Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
Actually the French have found reprocessing uneconomical, there are serious issues with contamination from their reprocessing facilities, and they are likely to be shut down in favor of disposal.
From the 2008 IPFM report:
Economic Costs of Reprocessing in France. In 2000, an official report commissioned by the French Prime Minister concluded that the choice of reprocessing instead of direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel for the entire French nuclear program would result in an increase in average generation cost of about 5.5 percent or $0.5 billion per installed GWe over a 40-year reactor life or an 85 percent increase of the total spent fuel and waste management (‘back-end’) costs.
Current projected costs by the industry and the Ministry of Industry show that, in addition to a number of other favorable assumptions, the investment and operating costs of a future reprocessing plant would need to be half the costs for the current La Hague facilities in order for reprocessing to cost no more than direct disposal.
Since 1995, EDF has assigned in its accounts a zero value to its stocks of separated plutonium, as well as to its stocks of reprocessed uranium. With the liberalization of the electricity sector, the economic burden of reprocessing is increasingly weighing on the French utility EDF. Cost issues constitute the main stumbling block for a new long-term agreement with AREVA following the reprocessing / MOX fabrication contract that ended in 2007.
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
"We find that, with past and current operating practices, there is no clear advantage for the reprocessing option either in terms of waste volumes or repository area. Depending upon assumptions, the underground volume required for spent MOX fuel and vitrified waste can be smaller or larger than that for direct disposal of spent LWR fuel."
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling natural gas or some sort of petroleum product.
Yes, this is commonly accepted FUD, but is actually utter rubbish. The Federal Government study of this issue indicates that up to 80% of baseload power can come from renewables without any issue. The entire East Coast of the US could be run off a modest number of offshore wind farms properly placed with almost no point when generation would fall below 50% of nameplate capacity. The economics are quite good and even without counting externalities of other power sources would be competitive.
Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
And the only reason nuclear has any sort of price comparison to solar or wind to begin with is the fact that, under the guidance of enviro-nuts, they've basically tarriffed the entire process, from proposition through decomission into the stratosphere. Require the kinds of multi-billion dollar investments (see bribes) for wind or solar plants that are now required for nuclear and watch the price of those options skyrocket too.
Again your information is completely off. Nuclear power has had considerable subsidies and breaks over its life. If you are suggesting that making it cost-competitive with wind (and probably SPV within the next 5 years) we need to toss out the regulations which are barely adequate to prevent disasters then I and virtually the whole public say "no thanks". Wind is safe, economical, and practical. This has been proven. SPV is safe, complementary to wind, and with modest continued investment is rapidly becoming economically viable as baseload power. In 5 years the idea of building a nuclear power plant will seem idiotic.
Reprocessing and breeding are dirty and VERY VERY EXPENSIVE technologies. They will never compete with mining natural uranium out of the ground until most of that uranium is gone, at which point only if we have a LOT of reactors will it even then be worth it. Sadly by that point we will have HAD to get rid of most of the waste we could reprocess since it will simply be insane to keep that much of it around on the off chance we decide to do it. What this means is that ironically it will never be cost-effective to reprocess fuel at any time, now or in the future. The only way would be a massive up front expenditure of money and the result would only be nuclear power that is 2x more expensive than it already is, not much of a bargain.
Thorium may well work, but the problem is we're a good long ways from building the type of reactor that we can put it in and burn all the fuel down (just using it in existing LWRs doesn't provide much benefit). Even with massive funding these reactors won't really come on line for 30 years, maybe more like 40 realistically. That puts them out to 2048-2058 time frame. Even LWRs like AP1000 won't be online for 10 years. Its not even clear they will be competitive with SOLAR by then, and they lose to wind NOW.
The bigger problem is that ALL REACTORS ARE RUN BY HUMANS and the track record for their response to major disasters is not great. Sometimes people do the right thing, in fact most of the time, but many opportunities exist for disaster, and a statistically significant amount of the time responses fail. Furthermore there will always be greedy and unmotivated operators cutting costs like TEPCO. I have no reason to believe that Entergy for instance (a major US operator of nuclear power plants) is any better than TEPCO, or regulated any better either. Is it thus not just a matter of time before we have Fukushima in the US? Probably. Its not clear that building a whole bunch of AP1000's or MSRs or whatever will materially improve that situation. It will just create greater complacency resulting in even worse preparedness. Its inherent in the system.
