Or you could just say that an acute dose of 2 gray to the lens caused the cataracts. You're confusing a stochastic dose rate over a long period of time with a deterministic effect which is incorrect (cataracts for astronauts are a deterministic effect). Also you're leaving out the quality factor and tissue weighting factor, so you can't even get a proper committed effective dose to the lens.
There's plenty of risk (99% of it to himself), which is why if he wants to build one, then he is going to have to follow all the same procedures that a hospital does when submitting a license application and radiation assessment for an accelerator. Nothing more, nothing less.
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That's regulations in Ireland, not everywhere. Ireland is in the minority for doing away with smoking, the vast majority of the world still believes in letting people decide for themselves
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Oh I understand just fine, but regulations don't say that.
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I guess it is a pretty libertarian point of view, but I've always taken the view that you can do whatever you want so long as you aren't hurting anyone else. By that I think it's alright for people who smoke to be around other people who smoke so long as people who don't smoke aren't forced to be around it if they don't want to. I don't smoke, nor do I support it, but I won't stand in someone's way of being an idiot if they so desire, and if a bunch of smokers want to sit in a room and develop metastasized cancer, go right ahead, less smokers in the future. In the US, every business has to meet OSHA regulations. They've been pretty slow to make regulations about smoking other than that there has to be a designated area for smokers on breaks. Good or bad, that's the reg right now. Since you mentioned unsafe working practices, if a business is susceptable to lawsuits for unsafe working environments under OSHA, then by all means, they're going to have to change or face the consequences. The result of unsafe working conditions back in the day, brought forward famously by the book "The Jungle," led to better working conditions through the strengthening of unions and job safety laws. Now if a group of workers in a place want to collectively strike to try to change the owner's mind about smoking on the job, they have every right to do so and the owner might actually listen, I think it'd be a great idea to do that. But there are many jobs out there, it's hard to believe that a person is relegated to a single job where being around smokers is the only option. If that is the case, they might have more to worry about then second hand smoke. Seriously though, when you take a job, you accept the possibility of risk. If you're a short order cook at the local greasy spoon, you have a possibility of burning yourself pretty badly on the job every day. There really isn't any way to make it safer than it is already, so you just have to accept the risk that you could burn yourself. We can't do away with restaurants because people might hurt themselves working there, same as we can't do away with highway road crews because someone might get hit, or keep people from becoming doctors because they might get sick from patients. People take risks because they think the benefits outweigh the consequences.
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Roads are public property though, a privately owned business is not
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It's not owned by the public, it's owned by a proprietor that chooses to allow smoking in his/her establishment. The workers are not forced to work there. They have the job with the understanding that there is smoking allowed. If they don't want to be around smoking, don't apply for a job there. If a pub owner has a hard time finding customers AND employees, then I'm sure he/she will have a change of heart on the smoking issue. Consider workers in any dangerous job, particularly highway road crews. They take those jobs with the understanding that there is a chance that a motorist will speed right through the work zone and kill them, but they're willing to forego the risks. When you take a job, you know what you're getting yourself into, that's part of personal responsibility. If you're afraid of radiation, don't work in the nuclear industry. If the sight of blood makes you squeamish, don't work in a hospital. It's your choice where you work. You choose where you go and what you do. You have a choice to go into that bar and give them your money, if you don't want to, you don't have to, because you can go anywhere else you want. It's your decision. If you don't want to go into a place because they allow smoking, let them know that because it might change their mind, but it should still be their choice since it's their business.
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I would hate to think that someone supports the genocide of the entire skunk population because they stink. hehe
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Eventhough I abhor smoking (volunteering as med physicist til the ph.d is done), I still think that government mandated smoking bans in public places aren't right. It should be up to the business owner to decide to allow smoking or not. If people like you and me don't want to patronize a restaurant because they allow smoking, then the business owner loses our money. If enough people decide not to go there, then the business owner will disallow smoking to bring back business. It's the free market that should decide the ban on smoking, not the government. People have a right to do with their lives and property as they please. If people want to be morons and smoke, it's their decision since it's their lives, just as it's my decision not to smoke. If you choose to go to a bar, you're choosing to go where people smoke. You don't have to go there, because you have as much an option of going somewhere else that doesn't allow smoking. If you still decide to go because you think it's such a great place, then it reverts back to a good old cost-benefit tradeoff where you place having fun at the moment over your future health. It's your decision since no one is holding a gun to your head to go there, whereas a government mandated ban is essentially holding a gun to the heads of the business owners telling them they cannot allow smoking. Smokers have just as much right to congregate together and smoke as does anyone else.
