Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The isotope responsible for almost all of the long term contamination is Cs-137, with a half life of about 30 years. So every century, the activity level drops by a factor of 10. IIRC, the most heavily contaminated area discovered (very close to the reactors) was giving a dose rate of 500 mSv/yr, so even that should be down to below background levels in 3 centuries, with most of the currently excluded area safe long before then.
Now, that's still a heck of a long time - but it's not the thousands of years you mention, and it means that large scale use of nuclear power for centuries will not result in ever-increasing amounts of land lost due to contamination from accidents.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
One way to look at it is that the fields corresponding to the various particles always exist and may therefore undergo interactions, even if they are in the "ground" state (no real particles) at any time. So you can regard the "internal state" as not of the particle but as of the field itself, and that can change between different excitation (number of particle) states just like an atom can undergo a transition between excited and ground state. E.g. the muon field, electron field, neutrino fields etc. can interact with each other via the weak interaction fields.
Or, to take a different approach, there is absolutely no requirement for the laws of nature to be intuitive, which is I suspect what you really mean by "make sense".
Whenever physicists say mass these days, it means "rest mass". Since relativistic mass is related to a particle's total energy by a factor of c^2, it's rather a redundant quantity and not useful to think about. Relativistic mass leads to confused ideas such as things getting heavier when they travel quickly, as though the object doing the travelling has somehow changed its properties.
It's far less confusing to think of only rest mass, momentum and energy.
Well, one way would be to make sure medicine was available to poor people, rather than just letting them die. Plenty of countries manage to treat asthmatics without overpriced OTC inhalers.
Also, suncream may not be cheap in many parts of the world. Ozone depletion doesn't just affect the country that caused it.
Yes, you're missing relativistic effects like the lack of absolute simultaneity etc. In special relativity, events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference may not be in a frame that is moving relative to it. In fact they can even happen in a different order - but only if the separation in distance between events is greater than the separation in time * c. So if you have a signal that can be produced by A that causes B, and that signal travels slower than c, A comes before B in all frames of reference. If it travels faster than c, there are some frames where B comes before A. So you could have situations where A causes B which prevents A...
From the estimates I saw for the UK FTTC/FTTP rollout, doing full FTTP everywhere was estimated at about five times as expensive as just running fibre to the street cabinets and using VDSL2 from there.
If I want three seperate places to sleep in my property then it makes very little difference how big the rooms are in a 2 bedroom property, I'm still missing a room.
Partition walls are not particularly difficult to install. Certainly not compared to the overall cost of the house. The one thing you can't get more of easily is total space, so that's a better primary measure of the value of a house.
Also, the state of home computing is much more advanced and it's virtually impossible to casually put together something that won't look pathetic compared to the commercial software already existing. That wasn't the case then - you saw a commercial game for the BBC and there was a very real feeling of "I could do that". Now, not really - doing something impressive by modern standards is virtually impossible for an individual at home.
Like what? Even fairly big things like modern games are only a few gigabytes, which doesn't take that long on a 10 Mbps connection. The vast majority of things you'd want to download are much smaller.
This may change in the future, but we were talking about right now.
You're talking about businesses, which is fair enough. A multi-national company will surely already have connection that's much faster than ADSL. The cost of running fibre to the premises is usually prohibitive for home use in most places, except for new housing developments. But it's not usually out of the reach of a major business with a need for it.
And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections.
That's debatable. 10 Mbps is plenty for current home uses, including streaming video, unless perhaps you have a lot of people sharing the connection or really feel the need for full HD streaming from the internet - and I suspect most people don't.
Thorium has similar problems to ordinary U/Pu fission. You still have fission product waste and still have the potential for release of large amounts of hazardous radioisotopes. It is fission, after all. These problems may well be manageable but they're manageable in conventional fission power stations too.
We buy the missiles from the US, not the bombs. Though the design may well be US-derived - once we'd tested our own hydrogen bomb, thus proving we could do it, the Americans gave us access to their designs which were further developed and more suitable for deployment.
