This got censored on climateprogress.org so stop reading if you are sensitive.
The question of what counts has put coal mining fatality statistics into a strange state. http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2010/05/05/will-latest-death-be-counted-as-mining-related/ Has President Obama allowed 2010 coal mining fatalities to double 2009 fatalities or is he still one shy of that dubious distinction? If the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) bites the bullet and counts the death as a coal mining fatality, then there will have been 36 so far this year, twice as many as for all of last year. If not, they keep the administration away from that statistic at least for a while. The stakes are high. At 37 fatalities, President Obama will have the highest percentage annual increase in coal mining fatalities of any President ever. His only way out is to close and fence dangerous mines. Current efforts focus on explosion dangers so roof collapses continue apace (fatalities #34 and #35 last month).
And, these statistics are also coming in the context of investigations into bribery at both the MSHA (Department of Labor) and likely at the Minerals Management Service again (Department of Interior) suggesting that coal mine and oil rig fatalities are caused by official and widespread corruption. Does that bribe count as taxable income?
Seems to me that bleeding a small amount of oxygen into the oil spill cap and burning it like a torch in the collected oil would warm the contents up enough to allow them to flow to the surface. Oxygen tanks could be lowered pretty easily and the robots can be used to switch them out as they empty.
Looks like only documents from 2005 can be requested since the law has a six year clock. Sounds like prosecutorial misconduct that he is demanding documents on every grant. Hope he is penalized for that.
The NRC's treatment of tritium is especially sad in this regard. They assume, in their assessment, that tritium remains bound in water. But, if that water irrigates crops, it will be bound is sugars and starches. When consumed, it will remain in the body for a much longer time increasing the dose. It seems to me that the NRC ignores basic biology when it claims tritium is benign. Ignoring science is a problem especially when government regulators do so to be propagandists for the regulated industry.
That depends on how many are novel. If they avoid past causes of accidents then safety improves. The NRC seems to have very great difficulty getting in front of radiation leaks from the same sources over and over and over again. They just keep on making the same mistakes again and again. The NTSB and FAA get pretty exhaustive when they try to figure out a problem.
How may fission products does coal ash contain? None, since the coal was not exposed during above ground nuclear tests. How about nuclear waste? That is what it is. Fission products. Those are dangerous. Not the uranium in coal ash.
1.
Regulatory oversight, authority and enforcement must be strengthened;
2. Buried pipes must be promptly replaced so that systems carrying radioactive effluent can be inspected, monitored, maintained and contained in the event of a leak;
3. The nuclear industry must be held accountable for radioactive releases to air, water and soil;
4. There must be more public transparency describing the source, cause and extent of radioactive releases from nuclear power plants; and
5. Radiation protection standards must be strengthened and applied consistently nationwide.
The frist test I got said it was Ookla then I could try M-Lab but at the end of the supposed M-Lab test the results page said it was Ookla and I could now try M-Lab. Also needed to hit the "start test" button twice in each case. Still some bugs to work out before the program really starts up in 5 days.
I realize that my mention of a factor of square root of three increase in size does not make sense unless you take the Pb-208 neutron absorption cross section to be about 0.5 mbarn, three times larger than my original guess. That is coming from here: http://pintassilgo2.ipen.br/biblioteca/2009/inac/15187.pdf Somehow that link did not post before.
I think atomic mass 211 is going to be the end point of any other chain we find so the one including Pb-208 is going to be it.
Having the target absorb neutrons probably is not so important for a lithium or beryllium target since it will likely lead to a couple of alphas which is exothermic in a pretty big way. It is what we are trying to do anyway. The target is a consumable.
I have started to look. Going much heavier seems to run into fissions in the neutron build up path. I'm wondering if there is an eight step path lower down.
For a random walk for the thermal neutrons, the linear size of the reactor only goes up as one over the square root of the smallest neutron absorption cross section in the chain so we are looking at a square root of three larger than my earlier guess, maybe 35 meters now if that guess was close. The mass of catalyst goes up as the 1.5 power in the inverse cross section. It might not be a bad thing if we consider the catalyst as thermal storage as well. We can provide dispatchable power using the heat capacity as a buffer.
Slashdot Mirror
This got censored on climateprogress.org so stop reading if you are sensitive.
The question of what counts has put coal mining fatality statistics into a strange state. http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2010/05/05/will-latest-death-be-counted-as-mining-related/ Has President Obama allowed 2010 coal mining fatalities to double 2009 fatalities or is he still one shy of that dubious distinction? If the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) bites the bullet and counts the death as a coal mining fatality, then there will have been 36 so far this year, twice as many as for all of last year. If not, they keep the administration away from that statistic at least for a while. The stakes are high. At 37 fatalities, President Obama will have the highest percentage annual increase in coal mining fatalities of any President ever. His only way out is to close and fence dangerous mines. Current efforts focus on explosion dangers so roof collapses continue apace (fatalities #34 and #35 last month).
And, these statistics are also coming in the context of investigations into bribery at both the MSHA (Department of Labor) and likely at the Minerals Management Service again (Department of Interior) suggesting that coal mine and oil rig fatalities are caused by official and widespread corruption. Does that bribe count as taxable income?
Presumably they did that prior to the London Dumping Convention which would prohibit using a nuke now: http://www.imo.org/home.asp?topic_id=1488
Seems to me that bleeding a small amount of oxygen into the oil spill cap and burning it like a torch in the collected oil would warm the contents up enough to allow them to flow to the surface. Oxygen tanks could be lowered pretty easily and the robots can be used to switch them out as they empty.