I'm susupiscious because they claim that high energy x-rays can't produce long lived radioactive waste. Apparently they haven't heard of photoneutrons. That and the plasma temperature for the H-B reaction is 10 times that of D-T, making it pretty difficult with standard materials. It looks like a viable research project though. My only concern with the researcher is that if this guy agreed to publish this article to a non-conventional journal to get more funding and awareness, then he's probably going to get it, but at the ire of the plasma fusion community, which usually spells doom for long-term funding.
Here's my question, do lawmakers really know enough about WiFi security and firewalls to write a coherent law requiring this? I'd draw the parallel between the FCC and the slow move to HDTV, which they really can't push too quickly because many people don't want/need to pay for a new tv and then pay more for cable/satellite. So since many people (including myself) run old equipment, what type of standard encryption and firewall will the law entail? Will they require WEP64/128, which can be easily broken, or WPA which old equipment isn't compatible with, or another form? Can they force a standard to be adopted by the residents within a county without stepping on the toes of the FCC? To the best of my knowledge, the band that 802.11 works in is public and unrestricted. What about firewalls? Are they going to legislate which ports you can have open? I seriously doubt the lawmakers would understand concerns like this, but should that be the case, how can they effectively legislate a law?
Read those for a better view than the often politicized and sometimes misleading wikipedia. A max of $400 million per plant per incident as stated by the parent's author in discussion was not correct. The PAAA supplies a pool of funds paid into by nearly every site containing DOE fuel, excluding accelerator operations. The current pot is up to around $11 billion. This isn't car insurance that you pay $600 bucks into every 6 months, because if you don't make a claim that would recover those funds, they're just being thrown down a hole. As you quoted, the sites would need to pay more than $3 billion annually to fully insure their operations. Should every site be required to pay a cost of $3 billion per year, that's more than the site. That in mind, it would negate the financial benefit of operating a plant, and thus the cost of energy would skyrocket since nuclear power produces the baseload of energy in many parts of the country. The idea behind the act is for each site to pay a certain amount per year to create an overly large pool of funds for cleanup/compensation in case of an accident. The chances of multiple sites requiring those funds at the same time is miniscule given nuclear power's track record, so the fund just grows each year since every site pays into the pot. The real question to ask is $11 billion a good amount to cover cleanup. To that I say, yes it is. The site with the worst reputation for mismanagement and contamination issues was Rocky Flats in Colorado, the DOD site that manufactured plutonium and bomb materials for defense purposes. The site was cleaned up for a contract of $11 billion. The site doesn't exist anymore since it was truly a success from the standpoint of cleanup of waste. The PAAA's fund of $11 billion would cover a cleanup of that magnitude for a commercial or DOE site quite easily
Very true. I always wonder why certain pro-nuclear groups don't spend money at PR firms? If they truly understood how the multitude perceives things, they could improve that perception at a young age and attempt to give some understanding to the average layman (or laywoman for this article). I'll bet if you ask someone what vitrified waste is, they'll say it's something to do with a sewer. I'm not saying everyone needs to be experts, but have a basic understanding. Fear of the unknown is one thing, but continued ignorance of that unknown is shameful.
So very true. It's also the sad fact that these politicians that we so easily bash are not proficient in every issue they are faced with during a session, so they read the condensed versions of everything. You ever try explaining the finer points of solvent degradation from radiation during reprocessing when trying to tell a politician that it will decrease the activity of nuclear waste to natural background levels in around 100 years? Yeah, I did, tried at least, and he gave me a very serious look, and said it sounded interesting if it's true (as if he had a better idea about it than I did). You have to hit the bullet points for any politician. If it sounds like he'll gain votes by supporting it, he'll "consider" it. Which means he won't ever look at it again unless there is a very, very large consensus supporting it, thus making it a safe stance. So for this Women's Institute, I'm sure their opinion is going to count just as much as any highly regarded engineer, because a politician or voter doesn't know what the hell they're talking about anyway.
