Err, fission is still going on. Fission is the process of a large isotope splitting into smaller more stable isotopes.
Granted, it's a much slower and cooler process than you would find at a commercial nuclear plant, or in the belly of a ship, but it is the same process.
Yeah, but you aren't just powering the computer. You are also running all the radio equipment, sensors, and supporting electronics. And also remember that a lot of the supporting electronics are fault tolerant, so you are running 3 times what you need, all on hardware designed in the early 90's.
Ok. That's like saying a wristwatch is not a chronomiter because it isn't mounted to the bridge of a ship.
If it ticks like a clock, and keeps time like a clock, it's a clock. If it harnesses energy from the decay of nuclear elements, and it does so by converting heat to electricity, it's a Nuclear reactor.
Oh yeah, and double all those amounts. That is the theoretical maximum that could be derived from the fuel. In practice, the best we can achieve is 40 percent. (In an industrial setting, small vehicle's like cars are lucky to get 10%).
So
2340 Kg / 0.40 = 5850 Kj of oil
3150 Kg / 0.40 = 7880 Kj of coal
That's pretty easy to do. Look up the enthalpy of combustion for fuel oil and coal. Any good thermodynamic textbook will have both. The unit for enthalpy is KJ/g (Kilojoules per gram of fuel.) A watt is 1 joule per second. (Isn't metric lovely?)
I googled around and found some stats from the power industry as "energy density of fossil fuel"
Energy density of Fuel Oil: 42.5 MJ/Kg
Energy density of Anthracite Coal: 31.4 MJ/Kg
MJ/Kg is Mega (million) joules per Kilogram. Our power unit provides 450 watts, thus uses 0.00045 MJ/s. A day's worth of power is 0.00045 MJ/s 3600 s/hour * 24 hours/day = 38.9 MJ. (Remember your signifigant digits!)
To convert that back to weight:
38.9 MJ/Kg / 42.5 MJ = 0.915 Kg/day of Oil
38.9 MJ/Kg / 31.4 MJ = 1.23 Kg/day of Coal
We are in the 7th year of the flight, so:
0.915 Kg/day * 365.26 days/year * 7 years = 2340 Kg of Oil
1.23 Kg/day * 365.26 * 7 = 3150 Kg of Coal.
Solar power doesn't provide a lot of energy in deep space. The sun out that far look like a really bright star. That why Cassini needed a nuclear reactor.
Airborne plutonium dust is nothing to sniff at. Plutonium is harmless as a solid, but in dust form it's very toxic. Of course, so are the vapors from the rocket's propellent tanks, just about every combusted plastic and rubber compound on the spacecraft, and all the vaporized metal.
Yes, the greenies were making a mountain out of a molehill. Nuclear powered satellites have been launched for years, and the reactors are specifically designed to survive the destruction of the spacecraft.
The problem is that we live in a world that is only willing to offer 30 seconds of attention about any subject at a time.
You see the FCC is like a coin with 2 sides. While you can only see one side of the coin at a time, the other side is still there.
Yes they are a pain in the ass some days. But they are also a pain in the ass to you foes. And my foe's foe is my friend, unless they piss me off, which, ah hell, just flip a coin.
Tails, today they are evil. Heads, today they are useful.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
--Preamble to the Constitution of the Unites States of a America
Bitch if you want, but last I checked nobody is jamming radio stations off the air with Ads for their new erectile disfuction cure, and the only thing screwing up your TV signal is distance or the wife operating the microwave.
The does it's job when you don't notice it doing it's job. The make rules to ensure that radio transmissions don't devolve into chaos. Without them we would live in a world where they guy with the biggest transmitter wins.
And they includes everything from baby monitors to wireless access points too, by the way.
And frankly there is no mutual exclusion between open-source and ease-of-use. By using open-source tools for your backend, you can spend more time refining the interface, and less time re-inventing the wheel.
I CAN configure Samba by hand, but it's worth it for me to pay for the tools.
Largely so I'm no longer the only one who can fix the equipment anymore. Do you know how nice life is when you can hand someone a dummy's book so you can move onto something more challenging.
I run an IT department with 4 people to service 200 users, an AS/400 based finance system, 30 ticket stations, 4 MSSQL databases, a retail store, 2 remote locations, in-house email, web services, and NT domain services. And when we aren't doing that, we are setting up a network for a traveling show that's coming in, or a for a rental.
We just bought a bunch of them to take over for our gaggle of Dell boxes that are EOL. We wanted 24 hour warm-body support. We wanted to be able to pre-buy spare parts. We wanted something off the shelf that pretty much used all the software we use today. (Postfix, MySQL, Samba.)
We will still use Gentoo on x86 for all our front-line stuff. (DNS, firewall, web serving) but we have 2 servers that have to be up, rain or shine, and stay running with a minimum of disruption for 3 years at a time. Gentoo is great, but new versions of stuff breaking our site configurations almost cost me my job on a few occasions.
Hey, I'm one of those freaks who DOES run everything through his computer screen. I have a TV capture card for my Playstation and VCR. (S-video is your friend). I play DVD's through my DVDRom deck. We have a small living room, so a 19" monitor and cheap 5-channel surround sound speakers just about does it for us.
The living room is a little small, but it's reasonably dark. I was thinking of upgrading to and DLP projector. The wife's been ragging on the Linux box, so I promised her the next computer would be a Mac anyway.
