What you have at these sites are the equivelents of 13-14 Chernobyl's (in terms of the amount of spent fuel stored).
I don't see how putting all of these eggs in one basket improves the situation. Improving the storage facilities at the present locations seems to me to be a better idea than putting all of this stuff in a single storage facility located in the middle of one of the most geologically active areas of the country.
Breeder reactors are a great idea that we should really use - except that they don't use all of the waste only most what do you do with old contaminated piping, reactor vessels, etc?
Disposal has always been an issue for the nuclear power industry and always will be. I object to the idea that taxpayers should be the ones footing the bill, which is certainly the case with Yucca Mtn. It seems to me, though, that as long as a material is radioactive there is potential for continued power generation, and I think that should be investigated and developed. That would certainly include the weapons-grade plutonium produced by the breeder reactors. I know there is a great deal of political opposition to them, but what else are we going to do with this stuff? Stuff it down a hole and pretend it doesn't exist?
Well, we could leave it where it is, possibly even *gasp* make the producers of that waste build better on-site storage facilities and pay for it themselves. At least that limits the scope of potential disaster to a few Three Mile Islands rather than a Chernobyl.
Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.
Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.
Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.
With the waste in barely radioactive form and these large containers, they could be dropped off anywhere undergground that has stable geology and never be an environmental problem to anyone.
It would be interesting to see if a class-action lawsuit could be filed under similar reasoning (although a class of N'Sync fans is probably something the world is better off without).
I'd buy an N'Sync CD to get a piece of that pie, although I'd probably have to hire someone to test it for me. I don't think I can stand to actually hear it myself.
Nuclear waste disaster on the order of Chernobyl is really only possible if all the nuclear waste were concentrated in one place; like, say, Yucca Mtn.
In the current situation we face isolated incidents on the order of Three Mile Island. Certainly undesirable, but nowhere near Chernobyl.
The situation is nowhere near as critical as you seem determined to believe, and there are much better solutions available, and in fact already in use in other countries. Specifically, the French use breeder reactors to burn this type of waste, which produces electric power and results in a reduction of total waste. The waste produced by these breeder plants has a half-life of only 30 years; much less of a storage problem than the 10,000 year half-life of the waste the DOE proposes to store at Yucca Mtn. Personally, I would rather wait another 20 years and spend another $80 billion to develope a real solution than to just dump it all in a storage tank on top of one of the most active faults in the country. What was that about Chernobyl?
And as for the Shoshone, their land wasn't stolen long ago as you seem to believe. It was stolen in 1979 (oddly, about 20 years ago. I wonder if that's just coincidence...) and the US government doctored the paperwork and manipulated the "legal" proceedings to make it look like it was done in 1872 and they were merely paying reparations for a wrong commited long ago.
Considering that the DOE has chosen to ignore the fact that Yucca Mtn sits on top of one of the most active faults in the country, I'm certainly reasured by how easy it is for the public to obtain this information.
Now we can truck radioactive waste across the country on public roads to one geologically unstable location! And as an added bonus it'll cost taxpayers about $50 billion. Gee, I'm sure glad our Prez has an energy policy!
Is it just me, or is this a monumentally stupid idea?
I haven't had any problems opening or saving to MS Office file formats with OpenOffice 6.41. I've been using it at work and at home for about a month now.
It seems like you have a lot of stability problems. Perhaps you should look at your hardware as the culprit? I've had more than a few experiences where I thought crappy code was causing all my crashes only to discover that my CPU was running hot due to a flakey fan or poorly installed HSF, or my hard drive was dying. Maybe your hardware just isn't up to the task?
I've used Word for a few years now and I've never had stability problems (although I nearly choked when you mentioned MS Word and HTML in the same sentence). Nor have I had any problems with OpenOffice 6.x, which I've been using for over a month now. OpenOffice is my recomendation for you, especially if you have legacy Word documents. I haven't run into problems with any of the MS Office formats in OpenOffice yet. It does like to warn me whenever I save to one, but so far it's been all bark and no bite. And, of course, it's available on multiple platforms.
Maybe he would like to have his hardware supported by his kernel...