Objects floating in the ocean are EXPOSED, they are easily damaged by weather, can be attacked easily, are hard to secure, and VERY expensive to operate.
On top of all this the article is silly. Nobody at MIT has 'designed' a reactor, they just made a proposal that is barely more than just saying "build it on an oil rig!" with a few pictures. They talk about reactors anywhere from 50MW up to 1000MW which means basically "Gosh, you could float almost any nuclear reactor!". However it is not AT ALL clear that a 1,000 MW reactor would be made safe by passive seawater cooling in the event of say the whole thing sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Consider the effects of Fukushima COMBINED with the McCondo well blow-out... Its not a pretty picture to imagine a meltdown in 100 meters of water not too far offshore. Yes, the ocean would probably make this less totally disasterous than on land, but it might also be IMPOSSIBLE to quell or clean up. Statements on the lines of "it must be safe in the ocean" are exactly what goeth before a fall in engineering.
Anyway, it will seriously have to be studied, though I suspect others have done so already. As they said, the Russians have been working on this concept for years. That's one of the interesting things about it though, working on it for years, but where's the beef? Its probably not quite so easy as it sounds.
I really can't recall. This was back when the original StarCraft first came out. This was in the day where my internet was ISDN or maybe asymmetric 512k cable-modem down and 56k modem up. It was a small size map that had land all around the edges, but the whole center was water, mostly filled with an island that had one fairly short bridge to the outside land at one corner. The island had some crystals, and the outside ring had some at the 2 corners, with the forth corner opposite the bridge being a start point. There might have been a few crystals in other spots, I don't recall exactly.
The trick was that the guy on the outside could do a 'slow rush' if it was done exactly right he could hit the island and win, if the island guy did ANYTHING except build basic units. This was mostly because it was easy to localize your opponents base/hive. Likewise you could work out that the island player could win if the outer player didn't create a way to cut off one of the two routes around the outside at exactly the right time. I don't recall the details perfectly, but I could probably still play it. Once you know the layout of the map its not too hard for a good player to see how to play it and then it comes out a draw most of the time. The really good players could beat you once they figured it out. I think maybe 2 or so players ever beat me cold on it, they must have been truly the very best of the best on Battle.net.
What makes things impossible to inspect is profit motive, nothing more.
Obviously, this is pretty much tautological. Enough money will solve ANY problem. The truth is no plant is 100% inspected. You can think otherwise and you are wrong. Look at VT Yankee's Tritium Leak problem. They weren't not doing an inspection procedure. The inspections they were doing were NOT FINDING A PROBLEM, and that means that (unbeknownst to the operator) some things aren't being properly inspected. Its not usually a deliberate thing, its simply that you WILL fail to find problems. It happens all the time. As plants age its more and more likely that these hidden problems exist in more and more critical components.
Sorry, I've worked around industrial facilities, including nuclear power plants. Hell, I've stood on top of the core of a research reactor and watched the Cerenkov glow, installed instruments at VY Yankee, etc. Lets just take VY as a good example. They COULD NOT, and DID NOT inspect plumbing underneath the plant (in fact they denied said plumbing even existed). The result was a tritium leak. There are simply pieces of these plants that can't be inspected. Trust me, I know all about ultrasound, x-rays, conductivity, etc etc etc. You can't be sure without putting eyeballs on it. Time and time again that has been proven, and some things we know we can't really inspect.
You can say that if you want, that doesn't make it true. There's clearly stuff inside these plants that nobody can look at and things that are so expensive to replace that building a new plant is cheaper. That's all that's required. You can't replace the pressure vessel on a PWR, not possible.
There are ALWAYS fundamental parts of the structure and inaccessible elements (pipes routing through masses of concrete or running under foundations for instance which are simply impractical to ever replace. In the case of nuclear power plants these things include highly critical parts like steel pressure vessels (which are degraded by neutron capture reactions amongst other things). You may be able to INSPECT these things, but once you deem that they've worn out its just game over, you decommission.
