I suspect they used PoE to provide 12.9 W to computers designed (or modded) for PoE power. SkinnyBytes has prebuilt Atom based laptops and desktops, but the library might have custom built ARM based systems.
They mention a one ton AC converter (and they had to remove walls to get it into place!), so it doesn't sound like they are using traditional PoE.
On my Atom based fileserver, with a variable speed power supply fan the only noise I could hear was the tiny fan that cools the chipset (the CPU is fanless but the chipset has its own dedicated fan). It got so annoying that I unplugged it and set up a quiet 80mm fan in the case to blow on the chipset heatsink.
There are plenty of silent PC options that don't require running special wiring just for DC power. In fact, some thin clients will power themselves over PoE (which I guess is technically a form of DC power). There's nothing magic about DC power that will make a PC silent.
Unless they are running all of the voltages required by a modern computer (12V, 5V, 3.3V, etc), then there are DC-DC converters in each computer doing the work that the power supply used to do, so it's unclear how this will dramatically reduce power usage over having an efficient fanless AC power supply.
I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?
Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that. On the other hand, you could have a flywheel or another type of battery bank (a very broad, shallow one, if you catch my drift - lots of cells) in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked. Sounds expensive to me, too. Flywheels are probably the logical choice. You bury them to prevent runaways in the case of failure. You float them on maglev bearings to make them efficient. The power company should be putting them underneath substations but there's room for them in a residential context as well. It's being done now but not enough IMO (and MO is worth every penny you've paid...)
Just because you *can* recharge the battery in 5 minutes doesn't mean you have to -- instead of charging a flywheel storage mechanism overnight you could just charge the car at whatever rate your household wiring can support.
Charging the 24KWh Nissan Leaf battery over 8 hours would take around 24 amps at 120V, which is easily achieved with a 30 amp residential circuit (though a 240VAC circuit would require smaller wires). Charging the same battery in 5 minutes would take 2400 amps which is not reasonable, not even with 240V 3 phase power which is typically the highest voltage you'll find in a residential house in the USA.
Leave the high speed charging to refueling stations - which could also mean mini charging stations in shopping malls and office parks since much of the danger and expense of gas stations is gone - no underground storage tanks, no gas spills, etc. Large office and shopping facilities already have large power feeds, so there's little incremental cost to adding a charging station.
But I'll tell you why I am not inclined towards E-books. I like to read in the tub.
But e-book readers are even better than paper books for reading in the tub.
I found that my kindle fits perfectly into a quart sized freezer baggy (which are a bit thicker than sandwich baggies), and I can still operate all of the controls. Perfect for reading in the tub, and unlike a paper book, there's no worries about the book getting soggy if you dip it into the water - you can dunk the entire baggy protected Kindle into the water and pick it up and continue reading.
The baggy also works well when you want to take it to the beach and protect it from sand... or when you're eating doritos and don't want it to get all cheesy.
And since I already had these baggies in the kitchen, total cost for this protection was a few cents.
California uses 257000 million kwh in a year or 257000 gwh
The Moura Photovoltaic Power Station ( an example of a large-scale plant) it generates 93 GWh per year in around 1 square mile of land. So to generate all of California's power would take 2700 square miles of desert, or 10% of the Mojave desert. And of course, this ignores the extra land that would have to be devoted to energy storage mechanisms to provide nighttime power. And ignores the need for excess capacity to account for cloudy/rainy days (even a desert gets rain - the Mojave desert receives around 5 inches of rain/year)
And this is for just one state (albeit a large one)
it seems much less destructive to build 15 modern 2 GW nuclear plants, consuming around one hundredth of the amount of land.
I'm having trouble finding any details on what makes this TWR reactor safe. They mention that it uses passive liquid metal cooling to ensure safety, but even passive cooling has potential failure modes. They state that relying on the laws of physics makes for a reliable reactor, but the laws of physics that govern diesel generators are well studied, yet they still failed at Fukushima.
From reading about other liquid metal designs, it sounds like natural convection alone is enough to keep the coolant flowing, but what happens if the earthquake or some manufacturing flaw causes a leak in the coolant pipes and the liquid coolant ends up on the floor of the reactor?
The PBR is supposed to be self regulating -- higher temperatures reduce the rate of the reaction, so even a total loss of coolant means that the fuel heats up to some steady state temperature and will stay there forever. What happens to a TWR if the coolant flow stops for any reason?
Of the following iconic tech companies, how many come from India? Apple, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Dell, HP, and I could go on. Other than staffing companies, what great tech companies were formed in India?
3 of Google's 9 Board of Directors were foreign-born. 50% of Google's 2 founders were foreign born.
Care to count the number of Nobel prizes that have come from the USA, as opposed to India? As I understand it, there are high schools in the USA that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India. Certainly there are several US colleges that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India.
