Where are the tons of water they are pumping in every day going?
Some of it is leaking, but I'll bet most is evaporating. All that spent fuel inside and outside the reactor itself is pretty hot, and it heats up the water, which evaporates faster than it would if it was room-temperature. The last I saw, the water in several spots was 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 F. A few swimming pools' worth of 140 degree water is going to evaporate quite a bit off every day.
Both of those are still theoretical at this point, not ready for wide-scale deployment, and the costs are quite high. I think you'll find that the pro-nuke crowd is also pro-wind and solar, but nuclear is clearly the safest and most efficient way to produce the kind of power we need, at a price we can afford, using technology we can actually deploy today.
Wind and solar are going to look a LOT better if we figure out room-temperature superconductors and keep making advances in lightweight composite materials. Until then, when evaluating power options that we can ramp-up and use right away to cut down on mortality and environmental damage, nuclear just looks like the best way to go.
How would you feel about replacing existing nuclear plants (built mostly in the 1960s and 1970s) with plants in the same places that are over 1,000 times safer, create less waste, and deliver much more power? I can't see a downside to that.
I was actually trying to figure something like this out here in Rhode Island, where our municipalities tax us quite a bundle on our cars (I pay over $400 a year in tax on a beat-up old Focus subcompact). Anyways, the DMV already knows your car's make, model, and year. I'd like to see the tax be a flat amount, modified by some result of a formula that factored-in curb weight (damage to roads) and mileage (damage to environment/economy). Basically, the goal would be to get as many people into as light and efficient cars as possible, and penalize the gas-guzzling cast-iron behemoths.
I think it's pretty clear that the PPC/x86 war ended similarly to the BetaMax/VHS one. PPC was a better architecture, and if it had received the same investment that Intel gave to keeping x86 alive, I believe it could have been dominant. Intel really screwed the AIM alliance with NetBurst too; Pentium 4s were crap CPUs, but they had BIG GHz painted on the box. I was doing virtualization (not emulation) on a PPC 604e, those features (borne of simplicity on the PPC side and complexity on the x86 side) were available way back on PPC, and the architecture was much better suited to tomorrow's model of 'many cores make light work'.
Also, it's all about backwards compatibility, Microsoft needs it so you can run apps from 1993 natively on Windows 7. Why Microsoft doesn't just release a 'totally native' system and put ALL the legacy stuff into 'classic mode' like Apple did is beyond me.
Sorry for the disjointed rant. It's the end of the day and I'm running low on coffee.
The 'greenies' have ben 'Microsofting* us for decades now. It's time to do something for -now- and plan for -later- when the big breakthrough lands.
* Microsoft: verb; To announce a feature or product that negates the value of the most likely competitor, but never actually deliver the product. See als: Real Soon Now.
So tell me, what's the value to the producer of a file that's copied freely via a private tracker? I suspect the people who produce child porn would be doing it regardless of profit.
Also, what does the 'market' look like? I suspect it's tiered like this:
1. Producers who are doing the actual hands-on harm to children. 2. First-tier buyers. They pay a premium to get the 'original' content. or 2b. First-tier traders who communicate directly with the producers to acquire content. --everything below this line doesn't matter to 'the market'-- 3. People who trade or download child porn pictures with no exchange of value. 4. People who accidentally stumble on child porn images, and silly teenagers.
It's pretty clear that you can't 'remove the market' and still retain values like the ones we uphold in the western world. We've seen this problem with drugs, we've seen it with alcohol, we've seen it with media piracy, and with prostitution. You can't really change how people act when they have basic rights like the fourth amendment.
If anything, they should make 'simple' child porn possession a civil offense with a $2,500 fine that goes to a good cause, then have -creation- or -purchasing- child porn be first and second degree offenses of the criminal code. That way, the law will be incentivized to actually hunt down the evil people, they won't get much credit for busting casual traders.
(note: I find the issue rather repulsive, but I'm trying to be rational. It's easy to just blurt out a visceral response to things as vile as this.)
the Internet is making it easier for potential pedophiles to indulge their deranged fantasies... in the past they might have left the house to actually molest children.
You know what I want open-sourced? Old video games. Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Ecco, Sim City 2000, Starcraft, etc.
The publishers can remove all the artwork for so that they don't step on their own trademarks for all I care. Those games all deserve to live forever, independent of the hardware they require.