Another aspect of this problem is that it isn't simple to inspect things either. In many cases it can simply be impossible and the things that are hardest to inspect are also likely to be the things that can't be replaced. What ends up happening is that someone makes a model and says "this aught to last 20 years" and 19 years later another guy gets paid by the owner to make a new model that says "this aught to last 40 years". Now, the new model should be realistic, but it may be far less conservative and as we know models aren't perfect.
For this reason the really prudent thing to do is stick with the initial estimates, they're probably the most conservative, and decommission when the design lifetime is reached. Its LIKELY to be a bit conservative but as one poster stated above its all about risk vs reward. Nothing is totally safe or sure, but the longer you run an old nuclear reactor the more likely it is that components will be weakened and compromised. You just never know what sort of unforeseen event is going to then put stress on things. A pipe that was 200% stronger than necessary when it was made and is still 140% stronger than necessary is still now too weak to withstand 180% of its original maximum load. That might be "Never supposed to happen" but a 36 meter tsunami wasn't either. Shit happens.
Exactly, they were having some weird issue that they were trying to understand. They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.
OTOH a long drawn out fire that selectively cripples portions of the aircraft seems quite unlikely to have prevented any possibility of communicating. While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and talk later' they also generally call for help pretty quickly when they can. Its human nature if nothing else to want someone to know what's happening so they can share their predicament. Its not exactly HARD for a pilot to make a radio call. In fact the process of making a distress call is deliberately VERY simple and straightforward. It involves generally pushing a button and talking.
The telling thing is the time frame. I'd buy the fire hypothesis if all of these maneuvers happened in a period of a few minutes and then the plane simply cruised off in some random direction and eventually crashed. That's not what happened though, the plane turned, changed altitude several times over a period of something like 40 minutes, AVOIDING RADAR, and then finally turned onto a course directly for the most remote part of the ocean. Fire simply doesn't explain that.
The perpetrator (pilot or co-pilot) simply waits for his opposite to go take a leak. Evidence is the event happened right after the sign-off with Malaysian ATC, a good time to imagine someone got up and left the cockpit. The perp then locks the cabin door and can do anything they want from then on, everyone else is just along for the ride. So he cuts cabin air, puts on his mask, climbs to 45,000 ft for a few minutes (not really necessary but maybe he's just being thorough, or maybe he doesn't even do that). Anyway, he's now got a 777 to himself and proceeds to lay in a course for the most god-forsaken part of the southern ocean.
Honestly, how hard is this? Its not like people expect this kind of thing. Its even possible a passenger could have done it. The cockpit door would be closed, but again someone may have come out into the cabin, a sudden unexpected rush by someone strong and quick with some training, they could quite plausibly seize the cockpit and then the same scenario plays out.
You don't turn around, you vector for the nearest runway long enough to stop on and scream for help! There wasn't so much as a single SOS from this aircraft, yet it made several turns and altitude changes, which wouldn't happen with an aircraft that was flying uncontrolled. It just doesn't really add up. Its also VERY unlikely a 777 would continue to fly at all after electrical system damage so extensive that its ACARS, transponder, and all radio systems failed and the flight crew was either killed or completely unable to enter the cockpit. That would require quite a weird and selective type of damage.
How about a hack? Software could do all of that stuff and is a lot more believable than a fire...
I had the most fun with StarCraft back when it FIRST came online. I crafted a small map with an island in the center and a ring of land around it, and one bridge onto the island. One guy started at the outside, opposite from the bridge, and the other started on the island. The funny thing was you could equally well win with any race from either starting position, but you had to know EXACTLY what to do right off, even the most minuscule deviation from the optimum (and not 100% obvious) build pattern would spell certain doom. It was incredibly fun to pick off the really highly rated players. 95% of them would figure it out after the first inevitable loss, but of course I would always blithely agree to reverse positions and beat them again with the equally tricky strategy for the other starting position. It took a LOT of tweaking to get that map perfect, but I think I must have been around 90:1 win:loss ratio on it. Not that this means I was really THAT good, not at all, lol. I bet that map is still floating around somewhere.
Just store the state of the vector space that corresponds to proper initialization in some sort of HSM. As part of the boot process you load that into memory and you are now initialized and ready to do full-strength authentication.