I don't know where you learned that fact, but it's not true or even applicable in this case of people living near reactor sites since it's NRC regulations that people cannot receive more than the average natural dose if they are outside boundaries of the site (also why most sites are in remote areas). Facilities are very heavily insured for both the site and the utility. They need laws limiting liability same as they need laws limiting the liability for a surgeon. Some laws are created for the benefit of the masses. It is entirely true that a family member is priceless to one's family, but should an accident occur, that person is not considered priceless by others. If a site has an accident and a worker dies, should the family be awarded as much as they want? The answer you get from most people is: of course not! Barring another chernobyl (which is impossible with western reactors due to the negative void coefficient and containment structures), what damage could be done to a large area that a utility would be liable for? A utility in that case would go under faster than Enron so there would be no trial. So you want a reason why facilities don't insure them fully? There ya go.
I agree, is it even the company's best interest to pay their employees to go green? Shouldn't there be tax incentives instead? Maybe lowering the cost of state registration/title/wheel taxes for energy efficient vehicles? To me, this is pretty far out of the scope of a business. Making their own vehicles energy efficient as UPS and Fedex have done is one thing, but throwing money away to employees for this is a bad move for the bottom line. If the world wants to go green, make the cost and effort to switch negligible to that of not going green.
Actually they did. Hence what is termed as the "breeding ratio" which is plutonium produced to the u235 used to make it. You can read some on LMFBR's if you want to know some more about that. The US didn't stop their weapons research when the cyclotron was built, so they made some improvements since 1940 in terms of EBR I and II. The critical mass of plutonium is less than uranium, but that has absolutely nothing to do with a breeder reactor since you're still in the same geometry, fuel density, moderator density, temperature for doppler effect, etc etc. The plutonium breeded rods were removed to chemically separate the Pu-239 out before it created Pu241 and excess Am241, since those have much less energy per fission and aren't useful in a bomb. The HEU inside the core was around 95%, and spaced to create a high flux in the center where the U238 rods were inserted. Since the reactors were shut down when not producing, they would have a fuel cycle of about 2 months much like HFIR (Cf-252 production reactor) does, so the amount of plutonium produced would be quite a bit in relation to the HEU used.
Pu isn't easily separated either. It can be done with very little loss of desired material, but it isn't easy. The toxicity of the process is astounding when including the amount waste from degradation of the TBP and related solvents in the PUREX process. The criticality issues really aren't a problem during this process so that isn't the dangerous part. The dangerous part is the toxicity of solvent waste and off gas treatment, eventhough HEPA filters can do wonders, where are you going to store gaseous rad waste?
That depends on your view of economical. If you consider breeder reactors that made plutonium for weapons programs in the US and USSR, then yes, those were very economical at the time since the contractors made so much I'd probably get any figure I would guess wrong. As far as a commercial breeder reactor that is used to make plutonium solely for use in a mixed oxide (MOX) core, then no. The US doesn't put a whole lot of money into breeder reactors when compared to advanced fuel cycle studies. You're very right when you say you can't see the nuclear industry going large for some time. The biggest reason is that we have no means of building a reactor. After the steel industry went largely overseas and the major utilities stopped building new plants, the corporations that build the major components (pressure vessels, steam generators, etc) went overseas. We don't even do reprocessing studies since we purchase our MOX fuel from Cogema (french company). You're very right by saying that the US won't go fully nuclear for some time; however, there are licenses that should be through the NRC by 2007 so expect some new plants to begin construction by 2010.