I want Sim City 2000 native on Windows and Linux, I want Starcraft that runs natively on big screens, I want Zelda for my PC and a level editor to go with it.
Actually, I've always wondered this. Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in I.T.? I'm not in management, but sometimes it feels like the entire organization is pointing at a cheap, simple, effective solution, and management goes and picks some multi-million-dollar monster that takes a year to set up.
Also, I've met a LOT of I.T. sales folks, and most give me the willies.
"I think some Japanese fire-fighters were also taken in with those burns, and I'm wondering what their current condition is. Probably not good."
Two workers at Fukushima were wading around in pretty nasty contaminated water without appropriate protection. It's my understanding that they were brought to hospital with minor skin burns, cleaned up, and released. I think the nature of the stuff they were in was that it gives you mild skin burns, but won't kill you unless it gets inside, you've got it all over you, and you're exposed for a long time. They're expected to live normal lives, I think.
Don't most nuclear weapons aim to 'burn' as small an amount of fissile material as quickly as possible (as little as a few hundred pounds), while power-generating reactors are loaded with tens of tons of fissile material that's intended to really only be 'partially used'?
I know I'm oversimplifying, but a reactor seems like a potentially HUGE dirty bomb, which is why modern designs and safeguards are so important. We value human lives a LOT more than we did thirty years ago.
I hear this all the time, but the statistics I've seen show that today's criminals are not only fewer and farther between, but much more passive than those of the last two decades.
Most police have to deal with scum of the earth all day, day in and day out, but very rarely end up in any sort of dangerous situation. You're much more likely to have a welfare mom take a dump in the back of the cruiser than you are to get punched.
I know an officer who serves high-risk warrants. He is basically 'full-time SWAT' in a major city. He has one operation every few weeks, most of the rest of the time is spent in the gym or napping. And yes, they 'practice' on pedophiles and pot smokers.
"The Hospital IT department doesn't offer... so I bought (with my cash) a tiny server, installed BSD and OpenLDAP for accounts, and installed and configured DAViCal."
Wow. Why not just push all the buttons on management to get the 'real' IT folks to support a calendaring package from this century, or at least a scheduled sync with a Google calendar that your devices can sync to?
What you just did was add a whole mess of unaccountable, unmaintainable, indispensable, and covert technology to the mix. If I was a manager in I.T., I would likely cut some of your department's support over something like this, and start inviting you to more meetings so there are no further 'misunderstandings'.
Cheaper, and a great source of power, for sure. Hydro could stand to be further developed all over the northeast, where streams, rivers, and water in general is abundant. Still, it's an order of magnitude less safe than solar or nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
"Rather, the real capital-cost escalation is due largely to the severe atrophy of the global infrastructure for making, building, managing, and operating reactors. This makes U.S. buyers pay in weakened dollars, since most components must now be imported."
So nuclear's cost of construction can't even be estimated properly in the USA, since we haven't been doing it, and we've put ourselves last-in-line for parts. This would change overnight if we invested a few billion in actually building a few AP1000s instead of engaging in decades of debate.
On top of that, in places like where I live, it's impossible to build much wind capacity on-land, and solar is something you can only use to supplement baseload, there are weeks that go by here in the winter and spring without sunlight (Boston area). Coal has a direct impact on lifespans, gas is expensive, and offshore wind costs almost three times as much as fossil fuel to produce.
To me, it makes sense to build nuclear plants away from population centers and upwind of the ocean, on geologically stable plots of land.
I would imagine that in a software development environment, you'd want to give teams or individuals allowances for hardware and software, instead of having a rigid IT structure.
I suppose it depends on what kind of product you're putting out, but loosening silly restrictions on the creative folks seems like a good idea.
That said, I admin hundreds of machines in academia, and NO project leaves my desk where users have admin privileges.
I'm not sure how you figure this... In Real Life, near Boston, a $40K solar installation would make my home net-zero electric-wise (sometimes I'm pumping energy in, sometimes I'm taking it out). That $40K installation needs to be replaced every 20-25 years... Figure $2K a year for solar.
Currently I pay 9 cents/kWh for a mix of coal and natural gas, my bill is about $50/month... Nuclear could drop that to 7 cents-ish, so the same ballbark. I'm paying $600 a year for fossil fuel energy, and would pay less for nuclear. Solar would have to drop to about 70% in cost to be effective for me.
