You are both right. Yes the particles from a bomb are trapped. But the volume at a radius of ~20,000km is HUGE and it won't add much to the background. Its unlikely to do much damage since they are designed to be rad hard for 20 odd years.
Well it is good enough for a lot of people. But streaming is a long way from True HD. Dam most is not even close to DVD quality. Some of us want DVD or better and would pay for it. If what we paid for worked.
The last DVD i rented was Transformers 2. It played out of order on all 3 computers, and skipped about 5min at chapter boundaries on my DVD player. The store said it wasn't their problem.
Chenobyl was a stupid short cut before it was even built. Sure 3 mile island was a problem, but no reactor outside the former USSR deserves to be lumped as unsafe as the RBMK design at Chenobyl. If i didn't know better it was like the designer tried to make a reactor that would blow up and then deliberately left out any containment building.
Here is the real rub. There are 11 of these reactors still running.
It should also be noted that other Russian designs are more similar to western design and many many times safer.
and its half life is only 12 years, and its Hydrogen, so unless its already in the form of water its most likely to get very very thinly distributed in the atmosphere.
However a leak is a leak. Its the problem. No one wants to go without power so we don't shut down old reactors. Every scared of radiation, so no new plants are built.
If we could replace the old nuclear power stations, nuclear would be a lot safer.
The difference in coding for RED camera work flows etc is massive as you well know. If it takes a year or two to get a iMovie clone that runs on Linux, how long would it take to get a full Final Cut clone done? It would be an expensive and very long project without financial backing.
It still wouldn't work. How much torrents are telesyncs, or from other sources that automatically bypass anything on BluRay or DVD. BlueRay rips are available almost same day as release anyway regardless of being better protected than CSS.
They're saying it doesn't work for the vast majority of people attempting to earn a living through their art.
How the hell is that Bono, Sonys or anyone else's problem?
If want be famous and rich as a $OCCUPATION, and thats my problem. Not anyone else's. Even if i just want to make a living as $OCCUPATION thats my problem, not yours and not Bono's and not some rich guy who got lucky.
The Russians did back in the 60s. Thats where the idea came from. The "virtual" cathode/anode idea was studied quite a bit by them and Buzzard references them in one of his few and quite poor papers.
Even wikipedia can help you with the "why it won't work" (under the fusion energy IIRC).
Electrons in a plasma emit massive amounts of x rays (Bremsstrahlung radiation). The amount depends on the charge of the ions, so with Boron fusion the x rays is 5 times higher than with DT or DD fuels. It also needs to be hotter since the protons need to overcome a higher potential in order to hit a B atom. This mean that no matter how hot the plasma is the fusion energy will *always* be less than the xray energy and the plasma will cool very rapidly or rather never get hot enough for fusion.
Now in a polywell or a fusor, they work by accelerating ions to high energy. ie a hot thing. Electrons are in the background plasma or directly injected (some Russians experiments did this) and are at low energy. The cold thing. They occupy the same space and ions/electrons can and *do* collide. A hot and cold thing in contact. Now if the probability of fusion is higher than the probability of colliding with an electron, you get some fusion before they loose all their energy to the electrons->xrays. But its not. You are about a million times more likely to hit an electron than to fuse.
We have a huge amount of experimental evidence and observations that back this up too. If something like this would work, we would have seen it work by now in some of the experiments back in the 60 and 70s. Asserting that everyone else is wrong without anything to back it up, and claiming that you can do H-B fusion when you can't even demonstrate a neutron yield at a fusor level, is a strong sign of heading towards crackpot territory. His scaling laws are literately pulled out of thin air. His talks further show how clearly he had no intention of dealing with the experimental and theoretical shortcomings of his claims.
This is widely accepted in the science community, with data to back it up. I find odd that something with speculative models and only long term predictions and almost no track record of validated models is held up as such a certainty (aka climate change) where something like this with *far far* more of consensus in the community and far more validated models and data and experiments, must surly be wrong. Faith will not make this work.
