This is a complex subject, so I'd rather listen to someone who might want to cover his ass but actually knows what he's talking about than to a neutral person with a poor grasp of the issue.
Yes, you should exercise caution when reading industry sources, but they're far better than the anti-nuclear people. The industry of course has an agenda, but at least it knows what it's talking about.
The waste is the biggest problem? 1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power. 2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat 3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste. 4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm 5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.
I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.
Considering that Chernobyl released several percent of its core directly into the air through a graphite fire, and the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was rated at 1000 MW (roughly the combined power of units 1 and 2 at Fukushima I), this can only be an extremely pessimistic upper bound.
Everything depended on the assumption that the coolant had a backup system.Once that assumption was mooted by the tsunami, the flaws in the rest of the system became known.
Not really. The real assumption that failed was that even if there was a complete loss of power in the plant, power could be reasonably quickly (8 hours) provided from outside the plant. The problems escalated because no supplies were available due to tsunami devastation, not even freshwater. The power grid was so damaged that an extra cable had to be laid to get any external power.
One of which is that once you lose cooling and can't get it restarted, you will inexorably have to vent hydrogen into a closed space full of air. Another is that there is no way to vent it to the outside to reduce the effects of an explosion.
The hydrogen was vented inside the containment on purpose, to allow activation products to decay. It could be vented outside the containment, but this would increase the radiation emissions, which the operators desperately wanted to minimize at that point. Hydrogen explosion was deemed an acceptable risk. It looks like this kind of mindset, "reduce public radiation exposure at all cost", is what caused the situation to escalate.
Another is that if the cooling system is completely bunged, there's no way to throw external coolant on the thing that has any effect.
The design assumption was that once cooling completely fails, the reactor will be drained, sealed and allowed to melt down. But this would necessitate a very costly cleanup which TEPCO wanted to avoid.
And another is that they stored the "spent" fuel rods in bunches in what is basically an open swimming pool, so that any chance it gets to evaporate the water around it will result in a fire.
Storing them elsewhere would necessarily expose the workers to more radiation. The point of the temporary storage near the reactor is to allow the fuel to lose most of its radioactivity before it is moved to a longer-term storage location.
What's criminal here is that these things were known to be bad assumptions long ago, but these reactors were operating as originally installed.
Each of the design considerations had a lot of thought behind it. The real problem is that the nuclear safety regulations are not based on a realistic risk analysis, but on fantasies (e.g. child drinking maximally contaminated water for an entire year, or somebody eating exclusively spinach for an entire year). As a result, the operators focused minimizing public radiation exposure rather than on stabilizing the facility, which was actually counterproductive.
The problem with insuring a nuclear reactor is that, if it does fail, the cost is going to be so huge that it would immediately bankrupt pretty much any insurance company.
This is what old, extremely pessimistic reactor accident consequence studies say - for example, they assume that LWR reactor core material can be dispersed as fine dust over a large area, even though there is no known physical process which could do that. The upcoming SOARCA study from the NRC will hopefully be more in line with reality.
The Chinese government likes lockdown only as long as they're the ones doing the locking. Once someone else is in control, it interferes with their own power.
Catholic Church is a good example. A variant of it can exist in China on the condition that it dissociates itself from the Pope, so it is not controlled by a foreign entity. Chinese don't like lockdown and censorship, they like a monopoly of power and influence on the public. Once you think about it, that's also what many of the Western leaders want, but don't have the means necessary to get it.
At its root this is not a political question, but a sociological one. For what it's worth, I would describe myself as a liberal socialist.
Really now. Who in this day and age really believes that the Reagan nuke build-up was anything more than hollow posturing against a dying nation?
Reagan was an utter idiot who didn't really understand the stability given by MAD. His SDI program proves it.
It worked so well that the military budget is STILL untouchable all these years later. Wise up you dipity-doo sniffing right-wing wannabe -- there is no nuclear threat. There hasn't been a nuclear threat since 1965.
