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Wait, what? When I first visited that page, I thought the tagline on the ticker read Global progress through technology. The world is over.

Their web page does not disappoint. I'll have to add a todo to search their careers page to see if they need any portal testers...

General Atomic's San Diego Tokamak is till running and performing very useful research, particularly in magnetic controls. http://www.ga.com/magnetic-fus... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

The research has been going on for decades, the problem is that the cost of developing it into a working commercial scale reactor is too great and will take took long. Tens of billions of dollars and a decade minimum.

4th gen reactors are relatively new. Not long into the test reactor phase. Its 3rd generations that has only recently moved into the commercial construction phase. I'd expect more like 20-30 years before 4th gen is ready for commercial operation. Even so, the ability to recycle existing waste is a huge offset and a huge win. Managing that waste has an incredible cost.

Even then it might not work. Doesn't make economic sense, will never be funded, not a practical solution.

If there are funding problems the cuts will be political in nature, not based in economics. As was done in the 90s under Clinton.

That's not moving the goal posts, that is reality. Your argument is basically a straw man, because you are choosing an easier target. Practical means something we can actually do now.

Your prediction was that no one would propose a practical solution and just blame environmentalists. The ability to build something now is your recent addition, the moving of the goal post. Continuing to research a promising series of designs that can offer enormous benefits not seen before is a very practical thing we can do right now.

You want some info on what is doable from the folks who have been researching and building reactors for decades? Their web site is terrible, you have to hover the cursor over the "nuclear waste" tab but there it is. http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

and point out that 4th gen nuclear reactors will consume the waste of previous gen reactors as fuel

Yes they can use some waste material as fuel, in fact some of the most difficult stuff to store. Unfortunately utter idiots have been pretending that they can consume all waste by magic and those utter idiots have set back the cause they are trying to promote. You appear to have fallen victim to such an idiot.

No, you merely mischaracterize what I have written by deleting relevant portions. I'll highlight the relevant portion you deleted:
"point out that 4th gen nuclear reactors will consume the waste of previous gen reactors as fuel, and the waste from 4th gen only remains hazardous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years."

By the way, one source of info for the above: the people who have been building reactors for decades. I'm sure I can find others put this was one of the first things that google finds. Their web site is terrible, you have to hover the cursor over the "nuclear waste" tab but there it is.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

Well, for 30 or so years. But what then? Then you have a huge pile of radioactive crap sitting there that you can't really get rid of sensibly and that will continue to sit there for a few millennia.

4th gen reactors use waste from previous generation reactors as fuel. The 4th gen waste is only hazardous for a few hundred years.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.

Well, it is.

As much as we would all really love solar and wind to scale to a level necessary for global needs that is not going to happen with current technology. Its many decades off. Lots of science and engineering are needed to get solar there. We need something to bridge the gap between today and that future date where solar scales.

If not nuclear then its natural gas, oil and coal.

Even environmentalists are starting to realize this, including a co-founder of GreenPeace.
"Moore says that his views have changed since founding Greenpeace, and he now believes that using nuclear energy can help counteract catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels. Says Moore, "The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles." Moore also cites reports from the Clean Air Council that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. "Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2 emissions annually," says Moore. "Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely." Moore points out that the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. He predicts that advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. According to Moore, British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, also believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Concerns about past accidents in the nuclear industry were also mentioned, as he claims the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as example, calling it "an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up". He also recognized the difficulty of dealing with nuclear waste."
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Gr...

Regarding nuclear waste from current reactors. 4th generation reactors can use this waste as fuel. And the waste from 4th gen is short lived. Hundred of years rather than tens of thousands.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

NASA also thinks nuclear has greatly improved the environment.
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms.

So you have an industry PR site.

A site by organizations who actually operate 4th gen test reactors. A site that the U.S. Department of Energy links to for more information, http://www.energy.gov/ne/artic....

http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...

a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change skeptics

Interesting, google found that page and I went with it since it seemed to say nothing beyond quoting General Atomic's specs on their reactor. If you follow the link they provide to General Atomics they do indeed state that the waste of previous gen reactors is used as fuel and that the waste of the 4th gen reactors is indeed short lived and only needs hundreds of years of storage. Unfortunately they do so with terrible hover over animated graphics, http://www.ga.com/energy-multi..., so I stuck to the summary since it was plain text that could be cut and pasted. BTW, General Atomics are the people who have been building reactors for decades. So these climate deniers clearly got the science correct on this reactor. When the truth happens to be on the side of liars, liars can indeed tell the truth, which seems to be the case here. Again, this page does nothing more than quote General Atomics. Apologies for not offering the General Atomics link directly and going with this summary. I assumed readers could manage clicking on the General Atomics link themselves, did you have some difficulty doing so? Or were you only interesting in the messenger and not the message (the science)?

http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

a motivational speaker

And the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

That's a strange characterization of organizations that the US Department of Energy refers people to for more information on 4th gen reactors, organizations who operate 4th gen test reactors and companies who will actually build 4th gen reactors and have been reactors for decades.