However don't read this as acceptance that tokamak is the only way to go. I think its one way, and currently has achieved the best confinement by a long shot. Other schemes should be perused, but lets make sure they at lest work in theory first. The Polywell does not.
American idol etc make huge amounts of money. Thats not broken. Thats good business. You may not like what comes out, but lots of people pay for it and watch it. Likewise with Hollywood. (avatar cost 232Million, box office 1Billon). This is not a broken business model. Its a bloody good one.
Many of these organization are just that. Some are founded by churches, but are clearly separated in that there only mandate is to "help". No strings about faith is *permitted*. If you think they are all 1850 missionaries today you have watched too much south park and not been involved (or even looked up) these organizations.
The last one I gave money (and time) too was a "teaching them to fish" type organization and external people were only there to "bootstrap" a education center, in that once locals were trained, it is run by locals (to preserve local culture etc). Local governments also supported the program.
I have read it (not wiki, but the real papers). I did do quite a bit of plasma and nuclear physics you know. Buzzard pushed his idea when he had only detected a few neutrons and then claimed it was the best anyone ever done (it was not by a long shot). If you want a dark horse fusion idea that can actually work, this is your best bet.
For some reason everyone thinks the science is rock solid when it comes to Climate studies. But when it comes to the next crackpot with the *same* fusion idea that been tried many many times before, a 100 years of experimental data and very very good theoretical understanding is now all wrong. We are talking about the 2nd law of thermodynamics here, entropy is increasing. A hot thing that is in contact with a cold thing will lose heat to the cold thing. At the very least the people in question should be able to say why it will be different this time round. But they don't, instead they make crazy claims like that they can do boron fusion even though its 1000x harder and lower power density and despite the fact they *can't* break even with DD or even DT.
For the pollywell to work it need to keep electrons and ions away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Yet the ion-election interaction probability is orders of magnitude higher than fusion. So without black magic it will use more energy that it produces. It does not matter how they are confined.
Thermonuclear fusion has failed to produce a working reactor. But confinement has been improved over a million fold. If we do that for the next 20 years, we will have DD fusion reactors, let along DT reactors.
I think we should peruse both options. Conventional should be focused on energy production and waste management today. I personally think molten salt reactors offer potential well beyond solid fuel based reactors.
How much wind and solar do you need to replace *current* nuclear power? A crap load that will sit around over half the time doing *nothing*.
Wind and solar have little chance doing much in 20 years time for the simple reason no one wants to pay that much for power (and we can't build that much stuff that quickly), and we are not investing in large energy storage that would also cost a fortune and again spend much of its time doing nothing. And they are not "free" in any sense and "socially desirable" really means build it somewhere else.
Nuclear is your only hope of replacing fossil fuels in the near future. Anything else is 20 years away. And what the hell is wrong with 20 years anyway, its not that long, aren't we suppose to be putting our short sightedness behind us?
There are no switches for the idiot to flip. The fuel is already *melted*. If you have a fusion reactor, why the hell would i want energy from fission at all?
Yes there could be a *fault*. But you can design it so that all physically possible faults result in no leaks to the outside world (as 3 mile island did). You can even design then so that all conceivable faults are easily dealt with after the fact and easy to clean up.
We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely.
Sounds nice on paper. The bottom line is that it doest work. We use too much power, with physics of scale, you can't compete with mass produced power. I will get my power cheaper than you by not doing that.
Next is the problem of generating power from what? Gas? Coal? Solar? wind? This won't work without some serious power storage and some serious over generation to "secure supply". Just ask some people who live far away from the grid.
Finally your facts about nuclear are not very accurate. Once through cycles that the US is obsessed with is not the norm and incredibly wasteful (seems to be the American way). The reactor stated here fixes many of these problems to very manageable levels. For example pressure water reactors get a burn up of fuel in the 20% range (Optimistically). Molten salt(with any fuel) gets 100%. Molten salt can even run on PWR waste nicely, and reduce the amount of long term waste by a factor of 10. Using Th is better since U233 tends to produce nicer waste, and will be reasonably safe in about 100 years, and there is much much less of it. There is more than enough U and Th to last 1000s years if we breed and reprocess.