The Nobel prize (since there are so few of them) seems like a bad way to judge a population's level of education. But if you look at Nobel prize per capita, the USA ranks #11:
If you compare the E.U. as a whole against the USA (which is closer in size and geographical area than one paticular european country), then Europe still outshines the USA in nobel prizes.
How many ground breaking tech breakthroughs have come from India in the last 200 years? Computers? Radio? TV? Radar? Nuclear power? Heavier than air flight? Light bulbs? Movies? Phonograph? Anything?
India is just now in the process of transforming itself from a 3rd world (2nd world?) nation into a first world nation, it's per capita GDP is just about 7% of the USA's. Most of the inventions you mention were invented more than 100 years ago and many were invented outside of the USA or by foreign immigrants:
Computer - 1830's - Charles Babbage ( England) Radio - late 1800's - various - Marconi, Tesla, Hertz, Edison among others TV - 1920's - Farnsworth - (American) Radar - 1930's - Sir Robert Watson-Watt ( England) Nuclear Power - 1938 - Otto Hahn (Germany) Flight - 1903 - Wrights (American) or Alberto Santos-Dumont (Brazillian (in Paris)) Light Bulb - 1806 - Humphrey Davy (England)
Ok, I'm tired of researching - but you get the picture - Americans didn't even invent much of the technology attributed to them.
So where is the evidence that Indians are all the "best and brightest" and Americans are all stupid? Do you realise about 50% of Indians are illiterate, and that India has the worst slums in the world? And yet we need Indians because they are great tech geniuses and entrepreneurs.
Don't just look at the India of today, look at the India of 20, 30, 50 years from now. That's what America is competing with.
Are these the same "brilliant" Japanese students who built a nuke plant that is melting down and are too fucking proud to accept outside help?
It's a little early to declare Fukishima as an engineering disaster - the plant survived the shaking from a 9.0 quake when it was designed to withstand a 7.9 quake. I haven't seen any reference to what size Tsunami it was designed to withstand. It will be interesting to find out what the tsunami spec was (if any) and how both the earthquake and tsunami specs were determined.
Engineers don't control funding - engineers are happy to design to any safety spec, but more safety comes at a cost, and neither government nor industry have unlimited funds. If society demanded absolute safety, cars would look like tanks, be restricted to 5mph, and would have built-in life support to keep occupants alive just in case the car drives into a lake. Oh, and would cost $200,000, but might save 40,000 lives/year.
You don't need to look overseas to see nuclear dangers - California has 2 coastal plans designed to withstand a 7.0 and 7.5 quake, and a 7.5 or greater quake is very likely to strike in the next 30 years. Oh, and in one of the plants the seismic supports were installed backwards, and in the other plant one of the reactor vessels were installed backwards -- and those *are* engineering mistakes.
The difference is that a scientist or engineer may take years to make money for the company, but by playing accounting shell games "Hey, if we lay of 50% of our product development staff, we can save millions, then next year we can just acquire a company for mere billions to make up for the fact that we have no product to sell", an MBA can provide instant results -- and that's all the stockholders care about. Day traders, high speed traders, all they care about is very short-term price fluctuations, they don't care if you gut your company and get rid of the people that made the company great in the first place as long as you're on track to meet next quarter's analyst estimates.
'Despite widely publicized claims that foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation, Matloff called that argument merely "a good sound byte for lobbyists'
I hate to say this, but it's true -- sure, there are a few scholastic stars that come out of the USA education system, but the majority of students aren't being pushed (or pushing) themselves to excel. In fact, many do a little as possible to just barely cruise through high school, those that apply themselves and work hard are often teased and goaded for working hard -- and I'm not just talking about the traditional geeks, but that guy on the track team is also called out for sutyding too hard and missing out on the after-school party with the boys.
There's no stigma to not doing well in high school -- or even dropping out. Parents hold much of this responsibility - sure, public schools are lacking, but the drive to succeed in school comes from home. Many parents can't even be bothered to see that their elementary school students complete required homework - and they'll make excuses for it "Oh, that takes too much time, Sally needs time to play" -- for an hour long assignment that was assigned a week ago. Of course, when a parent doesn't have a high school education it's hard for him/her to see the value of a good education, and harder still to help instill good study habits when they don't know what a good study habit is.
In contrast, school in Japan (to use one example) is highly competitive - students know that if they don't do well in high school they aren't going to get into their college of choice (which means a high paying job), and may not even get into a college at all are are relegated to trade school. This pressure starts early in their school life - by 7th or 8th grade a student better be on a college track or he/she is not going to make it. The school hours are long, with Saturday schooldays not being unheard of. Parents in turn push their children to do well in school.
I'm not saying that the Japanese culture is better, but I am saying that it produces better students. If a culture pushes 80% of its kids to excel at school, they are going to produce many more scientists and engineers than one that pushes 10% of its kids to excel, even if it only has 1/3 the population. And that's just one country -- if the USA is importing some of the best and brightest students in the world, then those imports are going to make up a significant portion of USA talent.