Inappropriate Comparison
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
There is a HUGE difference between what we are facing in Afghanistan and what the Soviets faced there. The Soviets were facing an opposition trained and supplied by the USA. The Taliban has no such backing.
My wife had similar joint problems after the birth of our daughter. It seems to have gone away, but we were very concerned for a while since the symptoms are a lot like Lupus, which can kill you. I would say that the problem went away somewhere around 12-15 months. I'll ask her for more details and maybe some advice when I get home and if she's got anything I'll post it tonight.
There are stretches and strengthening exercises you can do to prevent carpal tunnel. I discovered them through my martial arts school. Obviously if someones going to be practicing wrist locks on you, you want your wrists to be both strong and flexible, but I discovered that my carpal tunnel also went away when I started doing these excercises.
I won't try to describe them since I'm not sure I could do a very good job without having some pictures. Any martial art that uses joint lock tchniques should also teach stretching and strengthening exercises for those joints. If you have problems such as carpal tunnel I recomend looking into it.
In my experience it's not that difficult to tell the difference between those who have degrees and those who don't. I worked in construction for 10 years, and the education level of the people I worked with ranged from 8th grade to Masters. The difference really shows itself in 3 areas: problem solving, anger management, and... communication... skills.
Obviously, communication skills aren't that important in construction. If you're capable of yelling "look out below!" (or the abreviated version, "Headache!"), you're probably OK. Problem solving is certainly useful, but not necessary if you can follow directions. Anger management is the big one in construction. It was fairly common to see someone kick a wall or throw something, and in construction that's accepted, even expected. In IT it's probably less desirable to have someone throwing their tools across the room.
The really remarkable part is how uniform and predictable it is. Just by watching someone deal with a stressful situation, even something as simple as hitting their thumb with a hammer, you can tell what level of education they've achieved. Swearing in the above situation is universal of course, as an English Prof once told me, "use language that's appropriate and will most effectively convey your message", but what else they do while they curse is telling. I've never seen anyone with an Associates degree or higher throw a hammer in anger.
The purpose of government is not to protect us from ourselves. If some numbskull bodyslams his sister to death, how is that my fault? Why should I be punished for it by having my freedoms taken away? Pandering to the lowest common denominator leaves you with nothing but a society of lowest common denominators; a whole nation of little Johnnies who can't read or do basic math or understand personal responsibility, with a Mommy State to take care of them.
They would certainly have the infrastructure for that, assuming they'd be leveraging their PCS system. The little information I found at the provided link was on the order of "I'm a subscriber, what does this mean for me?", not anything that described the actual service.
I just checked their page and it looks like the range is fairly limited, but from the map I'd guess that the limitation is the installed base of fiber since the availability is basically from the main CO to the airport, and around the Air Force base and the biggest mall in town (which is only 10-15 years old).
Sounds interesting, though I'm surprised I haven't heard anything about it since I live about 50 miles outside of Sacramento. If what you say is true, I know a few people that will be VERY happy. What sort of range does it have?
Sprint is not a last mile providor. Unless they were going to string their own lines to your house and set up their own COs (increadibly expensive), they would have to lease lines and CO space from either the local telco (who is required to provide that option by federal law) or the local cable co (not bloody likely).
Last time I checked the going rate for long distance providors was $.04US/minute, meaning that's what Sprint has to pay your local telco for the privelege of providing you with long distance service. Basically that pays for maintenance of the physical lines. I don't know what the surcharges are for providing other services.
A mile is 5280 ft, in fact. I definately agree that this is all hype, and that the last 20 (or more) miles are what's really important. I remember reading something about technology that allowed DSL to be repeatable up to 50 miles about a year ago, but it seemed to disappear as I haven't heard anything about it recently.
Of course, what I really want is fiber to my home, but only ATT seems to be into that since it's required for cable modems (although even then it's only fiber to the pole outside your home). Unfortunately, ATT's horrible customer service has made them my last possible choice for providors of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how putting all of these eggs in one basket improves the situation. Improving the storage facilities at the present locations seems to me to be a better idea than putting all of this stuff in a single storage facility located in the middle of one of the most geologically active areas of the country.