If you're willing to do that, then just encrypt the password file and store the key in an HSM. Having the initialization vector is equivalent to having the password file with just conventional hashes.
I guess the advantage with this system is that if you have to restore from a backup tape after physical loss of the HSM then you can recover the file by just having a bunch of accounts log in.
Of course, if the attacker has a bunch of valid accounts on the system, then he can do the same thing and get the hashes...
The cure for that was in the paper, only specific accounts would be able to perform the initialization. Other accounts can authenticate, but they won't contribute to the initial setup of the vector space.
I suppose in essence you are correct, you could encrypt the whole file. So it just comes down to which is more convenient presumably.
99.9999% of all web applications, even the most incredibly custom stuff, uses a known framework that uses a known type of hashing and a salt that is stored in some standard place. Thus you don't really have to do any super complicated legwork. Even if you aren't SURE what your target is using there aren't that many choices and you can guess that MOST PHP programs use X, and most things deployed on JBoss use Y, and etc. looking at the length and form of the hash can often reduce the problem as well. If you can create an account on the victim system beforehand you have a known plaintext to play with also, which will give you your answer instantly assuming you have the salt or salting algo.
Just store the state of the vector space that corresponds to proper initialization in some sort of HSM. As part of the boot process you load that into memory and you are now initialized and ready to do full-strength authentication. If the startup process for your system is properly implemented this shouldn't present any unusual security problem. Its probably possible to automate this kind of process as well (say if said HSM only outputs data, so it would actually generate a 'boot command' including the vector space state, and send it to the application shell on starup, then the HSM would shut down until your system was reset).
I don't think any of the objections I've seen raised here are really valid. This kind of scheme is certainly more work than simple hashed passwords, but at this point it kinda seems like those aren't really adequate anymore, eh?
Reactors aren't actually economical when you use acceptable accounting practices, so that wouldn't be a money-making policy. At best you'd still have to clean up these small reactors, which would be basically the same problem.
Secondly, even assuming you made a profit, there's nothing saying that small reactors and thorium reactors will ever actually be produced. The net effect is you'd leave the site idle and hazardous in a floodplain for at least 3-4 decades while said reactors were designed, tested, built, and deployed. You'd also be betting on thorium, which has no commercial track record and in the form you're talking about has only had a sum total of a few 100 hours of operation in one test reactor that itself is now a very nasty pile of waste.
I don't feel comfortable having my decommissioning plan being based on highly speculative factors. As it is we have to put up with on-site dry-cask storage for FSM-knows-how-long until a high level waste repository is built. If someone DOES manage to build a thorium/breeder/traveling-wave/hybrid fusion/etc reactor to burn it all up in in the meantime, great, but I'm not wanting to hold my breathe for this. Reprocessing was supposed to be the solution to all our problems too and we can see how THAT turned out.
Gosh yes, and we should just leave this nuclear plant to rust in the middle of a flood plain, you know full of all kinds of fuel. You realize this is a GE MK1, the same as the reactors at Fukushima, with all the same design flaws, the nice spent fuel pool on the top floor, etc. Sorry, cleanup isn't an OPTION, its a necessity.
Agreed. It's a shame we can't harness it properly. (note: it takes almost as much energy - 95% as fossil fuel - to produce a working solar collection system as that system will provide over its entire life)
The plant was originally licensed for 20 years and had an expected design lifetime of 40 years, that is 2012. The fund was set up in 1972 and should have been managed such that it would be adequate in 2012 to shut the plant down. Thus the point is quite valid since said funds clearly are short by 40% or so. Entergy tried to extend the lifetime of the plant by another 20 years (and succeeded, they can legal go ahead and run it until 2032 and I believe even do so at a higher power output). They didn't need 'approval to run to the end of the year' except in the sense that there were certain regulatory questions that they needed answers for. If they HAD continued to operate then its possible the State would have continued various legal actions to get them shut down, but they weren't required to do so as of a year ago.
Yes, except those are the fantasy numbers that the nuclear industry and its dog, the NRC, publish. We're talking about REAL costs, what you actually pay, not the bogus ones.
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Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
Actually the French have found reprocessing uneconomical, there are serious issues with contamination from their reprocessing facilities, and they are likely to be shut down in favor of disposal.