* Konqueror/KDE in any version[20]
* Internet Explorer (any version) on Windows XP
* Safari on Windows XP
* wget[21]
* BlackBerry Browser
* Windows Mobile up to 6.5[22]
* Android default browser[23] (Targeted for Honeycomb but wont't be fixed until next version for phone users as Honeycomb will be reserved to tablets only)
* Oracle Java JSSE (As of 2011[update])
Server side
* Microsoft Internet Information Server IIS (As of 2009[update]).
* Apache Tomcat (As of 2011[update])
* IBM HTTP Server [24]
You don't need a separate IP for each domain. The apache web server can have multiple sites on one IP, each with a different SSL certificate. It just decides which site and certificate to use based on the site name in the http request.
How is that possible since the Host: header is hidden in the SSL stream and the web server can't accept and decrypt the SSL request until it has the right certificate.
This sounds like last summer's offshore oil well leak all over again.
Which also turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, like this whole episode will.
I think thats more indicative of the short attention span of news media - once the disaster passes, they lose interest and move on to the next sensational headline, with only minor followup on the previous disaster.
There are still serious effects from the gulf spill but since the oil isn't washing up on beaches anymore it doesn't make for interesting news footage.
Again, having mentioned it already once in this thread - are you old enough to remember Three Mile Island? It's hard to cover this sort of thing up - we were treated to endless talking head segments on every news program during that failure.
Right and we had the same talking head phenomena with this incident, but I don't remember the government releasing unedited surveillance camera feeds, which is what the drone footage amounts to.
The point would be for the exact level of damage to the spent fuel pools to be revealed, which would confirm the level of concern that should be given contamination fears.
But the way to do that is to have the footage review by recognized experts in the field (preferably from a number of different countries).
If they release the footage to the public then every news network will have their own nuclear "expert" pointing at a discarded firehose and claiming it's an exposed fuel rod.
Reactive power isn't imaginary, except in its mathematical representation. It is really due to the charging and discharging of lines and other reactances.
Maybe one in a hundred Slashdot readers would have understood the parent poster's comment... you understood what he was saying yet still didn't realize that he was being facetious.
You realize, of course, that engineers don't make funding decisions?
Yes, but they do have the ability to influence them. Also being able to incite public outrage by disclosing nuclear safety risks gives them a lot of leverage.
I think you overestimate the influence of engineers, I mean look at the GE employees back in the 70's that argued that this reactor design was dangerous and could suffer from a containment explosion and breach:
They quit their jobs and their concerns were dismissed and the reactor went on to be sold. And so far, 40 years later, the failure mode they warned about hasn't happened (not even at Fukushima).
And that's the problem with arguing against rare events or complicated failure modes - it's hard to say that they will definitely happen. When an engineer starts waving his arms and says "Hey! Wait, when the thingamagig rubs against the widget for 20 years and someone presses the big red button, bad things will happen", there's plenty of wiggle room for the powers-that-be to explain it away as an extremely rare set of conditions that won't happen. And most of the time they are right. Rare failure modes are just that... rare.
LIkewise, when an engineer says "Hey, for only $25M you can install another set of generators up the hill to protect against a Tsunami that scientists say is unlikely", people nod their heads and say "Yeah, that's a good idea"...until it comes down to funding it.
I would have thought the absolutely economic necessity of an uninterrupted power supply would also be a good inducement to spending money. Particularly when a stagnating economy would benefit greatly from a large public infrastructure program.
But they had batteries, and redundant generators (6 of them?), as well as being tied to the grid. Apparently the design spec for the facility didn't count on such a large Tsunami washing over it. Or maybe it did - I haven't seen any definitive details on why the generators failed. Maybe they were in watertight containment structures and some automatic safety control opened the air intakes and tried to start them while the air intakes were still under water? If that did happen, then that *is* an engineering failure, though maybe outside of the engineer's control if someone said "To prevent a runaway reactor in the event that the plant is abandoned, the generators *must* be started after 15 minutes on battery power regardless of what the water sensors say". I really don't know what happened...do you?
Yes it will be interesting to see just how epicly they failed here. Pumping water is such a trivial task and in this case so vitally important that I'm absolutely astounded it is a problem in 2011.
Yes, but you still don't know the root cause of the problem. Is it really an engineering failure if back when the reactor was designed, scientists said that a Tsunami of the magnitude that occured was a 1,000 year event and could be discounted over the projected lifetime of the facility? Engineers don't often have the luxury of overdesigning - they design to spec (which includes a safety factor).
Designing some generators to withstand a tsunami is not an engineering challenge. For one thing you can simply place them 30m or so above sea level with a risk factor of 0.