Also, they operate at high pressures to keep the water liquid past the normal 100C boiling point. In a BWR, pressure is 75 atmospheres, in a PWR it's 160. To get those pressures from depth of water and hold with an 'open top' (read: loss of containment at the top), you'd need a stack of water 750 meters high; double for a PWR. At lengths like that, you generate a lot of 'dirty' water, it saps a ton of efficiency from the reactor (warming-up a kilometer-long tube of water?), and it's more likely that a crack develops along the water column and you're back to square one.
If my investments average 8% (historically accurate) and inflation averages about 4% (also historically accurate), I'm still making 4% annually from my investment. Right now inflation is 2% and the stock market was up almost 13% in the last year... So your policy of NOT saving just lost you a bundle.
The idea that you and I will have equal votes in forty years, when my life of scrimping and saving means I have $1M in the bank, and you're penniless and living on debt scares the bejeezus out of me.
The magic number from all my calculations is around 12%. That pretty much assumes that the market will not be good at all, and inflation will be somewhat high. If you bank 12% of income your working career (including employer matches), and you purchase a home on a 30-year mortgage before you're 35 (so your housing costs essentially disappear at retirement), you should be GOLDEN, living better than you did when you were working.
$100 or $200 a month isn't going to cut it. A person working in technology making $50K should be putting away about $500/month to hit the magic number (again, if your employer offers a 1:1 match, use it so you only need to put away $250 of your own).
If you're in the middle class and you 'could use the $250', you either need to get a side job or cut your expenses. Drop the cable TV, sell the $20K car and drive a used subcompact, or get a roommate, because you're only half a missed paycheck away from being chewed-up by this modern world.
I live in a state with high cost of living, high taxes, and I only make middle class money, but I plan on looking like this when I retire: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/monopoly%20man.jpg because I should have anywhere between $800k and $1.4M in the bank when I turn 65. It's possible to do, you just have to exhibit some very un-American fiscal discipline.
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Where are the tons of water they are pumping in every day going?
Some of it is leaking, but I'll bet most is evaporating. All that spent fuel inside and outside the reactor itself is pretty hot, and it heats up the water, which evaporates faster than it would if it was room-temperature. The last I saw, the water in several spots was 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 F. A few swimming pools' worth of 140 degree water is going to evaporate quite a bit off every day.
Both of those are still theoretical at this point, not ready for wide-scale deployment, and the costs are quite high. I think you'll find that the pro-nuke crowd is also pro-wind and solar, but nuclear is clearly the safest and most efficient way to produce the kind of power we need, at a price we can afford, using technology we can actually deploy today.
Wind and solar are going to look a LOT better if we figure out room-temperature superconductors and keep making advances in lightweight composite materials. Until then, when evaluating power options that we can ramp-up and use right away to cut down on mortality and environmental damage, nuclear just looks like the best way to go.
How would you feel about replacing existing nuclear plants (built mostly in the 1960s and 1970s) with plants in the same places that are over 1,000 times safer, create less waste, and deliver much more power? I can't see a downside to that.
Because if you don't die immediately from coal particulate inhalation but instead from cancer years later, it doesn't count?
FTFY
I was actually trying to figure something like this out here in Rhode Island, where our municipalities tax us quite a bundle on our cars (I pay over $400 a year in tax on a beat-up old Focus subcompact). Anyways, the DMV already knows your car's make, model, and year. I'd like to see the tax be a flat amount, modified by some result of a formula that factored-in curb weight (damage to roads) and mileage (damage to environment/economy). Basically, the goal would be to get as many people into as light and efficient cars as possible, and penalize the gas-guzzling cast-iron behemoths.
I think it's pretty clear that the PPC/x86 war ended similarly to the BetaMax/VHS one. PPC was a better architecture, and if it had received the same investment that Intel gave to keeping x86 alive, I believe it could have been dominant. Intel really screwed the AIM alliance with NetBurst too; Pentium 4s were crap CPUs, but they had BIG GHz painted on the box. I was doing virtualization (not emulation) on a PPC 604e, those features (borne of simplicity on the PPC side and complexity on the x86 side) were available way back on PPC, and the architecture was much better suited to tomorrow's model of 'many cores make light work'.
Also, it's all about backwards compatibility, Microsoft needs it so you can run apps from 1993 natively on Windows 7. Why Microsoft doesn't just release a 'totally native' system and put ALL the legacy stuff into 'classic mode' like Apple did is beyond me.