I'm guessing you don't mean breeding U238 into U235. The breeding reaction with uranium, that I'm assuming you meant, is where the neutron is absorbed in the U238 which makes U239 which will beta decay into Np239 which beta decays into fissile Pu239 and then upwards with each subsequently absorbed neutron. There is no way to breed U235 effectively and in great abundance. You could have a high energy neutron that knocks a neutron out of U236, but the cross section for that is on the order of nanobarns whereas the XS of first chance fission has resonances near that of the total absorption XS, so it's not too likely. You can run a thorium cycle which can produce U233 which is also fissile, but has many reprocessing steps to remove the U233 from the thorium if that's the desired fuel type, and if reprocessing is the desired route, then breeding U238 into plutonium and reprocessing the fuel into a high burn up MOX would work best. I don't quite agree with your number of 50 years of nuclear fuel either. It's more like 150 years with the gen4 reactors that have the better flux profiles and can utilize high burnup fuelsmore effectively than the modified current versions. That fuel will last even longer once reprocessing becomes economically viable. Technology-wise we can reprocess spent fuel with very little loss of burnable fuel, with Cogema's diamex or JAERI's DIDPA solvent extraction processes that can get 99.97% of U, Pu, and minor actinides with very little contamination by some of the more annoying fission products. In short, you're right, there is a whole helluva lot of nuclear fuel available for many generations
You're kidding right? You think the US is run by religious fanatics? You're comparing the US to the Taliban? Where the government uses force to convert its subjects into practicing a certain religion? Apparently you're falling prey to buzz words in the media. The religious right, the right wing christian conservatives, revamping the country to puritanical colonialism all while doing mission statements and working on innovating their new and improved synergies. There is a jumble of all faiths running the US, many of the divisions of christianity, judaism, atheism, islam, etc. There is no state sponsored church, religion, or belief system that citizens are forced to join. It is ridiculous to think that the multitude in the US would follow a state designed religion in the first place. Look at the backlash over putting stickers on biology textbooks saying that evolution is only a theory, common sense is dominating ridiculous ideas. It isn't religious fanaticism running this country. It's apathy. Apathy towards hard work in school. We'd rather watch mind numbing reality tv than pick up a book or try to learn something new. Kids get passed to the next grade no matter if they work hard or not because we wouldn't want to hurt the little darling's self esteem, so the kids who would otherwise make an effort end up slacking off because they're guaranteed to pass anyway so why bother working hard? Why go out of your way to do well if you can just get by. There are plenty of would-be scientists out there in gradeschool that have no motivation because teachers don't reward diligence and effort, instead they spend more time trying to enforce discipline to a bunch of kids who don't care. What can a teacher do if the parents don't care in the first place? We constantly demonize teachers who discipline their students. How many times have you seen a parent go and complain that their kid was given detention or a bad grade when the kid deserved it? The biggest farce is the no child left behind act. Some kids need to be left behind. School isn't for everyone. Teach some kids a trade or useful everyday skills instead of forcing them to memorize shakespeare or other equally useless facts to them. Teach them how to work a cash register or fix a car. Don't waste their or the teacher's time by forcing the teacher to remediate the uninterested ones. Cater schools to kids who want to learn. All we owe people in this country is the chance to succeed, we don't have to make them do it if they don't want to. Let them fail if they don't want to put in effort, that way the teachers can focus on the students who want to learn, and ultimately schools will be better. Yeah I ranted, I'm just sick of seeing kids who have potential be held back because of other people.
I couldn't agree more. Watering down the curriculum is the worst thing to do. As soon as the students get out into the workplace, they will be so proud of their degree and will talk to everyone at the office about their alma mater, then will write a report that's so error strewn that the company won't ever hire anyone from that school again. The school will suffer in the rankings, since it's all peer evaluated anyway, and it will deter many people from attending that school. I have a thing for failing my seniors when it comes to them not getting their work done. I try to prepare them for the real world as best I can, and if that means dishing out some bad grades to make them work harder, so be it, because they'll have a much easier time later on if they put in the effort to learn it themselves now. Also I don't want them ruining my reputation in the field.
Every school is different. Georgia Tech has seen quite the opposite in the past 2 decades. Maybe it's the reputation of the school that turns off students for more competitive programs? Also many schools are going through budgetary crises, so they can't accept as many students for programs that aren't bringing in the big research dollars. This is where the big engineering schools kick the butts of the smaller ones, because they smaller ones really can't compete when it comes to facilities, faculty, and number of grad students. I'd assume that more students go to U of M for engineering instead of MSU since it's the bigger school for engineering.