But what do you do when you have a 31m Tsunami? After all, Sendai was hit by 30m waves...Alaska was once hit by a 500m Tsunami. And why would you even put 100 tons of generators on top of a tower when you can bury them in watertight enclosures?
Not having readily available alternatives is an engineering failure. This situation is disgraceful and and frankly I've been quite disturbed on how the nuclear industry has responded to these problems, downplaying th
This wouldn't solve the problem mentioned in the article however. Again having a national power grid is an obvious solution. It's a tiny country FFS, this stuff is really basic. My opinion of Japanese engineers has lowered significantly after this debarcle.
But they do have a single national power grid. It just turns out that they have two major sections with limited capacity between them -- just like how the USA is broken into 3 major grids with limited capacity between them:
It's not a huge engineering feat to add more capacity between grids - high capacity DC lines are quite common in the world, and with a DC line it doesn't matter what frequency is on the other end.
Of course, having a well connected grid doesn't ensure that unusual conditions can't trigger power problems:
My opinion of Japanese engineers has lowered significantly after this debacle.
You realize, of course, that engineers don't make funding decisions? Moving the country to one frequency standard would be hugely expensive, but not a big engineering feat. Nor would increasing transmission capacity between grids.
If you want to be disappointed in engineering, then you need look no farther than the West Coast of the USA - at their two California coastal plants, one had seismic reinforcements installed backwards and one had an entire reactor vessel installed backwards. Those are mistakes that *can* be blamed on engineers - either in design, drawings, or the on-site engineers that oversaw the projects. The engineers of Fukushima designed a nuclear power plant 40 years ago that largely stayed intact after an earthquake 30 times larger than it was designed to withstand - if the generators hadn't failed, then it's likely that there would have been no problems.
It remains to be seen why the generators failed - whether due to a tsunami greater than the reactor complex was designed for, a design failure, or some hardware or system failure.
But a russian reactor designed in the 1960's (?) is not really a portable solution that could be used in the modern world - even the Russians stopped using them after Chernobyl. No one is doubting that you *can* design a small portable reactor (especially if you don't have many safety constraints), it's just that none have been commercially produced so at this point they are all vaporware.
Some satellites have small nuclear reactors in them. These have been around since at least the 60s. Hardly what I would call imaginary.
I was talking about the original poster's 25MW truck portable reactors as being imaginary, I'm not sure why you are talking about a 1KW RTG - do you think installing a million of these is a good replacement for a single nuclear reactor? Is there any reason to believe that they can be adequately scaled to provide Gigawatt scale power?
Certification is only needed if they wish to deploy these reactors, they have already been developed.
So they've designed the ideal small, portable reactor that will solve the world's energy problems, the only stumbling block is that they are not allowed to sell it and they may not have even have created a prototype, but it looks great on paper.
That's the part that makes them imaginary -- they haven't been certified yet and no one yet knows that the reactor they describe will be certified. Who knows what changes the NRC might require before certification. Maybe this $50M truck transportable reactor will turn into a $150M reactor that has to be built and fueled on-site.
I think he was talking about real reactors, not imaginary ones....from the article you linked to:
So far, no manufacturer has sought certification for any small reactor, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Formal approvals would likely take three to five years, the same as for bigger reactors, says Scott Burnell, a commission spokesman.
It took most of a week to get new backup generators to those power plants. Shouldn't the Navy have some portable power plants, to help with disaster response? I suppose these shouldn't all be attached to the large ships, as they wouldn't want to tie up the Ronald Reagan next to the leaking nuclear power plant...
You can buy or rent 10 - 15MW containerized and trailerable portable gas turbine power plants. Several MW sized diesel gensets are quite common. All you gotta do is find a way to deliver them and a way to keep them fueled. Not a problem in a disaster zone where they are having trouble delivering basic necessities like food, right?
I mean, what's the problem with just airdropping a generator next to a nuclear plant emitting dangerous levels of radiation and plugging it in to the "emergency power" socket? Surely it's not any harder than plugging my refrigerator into my 1000W Honda generator. 1 KW @ 120VAC, 1MW at 5000VAC, it's all the same, right?
OTOH, I'm pretty sure that 300 MWp is plenty to power a few hospitals, food distribution areas, and some command/coordination centers. Probably have enough power left over to maybe keep some radios, and perhaps a light bulb or two going so that folks in shelters can get some light and news.
And how to do you plan on getting power to these hospitals, food distribution areas and some command/coordination centers from your carrier mounted generators without plugging into the same grid that powers everything else? Some of these are located kilometers away from the shoreline.
You don't just lay a 25KV transmission line on the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect they used PoE to provide 12.9 W to computers designed (or modded) for PoE power. SkinnyBytes has prebuilt Atom based laptops and desktops, but the library might have custom built ARM based systems.
They mention a one ton AC converter (and they had to remove walls to get it into place!), so it doesn't sound like they are using traditional PoE.