Sorry for the disjointed rant. It's the end of the day and I'm running low on coffee.
Don't be silly, we're right on the brink of a major breakthrough!
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/04/25/npfb-1978/
The 'greenies' have ben 'Microsofting* us for decades now. It's time to do something for -now- and plan for -later- when the big breakthrough lands.
* Microsoft: verb; To announce a feature or product that negates the value of the most likely competitor, but never actually deliver the product. See als: Real Soon Now.
So tell me, what's the value to the producer of a file that's copied freely via a private tracker? I suspect the people who produce child porn would be doing it regardless of profit.
Also, what does the 'market' look like? I suspect it's tiered like this:
1. Producers who are doing the actual hands-on harm to children.
2. First-tier buyers. They pay a premium to get the 'original' content.
or
2b. First-tier traders who communicate directly with the producers to acquire content.
--everything below this line doesn't matter to 'the market'--
3. People who trade or download child porn pictures with no exchange of value.
4. People who accidentally stumble on child porn images, and silly teenagers.
It's pretty clear that you can't 'remove the market' and still retain values like the ones we uphold in the western world. We've seen this problem with drugs, we've seen it with alcohol, we've seen it with media piracy, and with prostitution. You can't really change how people act when they have basic rights like the fourth amendment.
If anything, they should make 'simple' child porn possession a civil offense with a $2,500 fine that goes to a good cause, then have -creation- or -purchasing- child porn be first and second degree offenses of the criminal code. That way, the law will be incentivized to actually hunt down the evil people, they won't get much credit for busting casual traders.
(note: I find the issue rather repulsive, but I'm trying to be rational. It's easy to just blurt out a visceral response to things as vile as this.)
the Internet is making it easier for potential pedophiles to indulge their deranged fantasies... in the past they might have left the house to actually molest children.
Fixed that for you.
You know what I want open-sourced? Old video games. Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Ecco, Sim City 2000, Starcraft, etc.
The publishers can remove all the artwork for so that they don't step on their own trademarks for all I care. Those games all deserve to live forever, independent of the hardware they require.
I want Sim City 2000 native on Windows and Linux, I want Starcraft that runs natively on big screens, I want Zelda for my PC and a level editor to go with it.
Actually, I've always wondered this. Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in I.T.? I'm not in management, but sometimes it feels like the entire organization is pointing at a cheap, simple, effective solution, and management goes and picks some multi-million-dollar monster that takes a year to set up.
Also, I've met a LOT of I.T. sales folks, and most give me the willies.
"I think some Japanese fire-fighters were also taken in with those burns, and I'm wondering what their current condition is. Probably not good."
Two workers at Fukushima were wading around in pretty nasty contaminated water without appropriate protection. It's my understanding that they were brought to hospital with minor skin burns, cleaned up, and released. I think the nature of the stuff they were in was that it gives you mild skin burns, but won't kill you unless it gets inside, you've got it all over you, and you're exposed for a long time. They're expected to live normal lives, I think.
Don't most nuclear weapons aim to 'burn' as small an amount of fissile material as quickly as possible (as little as a few hundred pounds), while power-generating reactors are loaded with tens of tons of fissile material that's intended to really only be 'partially used'?
I know I'm oversimplifying, but a reactor seems like a potentially HUGE dirty bomb, which is why modern designs and safeguards are so important. We value human lives a LOT more than we did thirty years ago.
I hear this all the time, but the statistics I've seen show that today's criminals are not only fewer and farther between, but much more passive than those of the last two decades.
Most police have to deal with scum of the earth all day, day in and day out, but very rarely end up in any sort of dangerous situation. You're much more likely to have a welfare mom take a dump in the back of the cruiser than you are to get punched.
I know an officer who serves high-risk warrants. He is basically 'full-time SWAT' in a major city. He has one operation every few weeks, most of the rest of the time is spent in the gym or napping. And yes, they 'practice' on pedophiles and pot smokers.
"The Hospital IT department doesn't offer... so I bought (with my cash) a tiny server, installed BSD and OpenLDAP for accounts, and installed and configured DAViCal."
Wow. Why not just push all the buttons on management to get the 'real' IT folks to support a calendaring package from this century, or at least a scheduled sync with a Google calendar that your devices can sync to?
What you just did was add a whole mess of unaccountable, unmaintainable, indispensable, and covert technology to the mix. If I was a manager in I.T., I would likely cut some of your department's support over something like this, and start inviting you to more meetings so there are no further 'misunderstandings'.
