I'm pretty sure a number of newspapers have been offering daily emails of headlines for a long time. News groups have offered digests episodically. Any which have indicate the length of the digest have pretty much nail this.
No, the U235 naturally decays as does the Pu239. And, the half-life of the Pu is much shorter than for the U235, so you can't breed now and put the new fuel on the shelf for 5 billion years. In fact, since depleted uranium contains about half as much U235 as natural uranium, we can say that there is a practical limit of 700 million years for fission power in the solar system since we won't bother with uranium that is depleted by half. There is a practical limit of about 50 years on Earth since we are not going to use breeders and the practical ore will be gone. But any claims of billions of years of availability are completely bogus in this solar system owing to natural decay. This is a very fundamental aspect of the physics and people who claim otherwise are just demonstrating deep incompetence in the subject matter.
Where do the neutrons come from to convert U238? U235. You might breed now, but you won't then and you can't do the breeding ahead of time since the Pu won't last. These "nuclear is renewable" arguments are completely wrong.
Wow! statements like this are really really sad. It is U235 that is used, and U235 that is discussed in the article. It has a half-life of 0.7 billion years so only 0.8% will remain in 5 billion years. The half-life of Pu239 ridiculously short, so breeders can't help. Natural uranium won't be worth enriching towards the end of the Sun's life so there won't be any breeders. You'd need to go to another part of the galaxy for a fuel supply. You've completely missed the nature of the physics.
When a store puts a product on sale, and it gets a new customer, it also loses that customer when the sale is off? Interesting that a number sticks so hard, not just the relative scale.
I think you are right about this but I also think he inspires confidence because he is ready to send out George Mitchell and President Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, our people who are successful, rather than holding them back. Congratulations Mr. President.
This does not seem to be the case. There are a lot of bottlenecks and construction delays which give the factor of pi or more above estimated costs in every case. You get crews using the wrong cement and then the work has to be redone, or the foundry not coming through with a certified vessel or some other SNAFU. Standardization does not really help with this unless you build only one reactor at a time using the same crew over and over again. It is self limiting. You can't get a lot of new reactors without getting a lot of new screw-ups from lack of experience.
Nuclear costs upwards of $8 million/MW for a power plant and then you have to pay for fuel. This is more than four times as much as for thin film solar PV. You might be thinking that the cost of energy rather than capacity is low. Not so. It is also the most expensive on a kWh basis. http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf
Why you.... Back in the day we had to walk 20 miles to school and 25 back uphill both ways in 20 feet of snow. You don't know how good you've got it. I say lock their noses in a book and throw away the key!
In the sense that you use the heater less often the longer you use it, then yes. But the light bulb won't be used less because it is not being used for heat.
How much would these wise guys charge to let a dirty bomb builder know where to dive to get supplies? Probably not more that the bomb builder could pay.
God created woman, and she had 3 breasts.He said to the woman, "Is there anything on you that you'd like to change?"She said, "Yes. Could you get rid of this middle breast?"God snapped his fingers and it was done.She exclaimed, holding the third breast in her hand,"What am I going to do with this useless boob?"And God created man.
Low level radioactive waste dumping and industrial waste dumping were prohibited in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Interestingly, in the US, some "permanent" radioactive waste storage sites such as at Humboldt 3 reactor will have to be moved if there is much sea level rise as a result of global warming since disposal at sea is not allowed. Ahh the tangled webs we weave.
If light from your light bulb escapes out the window, you are heating the outdoors. If it reflects to space, it may never come into thermal equilibrium with anything. So, not quite 100% even though that is a good approximation.
I recently bought a couple of LED desk lamps at Target for $10 each. They seem like they are about 30 W equivalent. So that would be half the price for the whole fixture, a sort of goose neck clip on thing. The transformer is at the plug. Seems like one must be paying for the form factor in the Phillips product. LEDs are durable goods so it might make sense to consider them in a different light. Change fixtures rather than bulbs?
It was very hard to get a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission once it was decided to end the shuttle program. NASA did not want to put a shuttle at risk away from the space station orbit or have a backup shuttle ready to deal with a problem on the launch pad. Why was this the case? One was risking the program for ending the life of the shuttle which had to complete the space station. It was the risk to the schedule that was the problem. NASA was committed to flying an aging fleet a certain number of times which involves risk, but it did not want to risk the budget of money and flights and transition of suppliers and a whole set of bureaucratic concerns once a scope was set to the shuttle lifetime. NASA does not want to risk its existence. It is OK with risking components if its existence is assured. Losing the Hubble would have been fine.