Breeder reactors are a great idea that we should really use - except that they don't use all of the waste only most what do you do with old contaminated piping, reactor vessels, etc?
Disposal has always been an issue for the nuclear power industry and always will be. I object to the idea that taxpayers should be the ones footing the bill, which is certainly the case with Yucca Mtn. It seems to me, though, that as long as a material is radioactive there is potential for continued power generation, and I think that should be investigated and developed. That would certainly include the weapons-grade plutonium produced by the breeder reactors. I know there is a great deal of political opposition to them, but what else are we going to do with this stuff? Stuff it down a hole and pretend it doesn't exist?
Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.
Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.
Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.
Even a combination of these would be acceptable.
So yes, I do have a better idea.
So in other words, NOT YUCCA MTN!
I'd buy an N'Sync CD to get a piece of that pie, although I'd probably have to hire someone to test it for me. I don't think I can stand to actually hear it myself.
In the current situation we face isolated incidents on the order of Three Mile Island. Certainly undesirable, but nowhere near Chernobyl.
The situation is nowhere near as critical as you seem determined to believe, and there are much better solutions available, and in fact already in use in other countries. Specifically, the French use breeder reactors to burn this type of waste, which produces electric power and results in a reduction of total waste. The waste produced by these breeder plants has a half-life of only 30 years; much less of a storage problem than the 10,000 year half-life of the waste the DOE proposes to store at Yucca Mtn. Personally, I would rather wait another 20 years and spend another $80 billion to develope a real solution than to just dump it all in a storage tank on top of one of the most active faults in the country. What was that about Chernobyl?
And as for the Shoshone, their land wasn't stolen long ago as you seem to believe. It was stolen in 1979 (oddly, about 20 years ago. I wonder if that's just coincidence...) and the US government doctored the paperwork and manipulated the "legal" proceedings to make it look like it was done in 1872 and they were merely paying reparations for a wrong commited long ago.
Breeder reactors are probably the most realistic idea scientifically, but there are some serious political barriers that would have to be overcome.
Is it just me, or is this a monumentally stupid idea?
I've used Word for a few years now and I've never had stability problems (although I nearly choked when you mentioned MS Word and HTML in the same sentence). Nor have I had any problems with OpenOffice 6.x, which I've been using for over a month now. OpenOffice is my recomendation for you, especially if you have legacy Word documents. I haven't run into problems with any of the MS Office formats in OpenOffice yet. It does like to warn me whenever I save to one, but so far it's been all bark and no bite. And, of course, it's available on multiple platforms.
There is a HUGE difference between what we are facing in Afghanistan and what the Soviets faced there. The Soviets were facing an opposition trained and supplied by the USA. The Taliban has no such backing.
I won't try to describe them since I'm not sure I could do a very good job without having some pictures. Any martial art that uses joint lock tchniques should also teach stretching and strengthening exercises for those joints. If you have problems such as carpal tunnel I recomend looking into it.
Obviously, communication skills aren't that important in construction. If you're capable of yelling "look out below!" (or the abreviated version, "Headache!"), you're probably OK. Problem solving is certainly useful, but not necessary if you can follow directions. Anger management is the big one in construction. It was fairly common to see someone kick a wall or throw something, and in construction that's accepted, even expected. In IT it's probably less desirable to have someone throwing their tools across the room.
The really remarkable part is how uniform and predictable it is. Just by watching someone deal with a stressful situation, even something as simple as hitting their thumb with a hammer, you can tell what level of education they've achieved. Swearing in the above situation is universal of course, as an English Prof once told me, "use language that's appropriate and will most effectively convey your message", but what else they do while they curse is telling. I've never seen anyone with an Associates degree or higher throw a hammer in anger.
I already have a mother, thank you very much.
Last time I checked the going rate for long distance providors was $.04US/minute, meaning that's what Sprint has to pay your local telco for the privelege of providing you with long distance service. Basically that pays for maintenance of the physical lines. I don't know what the surcharges are for providing other services.
Of course, what I really want is fiber to my home, but only ATT seems to be into that since it's required for cable modems (although even then it's only fiber to the pole outside your home). Unfortunately, ATT's horrible customer service has made them my last possible choice for providors of anything.