First, USA defence budget (which I agree is total lunacy) is an entirely different issue, because the lion's share of it is conventional weaponry. Second, instead of investigating my ideas critically you're trying to bang the tribal drum by branding me as a neocon, which I am not (as mentioned before). No points for you.
All those missels might as well be filled with spare pin-ball machine parts for all the use they will ever get and they are absolutely no good as a modern deterrent.
Non sequitur. What really matters is not whether you actually have nuclear strike capability, but what others think about your nuclear strike capability. You could indeed replace all of the weapons with decoys, but it does not follow from it that you could publicly announce the dismantling of all of your warheads and the situation wouldn't change.
And we can't bomb anyone else.
Which is the whole purpose of the exercise. In a world governed by MAD, all nuclear powers have essentially equal standing.
Mod parent up. Many people detest the idea of MAD but so far it has worked. In practice, nukes are primarily a weapon of influence rather than destruction.
I think the continued existence of United Nations and its various agencies can be attributed in part to nuclear weapons, which made open conflict an existential risk for the superpowers, and created a need for a different way of resolving disputes. At this point, UN could probably survive without nuclear weapons, but its creation would not be possible without them.
I think that regardless of any ideology, nuclear disarmament is very unlikely on the grounds of simple game theory - it's essentially a prisoner's dilemma where the temptation to defect is extremely large (the last remaining nuclear power can blackmail the whole world) and punishment for mutual defection is small (the cost of producing and maintaining the weapons).
In fact, the Iranians chose the type of nuclear reactor that would produce nuclear fuel usable by both domestic and military plans precisely to hide how much nuclear fuel they're generating.
This is patently false. Bushehr is a VVER which is a Russian variant of the popular PWR (pressurized water reactor) design. PWRs are useless for plutonium production.
The killer psychopath does not take over the leadership of a nuclear armed country. He goes around killing people with his hands.
The power and control freaks are not psychopaths, and are capable of enough rational thought to realize that upon launching a preemptive nuclear attack they will die along with their country, which will be reduced to dust in massive retaliation.
Additionally, without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Western Europe in the 60s at the latest. The UN Security Council would have no real power, and wars between superpowers would probably continue.
his facility would be used to reprocess spent fuel from Canada's CANDU reactors to 'harvest' the pu-235 that is a natural byproduct of the fission process used in these reactors.
It's Pu-239. You are confusing with U-235.
Canada would be MUCH better off spending its energy (no pun intended) on developing an export market for it's reactor know-how and convincing countries to adopt them as a means to get off non-renewable energy.
That's kind of what they do, and the CANDU is used in China, Romania, South Korea, India and a few other countries.
So in a bomb you must make sure that there are enough U235 nuclei in the vicinity. That translates to concentration. How much concentration ? 98% pure at least, preferably more (if you want to be sure it blows up).
Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium. In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.
The only known way to separate them is to vaporize them into a highly positively charged plasma, then throw that plasma into a strong magnetic field, where the flow will start to rotate around the center of the field. This will create a minute difference in isotope concentration : less than 0.1% more U235 in the center, slightly over 0.2% more on the other side (the problem is thermalization, constantly remixing the isotopes). That's what's happening in those big tubes the US dislikes so much.
Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.
There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.
It is not known exactly how efficient this process is. But it is known that about 200 kg of ore (5% uranium) is needed to create 1 kg 95% U235 (which is what the first nuclear power plants ran on). Undoubtedly it's at least 10 times that for 98%, but... (the "losses" of this process are the fuel for it. You use the less pure output to fire a nuclear reactor to power the whole purification system, which eats a LOT of power).
Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)
Fissionable uranium, explosion-grade, is not easy to get. Not even if you're sitting on tons upon tons of fissionable material.
That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.
You can also use gconf-editor. Sadly some idiot at GNOME decided that the "interface" tab in Appearance properties was redundant and removed it, so there's no simple way to do it from the GUI.
