If they ever do build a superconducting grid I can't wait for the first catastrophic coolant failure.
The moment the resistance in one of those cables goes from zero to non zero it explodes and suddenly people will get paranoid about having superconducting lines anywhere near their houses and people will start blaming any random illnesses on superconducting dust from the explosion etc etc etc
And lets not forget that using regular reactors now doesn't even preclude reprocessing it later so the current use of once through reactors isn't that much of a problem even in the long term.
They kill birds and bats but that's a red herring since cats kill many orders of magnitude more. I actually like wind. It has it's place.
It just can't provide much more than 20% of the power we need at the right time in the right places without either throwing grid stability out the window or throwing away lots of the power generated.
I'm not so mad about the idea of boiling uranium so that it gets released as a gas into the atmosphere, coal plants are already doing that far too much.
People love to come up with exotic solutions to radioactive waste but there really is no need. Firing it into the sun is insanely overkill, anything which involves putting it into orbit is insane overkill and probably less safe than the most straightforward and comprehensive option:
Bury it in a hole in the desert.
Some people don't think that's fancy enough. So if you want you could wrap it in layers of glass and concrete and wrap that in a nice thick steel torpedo shaped shell and drop it into the deepest subduction zone you can find, it reaches the bottom going nice and fast and burries itself deep into the thick mud at the bottom. At this point it is no longer a problem.
I don't like this solution compared to the bury it in a hole option because it's like dropping gold bricks into the ocean. 50 years from now we might want to dig up what used to be waste and reprocess it. 90 % of it is still perfectly good fuel.
And that doesn't even include all the people with lung problems who are harmed by the pollution.
Even funnier: that 2 parts per million uranium in coal adds up fast when you burn billions of tons. You could run nuclear power plants on the uranium that coal plants spew into the air.(after enrichment of course)
What are your plans to deal with the massive quantities of waste produced in the process of mining the metal for enough wind turbines to be really useful? How about the various chemicals and waste materials from processing the cells for the billion and billions of solar panels you'd need to power the world?
Until I hear a good answer to that question, Solar and wind power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. It is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids.
People freak out at anything that puts out a few rems but don't seem bothered by shipments of arsenic, cyanide or any on of the thousands of other things which are far far far far far more likely to kill you, maim you etc. A nuclear plant 20 miles away is a reason to picket and scream and complain about how everyone is going to be killed in some nightmare scenario which people who actually know about the subject aren't worried about but a pesticide plant outside your town is no big deal.
It's like being terrified of meteorite strikes while playing in traffic.
Has anyone suggested simply eating it? It would unfortunately then collect and concentrate in sewage treatment plants and septic tanks, and so would defeat the purpose, but I'm curious...
12,000 metric tons of high-level waste (mostly spent reactor fuel rods) is produced worldwide each year. If that waste was let age for a few years like fine whiskey, split up into tiny 1.6mg portions encapsulated in glass, and then one fed to every person in the world...
a) Spent nuclear fuel rods, clad or declad, from commercial electricity generating reactors; average radioactivity being more than 2.5 million curies per cubic meter.
b) Semi-liquid sludge from nuclear bomb fabrication waste processing residue - average radioactivity being about 3500 curies per cubic meter.
All this waste contains five shorter lived and longer lived radionuclides of main concern. The shorter lived are strontium-90 whose half life, t1/2, is 28.5 years, and cesium-137 whose half life, t1/2, is 30 years. See Ref. 1 for the half-life values used in this study. The radioactivity of these shorter lived nuclides is approximately 95% of the total radioactivity of the nuclides of concern. Total hazardous life for these shorter lived nuclides is considered to be between 600 years and 1000 years depending upon one's point of view.
The longer lived isotopes are plutonium-239 whose t1/2 is 24,110 years, plutonium-240 whose t1/2 is 6,540 years, and curium-245 whose t1/2 is 8,500 years. Plutonium-238 whose t1/2is 88 years will have essentially disappeared after several thousand years, so in storage terms of the longer lived elements this isotope is not of concern as long as it will have been successfully contained for the next several thousand years. As for the life of these longer lived materials, the NRC considers 10,000 years as the storage time required; however, some people consider a lifetime as long as 100,000 years to 500,000 years as more appropriate. Sr-90 is a beta emitter, and the radiation won't penetrate the glass capsule. C-137 is a beta and gamma emitter, with 75% the energy released as beta, and the rest as 33keV and 662keV gamma.