Looks like only documents from 2005 can be requested since the law has a six year clock. Sounds like prosecutorial misconduct that he is demanding documents on every grant. Hope he is penalized for that.
The NRC's treatment of tritium is especially sad in this regard. They assume, in their assessment, that tritium remains bound in water. But, if that water irrigates crops, it will be bound is sugars and starches. When consumed, it will remain in the body for a much longer time increasing the dose. It seems to me that the NRC ignores basic biology when it claims tritium is benign. Ignoring science is a problem especially when government regulators do so to be propagandists for the regulated industry.
So there is tritium in coal now? Is that from spontaneous three body fission of uranium then? Not even close on this one....
That depends on how many are novel. If they avoid past causes of accidents then safety improves. The NRC seems to have very great difficulty getting in front of radiation leaks from the same sources over and over and over again. They just keep on making the same mistakes again and again. The NTSB and FAA get pretty exhaustive when they try to figure out a problem.
How may fission products does coal ash contain? None, since the coal was not exposed during above ground nuclear tests. How about nuclear waste? That is what it is. Fission products. Those are dangerous. Not the uranium in coal ash.
Really, the recommendations are basically what slashdotters have been writing regarding VT Yankee. It just turns out that the problem is very wide spread. http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/documents/LeakFirstFixLater_ExecutiveSummary_April2010.pdf
1. Regulatory oversight, authority and enforcement must be strengthened;
2. Buried pipes must be promptly replaced so that systems carrying radioactive effluent can be inspected, monitored, maintained and contained in the event of a leak;
3. The nuclear industry must be held accountable for radioactive releases to air, water and soil;
4. There must be more public transparency describing the source, cause and extent of radioactive releases from nuclear power plants; and
5. Radiation protection standards must be strengthened and applied consistently nationwide.
Cows are batteries, not this silly stuff: http://www.themeatrix.com/
There are number of cases of spent nuclear fuel going missing as well. It may end up surprising us the way these munitions have.
There are only single Qs, Xse or Zs in scrabble and only two blanks so your example does not work.
The highest possible word score is for Oxyphenbutazone at 1780 points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyphenbutazone but now one could name one's child to beat this. Secretly giving your child the middle name ZQXJKWH to have a potential 148 point opening move would beat out the record MUZJIKS at 126 (U blank) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#Records
It is the shortage of bits that is driving this. This has been a growing problem since 1995: http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/bitshortage.html
Now I can share my collection!!!
The Chesapeake Bay loses islands (famously in Michener's novel) and there is a nice essay about it here: http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=1116
The blue glow of death.... Who better than Bill to distribute it?
Already discussed this more than a year ago. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/01/30/1415200/Fusion-Fission-System-Burns-Hot-Radioactive-Waste
The frist test I got said it was Ookla then I could try M-Lab but at the end of the supposed M-Lab test the results page said it was Ookla and I could now try M-Lab. Also needed to hit the "start test" button twice in each case. Still some bugs to work out before the program really starts up in 5 days.
I realize that my mention of a factor of square root of three increase in size does not make sense unless you take the Pb-208 neutron absorption cross section to be about 0.5 mbarn, three times larger than my original guess. That is coming from here: http://pintassilgo2.ipen.br/biblioteca/2009/inac/15187.pdf Somehow that link did not post before.
Here is another chain though it also goes through Pb-208 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process
I think atomic mass 211 is going to be the end point of any other chain we find so the one including Pb-208 is going to be it.
Having the target absorb neutrons probably is not so important for a lithium or beryllium target since it will likely lead to a couple of alphas which is exothermic in a pretty big way. It is what we are trying to do anyway. The target is a consumable.
I have started to look. Going much heavier seems to run into fissions in the neutron build up path. I'm wondering if there is an eight step path lower down.
For a random walk for the thermal neutrons, the linear size of the reactor only goes up as one over the square root of the smallest neutron absorption cross section in the chain so we are looking at a square root of three larger than my earlier guess, maybe 35 meters now if that guess was close. The mass of catalyst goes up as the 1.5 power in the inverse cross section. It might not be a bad thing if we consider the catalyst as thermal storage as well. We can provide dispatchable power using the heat capacity as a buffer.
Here are some total cross sections for lead isotopes: http://wwwndc.jaea.go.jp/nd2001/proc/pdf/1_0327.pdf Around 11 barns so scattering is much more frequent than absorption I think.
I think the lead acts as its own moderator. The neutrons scatter even it they don't absorb and should become thermal pretty quickly. This is also why they would recross. I was thinking of a large bucket of mostly Pb-208 (rate limiting isotope) with a hole down to the center through which the proton/deuterium beam would pass to hit the target in the center. The Pb-208 cross section may be even small than my last guess: http://pintassilgo2.ipen.br/biblioteca/2009/inac/15187.pdf This source looks modern: http://books.google.com/books?id=f1oahKZsJ2gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=S.+F.+Mughabghab,+Neutron+Cross+Sections.+Neutron+Resonance+parameters+and&source=bl&ots=OcsiQDv4p7&sig=ISUedQtqKTm_cqT_w6yo78ylQxg&hl=en&ei=y8uOS5eOMcri8Qb7rtiBDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false