On my Atom based fileserver, with a variable speed power supply fan the only noise I could hear was the tiny fan that cools the chipset (the CPU is fanless but the chipset has its own dedicated fan). It got so annoying that I unplugged it and set up a quiet 80mm fan in the case to blow on the chipset heatsink.
There are plenty of silent PC options that don't require running special wiring just for DC power. In fact, some thin clients will power themselves over PoE (which I guess is technically a form of DC power). There's nothing magic about DC power that will make a PC silent.
Unless they are running all of the voltages required by a modern computer (12V, 5V, 3.3V, etc), then there are DC-DC converters in each computer doing the work that the power supply used to do, so it's unclear how this will dramatically reduce power usage over having an efficient fanless AC power supply.
I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?
Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that. On the other hand, you could have a flywheel or another type of battery bank (a very broad, shallow one, if you catch my drift - lots of cells) in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked. Sounds expensive to me, too. Flywheels are probably the logical choice. You bury them to prevent runaways in the case of failure. You float them on maglev bearings to make them efficient. The power company should be putting them underneath substations but there's room for them in a residential context as well. It's being done now but not enough IMO (and MO is worth every penny you've paid...)
Just because you *can* recharge the battery in 5 minutes doesn't mean you have to -- instead of charging a flywheel storage mechanism overnight you could just charge the car at whatever rate your household wiring can support.
Charging the 24KWh Nissan Leaf battery over 8 hours would take around 24 amps at 120V, which is easily achieved with a 30 amp residential circuit (though a 240VAC circuit would require smaller wires). Charging the same battery in 5 minutes would take 2400 amps which is not reasonable, not even with 240V 3 phase power which is typically the highest voltage you'll find in a residential house in the USA.
Leave the high speed charging to refueling stations - which could also mean mini charging stations in shopping malls and office parks since much of the danger and expense of gas stations is gone - no underground storage tanks, no gas spills, etc. Large office and shopping facilities already have large power feeds, so there's little incremental cost to adding a charging station.
But I'll tell you why I am not inclined towards E-books. I like to read in the tub.
But e-book readers are even better than paper books for reading in the tub.
I found that my kindle fits perfectly into a quart sized freezer baggy (which are a bit thicker than sandwich baggies), and I can still operate all of the controls. Perfect for reading in the tub, and unlike a paper book, there's no worries about the book getting soggy if you dip it into the water - you can dunk the entire baggy protected Kindle into the water and pick it up and continue reading.
The baggy also works well when you want to take it to the beach and protect it from sand... or when you're eating doritos and don't want it to get all cheesy.
And since I already had these baggies in the kitchen, total cost for this protection was a few cents.
It's a bit more than "some" desert.
California uses 257000 million kwh in a year or 257000 gwh
The Moura Photovoltaic Power Station ( an example of a large-scale plant) it generates 93 GWh per year in around 1 square mile of land. So to generate all of California's power would take 2700 square miles of desert, or 10% of the Mojave desert. And of course, this ignores the extra land that would have to be devoted to energy storage mechanisms to provide nighttime power. And ignores the need for excess capacity to account for cloudy/rainy days (even a desert gets rain - the Mojave desert receives around 5 inches of rain/year)
And this is for just one state (albeit a large one)
it seems much less destructive to build 15 modern 2 GW nuclear plants, consuming around one hundredth of the amount of land.
I'm having trouble finding any details on what makes this TWR reactor safe. They mention that it uses passive liquid metal cooling to ensure safety, but even passive cooling has potential failure modes. They state that relying on the laws of physics makes for a reliable reactor, but the laws of physics that govern diesel generators are well studied, yet they still failed at Fukushima.
From reading about other liquid metal designs, it sounds like natural convection alone is enough to keep the coolant flowing, but what happens if the earthquake or some manufacturing flaw causes a leak in the coolant pipes and the liquid coolant ends up on the floor of the reactor?
The PBR is supposed to be self regulating -- higher temperatures reduce the rate of the reaction, so even a total loss of coolant means that the fuel heats up to some steady state temperature and will stay there forever. What happens to a TWR if the coolant flow stops for any reason?
"The data show that for every H-1B position requested, U.S. technology
companies increase their employment by 5 workers."
Or maybe companies that are facing high-growth hire more workers, including H-1B's
Of the following iconic tech companies, how many come from India? Apple, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Dell, HP, and I could go on. Other than staffing companies, what great tech companies were formed in India?
3 of Google's 9 Board of Directors were foreign-born. 50% of Google's 2 founders were foreign born.
Care to count the number of Nobel prizes that have come from the USA, as opposed to India? As I understand it, there are high schools in the USA that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India. Certainly there are several US colleges that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India.