1 cubic meter of waste: 2.5 million curies % radiation in short-lived Sr-90/C-137 isotopes: appx 95% % radiation capable of penetrating capsule: appx 13% World population: 6.70 Billion Average mass of a human: 70kg Time for complete digestion: 24hr
1 Ci = 37GBq 1 rad = 0.01J/kg of absorbed radiation 1 rem = rule of thumb is 1 rad, but it's actually a lot more complicated Q for gamma, external = 1 Q for alpha, external = 0 Q for beta, external = 0 1 Sv = Q x 100rem 1keV = 1.60217646 × 10-16 joules Density of fuel rods: 11.0g/cc
Volume of fuel per capsule: 1.6mg/11.0g/cc= 0.145nm^2
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 1m^2: 2.5MCi *.95 *.13 = 308kCi = 1.14*10^16Bq "Dangerous" radiation emitted from 0.145nm^2: 1.14*10^16Bq/6.7G/3=567kBq/meal % of gamma rays striking human body absorbed by human body: appx 15% Radiation absorbed by the body: 85kBq Energy absorbed: 85kBq X (33keV/Bq+662keV/Bq)/2 * 1.60217646*10^-16 J/keV * 24*60*60s= 41mJ. Energy absorbed per kg: 41mJ/70kg/0.01J/kg = 0.6mrad Radiation exposure: 0.6mrem per meal Radiation exposure: 639mrem per year, or appx 255SWW.
Conclusion: we could quite literally eat all the nuclear waste generated worldwide and barely double our annual exposure to natural radiation. Not that I'd advocate this, but jesus christ, there's nothing wrong with burying it all in a hole in the ground!
Alternately, I could just go around the nation beating people with spent fuel rods until they gain some perspective in the matter.
I would be stunned, stunned if every industry with the word "nuclear" in its name, even the nuclear weapons industry(including the crapfest that was the soviet unions nuclear program) has caused more cancers deaths, injuries and poisonings than the worldwide coal industry.
But coal isn't sexy. Coal isn't scary.
If tomorrow we swapped every coal plant in the world for modern nuclear plants it would do vastly more good for the environment than every single accomplishment of every Greenpeace like organisation the world over combined has ever accomplished.
"and according to evolutionary theory this will (eventually) result in the extinction of all but one race"
What the fuck are you on? Evolutionary theory says nothing of the kind unless the textbooks have been published by the Aryans.
everything will become extinct eventually and before that happens lots of things can happen including species diverging into 2 species, divergent groups converging again before they reach the point where they can't breed with each other etc etc etc.
your statement is tripe.
you were doing so well for a little bit, people are different, yes, some groups are smaller or taller or etc etc on average but that has nothing to do with any particular individual.
with 7 billion individuals there's enough room for a great deal of variation in 10, 20, 30, 40 or any number of generations.
I like linux, I like programming on a linux machine, I like learning on a linux machine but I can't really game on a linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market.
What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux? What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
why wouldn't they use the users accounts? Botnets grab logins for hundreds of thousands of legit email accounts, hell they can even use the users own SSL connection to send the emails when they log in to their email. Whatever way users send normal mail the bots can emulate them.
Slashdot Mirror
If they ever do build a superconducting grid I can't wait for the first catastrophic coolant failure.
The moment the resistance in one of those cables goes from zero to non zero it explodes and suddenly people will get paranoid about having superconducting lines anywhere near their houses and people will start blaming any random illnesses on superconducting dust from the explosion etc etc etc
Remember Bhopal?
What happens when a plant that produces a solvent for one step in producing solar panels springs a leak and leads to another Bhopal?
That's not a technical problem.
If you're going to include madness and political problems then no solution you can propose to any human problem with anything on earth is viable.
And lets not forget that using regular reactors now doesn't even preclude reprocessing it later so the current use of once through reactors isn't that much of a problem even in the long term.