Pray tell, if we ship all the low-level entry-level stuff overseas, where are you planning on finding skilled labor?
If you answered: People with 7 years of experience grow on trees, you are a fool.
If you answered: We'll just cry "there are not enough skilled workers in America, we need to import skilled labor" you would be modern industry.
In 10 years time, when companies pick up stakes and leave these shores permanently, or you find yourself competing with people right off the boat and willing to work for peanuts, try to act surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, it's a much slower and cooler process than you would find at a commercial nuclear plant, or in the belly of a ship, but it is the same process.
Yeah, but you aren't just powering the computer. You are also running all the radio equipment, sensors, and supporting electronics. And also remember that a lot of the supporting electronics are fault tolerant, so you are running 3 times what you need, all on hardware designed in the early 90's.
Well, I also forgot to bring along the boiler, coolent water, heat exchanger, turbine, plumbing, ash disposal mechanism, spare parts...
If it ticks like a clock, and keeps time like a clock, it's a clock. If it harnesses energy from the decay of nuclear elements, and it does so by converting heat to electricity, it's a Nuclear reactor.
Let's see, it harnesses power from the decay of heavy elements into lighter ones. What part of Radioisotope did I fail to understand properly?
So
2340 Kg / 0.40 = 5850 Kj of oil
3150 Kg / 0.40 = 7880 Kj of coal
I googled around and found some stats from the power industry as "energy density of fossil fuel"
Energy density of Fuel Oil: 42.5 MJ/Kg
Energy density of Anthracite Coal: 31.4 MJ/Kg
MJ/Kg is Mega (million) joules per Kilogram. Our power unit provides 450 watts, thus uses 0.00045 MJ/s. A day's worth of power is 0.00045 MJ/s 3600 s/hour * 24 hours/day = 38.9 MJ. (Remember your signifigant digits!)
To convert that back to weight:
38.9 MJ/Kg / 42.5 MJ = 0.915 Kg/day of Oil
38.9 MJ/Kg / 31.4 MJ = 1.23 Kg/day of Coal
We are in the 7th year of the flight, so:
0.915 Kg/day * 365.26 days/year * 7 years = 2340 Kg of Oil
1.23 Kg/day * 365.26 * 7 = 3150 Kg of Coal.
Plus or minus.
I dunno, the appliance section of [insert retail store]?
Solar power doesn't provide a lot of energy in deep space. The sun out that far look like a really bright star. That why Cassini needed a nuclear reactor.
Well if the fumes didn't get you, the deep freeze or asphyphiation in the vacuum of space would for sure.
Speak for yourself. I have the kid to prove otherwise.
Yes, the greenies were making a mountain out of a molehill. Nuclear powered satellites have been launched for years, and the reactors are specifically designed to survive the destruction of the spacecraft.
The problem is that we live in a world that is only willing to offer 30 seconds of attention about any subject at a time.
Beat the rush.
Yes they are a pain in the ass some days. But they are also a pain in the ass to you foes. And my foe's foe is my friend, unless they piss me off, which, ah hell, just flip a coin.
Tails, today they are evil. Heads, today they are useful.
--Preamble to the Constitution of the Unites States of a America
Now do you really want to spend the rest of your life picking off aliens using a shotgun and exploding barrels of toxic waste?
The does it's job when you don't notice it doing it's job. The make rules to ensure that radio transmissions don't devolve into chaos. Without them we would live in a world where they guy with the biggest transmitter wins.
And they includes everything from baby monitors to wireless access points too, by the way.
And frankly there is no mutual exclusion between open-source and ease-of-use. By using open-source tools for your backend, you can spend more time refining the interface, and less time re-inventing the wheel.
Largely so I'm no longer the only one who can fix the equipment anymore. Do you know how nice life is when you can hand someone a dummy's book so you can move onto something more challenging.
Like posting on ./
That's it, the releases will be named after Las Vegas Casinos!
I already use Rsync to back up people's laptops. (For PC's I install cygwin and set up shared keys to the users don't have to remember a password.)
I run an IT department with 4 people to service 200 users, an AS/400 based finance system, 30 ticket stations, 4 MSSQL databases, a retail store, 2 remote locations, in-house email, web services, and NT domain services. And when we aren't doing that, we are setting up a network for a traveling show that's coming in, or a for a rental.
We just bought a bunch of them to take over for our gaggle of Dell boxes that are EOL. We wanted 24 hour warm-body support. We wanted to be able to pre-buy spare parts. We wanted something off the shelf that pretty much used all the software we use today. (Postfix, MySQL, Samba.)
We will still use Gentoo on x86 for all our front-line stuff. (DNS, firewall, web serving) but we have 2 servers that have to be up, rain or shine, and stay running with a minimum of disruption for 3 years at a time. Gentoo is great, but new versions of stuff breaking our site configurations almost cost me my job on a few occasions.
The living room is a little small, but it's reasonably dark. I was thinking of upgrading to and DLP projector. The wife's been ragging on the Linux box, so I promised her the next computer would be a Mac anyway.
If you answered: People with 7 years of experience grow on trees, you are a fool.
If you answered: We'll just cry "there are not enough skilled workers in America, we need to import skilled labor" you would be modern industry.
In 10 years time, when companies pick up stakes and leave these shores permanently, or you find yourself competing with people right off the boat and willing to work for peanuts, try to act surprised.