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Or you could just say that an acute dose of 2 gray to the lens caused the cataracts. You're confusing a stochastic dose rate over a long period of time with a deterministic effect which is incorrect (cataracts for astronauts are a deterministic effect). Also you're leaving out the quality factor and tissue weighting factor, so you can't even get a proper committed effective dose to the lens.
Any diabetic should be in favor of human/animal hybrids, look where their insulin is made.
I'm glad someone got it :-)
They wanted 3 because then they can say "AMD with the trifecta, baby!"
(College BBall fans might appreciate that)
There's plenty of risk (99% of it to himself), which is why if he wants to build one, then he is going to have to follow all the same procedures that a hospital does when submitting a license application and radiation assessment for an accelerator. Nothing more, nothing less.
That's regulations in Ireland, not everywhere. Ireland is in the minority for doing away with smoking, the vast majority of the world still believes in letting people decide for themselves
Oh I understand just fine, but regulations don't say that.
I guess it is a pretty libertarian point of view, but I've always taken the view that you can do whatever you want so long as you aren't hurting anyone else. By that I think it's alright for people who smoke to be around other people who smoke so long as people who don't smoke aren't forced to be around it if they don't want to. I don't smoke, nor do I support it, but I won't stand in someone's way of being an idiot if they so desire, and if a bunch of smokers want to sit in a room and develop metastasized cancer, go right ahead, less smokers in the future. In the US, every business has to meet OSHA regulations. They've been pretty slow to make regulations about smoking other than that there has to be a designated area for smokers on breaks. Good or bad, that's the reg right now. Since you mentioned unsafe working practices, if a business is susceptable to lawsuits for unsafe working environments under OSHA, then by all means, they're going to have to change or face the consequences. The result of unsafe working conditions back in the day, brought forward famously by the book "The Jungle," led to better working conditions through the strengthening of unions and job safety laws. Now if a group of workers in a place want to collectively strike to try to change the owner's mind about smoking on the job, they have every right to do so and the owner might actually listen, I think it'd be a great idea to do that. But there are many jobs out there, it's hard to believe that a person is relegated to a single job where being around smokers is the only option. If that is the case, they might have more to worry about then second hand smoke. Seriously though, when you take a job, you accept the possibility of risk. If you're a short order cook at the local greasy spoon, you have a possibility of burning yourself pretty badly on the job every day. There really isn't any way to make it safer than it is already, so you just have to accept the risk that you could burn yourself. We can't do away with restaurants because people might hurt themselves working there, same as we can't do away with highway road crews because someone might get hit, or keep people from becoming doctors because they might get sick from patients. People take risks because they think the benefits outweigh the consequences.
Roads are public property though, a privately owned business is not
It's not owned by the public, it's owned by a proprietor that chooses to allow smoking in his/her establishment. The workers are not forced to work there. They have the job with the understanding that there is smoking allowed. If they don't want to be around smoking, don't apply for a job there. If a pub owner has a hard time finding customers AND employees, then I'm sure he/she will have a change of heart on the smoking issue. Consider workers in any dangerous job, particularly highway road crews. They take those jobs with the understanding that there is a chance that a motorist will speed right through the work zone and kill them, but they're willing to forego the risks. When you take a job, you know what you're getting yourself into, that's part of personal responsibility. If you're afraid of radiation, don't work in the nuclear industry. If the sight of blood makes you squeamish, don't work in a hospital. It's your choice where you work. You choose where you go and what you do. You have a choice to go into that bar and give them your money, if you don't want to, you don't have to, because you can go anywhere else you want. It's your decision. If you don't want to go into a place because they allow smoking, let them know that because it might change their mind, but it should still be their choice since it's their business.
I would hate to think that someone supports the genocide of the entire skunk population because they stink. hehe
Eventhough I abhor smoking (volunteering as med physicist til the ph.d is done), I still think that government mandated smoking bans in public places aren't right. It should be up to the business owner to decide to allow smoking or not. If people like you and me don't want to patronize a restaurant because they allow smoking, then the business owner loses our money. If enough people decide not to go there, then the business owner will disallow smoking to bring back business. It's the free market that should decide the ban on smoking, not the government. People have a right to do with their lives and property as they please. If people want to be morons and smoke, it's their decision since it's their lives, just as it's my decision not to smoke. If you choose to go to a bar, you're choosing to go where people smoke. You don't have to go there, because you have as much an option of going somewhere else that doesn't allow smoking. If you still decide to go because you think it's such a great place, then it reverts back to a good old cost-benefit tradeoff where you place having fun at the moment over your future health. It's your decision since no one is holding a gun to your head to go there, whereas a government mandated ban is essentially holding a gun to the heads of the business owners telling them they cannot allow smoking. Smokers have just as much right to congregate together and smoke as does anyone else.