AWE isn't exactly a "company" either... their full name is the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which should provide some clue as to why they may be interested in this.
Solar heating is a different matter, but I'd be very surprised if you had solar electricity that paid for itself
Electricity is a bit different to a car. There's variation between cars, but mains electricity is a fixed standard. It doesn't matter what produces it, it's exactly the same stuff, so cost and reliability are really the only relevant factors.
Where can you buy, install and operate solar panels without some form of subsidy to make it worthwhile? Last time I checked, the panels alone would equate to more than $.12/kWh, never mind installation, maintenance and storage/balancing using the grid.
If you're talking worldwide, then probably none. But at least here in the UK, oil is not subsidised - in fact it's taxed fairly heavily, both on the production side when it's extracted from the North Sea and on the consumption side when it's sold as motor vehicle fuel.
How bizarre, linking to a group with the best understanding of the subject. I suppose you also distrust medical advice given by doctors on the grounds that they profit from medical treatments?
Fortunately, they present actual arguments, not mere assertions, so you don't have to take anybody's word for anything.
It's a well known phenomenon called confirmation bias. It's one of the things you have to learn not to be fooled by to do science. In fact, it's after I actually started doing scientific research of my own (in an unrelated field) that I stopped being an AGW "sceptic", as I noticed how strongly that view was affected by it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the most vocal AGW sceptics have no scientific research experience of any kind.
Meh, when I started using computers (not PCs, that came later) they were a niche. Being a niche isn't a problem.
What *is* a problem is the general direction home computing is moving in - towards heavily locked down, specialist appliances rather than flexible, general purpose platforms. Which is a tragedy, because until relatively recently the trend seemed to be moving the other way. The specialist online services like Compuserve or AOL got displaced by the open internet, platforms by one manufacturer got replaced by the generic PC, even Apple seemed to be going away from their proprietary ways. What does it mean for innovation if everything's controlled by a central authority like Apple, and you can't even do things to your own property without their permission?
The green groups aren't the ones doing the research, so what they say is neither here nor there. Scientists and scientific journals do not have a political agenda - or at least no more than any other human does, and not a unified one.
Slashdot Mirror
So? It's not as if anyone's going to move to Hungary for an internet connecction.
And wages will be much smaller, it's not as if that means it'll be any more affordable in practice. Probably also why it's much cheaper to deploy.
Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The isotope responsible for almost all of the long term contamination is Cs-137, with a half life of about 30 years. So every century, the activity level drops by a factor of 10. IIRC, the most heavily contaminated area discovered (very close to the reactors) was giving a dose rate of 500 mSv/yr, so even that should be down to below background levels in 3 centuries, with most of the currently excluded area safe long before then.
Now, that's still a heck of a long time - but it's not the thousands of years you mention, and it means that large scale use of nuclear power for centuries will not result in ever-increasing amounts of land lost due to contamination from accidents.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
One way to look at it is that the fields corresponding to the various particles always exist and may therefore undergo interactions, even if they are in the "ground" state (no real particles) at any time. So you can regard the "internal state" as not of the particle but as of the field itself, and that can change between different excitation (number of particle) states just like an atom can undergo a transition between excited and ground state. E.g. the muon field, electron field, neutrino fields etc. can interact with each other via the weak interaction fields.
Or, to take a different approach, there is absolutely no requirement for the laws of nature to be intuitive, which is I suspect what you really mean by "make sense".
Whenever physicists say mass these days, it means "rest mass". Since relativistic mass is related to a particle's total energy by a factor of c^2, it's rather a redundant quantity and not useful to think about. Relativistic mass leads to confused ideas such as things getting heavier when they travel quickly, as though the object doing the travelling has somehow changed its properties.
It's far less confusing to think of only rest mass, momentum and energy.
Well, one way would be to make sure medicine was available to poor people, rather than just letting them die. Plenty of countries manage to treat asthmatics without overpriced OTC inhalers.