They kill birds and bats but that's a red herring since cats kill many orders of magnitude more.
I actually like wind.
It has it's place.
It just can't provide much more than 20% of the power we need at the right time in the right places without either throwing grid stability out the window or throwing away lots of the power generated.
I'm not so mad about the idea of boiling uranium so that it gets released as a gas into the atmosphere, coal plants are already doing that far too much.
"Clean coal" is a meaningless buzzword.
It's the same old coal.
The same problems.
New marketing department.
Why put levies on a riverbank, the people living nearby need water to drink, surely when there's a flood it will only make them more healthy!
that 25 gigawats?
That's max output.
In reality wind power typically has a capacity factor of a bit more than 25%
Nuclear:
Capacity factor: U.S. average 92%
So in reality 8 GW or less of nuclear provides far more usable power than that 25 gigawats of wind.
It's not really a problem now.
People love to come up with exotic solutions to radioactive waste but there really is no need.
Firing it into the sun is insanely overkill, anything which involves putting it into orbit is insane overkill and probably less safe than the most straightforward and comprehensive option:
Bury it in a hole in the desert.
Some people don't think that's fancy enough.
So if you want you could wrap it in layers of glass and concrete and wrap that in a nice thick steel torpedo shaped shell and drop it into the deepest subduction zone you can find, it reaches the bottom going nice and fast and burries itself deep into the thick mud at the bottom. At this point it is no longer a problem.
I don't like this solution compared to the bury it in a hole option because it's like dropping gold bricks into the ocean.
50 years from now we might want to dig up what used to be waste and reprocess it.
90 % of it is still perfectly good fuel.
And that doesn't even include all the people with lung problems who are harmed by the pollution.
Even funnier: that 2 parts per million uranium in coal adds up fast when you burn billions of tons.
You could run nuclear power plants on the uranium that coal plants spew into the air.(after enrichment of course)
What are your plans to deal with the massive quantities of waste produced in the process of mining the metal for enough wind turbines to be really useful?
How about the various chemicals and waste materials from processing the cells for the billion and billions of solar panels you'd need to power the world?
Until I hear a good answer to that question, Solar and wind power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint.
It is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids.
People freak out at anything that puts out a few rems but don't seem bothered by shipments of arsenic, cyanide or any on of the thousands of other things which are far far far far far more likely to kill you, maim you etc.
A nuclear plant 20 miles away is a reason to picket and scream and complain about how everyone is going to be killed in some nightmare scenario which people who actually know about the subject aren't worried about but a pesticide plant outside your town is no big deal.
It's like being terrified of meteorite strikes while playing in traffic.
1:Rems to cancer rate is not linear.
2:Most cancer has little or nothing to do with radiation.
In any case we're not proposing actually eating it.
We're talking about burying it in a hole.In the desert. Miles from anyone.
Bury. It. In. A. Hole.
Or just eat it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31168840
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
Ok.
I'll make a better summary.
It looks at pretty much all of the energy generation options in a realistic manner.
page 104 and before you declare "YAY WE CAN DO IT!" also page 107.
If you have any beef with his figures read the appropriate section in the book.
Credits:
SA Forums user: grover
Has anyone suggested simply eating it? It would unfortunately then collect and concentrate in sewage treatment plants and septic tanks, and so would defeat the purpose, but I'm curious...
12,000 metric tons of high-level waste (mostly spent reactor fuel rods) is produced worldwide each year. If that waste was let age for a few years like fine whiskey, split up into tiny 1.6mg portions encapsulated in glass, and then one fed to every person in the world...
a) Spent nuclear fuel rods, clad or declad, from commercial electricity generating reactors; average radioactivity being more than 2.5 million curies per cubic meter.
b) Semi-liquid sludge from nuclear bomb fabrication waste processing residue - average radioactivity being about 3500 curies per cubic meter.
All this waste contains five shorter lived and longer lived radionuclides of main concern. The shorter lived are strontium-90 whose half life, t1/2, is 28.5 years, and cesium-137 whose half life, t1/2, is 30 years. See Ref. 1 for the half-life values used in this study. The radioactivity of these shorter lived nuclides is approximately 95% of the total radioactivity of the nuclides of concern. Total hazardous life for these shorter lived nuclides is considered to be between 600 years and 1000 years depending upon one's point of view.