From the 2008 IPFM report:
Economic Costs of Reprocessing in France. In 2000, an official report commissioned by the
French Prime Minister concluded that the choice of reprocessing instead of direct disposal of
spent nuclear fuel for the entire French nuclear program would result in an increase in average
generation cost of about 5.5 percent or $0.5 billion per installed GWe over a 40-year reactor life
or an 85 percent increase of the total spent fuel and waste management (‘back-end’) costs.
Current projected costs by the industry and the Ministry of Industry show that, in addition to a
number of other favorable assumptions, the investment and operating costs of a future
reprocessing plant would need to be half the costs for the current La Hague facilities in order for
reprocessing to cost no more than direct disposal.
Since 1995, EDF has assigned in its accounts a zero value to its stocks of separated plutonium, as
well as to its stocks of reprocessed uranium. With the liberalization of the electricity sector, the
economic burden of reprocessing is increasingly weighing on the French utility EDF. Cost issues
constitute the main stumbling block for a new long-term agreement with AREVA following the
reprocessing / MOX fabrication contract that ended in 2007.
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
"We find that, with past and current operating practices, there is no clear advantage for the
reprocessing option either in terms of waste volumes or repository area. Depending upon
assumptions, the underground volume required for spent MOX fuel and vitrified waste can be
smaller or larger than that for direct disposal of spent LWR fuel."
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling natural gas or some sort of petroleum product.
Yes, this is commonly accepted FUD, but is actually utter rubbish. The Federal Government study of this issue indicates that up to 80% of baseload power can come from renewables without any issue. The entire East Coast of the US could be run off a modest number of offshore wind farms properly placed with almost no point when generation would fall below 50% of nameplate capacity. The economics are quite good and even without counting externalities of other power sources would be competitive.
Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
And the only reason nuclear has any sort of price comparison to solar or wind to begin with is the fact that, under the guidance of enviro-nuts, they've basically tarriffed the entire process, from proposition through decomission into the stratosphere. Require the kinds of multi-billion dollar investments (see bribes) for wind or solar plants that are now required for nuclear and watch the price of those options skyrocket too.
Again your information is completely off. Nuclear power has had considerable subsidies and breaks over its life. If you are suggesting that making it cost-competitive with wind (and probably SPV within the next 5 years) we need to toss out the regulations which are barely adequate to prevent disasters then I and virtually the whole public say "no thanks". Wind is safe, economical, and practical. This has been proven. SPV is safe, complementary to wind, and with modest continued investment is rapidly becoming economically viable as baseload power. In 5 years the idea of building a nuclear power plant will seem idiotic.
Reprocessing and breeding are dirty and VERY VERY EXPENSIVE technologies. They will never compete with mining natural uranium out of the ground until most of that uranium is gone, at which point only if we have a LOT of reactors will it even then be worth it. Sadly by that point we will have HAD to get rid of most of the waste we could reprocess since it will simply be insane to keep that much of it around on the off chance we decide to do it. What this means is that ironically it will never be cost-effective to reprocess fuel at any time, now or in the future. The only way would be a massive up front expenditure of money and the result would only be nuclear power that is 2x more expensive than it already is, not much of a bargain.
Thorium may well work, but the problem is we're a good long ways from building the type of reactor that we can put it in and burn all the fuel down (just using it in existing LWRs doesn't provide much benefit). Even with massive funding these reactors won't really come on line for 30 years, maybe more like 40 realistically. That puts them out to 2048-2058 time frame. Even LWRs like AP1000 won't be online for 10 years. Its not even clear they will be competitive with SOLAR by then, and they lose to wind NOW.
The bigger problem is that ALL REACTORS ARE RUN BY HUMANS and the track record for their response to major disasters is not great. Sometimes people do the right thing, in fact most of the time, but many opportunities exist for disaster, and a statistically significant amount of the time responses fail. Furthermore there will always be greedy and unmotivated operators cutting costs like TEPCO. I have no reason to believe that Entergy for instance (a major US operator of nuclear power plants) is any better than TEPCO, or regulated any better either. Is it thus not just a matter of time before we have Fukushima in the US? Probably. Its not clear that building a whole bunch of AP1000's or MSRs or whatever will materially improve that situation. It will just create greater complacency resulting in even worse preparedness. Its inherent in the system.