This is true, but replacing steel, concrete and wood use with a substance mined from the carbon in the air only covers a few per cent of our emissions so we need another larger home for the carbon. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html
Not true. Making biochar is energy positive and can be done in a ways that produce useful gas or liquid fuels. The solar energy input to plant photosynthesis is the energy source and incomplete oxidation still releases energy. You can keep up with the subject here: http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
This is a target which may require effort beyond just eliminating emissions. Building up carbon in soil either through modified methods of agriculture or the use of biochar may be the most cost effective way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Nuclear power is not so good for space applications near the Earth's orbit. Once you stick the radiators on it to loose the heat, you might as well use solar panels which give more energy per unit mass than a nuclear power system. Further out from the Sun things are different but even Jupiter is going solar now: http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Target&Target=Jupiter&MCode=JU
I agree about future possibilities. With a complex road bed, it should be possible to charge car and truck batteries on the move. Tires, for example, are close enough to the road to allow wireless power transmission such as you find in a rechargeable electric toothbrush. This makes long haul electric road transport more convenient than using fuel. Adding sensors to indicate the presence of vehicles, people or animals stopped on the road should be easy as well.
One place where we are starting to have a complex road bed is at controlled intersections. Sensors help to determine when a light needs to change. These intersections tend to be a lot bumpier, perhaps because maintenance in complex. The present proposal might help to get a better more durable surface where a complex road bed is already needed for other reasons. Hope they can get rid of that slick white paint that causes my tires to spin out at wet start.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure a number of newspapers have been offering daily emails of headlines for a long time. News groups have offered digests episodically. Any which have indicate the length of the digest have pretty much nail this.
Boy, that's what I love about you nuclear nuts. Your childish Rube Goldberg scheme is like a Keystone Cops film. Dated, but amusing.
No, the U235 naturally decays as does the Pu239. And, the half-life of the Pu is much shorter than for the U235, so you can't breed now and put the new fuel on the shelf for 5 billion years. In fact, since depleted uranium contains about half as much U235 as natural uranium, we can say that there is a practical limit of 700 million years for fission power in the solar system since we won't bother with uranium that is depleted by half. There is a practical limit of about 50 years on Earth since we are not going to use breeders and the practical ore will be gone. But any claims of billions of years of availability are completely bogus in this solar system owing to natural decay. This is a very fundamental aspect of the physics and people who claim otherwise are just demonstrating deep incompetence in the subject matter.
Where do the neutrons come from to convert U238? U235. You might breed now, but you won't then and you can't do the breeding ahead of time since the Pu won't last. These "nuclear is renewable" arguments are completely wrong.
Wow! statements like this are really really sad. It is U235 that is used, and U235 that is discussed in the article. It has a half-life of 0.7 billion years so only 0.8% will remain in 5 billion years. The half-life of Pu239 ridiculously short, so breeders can't help. Natural uranium won't be worth enriching towards the end of the Sun's life so there won't be any breeders. You'd need to go to another part of the galaxy for a fuel supply. You've completely missed the nature of the physics.
When a store puts a product on sale, and it gets a new customer, it also loses that customer when the sale is off? Interesting that a number sticks so hard, not just the relative scale.
I think you are right about this but I also think he inspires confidence because he is ready to send out George Mitchell and President Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, our people who are successful, rather than holding them back. Congratulations Mr. President.
This does not seem to be the case. There are a lot of bottlenecks and construction delays which give the factor of pi or more above estimated costs in every case. You get crews using the wrong cement and then the work has to be redone, or the foundry not coming through with a certified vessel or some other SNAFU. Standardization does not really help with this unless you build only one reactor at a time using the same crew over and over again. It is self limiting. You can't get a lot of new reactors without getting a lot of new screw-ups from lack of experience.
Nuclear costs upwards of $8 million/MW for a power plant and then you have to pay for fuel. This is more than four times as much as for thin film solar PV. You might be thinking that the cost of energy rather than capacity is low. Not so. It is also the most expensive on a kWh basis. http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf
Why you.... Back in the day we had to walk 20 miles to school and 25 back uphill both ways in 20 feet of snow. You don't know how good you've got it. I say lock their noses in a book and throw away the key!