The Nobel prize (since there are so few of them) seems like a bad way to judge a population's level of education. But if you look at Nobel prize per capita, the USA ranks #11:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau_percap-nobel-prize-laureates-per-capita
If you compare the E.U. as a whole against the USA (which is closer in size and geographical area than one paticular european country), then Europe still outshines the USA in nobel prizes.
How many ground breaking tech breakthroughs have come from India in the last 200 years? Computers? Radio? TV? Radar? Nuclear power? Heavier than air flight? Light bulbs? Movies? Phonograph? Anything?
India is just now in the process of transforming itself from a 3rd world (2nd world?) nation into a first world nation, it's per capita GDP is just about 7% of the USA's. Most of the inventions you mention were invented more than 100 years ago and many were invented outside of the USA or by foreign immigrants:
Computer - 1830's - Charles Babbage ( England)
Radio - late 1800's - various - Marconi, Tesla, Hertz, Edison among others
TV - 1920's - Farnsworth - (American)
Radar - 1930's - Sir Robert Watson-Watt ( England)
Nuclear Power - 1938 - Otto Hahn (Germany)
Flight - 1903 - Wrights (American) or Alberto Santos-Dumont (Brazillian (in Paris))
Light Bulb - 1806 - Humphrey Davy (England)
Ok, I'm tired of researching - but you get the picture - Americans didn't even invent much of the technology attributed to them.
So where is the evidence that Indians are all the "best and brightest" and Americans are all stupid? Do you realise about 50% of Indians are illiterate, and that India has the worst slums in the world? And yet we need Indians because they are great tech geniuses and entrepreneurs.
Don't just look at the India of today, look at the India of 20, 30, 50 years from now. That's what America is competing with.
Are these the same "brilliant" Japanese students who built a nuke plant that is melting down and are too fucking proud to accept outside help?
It's a little early to declare Fukishima as an engineering disaster - the plant survived the shaking from a 9.0 quake when it was designed to withstand a 7.9 quake. I haven't seen any reference to what size Tsunami it was designed to withstand. It will be interesting to find out what the tsunami spec was (if any) and how both the earthquake and tsunami specs were determined.
Engineers don't control funding - engineers are happy to design to any safety spec, but more safety comes at a cost, and neither government nor industry have unlimited funds. If society demanded absolute safety, cars would look like tanks, be restricted to 5mph, and would have built-in life support to keep occupants alive just in case the car drives into a lake. Oh, and would cost $200,000, but might save 40,000 lives/year.
You don't need to look overseas to see nuclear dangers - California has 2 coastal plans designed to withstand a 7.0 and 7.5 quake, and a 7.5 or greater quake is very likely to strike in the next 30 years. Oh, and in one of the plants the seismic supports were installed backwards, and in the other plant one of the reactor vessels were installed backwards -- and those *are* engineering mistakes.
The difference is that a scientist or engineer may take years to make money for the company, but by playing accounting shell games "Hey, if we lay of 50% of our product development staff, we can save millions, then next year we can just acquire a company for mere billions to make up for the fact that we have no product to sell", an MBA can provide instant results -- and that's all the stockholders care about. Day traders, high speed traders, all they care about is very short-term price fluctuations, they don't care if you gut your company and get rid of the people that made the company great in the first place as long as you're on track to meet next quarter's analyst estimates.
'Despite widely publicized claims that foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation, Matloff called that argument merely "a good sound byte for lobbyists'
I hate to say this, but it's true -- sure, there are a few scholastic stars that come out of the USA education system, but the majority of students aren't being pushed (or pushing) themselves to excel. In fact, many do a little as possible to just barely cruise through high school, those that apply themselves and work hard are often teased and goaded for working hard -- and I'm not just talking about the traditional geeks, but that guy on the track team is also called out for sutyding too hard and missing out on the after-school party with the boys.
There's no stigma to not doing well in high school -- or even dropping out. Parents hold much of this responsibility - sure, public schools are lacking, but the drive to succeed in school comes from home. Many parents can't even be bothered to see that their elementary school students complete required homework - and they'll make excuses for it "Oh, that takes too much time, Sally needs time to play" -- for an hour long assignment that was assigned a week ago. Of course, when a parent doesn't have a high school education it's hard for him/her to see the value of a good education, and harder still to help instill good study habits when they don't know what a good study habit is.
In contrast, school in Japan (to use one example) is highly competitive - students know that if they don't do well in high school they aren't going to get into their college of choice (which means a high paying job), and may not even get into a college at all are are relegated to trade school. This pressure starts early in their school life - by 7th or 8th grade a student better be on a college track or he/she is not going to make it. The school hours are long, with Saturday schooldays not being unheard of. Parents in turn push their children to do well in school.
I'm not saying that the Japanese culture is better, but I am saying that it produces better students. If a culture pushes 80% of its kids to excel at school, they are going to produce many more scientists and engineers than one that pushes 10% of its kids to excel, even if it only has 1/3 the population. And that's just one country -- if the USA is importing some of the best and brightest students in the world, then those imports are going to make up a significant portion of USA talent.