Objects floating in the ocean are EXPOSED, they are easily damaged by weather, can be attacked easily, are hard to secure, and VERY expensive to operate.
On top of all this the article is silly. Nobody at MIT has 'designed' a reactor, they just made a proposal that is barely more than just saying "build it on an oil rig!" with a few pictures. They talk about reactors anywhere from 50MW up to 1000MW which means basically "Gosh, you could float almost any nuclear reactor!". However it is not AT ALL clear that a 1,000 MW reactor would be made safe by passive seawater cooling in the event of say the whole thing sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Consider the effects of Fukushima COMBINED with the McCondo well blow-out... Its not a pretty picture to imagine a meltdown in 100 meters of water not too far offshore. Yes, the ocean would probably make this less totally disasterous than on land, but it might also be IMPOSSIBLE to quell or clean up. Statements on the lines of "it must be safe in the ocean" are exactly what goeth before a fall in engineering.
Anyway, it will seriously have to be studied, though I suspect others have done so already. As they said, the Russians have been working on this concept for years. That's one of the interesting things about it though, working on it for years, but where's the beef? Its probably not quite so easy as it sounds.
LOL, last week it was vinegar, now its caffeine, will it be a good cuban cigar next week?
I really can't recall. This was back when the original StarCraft first came out. This was in the day where my internet was ISDN or maybe asymmetric 512k cable-modem down and 56k modem up. It was a small size map that had land all around the edges, but the whole center was water, mostly filled with an island that had one fairly short bridge to the outside land at one corner. The island had some crystals, and the outside ring had some at the 2 corners, with the forth corner opposite the bridge being a start point. There might have been a few crystals in other spots, I don't recall exactly.
The trick was that the guy on the outside could do a 'slow rush' if it was done exactly right he could hit the island and win, if the island guy did ANYTHING except build basic units. This was mostly because it was easy to localize your opponents base/hive. Likewise you could work out that the island player could win if the outer player didn't create a way to cut off one of the two routes around the outside at exactly the right time. I don't recall the details perfectly, but I could probably still play it. Once you know the layout of the map its not too hard for a good player to see how to play it and then it comes out a draw most of the time. The really good players could beat you once they figured it out. I think maybe 2 or so players ever beat me cold on it, they must have been truly the very best of the best on Battle.net.
What makes things impossible to inspect is profit motive, nothing more.
Obviously, this is pretty much tautological. Enough money will solve ANY problem. The truth is no plant is 100% inspected. You can think otherwise and you are wrong. Look at VT Yankee's Tritium Leak problem. They weren't not doing an inspection procedure. The inspections they were doing were NOT FINDING A PROBLEM, and that means that (unbeknownst to the operator) some things aren't being properly inspected. Its not usually a deliberate thing, its simply that you WILL fail to find problems. It happens all the time. As plants age its more and more likely that these hidden problems exist in more and more critical components.
Sorry, I've worked around industrial facilities, including nuclear power plants. Hell, I've stood on top of the core of a research reactor and watched the Cerenkov glow, installed instruments at VY Yankee, etc. Lets just take VY as a good example. They COULD NOT, and DID NOT inspect plumbing underneath the plant (in fact they denied said plumbing even existed). The result was a tritium leak. There are simply pieces of these plants that can't be inspected. Trust me, I know all about ultrasound, x-rays, conductivity, etc etc etc. You can't be sure without putting eyeballs on it. Time and time again that has been proven, and some things we know we can't really inspect.
You can say that if you want, that doesn't make it true. There's clearly stuff inside these plants that nobody can look at and things that are so expensive to replace that building a new plant is cheaper. That's all that's required. You can't replace the pressure vessel on a PWR, not possible.
There are ALWAYS fundamental parts of the structure and inaccessible elements (pipes routing through masses of concrete or running under foundations for instance which are simply impractical to ever replace. In the case of nuclear power plants these things include highly critical parts like steel pressure vessels (which are degraded by neutron capture reactions amongst other things). You may be able to INSPECT these things, but once you deem that they've worn out its just game over, you decommission.
