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Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream
Daniel_Stuckey writes "TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered the most attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But Terrapower just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too."
Wow, I finally have a reason to like/admire Bill Gates....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I don't know why Thor feels so second-rate. Superman doesn't have a day of the week and an element named after him.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And no one stops to remember grabthar's hammer...
Specially at the individual level that's exactly what money is: bottled time.
Those with the money control the future, good or bad.
Yes, I remember now. It was from a book at my local Carnegie Free Library, funded by wealthy philanthropist Andrew Carnegie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
Or it could have been at Stanford, which was funded by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.
Or to put it another way: focus is no substitute for vision. Government bureaucrats rare have vision.
will take on a larger meaning.
Table-ized A.I.
Will it run on windows with the metro interface?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
According to that Wikipedia link, "traveling wave" reactors could work without fuel reprocessing.
This is awesome, because I can't believe for a second that reprocessing molten salt fuel is going to be safe or environmentally friendly int the long run. Molten salt reactor fuel is literally a highly radioactive molten soup of materials that needs to be removed/filtered/processed from time to time in order to keep the reactor working.
You'll need to start at the beginning of the entire nuclear reactor concept. If you can find it, and it will take a little digging, you'll stumble upon a paper and subsequent decision from 1947-49. In it, the reactor lead engineer who also worked on some of the first nukes, stated we now have 'an endless supply of cheap energy' from a Thorium reactor design.
Now why wasn't it implemented? It did not produce enough byproduct plutonium for nuclear bombs.
Hopefully, they'll pull all of the detractors of Thorium kicking and screaming into the future, because this tech. needs to be fully explored and ultimately implemented.
I'd cite, but I'm on a phone. Sorry...
First those guys do a funky animation of a "travelling wave reactor", which looks like a cigarette burning down, and nothing like any reactor geometry would ever do.
Then after getting plenty of criticism about that, they change their tune and say they have a different TWR design in mind. Not a peep about how or why they fooled us all with the hoked-up animation.
Now they're thinking about Thorium. Like there isn't already 65 years of research on that.
That's the kind of good things you can do when you don't have to worry about some dick bag congressman defunding your agency because he doesn't like you.
I got here through a series of tubes
Thor Energy started a trial earlier this month.
Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Um... I think you might be forgetting some things here.
Or to put it another way: focus is no substitute for vision. Government bureaucrats rare have vision.
Of course they don't! Just look at the morons who elect them!
This is more or less the basic case for monarchy. As it was put to me once: there were good leaders, and there were bad leaders, in dynastic Europe, and there were an awful lot of wars. But none of them systematically raped own their countries in order to enrich themselves (as has happened in much of the post-colonial third world), nor did their martial ambitions wreak one tiny fraction of the havoc that was released upon their countries once war was in the hands of the people.
While Carnegie and Standford are admirable individuals, I think you're somewhat in denial here. The vast majority of long term projects happening in the world these days are funded by governments (whether they matter to the actual survival of the human species is another question, as humanity would survive just fine without any privately funded and without most government sponsored endeavours).
But take health care for example: all charities in the whole world combined only achieve a fraction of the medical support solely the US health care system provides for, let alone the European ones.
Private charity makes for very good PR, but simply lacks the mass to come anywhere close to the amount public services require.
As for vision, both individuals in interaction with government (= active involvement with their own society) and those know-it-better separatist privates can have visions equally. Personally I would take Neil deGrasse Tyson's campaigning over Bill Gates' profit oriented private funding, but luckily we can have both!
But they do remember Maxwell's Silver Hammer!
Bang Bang Maxwell's Silver hammer can down upon his head! (come on let's sing!) ....
Thorium has already been "seriously explored." How about a turnkey reactor design?
"Why is everyone running?" "The reactor blue-screened and we found out it's running on VISTA!!"
But none of them systematically raped own their countries in order to enrich themselves
maybe you should do a little research, I think you might be wrong.
once war was in the hands of the people.
and when was that, can you give me an example ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
i nearly snorted coffee onto my keyboard.
if bill gates really wanted to make the world more powerful he'd be helping the cd3wd project get all the knowledge of modern civilization into the hands of people who need it to tell them how to build modern everything...
Uh... no. Not at all.
The entirety of the culture of serfdom was the rape of your own country for the profit of the nobility.
