You are going to need to cite where a next gen laser will be 1k times more powerful. There is no Mores law of lasers... A rough polish (90% reflectively) does not add a huge expense to aircraft, in fact you save weight on paint.
And even at MWs ablation type shielding is quite effective.
And all movement power goes directly into shafts, not electricity generation. Cooling lasers so they still work is a huge problem at kW power levels. Its a unsolved problem for MW class if you want to do more than a few firings an hour.
The NIF(National Ignition Facility) does this. Its a lot bigger than a battle ship and can only fire 3-4 times a day due to cooling issues and the power draw is plain silly. Also you can't focus these kind of beams easily through the air due to nonlinear effects and ionization.
if 32kW kill you in 2 seconds. Then a dull metal polish with 90% reflectivity increases that to 20seconds. A highly reflective 99% mirror finish (probably not practical) increases the dwell time to 200seconds. This assumes *zero* heat lost to the air stream or via conduction to the rest of the airframe, both of which will be significant in the 20 and 200 second case. So the real dwell times will be larger.
Now add a layer of a ablative material underneath....
Thorium can and was weaponized. The US tested one U233 bomb. Sure is a valid fuel cycle, but any reactor is a weapon risk even just as a neutron source.
Nuclear can be load following. Homogeneous reactors can load follow with very rapid response time and can be made very small for example (there are other designs). Can they be made economically? I don't know. The costs of permits and containments make me skeptical of claims that small is economic.
The reactor parts are "low grade waste" and is generally safe after a few decades to a 100 years (depends of course-but thats about right for 99% of low grade reactor parts). Fast neutrons do get rid of the heavy elements in modern PWR waste. Thats where the "unsafe for 10 000 years" comes from. So already you have massively reduced the lifetime of the waste (other nasties have very long life times- so don't contribute to the radioactivity that much). There are few fission products that are problematic, they too can be dealt with via fast neutrons (Cs being the hardest to deal with). Even without that we are down to centuries of "high activity time" rather than 1000s. Now we add reprocessing. This brings the volume of the waste down by about 60 fold (more or less), and gives use 60 times more plain U + some Pu. We then dilute the waste to make thermal management easier, but its already much smaller and with a shorter lifetime.
We should be doing research into this now. Sure its not a done deal, and a clear waste management plan is needed. But once though fuel cycle is completely retarded. Its that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these problems in the fist place.
People seem to think 100 years is a long time. The hotel i stayed in Italy last year was build in 720AD. The wine cellar in Czech has been producing wine since at least ~800AD.
The containment building/structure is the money killer. So I tend to agree. Unless both containment cost and regulation cost are drastically slashed, I can't see small getting economical.
...and it would be cheap, it would be clean, and it would be safe.
You can't back that up with data. Why, because the data says pick 2.
Right now we are 40 years behind on reactor design. It would take several *expensive* pilot plants to prove that the idea works (I like molten salt reactors, with a Th or U fuel cycle and a unity breading ratio and in situ reprocessing).
Materials for fission reactors are expensive to developed and difficult to predict creep and corrosion performance because of the low neutron absorption cross section needed (restricting material choice) and radiation environment. Corrosion reactions can be quite different in a reactor compared to not in a reactor.
Once a pilot plant has been run for a while we can then produce cheaper plants. In that a proven design (so it worked well for 20+years) can then be built without having to revalidate the design. However the bulk of the cost for nuclear is still the containment building. That cost will not go away and does push the economics towards larger reactors.
As for the over time and budget mud that is often flung around, thats the case with any big project such as hydro, coal, gas and even renewables.
That same tech also makes living underground feasible (not that we would need to). Also even at the height of the cold war.. Big Eurptions still have more power than all the nukes put together. people seem to forget that nukes are big, but this rock we live on is *huge*.
All out nuclear war will be "life as we know it" changing (bye bye cites and about 99% of modern infrastructure). But not Human extinguishing.
Also, historically speaking we suck at killing each other. More people are killed falling down stairs in the US than from shootings. More people died of the Spanish flu than died in WWI. If you look at the population of earth over time, its hard to even see the blips that are the wars.
But hay, just about every generation that has ever lived seems to believe we are on the brink. Its a popular thing to believe, regardless of the historical, or scientific facts.