I honestly think the problem with FOSS and Linux is they are going about things ass backwards. They keep talking about how its a "drop in replacement for Windows" when in reality Linux is MUCH more like a Mac than it'll ever be like Windows. here is why, just as you can't grab any old piece of hardware and make a Hackentosh, so too can you not just grab any old parts off a shelf and make a Linux box that is reasonably decent. There is just too much common hardware that is seriously iffy in Linux. So you end up needing to buy specific hardware designed for Linux, which in the desktop, again like a Mac, will cost you more for less power than a windows machine. So in the end if you are gonna buy new hardware anyway, why not just buy a Mac and have better vendor support and less headaches?
Hardware incompatibility is rarely the problem. In fact, migrating to a new version of Windows would be significantly worse on the hardware compatibility side, because old hardware usually has only 32-bit Windows XP drivers. Meanwhile Linux drivers are cross-platform.
In the end after trying Linux on more pieces of hardware than I care to count I've found that Linux really works best in certain niches, like say education where you've got old hardware that won't run any newer windows and which has long been reverse engineered by Linux developers and is thus quite stable even across upgrades. But on new hardware, which this being a government I assume they are on the standard corporate 3 year upgrade cycle, there is simply too many pieces of common hardware where support is dicey if you can get it to work at all. And of course none of the big OEMs are gonna offer you Linux except on their more expensive workstations, again adding to the cost.
The government PC is going to have a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a hard drive, and maybe a CD drive. Nearly everyone will go with the integrated motherboard components. Nothing fancy is required, and support for components such as disk controllers and Intel graphics chipsets is excellent. The only problematic case is the old i815 graphics, but it's not sold anymore. Hardware is NOT the main problem.
I've seen enough science and done my own tests re GM foods to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are causing harm. Morgellon's Disease, I suspect, may be related to GMO's and the effects they have upon human DNA.
WTF!!! Do you realize that the "modified" DNA from GM food is not directly absorbed by your body, but broken into simpler molecules and then assimilated? That the proteins coded by extra genes are broken down into amino acids before being absorbed into the body?
Furthermore, you seem to think that it's wrong to use a gee from a mouse it in anything but a mouse. Well, it's silly. Many organisms do similar things with genes that are vastly different. Some functionally equivalent proteins are only 20% homological between e.g. people and cockroaches. Finally, we've been genetically modifying our crops for thousands of years via crossbreeding, hybrids, chemically induced mutations, and radiation induced mutations. Genetic engineering only gives us much better precision and diminishes the possibility of accidentally introducing unwanted traits.
Really, the organic / anti-GMO clowns are even more paranoid than the anti-nuclear clowns. There is no great conspiracy to poison you. Monsanto is not the only agricultural company in the world. GMOs will not kill you. There is no credible peer reviewed science to suggest that GM food is harmful in any way. GM crops reduce pesticide use, which is good. Go to a psychiatrist.
Farnsworth Fusor cannot yield a net energy gain. In general, any device where the plasma ion velocities are far the thermal equilibrium will never yield a net energy gain. I had a paper about this somewhere, but lost the reference.
I agree with the gist of your post, but: 1. TMI happened before Chernobyl, and had no impact on the public. It was a disaster only in the financial and PR sense. 2. Chernobyl's physical impact was moderate. What made it a total clusterfuck were ignorant and irresponsible foreign journalists, combined with the reluctance of Soviet authorities to disclose any actual data, that initiated a mass panic. If people were more rational about radiation, most of the exclusion zone would never be evacuated.
So nuclear technology is not at hand but solar and wind is? There is an 80% nuclear country (France), and an 80% hydro country (Brazil), but there is no 80% solar/wind country. It's pretty trivial to transition the grid to all-nuclear once the funds are available, but transitioning it to an intermittent source like wind or solar was never done before and the issues we will face are unknown.