Considering how he obtained his wealth in the first place, it actually is the least he can do.
Um... I think you might be forgetting
Yeah, military projects can do big things. There was an important vision there: the vision of the ability to move ICBMs rapidly and easily.
some
Government is also good at doing flashy but unsustainable.
things here.
Okay, I'll give you that one. However, it's worth pointing out that Ducks Unliminted preserves about 1/8th as much land as the National Park System, and much of it is less spectacular but more important for habitat preservation, and similar private coalitions protect lots of other land as well.
For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.
No, many of the long term projects that get a lot of media attention are funded by wealthy individuals. Taxpayer dollars go to many long-term projects that will benefit humanity as well.
The LHC, Super Kamiokande, and almost all the big physics projects are taxpayer funded. Almost all the big brain mapping initiatives going on today are publicly funded -- particularly through the NIH. Most climate monitoring is done by national governments and universities. Government funding is about the only thing keeping new antibiotics research alive since it's unprofitable.
Personally, I'd rather vote for people to put the money into projects that won't deliver short-term profits in hopes of greater long-term profits than cross my fingers and hope that if we let some people amass enough concentrated money that they'll spend it on something other than their own, narrow interests. For every Carnegie or Gates there are a dozen Koch brothers, Trumps, and second-generation rich twits like Paris Hilton.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Thinking about the blue glow given off as prompt neutrons slow down gives a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death".
Can we make sure Bill does a better job testing his new product this time.... Please?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Interesting point. I suppose the difference arises because with a monarch someone is responsible in a fairly undeniable way. The king may be an ass, but only a true sociopath is willing to be solely responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. In more democratic structures there are ways to spread the blame, and especially to pin it on ideology and the "good of the people" (not including those killed, presumably).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Isn't TerraPower a spinoff from Intellectual Ventures, the notorious patent troll?
I am all for thorium, but making those guys richer irks me.
"Oh no! The power's out! WTF?"
(cartman voice)
"Get Bill Gates in here!"
More specifically, elected leaders have no vision beyond the next set of elections and what resolves issues in the immediate here and now they can hang their hat on for votes.
Uh... no. Not at all.
You do not know what feudalism was all about. You are looking at it through the lens of someone who has never live outside of a monetary economy.
The nobility did not care one bit about profit. The 'currency' of the feudalism era was political power. People gave resources to those that had political power. Today we give political power to those that have resources. There was no 'raping of your own country for profit'. This was a time of might makes right. It probably still is, but more abstracted.
The question a lowly serf had to answer was this: Should I give some of my resources to the local lord that may or may not care about me in return for protection or should I risk having no protection at all and possibly lose everything to foreign lords that I know do not care about me?
And the US health care system provides for that medical support by taking taxes from those who work in the US. It does not come out of nowhere. If the US health care system did not exist, citizens would be spending that same money on a private health care system. This might, arguably, be better. (Consider, for example, how Lasik eye-surgery keeps getting cheaper and better over the years, much like computer parts do, in opposition to the rest of the health care system which seems to get more expensive and prohibitive as the years go by. What's the difference between the two?)
Government bureaucrats rare have vision - Well we might, but our bosses don't really expect "visioning" all that much :(
The thing about the Thorium-power dream is that the time frame puts it sometime after flying cars, strong AI, and colonies on the moon. For example: India has had a concerted 3-stage nuclear power program to make use of its abundant thorium. That project started in the 1950's. (Likewise, experiments with thorium have occurred throughout the world since the 1960's). India just recently entered "stage 2" where fast breeder reactors can start producing uranium-233 which is the seed for later thorium reactors. Commencement of "stage 3" and actual use of the thorium is projected to be sometime after the year 2050 if all goes well.
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme#Stage_III_.E2.80.93_thorium_based_reactors
Even TFA's link to the Weinberg Foundation site asserts that traveling wave reactors might be possible by the 2020's, but thorium reactors are by comparison "futuristic" and couldn't be implemented until some unknown time after that. And this from a paid booster for the idea.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
US know this and that's why the Nuclear deal with India didn't materialize - US wanted India to abandon all Thorium based efforts so tha i can sell its existing and legacy technologies to India.