I'm susupiscious because they claim that high energy x-rays can't produce long lived radioactive waste. Apparently they haven't heard of photoneutrons. That and the plasma temperature for the H-B reaction is 10 times that of D-T, making it pretty difficult with standard materials. It looks like a viable research project though. My only concern with the researcher is that if this guy agreed to publish this article to a non-conventional journal to get more funding and awareness, then he's probably going to get it, but at the ire of the plasma fusion community, which usually spells doom for long-term funding.
Here's my question, do lawmakers really know enough about WiFi security and firewalls to write a coherent law requiring this? I'd draw the parallel between the FCC and the slow move to HDTV, which they really can't push too quickly because many people don't want/need to pay for a new tv and then pay more for cable/satellite. So since many people (including myself) run old equipment, what type of standard encryption and firewall will the law entail? Will they require WEP64/128, which can be easily broken, or WPA which old equipment isn't compatible with, or another form? Can they force a standard to be adopted by the residents within a county without stepping on the toes of the FCC? To the best of my knowledge, the band that 802.11 works in is public and unrestricted. What about firewalls? Are they going to legislate which ports you can have open? I seriously doubt the lawmakers would understand concerns like this, but should that be the case, how can they effectively legislate a law?
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=4&catid=318
http://www.ans.org/pi/ps/docs/ps54-bi.pdf
Read those for a better view than the often politicized and sometimes misleading wikipedia. A max of $400 million per plant per incident as stated by the parent's author in discussion was not correct. The PAAA supplies a pool of funds paid into by nearly every site containing DOE fuel, excluding accelerator operations. The current pot is up to around $11 billion. This isn't car insurance that you pay $600 bucks into every 6 months, because if you don't make a claim that would recover those funds, they're just being thrown down a hole. As you quoted, the sites would need to pay more than $3 billion annually to fully insure their operations. Should every site be required to pay a cost of $3 billion per year, that's more than the site. That in mind, it would negate the financial benefit of operating a plant, and thus the cost of energy would skyrocket since nuclear power produces the baseload of energy in many parts of the country. The idea behind the act is for each site to pay a certain amount per year to create an overly large pool of funds for cleanup/compensation in case of an accident. The chances of multiple sites requiring those funds at the same time is miniscule given nuclear power's track record, so the fund just grows each year since every site pays into the pot. The real question to ask is $11 billion a good amount to cover cleanup. To that I say, yes it is. The site with the worst reputation for mismanagement and contamination issues was Rocky Flats in Colorado, the DOD site that manufactured plutonium and bomb materials for defense purposes. The site was cleaned up for a contract of $11 billion. The site doesn't exist anymore since it was truly a success from the standpoint of cleanup of waste. The PAAA's fund of $11 billion would cover a cleanup of that magnitude for a commercial or DOE site quite easily
Very true. I always wonder why certain pro-nuclear groups don't spend money at PR firms? If they truly understood how the multitude perceives things, they could improve that perception at a young age and attempt to give some understanding to the average layman (or laywoman for this article). I'll bet if you ask someone what vitrified waste is, they'll say it's something to do with a sewer. I'm not saying everyone needs to be experts, but have a basic understanding. Fear of the unknown is one thing, but continued ignorance of that unknown is shameful.
So very true. It's also the sad fact that these politicians that we so easily bash are not proficient in every issue they are faced with during a session, so they read the condensed versions of everything. You ever try explaining the finer points of solvent degradation from radiation during reprocessing when trying to tell a politician that it will decrease the activity of nuclear waste to natural background levels in around 100 years? Yeah, I did, tried at least, and he gave me a very serious look, and said it sounded interesting if it's true (as if he had a better idea about it than I did). You have to hit the bullet points for any politician. If it sounds like he'll gain votes by supporting it, he'll "consider" it. Which means he won't ever look at it again unless there is a very, very large consensus supporting it, thus making it a safe stance. So for this Women's Institute, I'm sure their opinion is going to count just as much as any highly regarded engineer, because a politician or voter doesn't know what the hell they're talking about anyway.