I also find it interesting that you consider blackouts on the "centralized" grid to be a problem, because I live on such a grid as well and get a momentary blackout maybe once a year; most often it is a local transmission failure, rather than a power plant failure, so a distributed generation system will not help.
You are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. In fact it would get much, much worse under the distributed renewable system, because a few days of calm cloudy weather is all it would take to bring down the entire country to a halt.
We can do this even now. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert decay heat directly to electricity using thermocouples. It's just shockingly expensive to produce meaningful amounts of power this way, because you need a lot of the most expensive metals.
Steam turbines scale excellently to very high powers, thermocouples and other similar direct heat to electricity technologies, not so much.
For a lot less effort we could come up with a treaty eliminating all of them.
No treaty will ever accomplish this, and moreover I don't think it's the wise thing to do. Without nuclear weapons, big conflict between the superpowers is bound to happen sooner or later, and is going to be devastating. The threat of being incinerated in a nuclear blaze is what keeps the leaders cold headed.
The recent arms reduction treaty between US and Russia is not the work of pacifists, but a simple economic calculation. It's not necessary to be able to destroy every backwoods village in a country to exert influence, and keeping nuclear warheads in service costs a lot of money.
Arms reduction is popular among the crowd and a good idea financially, but total disarmament is very unlikely, and probably even undesirable.
you'd have to find places to store a bunch of the daytime production for use at night (lots of pumped hydro storage located around the country might work for that)
That's an understatement. You'd have to use every possible natural site and then build ten times as many artificial ones. The amount of energy that would need to be stored is staggering, and the energy storage costs would make up the majority of expense in such a system.
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This is a complex subject, so I'd rather listen to someone who might want to cover his ass but actually knows what he's talking about than to a neutral person with a poor grasp of the issue.
Yes, you should exercise caution when reading industry sources, but they're far better than the anti-nuclear people. The industry of course has an agenda, but at least it knows what it's talking about.
The waste is the biggest problem?
1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power.
2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat
3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste.
4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.
I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.
Considering that Chernobyl released several percent of its core directly into the air through a graphite fire, and the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was rated at 1000 MW (roughly the combined power of units 1 and 2 at Fukushima I), this can only be an extremely pessimistic upper bound.
Everything depended on the assumption that the coolant had a backup system.Once that assumption was mooted by the tsunami, the flaws in the rest of the system became known.
Not really. The real assumption that failed was that even if there was a complete loss of power in the plant, power could be reasonably quickly (8 hours) provided from outside the plant. The problems escalated because no supplies were available due to tsunami devastation, not even freshwater. The power grid was so damaged that an extra cable had to be laid to get any external power.
One of which is that once you lose cooling and can't get it restarted, you will inexorably have to vent hydrogen into a closed space full of air. Another is that there is no way to vent it to the outside to reduce the effects of an explosion.
The hydrogen was vented inside the containment on purpose, to allow activation products to decay. It could be vented outside the containment, but this would increase the radiation emissions, which the operators desperately wanted to minimize at that point. Hydrogen explosion was deemed an acceptable risk. It looks like this kind of mindset, "reduce public radiation exposure at all cost", is what caused the situation to escalate.
Another is that if the cooling system is completely bunged, there's no way to throw external coolant on the thing that has any effect.
The design assumption was that once cooling completely fails, the reactor will be drained, sealed and allowed to melt down. But this would necessitate a very costly cleanup which TEPCO wanted to avoid.
And another is that they stored the "spent" fuel rods in bunches in what is basically an open swimming pool, so that any chance it gets to evaporate the water around it will result in a fire.
Storing them elsewhere would necessarily expose the workers to more radiation. The point of the temporary storage near the reactor is to allow the fuel to lose most of its radioactivity before it is moved to a longer-term storage location.
What's criminal here is that these things were known to be bad assumptions long ago, but these reactors were operating as originally installed.