Has always been the future. Sure, efficiency is not as high as in the full blown nuclear plant with 'new' rods, but if you can run your car/house/cell phone on waste. its a win/win.. 'cheap' universal power and delayed waste.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.
There's a good reason for this. Many (although not all) very wealthy people did a lot of things right to get that way. They managed their businesses well and made good financial decisions. Thus they will naturally apply those same skills to their philanthropy as well.
Now let's look at politicians. While a small percentage were also successful in business, the majority are most skilled at.... being politicians. Which of course infers no actual business or financial skills whatsoever, and certainly no actual experience.
Better known as 318230.
Our whole society is heavily dependent on power, and we like, we need lots of it and its key to all this other stuff we want or want to do. We also don't to pollute to get it, and we want it cheap. We don't need to try and pick a single solution, but we need a way to support and encourage a lot of ideas that might help provide cheap clean power someday. In some cases that will be government sponsored research, and others maybe tax breaks to encourage the private attempts.
Side note, Bill Gates should be congratulated for helping fight AIDS and other diseases, but if any of these power initiatives he supports pan out, that will also be be worthy of praise. It is not an either or situation on this.
the way he's vaccinating all of Africa, making the entire continent his lab rat test bed! That's fucking awesome!
Really? In what European country did conditions resemble what you see in, say, Nigeria, where the ruling elite will actually try to run down the country in order to steal more? Nobles had a vested interest in keeping their properties well-maintained, if only to be sure that they were giving their children and grandchildren better properties.
People look at Versailles and think that Louis XIV was a thieving bastard. And it's true, in the same fashion that taxation is still theft today. After all, we still give up a not inconsiderable portion of our paycheck to pay for our rulers. But it's also true that Louis wanted to give his family the best possible chance, and the best possible France, because only by having France grow richer and richer could his little cut off the top get bigger. That's not the case with a republic or a democracy.
As long as they dont spend too much and lose sight of the TWR project
this is an amazing tech but i do hope they continue with TWR reactors which will be more of an asset in the short term since it can essentially 'clean' radioactive waste from conventional reactors
What about all the stuff his foundation does about malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV? Or the stuff he's doing for sanitation and disaster relief? [Etc...]
Let's have a sober look at Bill Gates.
1) He amassed an enormous fortune by breaking the law.
Microsoft forced computer sellers to include Windows with all their products, even if the customer didn't want it or wasn't going to use it. They also made it impossible to "return" the prepackaged OS. They leveraged their popularity to suppress other competing products such as linux.
I can remember when running a service pack for Windows deleted Pegasys mail from my system and replaced it with Microsoft's product. Microsoft did this for a lot of installed products: they illegally leveraged their position as OS vendor to suppress competing products in other areas, notably browsers such as Netscape.
Many times, Microsoft would to look into "purchasing" a company, examine all their source code under NDA, say "no thanks", and 6 months later come out with their own competing product. This was done so often it became a meme in business. Several lawsuits were filed, which Microsoft quashed by using their money to leverage the legal system (ie - businesses went broke trying to fight Microsoft).
2) He lived off of his fortune in all voluptuousness for many years, siphoning whatever he needed to support his lifestyle off of his enormous wealth.
3) At the sunset of his life when he's essentially done everything he wanted, he sets aside a portion to allow his daughter to live comfortably, sets aside a portion for him (and his wife) to live comfortably, then uses the part that he doesn't need for charitable purposes.
We measure people by the strength of their belief. We can't label Bill Gates a truly charitable person because what he gives to charity costs him nothing.
This is not true charity, it's reputation repair.
Normally, I don't bother with trolls, but since there might be impressionable youngsters around, you might wish to examine the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Great War (aka World War I), and World War II, all of which involved conscript armies fighting for national pride rather than volunteer armies fighting for the narrow interests of their paymasters. Compare body counts.
The US health care systems is entirely private at this time. Government sets the pricing on the services they buy for small subset of the population that they pay health care on (welfare and medicare) but overall the private hospitals and insurances companies play a much bigger part.
It would be nice if a private health care system were better, but I fear this is just wishful thinking. Can you show me any case of such a system coming into being? Will any one of the countries without health care coverage today be able to develop it on a private basis soon-ish? Do you think the private sector could acomplish anything close to the US interstate highway system or the German Autobahn in terms of quality and accessibility? Same for the postal systems emphasising coverage of every remote location a citizen lives at? Or the worldwide internet infrastructure, backbones at payable customer rates. Not to mention the LHC, ITER or the ISS...