Another aspect of this problem is that it isn't simple to inspect things either. In many cases it can simply be impossible and the things that are hardest to inspect are also likely to be the things that can't be replaced. What ends up happening is that someone makes a model and says "this aught to last 20 years" and 19 years later another guy gets paid by the owner to make a new model that says "this aught to last 40 years". Now, the new model should be realistic, but it may be far less conservative and as we know models aren't perfect.
For this reason the really prudent thing to do is stick with the initial estimates, they're probably the most conservative, and decommission when the design lifetime is reached. Its LIKELY to be a bit conservative but as one poster stated above its all about risk vs reward. Nothing is totally safe or sure, but the longer you run an old nuclear reactor the more likely it is that components will be weakened and compromised. You just never know what sort of unforeseen event is going to then put stress on things. A pipe that was 200% stronger than necessary when it was made and is still 140% stronger than necessary is still now too weak to withstand 180% of its original maximum load. That might be "Never supposed to happen" but a 36 meter tsunami wasn't either. Shit happens.
Exactly. The WHOLE POINT of the door is to make it impossible for anyone to get into the flight deck no matter what.
Exactly, they were having some weird issue that they were trying to understand. They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.
OTOH a long drawn out fire that selectively cripples portions of the aircraft seems quite unlikely to have prevented any possibility of communicating. While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and talk later' they also generally call for help pretty quickly when they can. Its human nature if nothing else to want someone to know what's happening so they can share their predicament. Its not exactly HARD for a pilot to make a radio call. In fact the process of making a distress call is deliberately VERY simple and straightforward. It involves generally pushing a button and talking.
The telling thing is the time frame. I'd buy the fire hypothesis if all of these maneuvers happened in a period of a few minutes and then the plane simply cruised off in some random direction and eventually crashed. That's not what happened though, the plane turned, changed altitude several times over a period of something like 40 minutes, AVOIDING RADAR, and then finally turned onto a course directly for the most remote part of the ocean. Fire simply doesn't explain that.
Fire also doesn't explain which things failed.
The perpetrator (pilot or co-pilot) simply waits for his opposite to go take a leak. Evidence is the event happened right after the sign-off with Malaysian ATC, a good time to imagine someone got up and left the cockpit. The perp then locks the cabin door and can do anything they want from then on, everyone else is just along for the ride. So he cuts cabin air, puts on his mask, climbs to 45,000 ft for a few minutes (not really necessary but maybe he's just being thorough, or maybe he doesn't even do that). Anyway, he's now got a 777 to himself and proceeds to lay in a course for the most god-forsaken part of the southern ocean.
Honestly, how hard is this? Its not like people expect this kind of thing. Its even possible a passenger could have done it. The cockpit door would be closed, but again someone may have come out into the cabin, a sudden unexpected rush by someone strong and quick with some training, they could quite plausibly seize the cockpit and then the same scenario plays out.
You don't turn around, you vector for the nearest runway long enough to stop on and scream for help! There wasn't so much as a single SOS from this aircraft, yet it made several turns and altitude changes, which wouldn't happen with an aircraft that was flying uncontrolled. It just doesn't really add up. Its also VERY unlikely a 777 would continue to fly at all after electrical system damage so extensive that its ACARS, transponder, and all radio systems failed and the flight crew was either killed or completely unable to enter the cockpit. That would require quite a weird and selective type of damage.
How about a hack? Software could do all of that stuff and is a lot more believable than a fire...
Just goes to show, there's no such thing as enough SQA...
I had the most fun with StarCraft back when it FIRST came online. I crafted a small map with an island in the center and a ring of land around it, and one bridge onto the island. One guy started at the outside, opposite from the bridge, and the other started on the island. The funny thing was you could equally well win with any race from either starting position, but you had to know EXACTLY what to do right off, even the most minuscule deviation from the optimum (and not 100% obvious) build pattern would spell certain doom. It was incredibly fun to pick off the really highly rated players. 95% of them would figure it out after the first inevitable loss, but of course I would always blithely agree to reverse positions and beat them again with the equally tricky strategy for the other starting position. It took a LOT of tweaking to get that map perfect, but I think I must have been around 90:1 win:loss ratio on it. Not that this means I was really THAT good, not at all, lol. I bet that map is still floating around somewhere.