Each of the design considerations had a lot of thought behind it. The real problem is that the nuclear safety regulations are not based on a realistic risk analysis, but on fantasies (e.g. child drinking maximally contaminated water for an entire year, or somebody eating exclusively spinach for an entire year). As a result, the operators focused minimizing public radiation exposure rather than on stabilizing the facility, which was actually counterproductive.
Solution: nuclear powered ships. As a bonus, the ships can go really fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6OHHGrVM3g
(in the middle he says some standard anti-nuclear bullshit, but otherwise it's a great clip)
The problem with insuring a nuclear reactor is that, if it does fail, the cost is going to be so huge that it would immediately bankrupt pretty much any insurance company.
This is what old, extremely pessimistic reactor accident consequence studies say - for example, they assume that LWR reactor core material can be dispersed as fine dust over a large area, even though there is no known physical process which could do that. The upcoming SOARCA study from the NRC will hopefully be more in line with reality.
The anti-nuclear activists have been quite successful with such an argument.
The Chinese government likes lockdown only as long as they're the ones doing the locking. Once someone else is in control, it interferes with their own power.
Catholic Church is a good example. A variant of it can exist in China on the condition that it dissociates itself from the Pope, so it is not controlled by a foreign entity. Chinese don't like lockdown and censorship, they like a monopoly of power and influence on the public. Once you think about it, that's also what many of the Western leaders want, but don't have the means necessary to get it.
Psst! Your political ideologies are showing.
At its root this is not a political question, but a sociological one. For what it's worth, I would describe myself as a liberal socialist.
Really now. Who in this day and age really believes that the Reagan nuke build-up was anything more than hollow posturing against a dying nation?
Reagan was an utter idiot who didn't really understand the stability given by MAD. His SDI program proves it.
It worked so well that the military budget is STILL untouchable all these years later. Wise up you dipity-doo sniffing right-wing wannabe -- there is no nuclear threat. There hasn't been a nuclear threat since 1965.
First, USA defence budget (which I agree is total lunacy) is an entirely different issue, because the lion's share of it is conventional weaponry. Second, instead of investigating my ideas critically you're trying to bang the tribal drum by branding me as a neocon, which I am not (as mentioned before). No points for you.
All those missels might as well be filled with spare pin-ball machine parts for all the use they will ever get and they are absolutely no good as a modern deterrent.
Non sequitur. What really matters is not whether you actually have nuclear strike capability, but what others think about your nuclear strike capability. You could indeed replace all of the weapons with decoys, but it does not follow from it that you could publicly announce the dismantling of all of your warheads and the situation wouldn't change.
And we can't bomb anyone else.
Which is the whole purpose of the exercise. In a world governed by MAD, all nuclear powers have essentially equal standing.
Mod parent up. Many people detest the idea of MAD but so far it has worked. In practice, nukes are primarily a weapon of influence rather than destruction.
I think the continued existence of United Nations and its various agencies can be attributed in part to nuclear weapons, which made open conflict an existential risk for the superpowers, and created a need for a different way of resolving disputes. At this point, UN could probably survive without nuclear weapons, but its creation would not be possible without them.
I think that regardless of any ideology, nuclear disarmament is very unlikely on the grounds of simple game theory - it's essentially a prisoner's dilemma where the temptation to defect is extremely large (the last remaining nuclear power can blackmail the whole world) and punishment for mutual defection is small (the cost of producing and maintaining the weapons).
In fact, the Iranians chose the type of nuclear reactor that would produce nuclear fuel usable by both domestic and military plans precisely to hide how much nuclear fuel they're generating.
This is patently false. Bushehr is a VVER which is a Russian variant of the popular PWR (pressurized water reactor) design. PWRs are useless for plutonium production.
The killer psychopath does not take over the leadership of a nuclear armed country. He goes around killing people with his hands.
The power and control freaks are not psychopaths, and are capable of enough rational thought to realize that upon launching a preemptive nuclear attack they will die along with their country, which will be reduced to dust in massive retaliation.