Cheaper, and a great source of power, for sure. Hydro could stand to be further developed all over the northeast, where streams, rivers, and water in general is abundant. Still, it's an order of magnitude less safe than solar or nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
2012: "Powered by the new Apple Rattlesnake chip!"
2014: "Powered by the new Apple Cobra chip!"
2016: "Powered by the new Apple Water Moccasin chip!"
From the article you linked:
"Rather, the real capital-cost escalation is due largely to the severe atrophy of the global infrastructure for making,
building, managing, and operating reactors. This makes U.S. buyers pay in weakened dollars,
since most components must now be imported."
So nuclear's cost of construction can't even be estimated properly in the USA, since we haven't been doing it, and we've put ourselves last-in-line for parts. This would change overnight if we invested a few billion in actually building a few AP1000s instead of engaging in decades of debate.
On top of that, in places like where I live, it's impossible to build much wind capacity on-land, and solar is something you can only use to supplement baseload, there are weeks that go by here in the winter and spring without sunlight (Boston area). Coal has a direct impact on lifespans, gas is expensive, and offshore wind costs almost three times as much as fossil fuel to produce.
To me, it makes sense to build nuclear plants away from population centers and upwind of the ocean, on geologically stable plots of land.
The real question now is what comes next.
Here's a hint: It will be faster, and it will probably be called 'A6'. Just a guess.
I would imagine that in a software development environment, you'd want to give teams or individuals allowances for hardware and software, instead of having a rigid IT structure.
I suppose it depends on what kind of product you're putting out, but loosening silly restrictions on the creative folks seems like a good idea.
That said, I admin hundreds of machines in academia, and NO project leaves my desk where users have admin privileges.
I'm not sure how you figure this... In Real Life, near Boston, a $40K solar installation would make my home net-zero electric-wise (sometimes I'm pumping energy in, sometimes I'm taking it out). That $40K installation needs to be replaced every 20-25 years... Figure $2K a year for solar.
Currently I pay 9 cents/kWh for a mix of coal and natural gas, my bill is about $50/month... Nuclear could drop that to 7 cents-ish, so the same ballbark. I'm paying $600 a year for fossil fuel energy, and would pay less for nuclear. Solar would have to drop to about 70% in cost to be effective for me.
Also, they operate at high pressures to keep the water liquid past the normal 100C boiling point. In a BWR, pressure is 75 atmospheres, in a PWR it's 160. To get those pressures from depth of water and hold with an 'open top' (read: loss of containment at the top), you'd need a stack of water 750 meters high; double for a PWR. At lengths like that, you generate a lot of 'dirty' water, it saps a ton of efficiency from the reactor (warming-up a kilometer-long tube of water?), and it's more likely that a crack develops along the water column and you're back to square one.
If my investments average 8% (historically accurate) and inflation averages about 4% (also historically accurate), I'm still making 4% annually from my investment. Right now inflation is 2% and the stock market was up almost 13% in the last year... So your policy of NOT saving just lost you a bundle.
You'd have to be a bozo to keep $250K in a bank account, this would be invested, naturally.
The idea that you and I will have equal votes in forty years, when my life of scrimping and saving means I have $1M in the bank, and you're penniless and living on debt scares the bejeezus out of me.
The magic number from all my calculations is around 12%. That pretty much assumes that the market will not be good at all, and inflation will be somewhat high. If you bank 12% of income your working career (including employer matches), and you purchase a home on a 30-year mortgage before you're 35 (so your housing costs essentially disappear at retirement), you should be GOLDEN, living better than you did when you were working.
$100 or $200 a month isn't going to cut it. A person working in technology making $50K should be putting away about $500/month to hit the magic number (again, if your employer offers a 1:1 match, use it so you only need to put away $250 of your own).
If you're in the middle class and you 'could use the $250', you either need to get a side job or cut your expenses. Drop the cable TV, sell the $20K car and drive a used subcompact, or get a roommate, because you're only half a missed paycheck away from being chewed-up by this modern world.
I live in a state with high cost of living, high taxes, and I only make middle class money, but I plan on looking like this when I retire: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/monopoly%20man.jpg because I should have anywhere between $800k and $1.4M in the bank when I turn 65. It's possible to do, you just have to exhibit some very un-American fiscal discipline.