Realistically we have to answer all these with: no.
Private funding[0] simply does not lend itself to huge infrastructure investments with (often many) decades of ROI, most of which is not even going back to its pocket. Public investment does however, because it states a goal (= need to be satisfied) and realises it at a monetary loss, while netting other important gains. ;)
The free market is an awesome concept and the best known reliable optimiser-for-profit, but some things, like infrastructure (to which I include education and health care), are not meant for profit, no matter how much your local 1%er claims will trickle down to you
As for your question: Lasik is a luxury service with a clear monetisation mechanism, not the constant and long-term expeditures in geriatrics or the fiscally thankless basic coverage for low-income families.
It's very well suited to profit optimisation and should be in a free market environment, but most of medicine isn't.
[0] The profit oriented sort because of the lengthiness, and the second kind, charity, because the number of private individuals who have that much money to burn is negligibly small (or often zero).
They plan to make 50 Cobol Thorium reactors across the country, hidden for the safety of the people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
Does he get to carry a big hammer? And can he launch lightening bolts at his enemies?
those conscripts in most cases did not have other options (economic pressure/peer pressure/stupidity(see below)/...). in WWI and WWII desertion = penalty of death.
and national pride ? That's a new means of keeping people stupid (following in the footsteps of religion : 'us' vs. 'them')
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The Gates connection is an idiotic myth.
No, the connection is wrong only as far he didn't literally say "ought to be enough for everyone".
That the correct quote:
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
yup, he admit that he had a part in designing the 640k limitation and admits that he though at the beginning that it shouldn't be problematic, but the realised the error later.
Yes it was due to the design of the original PC, which used 640k for RAM and the rest for video & BIOS.
The 8088/8086 processor used in there machine has no such limitation. (Hint: 640k isn't a power of two, so very likely, it isn't a bus limitation. The bus is 20bits, meaning that it can address spaces up to 1MB).
The 640k is purely an arbitrary choice. You have to put the non RAM parts (ROM, Video ram, etc.) somewhere in the address space.
The most prevalent way to do it back then is to put this part in a fixed range at the beginning of the address space, and then put the ram afterward. That's the way it was designed on most home micro computers.
IBM and Microsoft (per Bill Gate's own admission) collaborated in the designing of the PC architecture. Surprisingly, they did NOT follow the prevalent way. They opted to sereve the address space 00000-9FFFF for RAM and A0000-FFFFF for the rest. (That's where the 640k come from: it's the first address with a hex "letter" instead of "number" because that the arbitrary point they choose for the RAM/ROM split).
Had they chosen to go for the most prevalent way, problems would never had arisen, the upper simply being pushed as newer CPUs with wider buses became more widespread.
But, IBM though of the PC as a glorified terminal with which to talk to their big irons. They didn't see much interest in providing much RAM. The important part was their minicomputers and mainframe, and those DID have more provision built-in. ...except it wasn't. If they were paying a little bit more attention to what was happening around them, they might have thought a little bit better and thought of a design which doesn't put a restriction on memory.
Microsoft on their side, came from a background of 8-bit home micro computers, in which 64k was huge.
As Billy said, 640k could seem to them as being more than anything ever needed. They could write software running inside 64k. The PC could even ship with incredible amount of RAM like 128k. Why would anyone need addresse of more than 640kb.
Also the first PC were equiped with amounts of RAM varying between 16k and 256k - so it was not "640k of RAM, then BIOS" but more like "a few kb of RAM, a huge unused gap in the address space, then BIOS" - given the huge gap, the address split might have looked reasonable...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'll be sure to pay lots of attention to the guy whose .sig is an unpunctuated quote from Chomsky.
The nobility and the monarchy were adversaries.
Modern monarchy functions as a referee who makes politicians keep to the rules.