2000-5000 years worth of Uranium (with reprocessing but not including ocean extraction) should be long enough to get DD fusion working. DD fusion should last more than several billion years with our ocean supply.
Of course by then perhaps renewables are cheaper....
Ok, So i went and watched Voyage to the Planets because of this recommendation. Quite frankly, if you want a case against sending people, send robots instead, that was it. It was totally devoid of any detail other than vague statements like "difficult", and felt like the the director was just tring to relive the nostalgia of the moon landing all over again *at every god dam planet*. Even Pluto!
To top it all off, it was quite incorrect about many of the details "shown graphically" and with sweeping statements (like traveling through the asteroid belt being dangerous. Its 99.99999999999999% nothing, and the chances of hitting anything are far less that one of the crew deciding to go all Jack the Ripper on the rest.)
I miss the days when science TV had science in it rather than BS "drama" with a bunch of "keeping it real" (aka total losers) characters.
I was rooting for a CME to wipe the whole crew out so we could send the robotic probes instead. Maybe then we could get some science done.
Having worked in a big corporation, try to do *anything* without the express approval of the legal department.
Laws are written in a way where we are told we can't understand them, and must seek "legal advice" at every turn. Unlike real professionals, there is nothing wrong --legally-- with bad legal advice or incompetence, you get to stay a lawyer. Just see how long an engineer stays an engineer when they get things wrong, like a bridge wasn't strong enough.
I have known too many lawyers. All they care about is "due process", which is legaleses (why does that word even exist) for "lots of billable hours".
The real problem is that it cost so much to *challenge* a patent on any grounds, and that at the end of the day, a patent attorney/judge decides what "obvious" is. Just a standard "do I infringe" from a attorney can cost $20K, and unlike an engineers report, it can be completely wrong and its not the attorneys problem or fault.
Now add the fact the groups like MPEG-LA have 1000s of patents, even small costs become massive.
The current system is self serving. Its serving lawyers under the pretense of protecting inventors.
As much as I agree with the general sentiment of your comment. It should be pointed out that things have never been better than now by any reasonable metric you can use. Lower income people have a better quality of life than ever before, have more purchasing power than before, have more labor protections than before (outside the US at least) etc.
We like to think about the good old days, but that was when we were 5, and our parents hid the worlds problems from us (and we just didn't care).
True for a current case. But a cold case may not store samples properly due to costs. Hence you only have the markers tested back then (the number of markers has been increased quite a bit in the last 10 years).
Also lets not forget that the accusing someone of a crime still has significant social costs even if they are cleared. Like their DNA ending up on a database or a trial by media, or even worse, the cops see a "suspect they didn't get last time".
Fishing exhibitions for suspects is generally a bad idea.
Your objection does not, I believe, lead to a rational conclusion that convictions based on false-positives will rise, huge budgets squandered, or other similar troubles occur.
I didn't say it would, and besides, we already have that to an extent.
Once police are sufficiently interested in a small handful of individuals..
Once a suspect you are now on a database as a suspect for a crime... that they perhaps didn't solve, even if cleared. Try going back to a normal life if you are a suspect for a pedophile charge. The last person in NZ, despite getting completely cleared, had to shift to a different country. Accusation of a crime can be as damaging as getting convicted for many people.
On top of all this, DNA is not as good as many think in finding the guilty person. CSI and shows like this over sell this type of evidence. But my DNA at a scene of crime just means I may have been there at some time and little else.
I am quite simply against nationwide database and solving crime via data mining for these reasons.
True SNPs are correlated. But are far more random that other markers used from generation to generation (1 in 1000 mutate between child and parent IIRC). To be effective I am thinking of 10k SNPs or so. Not a few 100. Currently this is not affordable at all. But its only getting cheaper...what we need is a cheap SNP chip.
The idea is to look at the DNA down to a level where everyone really is unique.
But I don't want a DNA database anyway. Even the database of "convicted whatever" is a farce, since you can end up in the database just by being a witness let alone a suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
You are going to need to cite where a next gen laser will be 1k times more powerful. There is no Mores law of lasers... A rough polish (90% reflectively) does not add a huge expense to aircraft, in fact you save weight on paint.
And even at MWs ablation type shielding is quite effective.