In fact a 1GW power station could hold 100 years of waste in a reasonably small area that can be co located . After that the stuff that went in first can be taken out. This avoids transportation issues.
Finally there are many things that we deal with routinely that are just as bad in industry. DDTs don't ever become safe. Ever. Yes we should have a waste solution as part of moving back to nuclear, but its not the boogie man. And we should burn most of the waste we have rather than bury it. Finally we must realistically asses the costs (environmental and financial) of the different options. Even the most extreme greenies are are not using less energy and it needs to come from somewhere.
Oh an interesting side note. Molten salt reactors are easily scaled down and up. So small "community" based power stations are theoretically possible.
Load following is a feature of molten salt, which can be used with U as well. In fact the demonstration reactors did use U. Also they are not just load following , they can in theory load follow well enough for peak power.
The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell...
Only if you permit the laws of physics to be wrong and a number of experiments to also be wrong. ITER could work. But its not the best next step, and the multinational nature costs the project huge gobs of money with internal politics and the like.
Also most say that for next gen conventional nuclear we are looking at 10-20 years at least as well (for the experimental reactors).
There is a lot more Th than that. Try more than >1000years, and we have a lot more U around than we thought when everyone was ranting about it only lasting 100 years as well. Providing we don't do something stupid with once through fuel cycles, nuclear could take us so far into the future its would be pointless even speculating what we would have avalible to us. Hell we probably have fusors and time traveling Delorians.
3) People have been constructing and selling apocalyptic vision ever since St. John wrote his version on the Isle of Patmos. May not want to hold your breath just yet.
Its been going on far longer than that. We (Humans) seem to love the idea that the end of all things will happen in our lifetime. I guess we don't like the idea of being just some insignificant speck of a soul, in some insignificant period of time.
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You are both right. Yes the particles from a bomb are trapped. But the volume at a radius of ~20,000km is HUGE and it won't add much to the background. Its unlikely to do much damage since they are designed to be rad hard for 20 odd years.
Now LEO based satellites are a different story.
Its like convincing people that counting in a casino is cheating. I really seems to work.
Well it is good enough for a lot of people. But streaming is a long way from True HD. Dam most is not even close to DVD quality. Some of us want DVD or better and would pay for it. If what we paid for worked.
I wired up my own. It cost about 20NZD at the time.
The last DVD i rented was Transformers 2. It played out of order on all 3 computers, and skipped about 5min at chapter boundaries on my DVD player. The store said it wasn't their problem.
As i said, it was the last DVD i rented.
What about Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds? And i would recommend they write something *for the silver screen* rather than try to adapt something.
Chenobyl was a stupid short cut before it was even built. Sure 3 mile island was a problem, but no reactor outside the former USSR deserves to be lumped as unsafe as the RBMK design at Chenobyl. If i didn't know better it was like the designer tried to make a reactor that would blow up and then deliberately left out any containment building.
Here is the real rub. There are 11 of these reactors still running.
It should also be noted that other Russian designs are more similar to western design and many many times safer.
and its half life is only 12 years, and its Hydrogen, so unless its already in the form of water its most likely to get very very thinly distributed in the atmosphere.
However a leak is a leak. Its the problem. No one wants to go without power so we don't shut down old reactors. Every scared of radiation, so no new plants are built.
If we could replace the old nuclear power stations, nuclear would be a lot safer.
The difference in coding for RED camera work flows etc is massive as you well know. If it takes a year or two to get a iMovie clone that runs on Linux, how long would it take to get a full Final Cut clone done? It would be an expensive and very long project without financial backing.
I can't either. However bit torrent seems to work just fine, so i have heard.
It still wouldn't work. How much torrents are telesyncs, or from other sources that automatically bypass anything on BluRay or DVD. BlueRay rips are available almost same day as release anyway regardless of being better protected than CSS.
They're saying it doesn't work for the vast majority of people attempting to earn a living through their art.
How the hell is that Bono, Sonys or anyone else's problem?