I don't know where you learned that fact, but it's not true or even applicable in this case of people living near reactor sites since it's NRC regulations that people cannot receive more than the average natural dose if they are outside boundaries of the site (also why most sites are in remote areas). Facilities are very heavily insured for both the site and the utility. They need laws limiting liability same as they need laws limiting the liability for a surgeon. Some laws are created for the benefit of the masses. It is entirely true that a family member is priceless to one's family, but should an accident occur, that person is not considered priceless by others. If a site has an accident and a worker dies, should the family be awarded as much as they want? The answer you get from most people is: of course not! Barring another chernobyl (which is impossible with western reactors due to the negative void coefficient and containment structures), what damage could be done to a large area that a utility would be liable for? A utility in that case would go under faster than Enron so there would be no trial. So you want a reason why facilities don't insure them fully? There ya go.
I agree, is it even the company's best interest to pay their employees to go green? Shouldn't there be tax incentives instead? Maybe lowering the cost of state registration/title/wheel taxes for energy efficient vehicles? To me, this is pretty far out of the scope of a business. Making their own vehicles energy efficient as UPS and Fedex have done is one thing, but throwing money away to employees for this is a bad move for the bottom line. If the world wants to go green, make the cost and effort to switch negligible to that of not going green.
Actually they did. Hence what is termed as the "breeding ratio" which is plutonium produced to the u235 used to make it. You can read some on LMFBR's if you want to know some more about that. The US didn't stop their weapons research when the cyclotron was built, so they made some improvements since 1940 in terms of EBR I and II. The critical mass of plutonium is less than uranium, but that has absolutely nothing to do with a breeder reactor since you're still in the same geometry, fuel density, moderator density, temperature for doppler effect, etc etc. The plutonium breeded rods were removed to chemically separate the Pu-239 out before it created Pu241 and excess Am241, since those have much less energy per fission and aren't useful in a bomb. The HEU inside the core was around 95%, and spaced to create a high flux in the center where the U238 rods were inserted. Since the reactors were shut down when not producing, they would have a fuel cycle of about 2 months much like HFIR (Cf-252 production reactor) does, so the amount of plutonium produced would be quite a bit in relation to the HEU used.
Pu isn't easily separated either. It can be done with very little loss of desired material, but it isn't easy. The toxicity of the process is astounding when including the amount waste from degradation of the TBP and related solvents in the PUREX process. The criticality issues really aren't a problem during this process so that isn't the dangerous part. The dangerous part is the toxicity of solvent waste and off gas treatment, eventhough HEPA filters can do wonders, where are you going to store gaseous rad waste?
That depends on your view of economical. If you consider breeder reactors that made plutonium for weapons programs in the US and USSR, then yes, those were very economical at the time since the contractors made so much I'd probably get any figure I would guess wrong. As far as a commercial breeder reactor that is used to make plutonium solely for use in a mixed oxide (MOX) core, then no. The US doesn't put a whole lot of money into breeder reactors when compared to advanced fuel cycle studies. You're very right when you say you can't see the nuclear industry going large for some time. The biggest reason is that we have no means of building a reactor. After the steel industry went largely overseas and the major utilities stopped building new plants, the corporations that build the major components (pressure vessels, steam generators, etc) went overseas. We don't even do reprocessing studies since we purchase our MOX fuel from Cogema (french company). You're very right by saying that the US won't go fully nuclear for some time; however, there are licenses that should be through the NRC by 2007 so expect some new plants to begin construction by 2010.