Every European war since the Romans was fought with conscripts, with the exception of some of the Crusades. Do you think the peasants armed with sharp sticks on the front line of the battle against the invading Turks were patriotic volunteers? No, they only advanced because they were more afraid of the certain death behind them than they were of the possible death in front of them. If they survived the battle they might be able to go home, if they tried to desert they would be slaughtered.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Humans are socially heirarchial. People like being told what to do, and being a part of a bigger organization. It's part of the herd mentality, where we feel there's safety in numbers. Note that humans stampede not so unlike gazelle or elephants. But most people don't like telling others what to do. They do it out of necessity rather than want, and only because they are more able than their peers. People don't found organizations to be bosses of other people. They found organizations to achive their goals, and become bosses because they cannot do it alone. Only a few people desire being the head of the organization, and there's a special term for those people: sociopaths.
Monarchy comes out of this organization structure. In fact, monarchy is the structure extruded one additional level up. The monarch is usually decided upon by tribal or clan leaders between many tribes or clans, the leader of leaders so to speak. Those local leaders become the remainder of the nobility, and while they enjoy some degree of autonomy, they also place themselves subject to the whims of the current reigning monarch, which if they chose correctly, would not be detrimental to their own goals.
The problem with monarchy is not in the organizational system of power itself. It is, after all, the most natural and hence the most efficient system for getting things done. Instead, it is in the method of succession. It has to do with the two conflicting goals of the unlucky sap chosen to be monarch.
The monarch is given the position for the good of the whole society. The monarch thus must act for the good of the whole society. However, the monarch is a human being, and as all other living creatures, the goal of humans is to ensure the survival of their line. Thus monarchs almost always chooses their successor, always chooses among their children, and almost always chooses the first born of the same sex (without an existing code, a male monarch will always choose the eldest male child, the female monarch will always choose the eldest female child). Again, the reason for doing this goes back to the goal of life itself.
And, for the most part, the other leaders go with it. They go with it because the monarch was chosen to make such decisions. The point of the monarchy is to resolve the conflicts between the individual localities, and having the local leaders instead determine the succession would be reintroducing the very type of conflict the establishment of the monarchy was supposed to resolve. They go with it because the previous monarch was pretty good, and there's a decent chance his issue would be about the same. They go with it because they didn't want their current minor leadership position in the first place, and they weren't going to risk getting a major one.
Of course, we know that while the first few successors may be decent or outright good, things inevitably go bad. The line of monarchs goes weak. It forgets its purpose and begins to overreach. It attracts those who desire power, and it goes sociopathic. What follows is always conflict among the other heads, some war, lots of overthrowing, maybe some splitting or some joining, and eventually, a new monarchy is established. Again, things are good for a generation or several, and again, things go bad.
The purpose of a republic is to break out of this cycle of rising and falling leadership, in particular the chaos in between monarch lines. It has the same structure, local leaders, and a chosen leader of leaders. But the leaders are not set for life, and the succession is chosen by the ruled on a set period. This is an important distinction. Term lengths and to a lesser extent, term limits are what separates republics from monarchies. George Washington could have been king. Most people forget that he had both popular support and the army on his side. And that's usually sufficient grounds to establish a new monarchy. Instead, he set two precedents, these being the two, and it is because of his choices, not the Constitution nor the Declaration, that th
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
There's a fascinating video on the "Solve For X" site that follows this Thorium advocate around. It's very convincing!
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/thorium-an-energy-solution-thorium-remix-2011
Carnegie Free Library ... Stanford University
That doesn't prove that wealthy individuals are more philanthropic than government, or that they have more "vision". It just means they're better at branding.
Wealthy industrialist gives several million to found a new library/university. The question "what should we call it?" answers itself, even if it isn't explicitly spelled out in the conditions of the bequest.
The state or federal government gives several million to found a new library/university. What should we call it? Dollars to donuts "The Federal Government of the United States Library" or "The State of California University" isn't going to be considered. Heck, they'll be actively discouraged to avoid appearance that the library or university is government run.
Note that it's also easy for a private individual to grab credit for something that was primarily government funded. For example, a local government founds a library, and pays for its operation for many years. The "West Anytown Library" is very popular, and needs expansion. The West Anytown city government is a bit cash strapped at the moment, and can only cover 70% of the construction cost. Not to fear, philanthropist James K. Moneybags is willing to donate several million to cover the difference. Low and behold, witness the grand reopening of the "James K. Moneybags Public Library", despite the fact that government payed for most of it, and will continue to fund the long term operating expenses.