There were significant releases of radioactive materials from TMI-2, both during and after the incident.
Citation required. Having read the reports, your making stuff up. The rest of your reply is the same.
And all movement power goes directly into shafts, not electricity generation. Cooling lasers so they still work is a huge problem at kW power levels. Its a unsolved problem for MW class if you want to do more than a few firings an hour.
The NIF(National Ignition Facility) does this. Its a lot bigger than a battle ship and can only fire 3-4 times a day due to cooling issues and the power draw is plain silly. Also you can't focus these kind of beams easily through the air due to nonlinear effects and ionization.
if 32kW kill you in 2 seconds. Then a dull metal polish with 90% reflectivity increases that to 20seconds. A highly reflective 99% mirror finish (probably not practical) increases the dwell time to 200seconds. This assumes *zero* heat lost to the air stream or via conduction to the rest of the airframe, both of which will be significant in the 20 and 200 second case. So the real dwell times will be larger.
Now add a layer of a ablative material underneath....
Thorium can and was weaponized. The US tested one U233 bomb. Sure is a valid fuel cycle, but any reactor is a weapon risk even just as a neutron source.
Nuclear can be load following. Homogeneous reactors can load follow with very rapid response time and can be made very small for example (there are other designs). Can they be made economically? I don't know. The costs of permits and containments make me skeptical of claims that small is economic.
The reactor parts are "low grade waste" and is generally safe after a few decades to a 100 years (depends of course-but thats about right for 99% of low grade reactor parts). Fast neutrons do get rid of the heavy elements in modern PWR waste. Thats where the "unsafe for 10 000 years" comes from. So already you have massively reduced the lifetime of the waste (other nasties have very long life times- so don't contribute to the radioactivity that much). There are few fission products that are problematic, they too can be dealt with via fast neutrons (Cs being the hardest to deal with). Even without that we are down to centuries of "high activity time" rather than 1000s. Now we add reprocessing. This brings the volume of the waste down by about 60 fold (more or less), and gives use 60 times more plain U + some Pu. We then dilute the waste to make thermal management easier, but its already much smaller and with a shorter lifetime.
We should be doing research into this now. Sure its not a done deal, and a clear waste management plan is needed. But once though fuel cycle is completely retarded. Its that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these problems in the fist place.
People seem to think 100 years is a long time. The hotel i stayed in Italy last year was build in 720AD. The wine cellar in Czech has been producing wine since at least ~800AD.
The containment building/structure is the money killer. So I tend to agree. Unless both containment cost and regulation cost are drastically slashed, I can't see small getting economical.
You don't have to stop for fuel.
...and it would be cheap, it would be clean, and it would be safe.
You can't back that up with data. Why, because the data says pick 2.
Right now we are 40 years behind on reactor design. It would take several *expensive* pilot plants to prove that the idea works (I like molten salt reactors, with a Th or U fuel cycle and a unity breading ratio and in situ reprocessing).
Materials for fission reactors are expensive to developed and difficult to predict creep and corrosion performance because of the low neutron absorption cross section needed (restricting material choice) and radiation environment. Corrosion reactions can be quite different in a reactor compared to not in a reactor.
Once a pilot plant has been run for a while we can then produce cheaper plants. In that a proven design (so it worked well for 20+years) can then be built without having to revalidate the design. However the bulk of the cost for nuclear is still the containment building. That cost will not go away and does push the economics towards larger reactors.
As for the over time and budget mud that is often flung around, thats the case with any big project such as hydro, coal, gas and even renewables.
We worse than cockroaches.
That same tech also makes living underground feasible (not that we would need to). Also even at the height of the cold war.. Big Eurptions still have more power than all the nukes put together. people seem to forget that nukes are big, but this rock we live on is *huge*.
All out nuclear war will be "life as we know it" changing (bye bye cites and about 99% of modern infrastructure). But not Human extinguishing.
Also, historically speaking we suck at killing each other. More people are killed falling down stairs in the US than from shootings. More people died of the Spanish flu than died in WWI. If you look at the population of earth over time, its hard to even see the blips that are the wars.
But hay, just about every generation that has ever lived seems to believe we are on the brink. Its a popular thing to believe, regardless of the historical, or scientific facts.