Wow, I had no idea that existed -- too bad there are so many clients and servers that don't yet support it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#No_support
The following combinations do not support SNI:
Client side
* Konqueror/KDE in any version[20]
* Internet Explorer (any version) on Windows XP
* Safari on Windows XP
* wget[21]
* BlackBerry Browser
* Windows Mobile up to 6.5[22]
* Android default browser[23] (Targeted for Honeycomb but wont't be fixed until next version for phone users as Honeycomb will be reserved to tablets only)
* Oracle Java JSSE (As of 2011[update])
Server side
* Microsoft Internet Information Server IIS (As of 2009[update]).
* Apache Tomcat (As of 2011[update])
* IBM HTTP Server [24]
You don't need a separate IP for each domain. The apache web server can have multiple sites on one IP, each with a different SSL certificate. It just decides which site and certificate to use based on the site name in the http request.
How is that possible since the Host: header is hidden in the SSL stream and the web server can't accept and decrypt the SSL request until it has the right certificate.
Which also turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, like this whole episode will.
I think thats more indicative of the short attention span of news media - once the disaster passes, they lose interest and move on to the next sensational headline, with only minor followup on the previous disaster.
There are still serious effects from the gulf spill but since the oil isn't washing up on beaches anymore it doesn't make for interesting news footage.
Again, having mentioned it already once in this thread - are you old enough to remember Three Mile Island? It's hard to cover this sort of thing up - we were treated to endless talking head segments on every news program during that failure.
Right and we had the same talking head phenomena with this incident, but I don't remember the government releasing unedited surveillance camera feeds, which is what the drone footage amounts to.
The point would be for the exact level of damage to the spent fuel pools to be revealed, which would confirm the level of concern that should be given contamination fears.
But the way to do that is to have the footage review by recognized experts in the field (preferably from a number of different countries).
If they release the footage to the public then every news network will have their own nuclear "expert" pointing at a discarded firehose and claiming it's an exposed fuel rod.
Reactive power isn't imaginary, except in its mathematical representation. It is really due to the charging and discharging of lines and other reactances.
Maybe one in a hundred Slashdot readers would have understood the parent poster's comment... you understood what he was saying yet still didn't realize that he was being facetious.
You realize, of course, that engineers don't make funding decisions?
Yes, but they do have the ability to influence them. Also being able to incite public outrage by disclosing nuclear safety risks gives them a lot of leverage.
I think you overestimate the influence of engineers, I mean look at the GE employees back in the 70's that argued that this reactor design was dangerous and could suffer from a containment explosion and breach:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20110318/wl_csm/370818_1
They quit their jobs and their concerns were dismissed and the reactor went on to be sold. And so far, 40 years later, the failure mode they warned about hasn't happened (not even at Fukushima).
And that's the problem with arguing against rare events or complicated failure modes - it's hard to say that they will definitely happen. When an engineer starts waving his arms and says "Hey! Wait, when the thingamagig rubs against the widget for 20 years and someone presses the big red button, bad things will happen", there's plenty of wiggle room for the powers-that-be to explain it away as an extremely rare set of conditions that won't happen. And most of the time they are right. Rare failure modes are just that... rare.
LIkewise, when an engineer says "Hey, for only $25M you can install another set of generators up the hill to protect against a Tsunami that scientists say is unlikely", people nod their heads and say "Yeah, that's a good idea"...until it comes down to funding it.
I would have thought the absolutely economic necessity of an uninterrupted power supply would also be a good inducement to spending money. Particularly when a stagnating economy would benefit greatly from a large public infrastructure program.
But they had batteries, and redundant generators (6 of them?), as well as being tied to the grid. Apparently the design spec for the facility didn't count on such a large Tsunami washing over it. Or maybe it did - I haven't seen any definitive details on why the generators failed. Maybe they were in watertight containment structures and some automatic safety control opened the air intakes and tried to start them while the air intakes were still under water? If that did happen, then that *is* an engineering failure, though maybe outside of the engineer's control if someone said "To prevent a runaway reactor in the event that the plant is abandoned, the generators *must* be started after 15 minutes on battery power regardless of what the water sensors say". I really don't know what happened...do you?
Yes it will be interesting to see just how epicly they failed here. Pumping water is such a trivial task and in this case so vitally important that I'm absolutely astounded it is a problem in 2011.
Yes, but you still don't know the root cause of the problem. Is it really an engineering failure if back when the reactor was designed, scientists said that a Tsunami of the magnitude that occured was a 1,000 year event and could be discounted over the projected lifetime of the facility? Engineers don't often have the luxury of overdesigning - they design to spec (which includes a safety factor).
Designing some generators to withstand a tsunami is not an engineering challenge. For one thing you can simply place them 30m or so above sea level with a risk factor of 0.