If want be famous and rich as a $OCCUPATION, and thats my problem. Not anyone else's. Even if i just want to make a living as $OCCUPATION thats my problem, not yours and not Bono's and not some rich guy who got lucky.
The Russians did back in the 60s. Thats where the idea came from. The "virtual" cathode/anode idea was studied quite a bit by them and Buzzard references them in one of his few and quite poor papers.
Even wikipedia can help you with the "why it won't work" (under the fusion energy IIRC).
Electrons in a plasma emit massive amounts of x rays (Bremsstrahlung radiation). The amount depends on the charge of the ions, so with Boron fusion the x rays is 5 times higher than with DT or DD fuels. It also needs to be hotter since the protons need to overcome a higher potential in order to hit a B atom. This mean that no matter how hot the plasma is the fusion energy will *always* be less than the xray energy and the plasma will cool very rapidly or rather never get hot enough for fusion.
Now in a polywell or a fusor, they work by accelerating ions to high energy. ie a hot thing. Electrons are in the background plasma or directly injected (some Russians experiments did this) and are at low energy. The cold thing. They occupy the same space and ions/electrons can and *do* collide. A hot and cold thing in contact. Now if the probability of fusion is higher than the probability of colliding with an electron, you get some fusion before they loose all their energy to the electrons->xrays. But its not. You are about a million times more likely to hit an electron than to fuse.
We have a huge amount of experimental evidence and observations that back this up too. If something like this would work, we would have seen it work by now in some of the experiments back in the 60 and 70s. Asserting that everyone else is wrong without anything to back it up, and claiming that you can do H-B fusion when you can't even demonstrate a neutron yield at a fusor level, is a strong sign of heading towards crackpot territory. His scaling laws are literately pulled out of thin air. His talks further show how clearly he had no intention of dealing with the experimental and theoretical shortcomings of his claims.
This is widely accepted in the science community, with data to back it up. I find odd that something with speculative models and only long term predictions and almost no track record of validated models is held up as such a certainty (aka climate change) where something like this with *far far* more of consensus in the community and far more validated models and data and experiments, must surly be wrong. Faith will not make this work.
However don't read this as acceptance that tokamak is the only way to go. I think its one way, and currently has achieved the best confinement by a long shot. Other schemes should be perused, but lets make sure they at lest work in theory first. The Polywell does not.
American idol etc make huge amounts of money. Thats not broken. Thats good business. You may not like what comes out, but lots of people pay for it and watch it. Likewise with Hollywood. (avatar cost 232Million, box office 1Billon). This is not a broken business model. Its a bloody good one.
Many of these organization are just that. Some are founded by churches, but are clearly separated in that there only mandate is to "help". No strings about faith is *permitted*. If you think they are all 1850 missionaries today you have watched too much south park and not been involved (or even looked up) these organizations.
The last one I gave money (and time) too was a "teaching them to fish" type organization and external people were only there to "bootstrap" a education center, in that once locals were trained, it is run by locals (to preserve local culture etc). Local governments also supported the program.
I have read it (not wiki, but the real papers). I did do quite a bit of plasma and nuclear physics you know. Buzzard pushed his idea when he had only detected a few neutrons and then claimed it was the best anyone ever done (it was not by a long shot). If you want a dark horse fusion idea that can actually work, this is your best bet.
For some reason everyone thinks the science is rock solid when it comes to Climate studies. But when it comes to the next crackpot with the *same* fusion idea that been tried many many times before, a 100 years of experimental data and very very good theoretical understanding is now all wrong. We are talking about the 2nd law of thermodynamics here, entropy is increasing. A hot thing that is in contact with a cold thing will lose heat to the cold thing. At the very least the people in question should be able to say why it will be different this time round. But they don't, instead they make crazy claims like that they can do boron fusion even though its 1000x harder and lower power density and despite the fact they *can't* break even with DD or even DT.
..4 weeks of vacation?
Did they doc 2 weeks off our vacations? I currently get 5 weeks per year.
For the pollywell to work it need to keep electrons and ions away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Yet the ion-election interaction probability is orders of magnitude higher than fusion. So without black magic it will use more energy that it produces. It does not matter how they are confined.