Space flight is limited by fuel, not energy. Except if we build a space elevator/giant railgun wich may or may not be possible.

I'm pretty sure that what he meant was that it would be easier to bring compact power sources into space and potentially refuel them if they were being used on a planetary body or elsewhere that might have a supply of hydrogen and nickel. Right now the only options we have are solar and nuclear for providing power in space, the former requires a lot of mass for small gain and the latter has become a bit of a hairy political issue. Also, using a railgun is not as far fetched as you think [1] [2], the limitations are mainly related to the amount of power that can be supplied.

Food and water can't be produced by energy. Human population can't grow exponentially much longer.

Tell that to a third-world farmer hauling water and planting crops by hand. Before cheap, available internal combustion engines food production was drastically lower than it is today simply because it was so labor intesive. The arrival of motor driven farm equipment and the advances in irrigation and fertilizer production made possible by new energy sources are the reason that the world population has hit 7 billion this quickly. [3] Human reproduction also tends to level out as standard of living increases. [4]

You are assuming we find a way around the second law of thermodynamics.

I don't see anywhere that he implied we would violate conservation of energy. It looks like all he is saying is that 1) the study of particle physics may lead to new ways of producing fission or fusion economically 2) sustainable fusion would be more efficient at releasing energy than current methods e.g. fossil fuels, solar, wind, etc. 3) E=mc^2 does in fact hold the promise that we will someday be able to readily convert mass to usable energy.

I agree it could be more powerful, but I thought the point of lasers was silence, precision, very little splash damage, and light speed travel to the target. Bullets are way slower than light, more adversely affected by wind, windows, etc. The use for this would probably be sniping guys with guns off a mosque with a drone instead of blowing up all their civilian shields and getting on the news.

Slightly more info and likely a big part of TFA's source:
http://www.ga.com/purchasing/pdf/HELLADS.pdf

heh, captcha is ablation ;)

These things are a great way to make a beautiful landscape hideous.

As opposed to what, a coal plant?

Personally I think the electrical towers are really ugly. These artistic pylons are an interesting start to the "beautify the tower" problem, but what I'd really like to see are transmission towers that are sculptures. Some ideas off the top of my head: Paul Bunyan, Woody Hayes, Iron Man, Superman, knights, samurai, ninjas (probably should only be used for wireless power transmission, otherwise the cables will give them away), Micky Mouse, Greek Gods (Like from Rockefeller Center), national heroes, sports mascots.

Never mind that they actually are better for the environment than anything else.

Clean renewable energy is worse for the environment than radioactive waste? I understand that nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal and oil, and that it produces constant power and all that, but how is it better for the environment than wind?

In this case, yes. Wind power is nice, but wind isn't constant. Do you want your family or loved ones undergoing surgery when the wind stops and the power fails? I sure don't.

Radioactive waste can be mitigated by several methods:

1. Use of Breeder Reactors which actually create more fissionable fuel as they operate. So a lot of the radioactive waste is actually recycled into fuel sources.

2. Modern reactor designs are more efficient than the prior designs. Just like cars from 2000 are more reliable, have better fuel economy, and are safer than cars from the 1960's, the reactors that are being designed and implemented now outside the U.S. typically have 1/3 fewer mechanical parts and are made from materials that will last a lot longer. See Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor and Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor for two examples of these designs. Wikipedia has more information about these "Generation III" reactors.
3. Power generation efficiency could be increased beyond current levels by adding Stirling Engine-style generators to the cooling towers, but note that many of the Generation 3 and newer reactor designs don't use cooling towers (Three Mile Island).
4. Depleted uranium is great for tank/aircraft shells, tank armor, and has several other uses in the civilian market.
5. The Federal Government promised the nuclear power industry a radioactive waste storage facility, Yucca Mountain, in 1987. It's a law. The nuclear industry has been paying for that, doubling the end-user cost of electricity, but hasn't received anything in exchange for the money. And then Secretary Chu decides that Yucca Mountain isn't good enough and kills it. So basically the nuclear power industry has paid millions of dollars for the past two decades and got nothing back for it, except coolant ponds that are filling up with more and more spent fuel, scattered across the country rather than being held in a single, secured location.

You may point to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear reactors should be avoided. Good point, but the cause of that problem wasn't the reactor itself, it was the people running the reactor. Some stupid test* was conceived by an idiot, and when the most experienced shift refused to do it because it was dangerous, the idiot tried again and again until he got a group of less-experienced people who didn't know any better to do the test. Then things went wrong and we're left with Satan's spotlight shini

Wierd. First, it's not a "nuclear battery". Those have been around since the 1950s, and they typically have quite modest power output, from a few watts to a few hundred watts. They're just some radioactive material decaying at its normal rate; they don't use a chain reaction. If this thing is supposed to produce 27MW, it has to be a real nuclear reactor.