Additionally, without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Western Europe in the 60s at the latest. The UN Security Council would have no real power, and wars between superpowers would probably continue.
his facility would be used to reprocess spent fuel from Canada's CANDU reactors to 'harvest' the pu-235 that is a natural byproduct of the fission process used in these reactors.
It's Pu-239. You are confusing with U-235.
Canada would be MUCH better off spending its energy (no pun intended) on developing an export market for it's reactor know-how and convincing countries to adopt them as a means to get off non-renewable energy.
That's kind of what they do, and the CANDU is used in China, Romania, South Korea, India and a few other countries.
So in a bomb you must make sure that there are enough U235 nuclei in the vicinity. That translates to concentration. How much concentration ? 98% pure at least, preferably more (if you want to be sure it blows up).
Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium.
In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.
The only known way to separate them is to vaporize them into a highly positively charged plasma, then throw that plasma into a strong magnetic field, where the flow will start to rotate around the center of the field. This will create a minute difference in isotope concentration : less than 0.1% more U235 in the center, slightly over 0.2% more on the other side (the problem is thermalization, constantly remixing the isotopes). That's what's happening in those big tubes the US dislikes so much.
Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.
There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.
It is not known exactly how efficient this process is. But it is known that about 200 kg of ore (5% uranium) is needed to create 1 kg 95% U235 (which is what the first nuclear power plants ran on). Undoubtedly it's at least 10 times that for 98%, but ... (the "losses" of this process are the fuel for it. You use the less pure output to fire a nuclear reactor to power the whole purification system, which eats a LOT of power).
Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)
Fissionable uranium, explosion-grade, is not easy to get. Not even if you're sitting on tons upon tons of fissionable material.
That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.
Run this in terminal to get the old layout.
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"
You can also use gconf-editor.
Sadly some idiot at GNOME decided that the "interface" tab in Appearance properties was redundant and removed it, so there's no simple way to do it from the GUI.
OS X spam.
Ubuntu doesn't require tinkering to keep working, unlike Windows. It sometimes requires tinkering at the start, and after major upgrades.
I honestly think the problem with FOSS and Linux is they are going about things ass backwards. They keep talking about how its a "drop in replacement for Windows" when in reality Linux is MUCH more like a Mac than it'll ever be like Windows. here is why, just as you can't grab any old piece of hardware and make a Hackentosh, so too can you not just grab any old parts off a shelf and make a Linux box that is reasonably decent. There is just too much common hardware that is seriously iffy in Linux. So you end up needing to buy specific hardware designed for Linux, which in the desktop, again like a Mac, will cost you more for less power than a windows machine. So in the end if you are gonna buy new hardware anyway, why not just buy a Mac and have better vendor support and less headaches?
Hardware incompatibility is rarely the problem. In fact, migrating to a new version of Windows would be significantly worse on the hardware compatibility side, because old hardware usually has only 32-bit Windows XP drivers. Meanwhile Linux drivers are cross-platform.
In the end after trying Linux on more pieces of hardware than I care to count I've found that Linux really works best in certain niches, like say education where you've got old hardware that won't run any newer windows and which has long been reverse engineered by Linux developers and is thus quite stable even across upgrades. But on new hardware, which this being a government I assume they are on the standard corporate 3 year upgrade cycle, there is simply too many pieces of common hardware where support is dicey if you can get it to work at all. And of course none of the big OEMs are gonna offer you Linux except on their more expensive workstations, again adding to the cost.
The government PC is going to have a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a hard drive, and maybe a CD drive. Nearly everyone will go with the integrated motherboard components. Nothing fancy is required, and support for components such as disk controllers and Intel graphics chipsets is excellent. The only problematic case is the old i815 graphics, but it's not sold anymore. Hardware is NOT the main problem.
I've seen enough science and done my own tests re GM foods to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are causing harm. Morgellon's Disease, I suspect, may be related to GMO's and the effects they have upon human DNA.