2000-5000 years worth of Uranium (with reprocessing but not including ocean extraction) should be long enough to get DD fusion working. DD fusion should last more than several billion years with our ocean supply.
Of course by then perhaps renewables are cheaper....
How does Sphinx stack up to the rest?
Ok, So i went and watched Voyage to the Planets because of this recommendation. Quite frankly, if you want a case against sending people, send robots instead, that was it. It was totally devoid of any detail other than vague statements like "difficult", and felt like the the director was just tring to relive the nostalgia of the moon landing all over again *at every god dam planet*. Even Pluto!
To top it all off, it was quite incorrect about many of the details "shown graphically" and with sweeping statements (like traveling through the asteroid belt being dangerous. Its 99.99999999999999% nothing, and the chances of hitting anything are far less that one of the crew deciding to go all Jack the Ripper on the rest.)
I miss the days when science TV had science in it rather than BS "drama" with a bunch of "keeping it real" (aka total losers) characters.
I was rooting for a CME to wipe the whole crew out so we could send the robotic probes instead. Maybe then we could get some science done.
Having worked in a big corporation, try to do *anything* without the express approval of the legal department.
Laws are written in a way where we are told we can't understand them, and must seek "legal advice" at every turn. Unlike real professionals, there is nothing wrong --legally-- with bad legal advice or incompetence, you get to stay a lawyer. Just see how long an engineer stays an engineer when they get things wrong, like a bridge wasn't strong enough.
I have known too many lawyers. All they care about is "due process", which is legaleses (why does that word even exist) for "lots of billable hours".
The real problem is that it cost so much to *challenge* a patent on any grounds, and that at the end of the day, a patent attorney/judge decides what "obvious" is. Just a standard "do I infringe" from a attorney can cost $20K, and unlike an engineers report, it can be completely wrong and its not the attorneys problem or fault.
Now add the fact the groups like MPEG-LA have 1000s of patents, even small costs become massive.
The current system is self serving. Its serving lawyers under the pretense of protecting inventors.
As much as I agree with the general sentiment of your comment. It should be pointed out that things have never been better than now by any reasonable metric you can use. Lower income people have a better quality of life than ever before, have more purchasing power than before, have more labor protections than before (outside the US at least) etc.
We like to think about the good old days, but that was when we were 5, and our parents hid the worlds problems from us (and we just didn't care).
True for a current case. But a cold case may not store samples properly due to costs. Hence you only have the markers tested back then (the number of markers has been increased quite a bit in the last 10 years).
Also lets not forget that the accusing someone of a crime still has significant social costs even if they are cleared. Like their DNA ending up on a database or a trial by media, or even worse, the cops see a "suspect they didn't get last time".
Fishing exhibitions for suspects is generally a bad idea.
Good luck telling people that you don't need the ~70km of coastline. Also the price tag for the resultant electricity may not be favorable at all.
Name me one *[dam/coal/gas]* power station that actually went into operation and stayed within budget while it was constructed..
What trees? ;)
Your objection does not, I believe, lead to a rational conclusion that convictions based on false-positives will rise, huge budgets squandered, or other similar troubles occur.
I didn't say it would, and besides, we already have that to an extent.
Once police are sufficiently interested in a small handful of individuals..
Once a suspect you are now on a database as a suspect for a crime... that they perhaps didn't solve, even if cleared. Try going back to a normal life if you are a suspect for a pedophile charge. The last person in NZ, despite getting completely cleared, had to shift to a different country. Accusation of a crime can be as damaging as getting convicted for many people.
On top of all this, DNA is not as good as many think in finding the guilty person. CSI and shows like this over sell this type of evidence. But my DNA at a scene of crime just means I may have been there at some time and little else.
I am quite simply against nationwide database and solving crime via data mining for these reasons.
True SNPs are correlated. But are far more random that other markers used from generation to generation (1 in 1000 mutate between child and parent IIRC). To be effective I am thinking of 10k SNPs or so. Not a few 100. Currently this is not affordable at all. But its only getting cheaper...what we need is a cheap SNP chip.
The idea is to look at the DNA down to a level where everyone really is unique.
But I don't want a DNA database anyway. Even the database of "convicted whatever" is a farce, since you can end up in the database just by being a witness let alone a suspect.