Both are contributing to sea level rise so the net effect is loss of ice. See page 3 here: http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/PDF/Ch3_compendium2009.pdf
The whole report can be found here: http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/
In the sense that you use the heater less often the longer you use it, then yes. But the light bulb won't be used less because it is not being used for heat.
How much would these wise guys charge to let a dirty bomb builder know where to dive to get supplies? Probably not more that the bomb builder could pay.
God created woman, and she had 3 breasts.He said to the woman, "Is there anything on you that you'd like to change?"She said, "Yes. Could you get rid of this middle breast?"God snapped his fingers and it was done.She exclaimed, holding the third breast in her hand,"What am I going to do with this useless boob?"And God created man.
The part of international law that covers this is the London Dumping Convention which prohibits this sort of thing. http://www.imo.org/Conventions/contents.asp?topic_id=258&doc_id=681
Low level radioactive waste dumping and industrial waste dumping were prohibited in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Interestingly, in the US, some "permanent" radioactive waste storage sites such as at Humboldt 3 reactor will have to be moved if there is much sea level rise as a result of global warming since disposal at sea is not allowed. Ahh the tangled webs we weave.
Replacing windows with Vacuum Insulated Glass would be even better since windows save energy on lighting during the day. This is in field tests now: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/guardian-gearing-up-bring-vacuum-glazing-market
If light from your light bulb escapes out the window, you are heating the outdoors. If it reflects to space, it may never come into thermal equilibrium with anything. So, not quite 100% even though that is a good approximation.
I recently bought a couple of LED desk lamps at Target for $10 each. They seem like they are about 30 W equivalent. So that would be half the price for the whole fixture, a sort of goose neck clip on thing. The transformer is at the plug. Seems like one must be paying for the form factor in the Phillips product. LEDs are durable goods so it might make sense to consider them in a different light. Change fixtures rather than bulbs?
It was very hard to get a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission once it was decided to end the shuttle program. NASA did not want to put a shuttle at risk away from the space station orbit or have a backup shuttle ready to deal with a problem on the launch pad. Why was this the case? One was risking the program for ending the life of the shuttle which had to complete the space station. It was the risk to the schedule that was the problem. NASA was committed to flying an aging fleet a certain number of times which involves risk, but it did not want to risk the budget of money and flights and transition of suppliers and a whole set of bureaucratic concerns once a scope was set to the shuttle lifetime. NASA does not want to risk its existence. It is OK with risking components if its existence is assured. Losing the Hubble would have been fine.
This is true, but replacing steel, concrete and wood use with a substance mined from the carbon in the air only covers a few per cent of our emissions so we need another larger home for the carbon. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html
Solar panels can make shade too. But, they'd be small compared to your cloud.
Not true. Making biochar is energy positive and can be done in a ways that produce useful gas or liquid fuels. The solar energy input to plant photosynthesis is the energy source and incomplete oxidation still releases energy. You can keep up with the subject here: http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
A target for the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that makes sense is 350 ppm: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
This target is getting broader support: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hacayDuUcngLmhNkplHB5VtG5GNw
This is a target which may require effort beyond just eliminating emissions. Building up carbon in soil either through modified methods of agriculture or the use of biochar may be the most cost effective way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Nuclear power is not so good for space applications near the Earth's orbit. Once you stick the radiators on it to loose the heat, you might as well use solar panels which give more energy per unit mass than a nuclear power system. Further out from the Sun things are different but even Jupiter is going solar now: http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Target&Target=Jupiter&MCode=JU
I agree about future possibilities. With a complex road bed, it should be possible to charge car and truck batteries on the move. Tires, for example, are close enough to the road to allow wireless power transmission such as you find in a rechargeable electric toothbrush. This makes long haul electric road transport more convenient than using fuel. Adding sensors to indicate the presence of vehicles, people or animals stopped on the road should be easy as well.
One place where we are starting to have a complex road bed is at controlled intersections. Sensors help to determine when a light needs to change. These intersections tend to be a lot bumpier, perhaps because maintenance in complex. The present proposal might help to get a better more durable surface where a complex road bed is already needed for other reasons. Hope they can get rid of that slick white paint that causes my tires to spin out at wet start.