I'm guessing you don't mean breeding U238 into U235. The breeding reaction with uranium, that I'm assuming you meant, is where the neutron is absorbed in the U238 which makes U239 which will beta decay into Np239 which beta decays into fissile Pu239 and then upwards with each subsequently absorbed neutron. There is no way to breed U235 effectively and in great abundance. You could have a high energy neutron that knocks a neutron out of U236, but the cross section for that is on the order of nanobarns whereas the XS of first chance fission has resonances near that of the total absorption XS, so it's not too likely. You can run a thorium cycle which can produce U233 which is also fissile, but has many reprocessing steps to remove the U233 from the thorium if that's the desired fuel type, and if reprocessing is the desired route, then breeding U238 into plutonium and reprocessing the fuel into a high burn up MOX would work best. I don't quite agree with your number of 50 years of nuclear fuel either. It's more like 150 years with the gen4 reactors that have the better flux profiles and can utilize high burnup fuelsmore effectively than the modified current versions. That fuel will last even longer once reprocessing becomes economically viable. Technology-wise we can reprocess spent fuel with very little loss of burnable fuel, with Cogema's diamex or JAERI's DIDPA solvent extraction processes that can get 99.97% of U, Pu, and minor actinides with very little contamination by some of the more annoying fission products. In short, you're right, there is a whole helluva lot of nuclear fuel available for many generations
You're kidding right? You think the US is run by religious fanatics? You're comparing the US to the Taliban? Where the government uses force to convert its subjects into practicing a certain religion? Apparently you're falling prey to buzz words in the media. The religious right, the right wing christian conservatives, revamping the country to puritanical colonialism all while doing mission statements and working on innovating their new and improved synergies. There is a jumble of all faiths running the US, many of the divisions of christianity, judaism, atheism, islam, etc. There is no state sponsored church, religion, or belief system that citizens are forced to join. It is ridiculous to think that the multitude in the US would follow a state designed religion in the first place. Look at the backlash over putting stickers on biology textbooks saying that evolution is only a theory, common sense is dominating ridiculous ideas. It isn't religious fanaticism running this country. It's apathy. Apathy towards hard work in school. We'd rather watch mind numbing reality tv than pick up a book or try to learn something new. Kids get passed to the next grade no matter if they work hard or not because we wouldn't want to hurt the little darling's self esteem, so the kids who would otherwise make an effort end up slacking off because they're guaranteed to pass anyway so why bother working hard? Why go out of your way to do well if you can just get by. There are plenty of would-be scientists out there in gradeschool that have no motivation because teachers don't reward diligence and effort, instead they spend more time trying to enforce discipline to a bunch of kids who don't care. What can a teacher do if the parents don't care in the first place? We constantly demonize teachers who discipline their students. How many times have you seen a parent go and complain that their kid was given detention or a bad grade when the kid deserved it? The biggest farce is the no child left behind act. Some kids need to be left behind. School isn't for everyone. Teach some kids a trade or useful everyday skills instead of forcing them to memorize shakespeare or other equally useless facts to them. Teach them how to work a cash register or fix a car. Don't waste their or the teacher's time by forcing the teacher to remediate the uninterested ones. Cater schools to kids who want to learn. All we owe people in this country is the chance to succeed, we don't have to make them do it if they don't want to. Let them fail if they don't want to put in effort, that way the teachers can focus on the students who want to learn, and ultimately schools will be better. Yeah I ranted, I'm just sick of seeing kids who have potential be held back because of other people.
I couldn't agree more. Watering down the curriculum is the worst thing to do. As soon as the students get out into the workplace, they will be so proud of their degree and will talk to everyone at the office about their alma mater, then will write a report that's so error strewn that the company won't ever hire anyone from that school again. The school will suffer in the rankings, since it's all peer evaluated anyway, and it will deter many people from attending that school. I have a thing for failing my seniors when it comes to them not getting their work done. I try to prepare them for the real world as best I can, and if that means dishing out some bad grades to make them work harder, so be it, because they'll have a much easier time later on if they put in the effort to learn it themselves now. Also I don't want them ruining my reputation in the field.
Every school is different. Georgia Tech has seen quite the opposite in the past 2 decades. Maybe it's the reputation of the school that turns off students for more competitive programs? Also many schools are going through budgetary crises, so they can't accept as many students for programs that aren't bringing in the big research dollars. This is where the big engineering schools kick the butts of the smaller ones, because they smaller ones really can't compete when it comes to facilities, faculty, and number of grad students. I'd assume that more students go to U of M for engineering instead of MSU since it's the bigger school for engineering.