And it is. Here's the patent application, out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The basic idea is this: "This present invention achieves control by utilizing the properties of a fissile metal hydride as a self-contained nuclear fuel and neutron energy moderator. If the physical size, fissile metal content and enrichment are appropriately selected, the metal will absorb ambient hydrogen, which moderates the neutron energies so that nuclear fission criticality is achieved. The temperature will then be increased by the fission reactions until the dissociation pressure of the hydrogen for that temperature is greater than the ambient pressure of the hydrogen, at which point the hydrogen dissociates from the hydride and the source becomes sub-critical." So that's the way it self-regulates. It's supposed to operate at a constant temperature; if you remove heat with a working fluid, it produces more heat; if you don't, it stabilizes at its normal operating temperature. It's a uranium reactor, using 5% enriched uranium. Runs at 350C to 800C. Uses heat pipes to get the heat out to a working fluid, probably water, used to make steam and drive a turbine.

It's not clear if this is a workable design. There's no prototype. But it's at least plausible. It's not a totally new idea; the TRIGA reactors are self-regulating in a somewhat similar fashion.

The "Los Alamos Study Group" that made critical comments has nothing to do with Los Alamos National Laboratories. Their director "worked as a transportation planner, natural foods manufacturing entrepreneur, high school teacher, hazardous waste investigator, and contaminant hydrologist."

If society won't even accept safe fission designs, what makes you think we will ever get far more powerful fusion reactors built? I think the largest problem now is the culture of misinformation and fear, not the problem of technology.

Unless I'm wrong, the production of non-military nuclear reactor designs in the US for the last 30 years have been... zero. Unless you count the Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini space probes. Call me when we upgrade all of our reactors from 1973 designs to a much safer and cleaner Gen IV design -- like this bad boy (now with free hydrogen!) instead of taking high-level radioactives --potential fuel-- driving them recklessly around the country in truck, and shoving it into a salt mine, or some similar brilliant idea.

Besides, though I lust for the sheer coolness of magnetically confined plasma as much as any proper geek, the the simple fact is we have had the technology to use fusion for power for quite some time now(press release from 1998, although building the X-1 was promptly cancelled without reason) with Z-pinch inertial confinement on the insanely cool Z machine at Sandia.

Yawn. Wake me went the politics of our time aren't ruled by Luddites with pitchforks and torches...

Founded in 1955 as a division of General Dynamics, the company had an initial charter to explore peaceful uses of atomic energy.

Well, they do make this... http://gt-mhr.ga.com/

They also make high energy capacitors for nucelar aplications and those are most likely where the railgun tech grew out of.

http://www.ga.com/atg/railgun.php I'm not sure if the Z machine can really be termed a "railgun" but these things are in preliminary stages and can shoot projectiles.

There is an excelent article on pebble bed reactors in wikipedia. Briefly, the idea is credited to a German physicist Rudolf Schulten. General Atomic is building one in Russia (link). Also there was a project at MIT under Andrew Kadak, but the website, gives an impression that the work did not go far.

Their key risk is they have large quantities of graphite in them. If you recall Chernobyl was the disaster it was partially thanks to graphite because in the event of an accident and enough heat graphite burns furiously.

That's urban legend. From http://www.ga.com/gtmhr/7nuclear.html:

"The red glow observed during the Chernobyl accident was the expected color of luminescence for graphite at 700C and not a large-scale graphite fire, as some have incorrectly assumed."

Did a little research, methinks the power-weight ration of solar is crappier than anything around.

Even with this thin-film solar cell, this little fella would need 133in^2 of surface area, and the solar cells alone would weigh 21.6g.

Too bad, but it'd still be cool to make an RC plane/predator/mini-uav/whatnot with the RC Aircraft series.

nuclear reactions are one of ( it not )the most abundant natural reaction(s) in the known universe. everything "green", plants, wind; is owed to the energy from our sun. A big, bright nuclear reaction.
The reason nuclear has such a bad rap is that it was introduced first as a weapon, instead of an energy supply. Look up "nuclear" on google images and you'll see what people first think of when they hear the word.
Had we created nuclear power plants before blowing stuff up people might view that infamous nuclear symbol as innocuous as the "+-" of electrical current.

heh, not quite your idea. I'm not allowed to give details except that its progressing quite well and will most likely go from San Diego to Las Vegas with possible stops in between.

http://www.ga.com/atg/ems/transrap.html

Please take a look at a Maglev. Notice how it wraps around the track? It is extremely unlikely for one of these suckers to derail, and physically impossible for these things to crash into each other.