WTF!!! Do you realize that the "modified" DNA from GM food is not directly absorbed by your body, but broken into simpler molecules and then assimilated? That the proteins coded by extra genes are broken down into amino acids before being absorbed into the body?
Furthermore, you seem to think that it's wrong to use a gee from a mouse it in anything but a mouse. Well, it's silly. Many organisms do similar things with genes that are vastly different. Some functionally equivalent proteins are only 20% homological between e.g. people and cockroaches. Finally, we've been genetically modifying our crops for thousands of years via crossbreeding, hybrids, chemically induced mutations, and radiation induced mutations. Genetic engineering only gives us much better precision and diminishes the possibility of accidentally introducing unwanted traits.
Really, the organic / anti-GMO clowns are even more paranoid than the anti-nuclear clowns. There is no great conspiracy to poison you. Monsanto is not the only agricultural company in the world. GMOs will not kill you. There is no credible peer reviewed science to suggest that GM food is harmful in any way. GM crops reduce pesticide use, which is good. Go to a psychiatrist.
Farnsworth Fusor cannot yield a net energy gain. In general, any device where the plasma ion velocities are far the thermal equilibrium will never yield a net energy gain. I had a paper about this somewhere, but lost the reference.
I agree with the gist of your post, but:
1. TMI happened before Chernobyl, and had no impact on the public. It was a disaster only in the financial and PR sense.
2. Chernobyl's physical impact was moderate. What made it a total clusterfuck were ignorant and irresponsible foreign journalists, combined with the reluctance of Soviet authorities to disclose any actual data, that initiated a mass panic. If people were more rational about radiation, most of the exclusion zone would never be evacuated.
So nuclear technology is not at hand but solar and wind is? There is an 80% nuclear country (France), and an 80% hydro country (Brazil), but there is no 80% solar/wind country. It's pretty trivial to transition the grid to all-nuclear once the funds are available, but transitioning it to an intermittent source like wind or solar was never done before and the issues we will face are unknown.
I also find it interesting that you consider blackouts on the "centralized" grid to be a problem, because I live on such a grid as well and get a momentary blackout maybe once a year; most often it is a local transmission failure, rather than a power plant failure, so a distributed generation system will not help.
You are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. In fact it would get much, much worse under the distributed renewable system, because a few days of calm cloudy weather is all it would take to bring down the entire country to a halt.
We can do this even now. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert decay heat directly to electricity using thermocouples. It's just shockingly expensive to produce meaningful amounts of power this way, because you need a lot of the most expensive metals.
Steam turbines scale excellently to very high powers, thermocouples and other similar direct heat to electricity technologies, not so much.
For a lot less effort we could come up with a treaty eliminating all of them.
No treaty will ever accomplish this, and moreover I don't think it's the wise thing to do. Without nuclear weapons, big conflict between the superpowers is bound to happen sooner or later, and is going to be devastating. The threat of being incinerated in a nuclear blaze is what keeps the leaders cold headed.
The recent arms reduction treaty between US and Russia is not the work of pacifists, but a simple economic calculation. It's not necessary to be able to destroy every backwoods village in a country to exert influence, and keeping nuclear warheads in service costs a lot of money.
Arms reduction is popular among the crowd and a good idea financially, but total disarmament is very unlikely, and probably even undesirable.
By the way, most of this heat comes from uranium and thorium decay.
Geothermal power is an inefficient form of nuclear power.
you'd have to find places to store a bunch of the daytime production for use at night (lots of pumped hydro storage located around the country might work for that)
That's an understatement. You'd have to use every possible natural site and then build ten times as many artificial ones. The amount of energy that would need to be stored is staggering, and the energy storage costs would make up the majority of expense in such a system.
The 10 000 square miles figure is far too low - the realistic figure is around 300 000 square miles.
http://www.cleanenergyinsight.org/energy-insights/what-does-renewable-energy-look-like-part-ii/