But what do you do when you have a 31m Tsunami? After all, Sendai was hit by 30m waves...Alaska was once hit by a 500m Tsunami. And why would you even put 100 tons of generators on top of a tower when you can bury them in watertight enclosures?
Not having readily available alternatives is an engineering failure. This situation is disgraceful and and frankly I've been quite disturbed on how the nuclear industry has responded to these problems, downplaying th
This wouldn't solve the problem mentioned in the article however. Again having a national power grid is an obvious solution. It's a tiny country FFS, this stuff is really basic. My opinion of Japanese engineers has lowered significantly after this debarcle.
But they do have a single national power grid. It just turns out that they have two major sections with limited capacity between them -- just like how the USA is broken into 3 major grids with limited capacity between them:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398
It's not a huge engineering feat to add more capacity between grids - high capacity DC lines are quite common in the world, and with a DC line it doesn't matter what frequency is on the other end.
Of course, having a well connected grid doesn't ensure that unusual conditions can't trigger power problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003
My opinion of Japanese engineers has lowered significantly after this debacle.
You realize, of course, that engineers don't make funding decisions? Moving the country to one frequency standard would be hugely expensive, but not a big engineering feat. Nor would increasing transmission capacity between grids.
If you want to be disappointed in engineering, then you need look no farther than the West Coast of the USA - at their two California coastal plants, one had seismic reinforcements installed backwards and one had an entire reactor vessel installed backwards. Those are mistakes that *can* be blamed on engineers - either in design, drawings, or the on-site engineers that oversaw the projects. The engineers of Fukushima designed a nuclear power plant 40 years ago that largely stayed intact after an earthquake 30 times larger than it was designed to withstand - if the generators hadn't failed, then it's likely that there would have been no problems.
It remains to be seen why the generators failed - whether due to a tsunami greater than the reactor complex was designed for, a design failure, or some hardware or system failure.
But a russian reactor designed in the 1960's (?) is not really a portable solution that could be used in the modern world - even the Russians stopped using them after Chernobyl. No one is doubting that you *can* design a small portable reactor (especially if you don't have many safety constraints), it's just that none have been commercially produced so at this point they are all vaporware.
Some satellites have small nuclear reactors in them. These have been around since at least the 60s. Hardly what I would call imaginary.
I was talking about the original poster's 25MW truck portable reactors as being imaginary, I'm not sure why you are talking about a 1KW RTG - do you think installing a million of these is a good replacement for a single nuclear reactor? Is there any reason to believe that they can be adequately scaled to provide Gigawatt scale power?
Certification is only needed if they wish to deploy these reactors, they have already been developed.
So they've designed the ideal small, portable reactor that will solve the world's energy problems, the only stumbling block is that they are not allowed to sell it and they may not have even have created a prototype, but it looks great on paper.
That's the part that makes them imaginary -- they haven't been certified yet and no one yet knows that the reactor they describe will be certified. Who knows what changes the NRC might require before certification. Maybe this $50M truck transportable reactor will turn into a $150M reactor that has to be built and fueled on-site.
The most compact nuclear power plants around (naval units used in submarines) weigh about 1000 tons.
Wrong, these are much smaller.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_22/b4180020375312.htm
I think he was talking about real reactors, not imaginary ones....from the article you linked to:
So far, no manufacturer has sought certification for any small reactor, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Formal approvals would likely take three to five years, the same as for bigger reactors, says Scott Burnell, a commission spokesman.
It took most of a week to get new backup generators to those power plants. Shouldn't the Navy have some portable power plants, to help with disaster response? I suppose these shouldn't all be attached to the large ships, as they wouldn't want to tie up the Ronald Reagan next to the leaking nuclear power plant...
You can buy or rent 10 - 15MW containerized and trailerable portable gas turbine power plants. Several MW sized diesel gensets are quite common. All you gotta do is find a way to deliver them and a way to keep them fueled. Not a problem in a disaster zone where they are having trouble delivering basic necessities like food, right?
I mean, what's the problem with just airdropping a generator next to a nuclear plant emitting dangerous levels of radiation and plugging it in to the "emergency power" socket? Surely it's not any harder than plugging my refrigerator into my 1000W Honda generator. 1 KW @ 120VAC, 1MW at 5000VAC, it's all the same, right?
OTOH, I'm pretty sure that 300 MWp is plenty to power a few hospitals, food distribution areas, and some command/coordination centers. Probably have enough power left over to maybe keep some radios, and perhaps a light bulb or two going so that folks in shelters can get some light and news.
And how to do you plan on getting power to these hospitals, food distribution areas and some command/coordination centers from your carrier mounted generators without plugging into the same grid that powers everything else? Some of these are located kilometers away from the shoreline.
You don't just lay a 25KV transmission line on the ground.