I for one welcome our Maglev overlords. At 581kph it should limit my 43 minute train time to school to roughly 8 minutes. Cross country? At most 30.

This Toshiba design looks a bit like the South African pebble bed modular reactor and the General Atomics GT-MHR, so the idea is not really new.

1) Old reactors suffer from old and bad design constraints.

2) These same old reactors also suffer from improper management which leads to the numerous problems such as sludge and accident potential.

3) All of this could have been avoided by adopting new nuclear technology and proper maintenance and cleanup.

4) New reactor designs such as the pebble bed and the Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor eliminate many of these problems while producing 50% more efficiency and less waste.

and 5) (a biggie) if the whole world used Nuclear power, Uranium reserves would be depleted in an estimated 50-100 years depending on the recycling technology.

The future of power generation is really either in de-centralizing power by using things like fuel cells in every home. Or, creating even bigger power grids hooked up to a Fusion Reactor. However, the fact of the matter is that if civilization is to continue for another 100 or even 200 years (not that long from a historical method), then great strides in technology need to be taken now. And it looks like they are. Fusion is ready for the first power generating beta reactor, fuel cells are ready now, its now up to business and society to see the work completed....

For a technological advance example, TRIGA nuclear plants *cannot* melt down. Can't. Go ahead and pull out all of the control rods... the fuel itself dampens the neutrons and the reactor shuts down.

For a non-technological development, you'd think we'd want to reduce our reliance on a, shall we say, less-than-stable-region.

One would think that the altered political and technological realities of our world would lead to a resurgence in non-fossil power (similar to the 70s when rising oil prices made all of those hippie Californians put solar water heaters on their roofs). I guess we'll have to wait a generation or so for the memories of Three Mile Island to fade.

Also check out the "inherently safe" TRIGA reactor design.

• "The company is named "Blacklight Power""
  • All the really cool names like "Lockheed-Martin" are already taken.
  • If you weren't spending money on start-ups with silly names several decades ago, you would have missed the opportunity to invest in General Atomics.
• The guy looks funny in that lab jacket.
  • It's the guys that don't look funny in a lab jacket that worry me.
• "Most of the scientific community finds these theories "crackpot ideas"."
  • So? We should all be more concerned with what the scientific method has to say about his ideas, not the "community."
  • If we don't, we'd be no better than the Catholics who locked up Galileo.

"He's raised 30 million dollars."

• 99.99% of which did not come from Slashdot users.
  • If we're not monetarily involved, what's wrong with a little cheerleading?
  
  

There aren't many of these things. As of 1998, there were five units, each with four aircraft. A unit (ground equipment, 4 UAVs, and 55-person crew) costs $40 million, the USAF says. And it supposedly needs a 5000' paved runway, which seems excessive for something smaller than most light aircraft. It's not a robot; there's a pilot on the ground directly controlling the craft.

Here's the press release for the "Hellfire on a Predator" test. Probably hasn't been deployed yet.

Israel Aircraft Industries makes the most useful military UAVs. Theirs are smaller, with less range (which makes sense; their enemies are nearby), and are typically launched off a rail on a truck-mounted launcher, like a missile, then landed by parachute. The Israeli UAVs tend to be more autonomous; they assume they'll have serious jamming opposition and won't be able to maintain communications continuously. USAF UAVs are flown by a pilot with a joystick; Israeli UAVs tend to be controlled with a keyboard, carrying out a preplanned mission if they can't communicate

According to General Atomics Aeronautics (General Atomics), the manufacturers of the predator aircraft, they can operate for 24 hours on target at 400 NM. If the London times are to be believed, the maximum flight time is 40 hours. Through the miracle of story problems, that gives us a cruising speed of about 50 mph and a range of 1000 NM there and back or 2000 NM straight through if you just want one picture as you fly by. Of course, that assumes that the fuel consumption is the same for distance travel or loitering over the target.

Additionally they have a variety of cool little aircraft on their page, and they also appear to make really ugly European light rail trains. Dropped on Afghanistan from a great height, these are just as likely to eradicate evil-doers as our current national plan.

Firstly, since the Predator has only a rear propellor, it certainly can't "hover" the way the Apache does for accuracy, concealment and timing purposes.

Secondly, if the plane's major role is in surveillance then it will necessarily maintain a high altitude - meaning 10 or 20 thousand feet. This poses problems if, as this link suggests, the Hellfire is unreliable or unusable over about 2,000 ft.

Since the first tests were only done in February, what is the chance that these problems have been satisfactorily solved?

Futhermore, a remotely piloted plane has reduced situational awareness. I don't think the manufacturers (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems) would be particularly pleased if friendly-fire casualties in Afghanistan were put down to the inaccuracy of their "robot" planes.