Just store the state of the vector space that corresponds to proper initialization in some sort of HSM. As part of the boot process you load that into memory and you are now initialized and ready to do full-strength authentication.
If you're willing to do that, then just encrypt the password file and store the key in an HSM. Having the initialization vector is equivalent to having the password file with just conventional hashes.
I guess the advantage with this system is that if you have to restore from a backup tape after physical loss of the HSM then you can recover the file by just having a bunch of accounts log in.
Of course, if the attacker has a bunch of valid accounts on the system, then he can do the same thing and get the hashes...
The cure for that was in the paper, only specific accounts would be able to perform the initialization. Other accounts can authenticate, but they won't contribute to the initial setup of the vector space.
I suppose in essence you are correct, you could encrypt the whole file. So it just comes down to which is more convenient presumably.
99.9999% of all web applications, even the most incredibly custom stuff, uses a known framework that uses a known type of hashing and a salt that is stored in some standard place. Thus you don't really have to do any super complicated legwork. Even if you aren't SURE what your target is using there aren't that many choices and you can guess that MOST PHP programs use X, and most things deployed on JBoss use Y, and etc. looking at the length and form of the hash can often reduce the problem as well. If you can create an account on the victim system beforehand you have a known plaintext to play with also, which will give you your answer instantly assuming you have the salt or salting algo.
Just store the state of the vector space that corresponds to proper initialization in some sort of HSM. As part of the boot process you load that into memory and you are now initialized and ready to do full-strength authentication. If the startup process for your system is properly implemented this shouldn't present any unusual security problem. Its probably possible to automate this kind of process as well (say if said HSM only outputs data, so it would actually generate a 'boot command' including the vector space state, and send it to the application shell on starup, then the HSM would shut down until your system was reset).
I don't think any of the objections I've seen raised here are really valid. This kind of scheme is certainly more work than simple hashed passwords, but at this point it kinda seems like those aren't really adequate anymore, eh?
Reactors aren't actually economical when you use acceptable accounting practices, so that wouldn't be a money-making policy. At best you'd still have to clean up these small reactors, which would be basically the same problem.
Secondly, even assuming you made a profit, there's nothing saying that small reactors and thorium reactors will ever actually be produced. The net effect is you'd leave the site idle and hazardous in a floodplain for at least 3-4 decades while said reactors were designed, tested, built, and deployed. You'd also be betting on thorium, which has no commercial track record and in the form you're talking about has only had a sum total of a few 100 hours of operation in one test reactor that itself is now a very nasty pile of waste.
I don't feel comfortable having my decommissioning plan being based on highly speculative factors. As it is we have to put up with on-site dry-cask storage for FSM-knows-how-long until a high level waste repository is built. If someone DOES manage to build a thorium/breeder/traveling-wave/hybrid fusion/etc reactor to burn it all up in in the meantime, great, but I'm not wanting to hold my breathe for this. Reprocessing was supposed to be the solution to all our problems too and we can see how THAT turned out.
Gosh yes, and we should just leave this nuclear plant to rust in the middle of a flood plain, you know full of all kinds of fuel. You realize this is a GE MK1, the same as the reactors at Fukushima, with all the same design flaws, the nice spent fuel pool on the top floor, etc. Sorry, cleanup isn't an OPTION, its a necessity.
Agreed. It's a shame we can't harness it properly. (note: it takes almost as much energy - 95% as fossil fuel - to produce a working solar collection system as that system will provide over its entire life)
This is uttermost nonsense.
The plant was originally licensed for 20 years and had an expected design lifetime of 40 years, that is 2012. The fund was set up in 1972 and should have been managed such that it would be adequate in 2012 to shut the plant down. Thus the point is quite valid since said funds clearly are short by 40% or so. Entergy tried to extend the lifetime of the plant by another 20 years (and succeeded, they can legal go ahead and run it until 2032 and I believe even do so at a higher power output). They didn't need 'approval to run to the end of the year' except in the sense that there were certain regulatory questions that they needed answers for. If they HAD continued to operate then its possible the State would have continued various legal actions to get them shut down, but they weren't required to do so as of a year ago.
Yes, except those are the fantasy numbers that the nuclear industry and its dog, the NRC, publish. We're talking about REAL costs, what you actually pay, not the bogus ones.