Just because a famous person has their name attached to something also doesn't mean they were at all critical to make it a philanthropic success. Take the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest private medical research organizations in existence. It started life 100% as a tax dodge. Medical institutes got a sweet tax deal, so Hughes funneled all his money through HHMI, though it didn't do much if any medical work (just enough to keep the IRS off its back). It was only after Hughes died and the HHMI was sitting on a pile of cash did those left in charge decide to turn HHMI into the legitimate philanthropic organization it is today.
So the short answer is you have selection bias - you increase the contributions of wealthy industrialists and decrease those of governments, simply because the industrialists get their names slapped on things, whereas governments typically don't.
Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, ...
The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.
In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.
Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Government bureaucrats funded nuclear power, jet engines, highways, water supplies, airports, etc.
Did you know one of the most commonly used airliner engines in the world, the CFM56 engine, is directly based on the F101 engine of the B-1 Lancer USAF bomber?
The market now may not be tight, but the world's total supply of U-235 is very small. Plus it takes vast amounts of energy to refine it out of the ore, since over 99% of the uranium is U-238. And if I understand the process correctly, it's refined by making it into UF6, which is spun in a chain of centrifuges. Now how do you make UF6? With FOOF! Look that one up... fluorine dioxide. Nasty.
If we really tried to power the world's electric supply with U-235, we'd soon run low. (Or die from meltdowns.) But there's a virtually infinite supply of thorium. It's not just cheap; it's practically free, since it's a waste product of rare earth mining, and we need to refine tons of neodymium in order to have good magnets for motors and generators. Yes, the MSBR needs a seed of U-233, but enough of those reactors do exist.
I guess you never heard of the Chinese Warring States period. They also had conscription but were ruled by Kings and it all happened several hundred years BC.
Conscription is hardly new. Just because there was a period where so called professional armies dominated in European history it does not mean it had always been that way.
Hmmm... Right. If only Stalin knew!
India produces cheap software.
Reactors are hardware.
No wonder they take so long to produce them.
I think in the end, once we start to scale up the molten-salt reactors based on Alvin Weinberg's research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it could open the door for the biggest breakthrough in electricity generation in many, many years.
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor has several major advantages over uranium-fueled reactors:
1. It uses commonly-found thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, vastly cheaper than uranium-235 processed into fuel rods.
2. it does not need a pressurized reactor vessel.
3. It can even use reprocessed spent uranium-235 fuel rods or even plutonium-239 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
4. During an emergency (SCRAM) shutdown, all you need to do is dump the liquid fuel mix out of the reactor vessel. It can be done completely mechanically, very important in earthquake-prone areas like Japan or the US West Coast.
5. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate electricity, we eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or having to locate the reactor site near a large body of cooling water.
6. The amount of nuclear waste generated is very small, and the waste only has a half-life of under 300 years. That means waste disposal can be done at disused salt mines or salt domes--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
The Department of Energy should help design a "cookie cutter" complete LFTR generating plant rated at 1,000 MW output, and build possibly over 100 of them across the continental USA. This would allow us to phase out many older coal-fired power plants and create enough elecctric generating power to do things like electrifying all our long-distance railroads and even do large-scale water desalinization.
Mr. Burns is purely non-coincidential!
Is he going to take the technology to China and build there, or will it be kept here?
BUT, if he does the right thing, he will FINALLY have done something decent.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hmmm... Right. If only Stalin knew!
I think Stalin was able to shift the blame to ideology and the "good of the people". A king might find that more difficult.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well then YOU sir should look at how that investment paid off in the case of Detroit. After pushing more than $100,000,000 every year into the city coffers above and beyond what they took in it is now the world's largest slum.
By this logic we should all convert to Mormonism, and then we too could have car elevators.
Government bureaucrats rare have vision.