The longer lived isotopes are plutonium-239 whose t1/2 is 24,110 years, plutonium-240 whose t1/2 is 6,540 years, and curium-245 whose t1/2 is 8,500 years. Plutonium-238 whose t1/2is 88 years will have essentially disappeared after several thousand years, so in storage terms of the longer lived elements this isotope is not of concern as long as it will have been successfully contained for the next several thousand years. As for the life of these longer lived materials, the NRC considers 10,000 years as the storage time required; however, some people consider a lifetime as long as 100,000 years to 500,000 years as more appropriate.
Sr-90 is a beta emitter, and the radiation won't penetrate the glass capsule.
C-137 is a beta and gamma emitter, with 75% the energy released as beta, and the rest as 33keV and 662keV gamma.
1 cubic meter of waste: 2.5 million curies
% radiation in short-lived Sr-90/C-137 isotopes: appx 95%
% radiation capable of penetrating capsule: appx 13%
World population: 6.70 Billion
Average mass of a human: 70kg
Time for complete digestion: 24hr
1 Ci = 37GBq
1 rad = 0.01J/kg of absorbed radiation
1 rem = rule of thumb is 1 rad, but it's actually a lot more complicated
Q for gamma, external = 1
Q for alpha, external = 0
Q for beta, external = 0
1 Sv = Q x 100rem
1keV = 1.60217646 × 10-16 joules
Density of fuel rods: 11.0g/cc
Volume of fuel per capsule: 1.6mg/11.0g/cc= 0.145nm^2
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 1m^2: 2.5MCi * .95 * .13 = 308kCi = 1.14*10^16Bq
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 0.145nm^2: 1.14*10^16Bq/6.7G/3=567kBq/meal
% of gamma rays striking human body absorbed by human body: appx 15%
Radiation absorbed by the body: 85kBq
Energy absorbed: 85kBq X (33keV/Bq+662keV/Bq)/2 * 1.60217646*10^-16 J/keV * 24*60*60s= 41mJ.
Energy absorbed per kg: 41mJ/70kg/0.01J/kg = 0.6mrad
Radiation exposure: 0.6mrem per meal
Radiation exposure: 639mrem per year, or appx 255SWW.
Conclusion: we could quite literally eat all the nuclear waste generated worldwide and barely double our annual exposure to natural radiation. Not that I'd advocate this, but jesus christ, there's nothing wrong with burying it all in a hole in the ground!
Alternately, I could just go around the nation beating people with spent fuel rods until they gain some perspective in the matter.
I would be stunned, stunned if every industry with the word "nuclear" in its name, even the nuclear weapons industry(including the crapfest that was the soviet unions nuclear program) has caused more cancers deaths, injuries and poisonings than the worldwide coal industry.
But coal isn't sexy.
Coal isn't scary.
If tomorrow we swapped every coal plant in the world for modern nuclear plants it would do vastly more good for the environment than every single accomplishment of every Greenpeace like organisation the world over combined has ever accomplished.
But no.
Atoms are scary.
Read this.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Seriously.
Actually read it.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
"and according to evolutionary theory this will (eventually) result in the extinction of all but one race"
What the fuck are you on?
Evolutionary theory says nothing of the kind unless the textbooks have been published by the Aryans.
everything will become extinct eventually and before that happens lots of things can happen including species diverging into 2 species, divergent groups converging again before they reach the point where they can't breed with each other etc etc etc.
your statement is tripe.
you were doing so well for a little bit, people are different, yes, some groups are smaller or taller or etc etc on average but that has nothing to do with any particular individual.
with 7 billion individuals there's enough room for a great deal of variation in 10, 20, 30, 40 or any number of generations.
I like linux, I like programming on a linux machine, I like learning on a linux machine but I can't really game on a linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market.
What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?
What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?
I was mistaken
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
why wouldn't they use the users accounts?
Botnets grab logins for hundreds of thousands of legit email accounts, hell they can even use the users own SSL connection to send the emails when they log in to their email.
Whatever way users send normal mail the bots can emulate them.