Thermonuclear fusion has failed to produce a working reactor. But confinement has been improved over a million fold. If we do that for the next 20 years, we will have DD fusion reactors, let along DT reactors.
I think we should peruse both options. Conventional should be focused on energy production and waste management today. I personally think molten salt reactors offer potential well beyond solid fuel based reactors.
How much wind and solar do you need to replace *current* nuclear power? A crap load that will sit around over half the time doing *nothing*.
Wind and solar have little chance doing much in 20 years time for the simple reason no one wants to pay that much for power (and we can't build that much stuff that quickly), and we are not investing in large energy storage that would also cost a fortune and again spend much of its time doing nothing. And they are not "free" in any sense and "socially desirable" really means build it somewhere else.
Nuclear is your only hope of replacing fossil fuels in the near future. Anything else is 20 years away. And what the hell is wrong with 20 years anyway, its not that long, aren't we suppose to be putting our short sightedness behind us?
There are no switches for the idiot to flip. The fuel is already *melted*. If you have a fusion reactor, why the hell would i want energy from fission at all?
Yes there could be a *fault*. But you can design it so that all physically possible faults result in no leaks to the outside world (as 3 mile island did). You can even design then so that all conceivable faults are easily dealt with after the fact and easy to clean up.
We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely.
Sounds nice on paper. The bottom line is that it doest work. We use too much power, with physics of scale, you can't compete with mass produced power. I will get my power cheaper than you by not doing that.
Next is the problem of generating power from what? Gas? Coal? Solar? wind? This won't work without some serious power storage and some serious over generation to "secure supply". Just ask some people who live far away from the grid.
Finally your facts about nuclear are not very accurate. Once through cycles that the US is obsessed with is not the norm and incredibly wasteful (seems to be the American way). The reactor stated here fixes many of these problems to very manageable levels. For example pressure water reactors get a burn up of fuel in the 20% range (Optimistically). Molten salt(with any fuel) gets 100%. Molten salt can even run on PWR waste nicely, and reduce the amount of long term waste by a factor of 10. Using Th is better since U233 tends to produce nicer waste, and will be reasonably safe in about 100 years, and there is much much less of it. There is more than enough U and Th to last 1000s years if we breed and reprocess.
In fact a 1GW power station could hold 100 years of waste in a reasonably small area that can be co located . After that the stuff that went in first can be taken out. This avoids transportation issues.
Finally there are many things that we deal with routinely that are just as bad in industry. DDTs don't ever become safe. Ever. Yes we should have a waste solution as part of moving back to nuclear, but its not the boogie man. And we should burn most of the waste we have rather than bury it. Finally we must realistically asses the costs (environmental and financial) of the different options. Even the most extreme greenies are are not using less energy and it needs to come from somewhere.
Oh an interesting side note. Molten salt reactors are easily scaled down and up. So small "community" based power stations are theoretically possible.
Load following is a feature of molten salt, which can be used with U as well. In fact the demonstration reactors did use U. Also they are not just load following , they can in theory load follow well enough for peak power.
The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell...
Only if you permit the laws of physics to be wrong and a number of experiments to also be wrong. ITER could work. But its not the best next step, and the multinational nature costs the project huge gobs of money with internal politics and the like.
Also most say that for next gen conventional nuclear we are looking at 10-20 years at least as well (for the experimental reactors).
Personally I think we should get started.
There is a lot more Th than that. Try more than >1000years, and we have a lot more U around than we thought when everyone was ranting about it only lasting 100 years as well. Providing we don't do something stupid with once through fuel cycles, nuclear could take us so far into the future its would be pointless even speculating what we would have avalible to us. Hell we probably have fusors and time traveling Delorians.
3) People have been constructing and selling apocalyptic vision ever since St. John wrote his version on the Isle of Patmos. May not want to hold your breath just yet.
Its been going on far longer than that. We (Humans) seem to love the idea that the end of all things will happen in our lifetime. I guess we don't like the idea of being just some insignificant speck of a soul, in some insignificant period of time.