IMHO, governments are permanently tied by network of mutually opposed powerful interests of exactly Andrew Carnegie or Leland Stanford (or Bill Gates) kind of people. If government was free to materialize visions, it would attract people with vision into its service. Bureaucracy being huge, we can't reject the possibility of some people in it having talent and vision, but it is sapped, mutilated by compromises and essentially wasted there. So, if you have vision, the way to pursue it is to first make sure you become ridiculously filthy rich by any means, then proceed to make your real dreams come true.
nuclear fission: the only way to destroy the universe. ...
i don't see much energy being transformed into matter (unless i look up to the sky on a SUNNY day).
but destroying the legos (atoms) seems to be popular on this 3rd rock.
seriously: shouldn't humans figure out how to create the periodic table from the bottom up first, before
going about destroying it from the top down?
if you take a step back and LOOK what's happening in nuclear fission, you are creating a HOLE in the universe.
not a blackhole, but more like a VOID. missing pieces. sure it would be more obvious if there were no decay
products, but nevertheless some of the mass is MISSING. you might argue that this is what is intended, but
you have no way to put that resulting "energy" into a closet, or use it for weight lifting or go for a walk with
it or have it for a tasty dinner... it's GONE!
my guess is that aliens are not looking kindly at us destroying the legos of the universe, especially if
we are just making debts with no clue on how to repay those missing legos
Utter poppycock. 1/3 of the population of Europe died in the 30 year's war. In medieval Europe, war typically consisted of making tours of the countryside to slaughter peasants and burn crops (condemning survivors to starvation) since your opponent was usually holed up in a castle. Rape was not decried because it was just the monarch/noble's right to fuck whomsoever he wanted whenever he wanted. This was so normal that despite the age's obsession with (paternal) bloodlines, one such bastard became the King of England (his name was William, you may have heard of him).
The only reason the wars of the 20th century were so much bigger was because the people had managed to free themselves of an oppressive monarchy enough to experience spectacular, unprecedented population (and wealth) growth. Proportionally, these wars were much smaller than the ones that had torn Europe apart in the past.
Most of the heads of state during WWI were monarchs; three of them (Germany, Austria and Russia) were absolute monarchies. If you think the Habsburgs did not rape Austria for wealth before sending its young men off to die, you should tour their palaces in Vienna, Budapest and Prague. Oh, and know that they regularly raped their servants.
For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.
Honestly there are some projects that are too big/too expensive/too vague on returns for even the wealthiest individuals to tackle. No single person or company could have gotten us to the moon in the 1960's. Transportation infrastructure absent government regulation and standardization is a nightmare (just look at the private railroad industry - they couldn't even agree on the same distance between *rails*). And say what you will about our military expenditures, but the military is there first on a lot of expensive, wildly experimental, cutting edge technology and they cover a lot of the high-risk low-return R&D work that later gets used by industry 10-20 years down the road. I'm talking things like rockets, lasers, radar, cell phones, nuclear technology, GPS, and the internet. All of this has *massively* benefited private industry and society as a whole, and very little to none of it could've been done by any individual or company.
I highly doubt Elon Musk with all his resources could've gotten a GPS satellite constellation off the ground. And even if he had, would it be free to use the signal like it is today?
I always think about the opening sequence of The Simpsons when I think about the security of nuke power plants. But, yeah, it would be nice to put that stuff to good use.
Why are we so slow to adopt better things? Are we that resistant to change? This tech has been available 60 years ago.
IIRC, the Thirty Years' War involved a lot of volunteer armies fighting for the narrow interests of their paymasters. That was one of the most savage and (proportionally) destructive wars in modern European history. It caused a wave of revulsion that inspired kings to agree to laws of war, which led to the relatively benign wars of kings. This started breaking down with the attempted suppression of the French revolution, and was mostly broken down by the last of the dynastic wars in 1914.
Your distinction of conscripts and national pride vs. volunteers and employers is not anywhere near as clear-cut as you imply.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'd argue that the Thirty Years' War doesn't fit the mold of a standard dynastic war, being based so heavily on religion. And the dynasties managed to capture a bit of the nationalism spirit by the end - otherwise calls for conscription would have led to revolution, not joining up (which they eventually did). Of course, this is a Slashdot comment, not a thesis, so expect it to be a little broad.
A recent report synopsis in Science Daily says that heat generation is the cause of global warming. CO2 is a symptom. It says all forms of nuclear power generation as well as carbon sequestration (clean coal) are false hopes: the heat generated is the core problem.
We really need to understand this study as it is a game changer if it holds up.
I'll post a link later. Doing this from iPhone so can't access another page simultaneously.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713085248.htm
I object to the automatic coward label. I have no clue what the login is though I get this mailing regularly. Automatic judging may be part of the problem. It certainly is not part of any meaningful solution
Gary Nelson
Port Townsend wa