Also, suncream may not be cheap in many parts of the world. Ozone depletion doesn't just affect the country that caused it.
Yes but there is one little thing everyone seems to be missing...this will KILL PEOPLE DEAD
Melanoma will KILL PEOPLE DEAD too.
Yes, you're missing relativistic effects like the lack of absolute simultaneity etc. In special relativity, events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference may not be in a frame that is moving relative to it. In fact they can even happen in a different order - but only if the separation in distance between events is greater than the separation in time * c. So if you have a signal that can be produced by A that causes B, and that signal travels slower than c, A comes before B in all frames of reference. If it travels faster than c, there are some frames where B comes before A. So you could have situations where A causes B which prevents A...
From the estimates I saw for the UK FTTC/FTTP rollout, doing full FTTP everywhere was estimated at about five times as expensive as just running fibre to the street cabinets and using VDSL2 from there.
If I want three seperate places to sleep in my property then it makes very little difference how big the rooms are in a 2 bedroom property, I'm still missing a room.
Partition walls are not particularly difficult to install. Certainly not compared to the overall cost of the house. The one thing you can't get more of easily is total space, so that's a better primary measure of the value of a house.
at commercial scale it's at or near $1.20/watt.
Is that installed cost or just the cost of the panels at the factory gate?
Bear in mind also that in a lot of the world, load factors for solar PV are extremely low - well under 20%, perhaps nearer 10% for northern Europe.
Also, the state of home computing is much more advanced and it's virtually impossible to casually put together something that won't look pathetic compared to the commercial software already existing. That wasn't the case then - you saw a commercial game for the BBC and there was a very real feeling of "I could do that". Now, not really - doing something impressive by modern standards is virtually impossible for an individual at home.
Like what? Even fairly big things like modern games are only a few gigabytes, which doesn't take that long on a 10 Mbps connection. The vast majority of things you'd want to download are much smaller.
This may change in the future, but we were talking about right now.
You're talking about businesses, which is fair enough. A multi-national company will surely already have connection that's much faster than ADSL. The cost of running fibre to the premises is usually prohibitive for home use in most places, except for new housing developments. But it's not usually out of the reach of a major business with a need for it.
And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections.
That's debatable. 10 Mbps is plenty for current home uses, including streaming video, unless perhaps you have a lot of people sharing the connection or really feel the need for full HD streaming from the internet - and I suspect most people don't.
Thorium has similar problems to ordinary U/Pu fission. You still have fission product waste and still have the potential for release of large amounts of hazardous radioisotopes. It is fission, after all. These problems may well be manageable but they're manageable in conventional fission power stations too.
We buy the missiles from the US, not the bombs. Though the design may well be US-derived - once we'd tested our own hydrogen bomb, thus proving we could do it, the Americans gave us access to their designs which were further developed and more suitable for deployment.
AWE isn't exactly a "company" either... their full name is the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which should provide some clue as to why they may be interested in this.
Solar heating is a different matter, but I'd be very surprised if you had solar electricity that paid for itself
Electricity is a bit different to a car. There's variation between cars, but mains electricity is a fixed standard. It doesn't matter what produces it, it's exactly the same stuff, so cost and reliability are really the only relevant factors.
Where can you buy, install and operate solar panels without some form of subsidy to make it worthwhile? Last time I checked, the panels alone would equate to more than $.12/kWh, never mind installation, maintenance and storage/balancing using the grid.
If you're talking worldwide, then probably none. But at least here in the UK, oil is not subsidised - in fact it's taxed fairly heavily, both on the production side when it's extracted from the North Sea and on the consumption side when it's sold as motor vehicle fuel.
Nothing about ease of use implies the need to lock down the device with no way to override the lock.
How bizarre, linking to a group with the best understanding of the subject. I suppose you also distrust medical advice given by doctors on the grounds that they profit from medical treatments?
Fortunately, they present actual arguments, not mere assertions, so you don't have to take anybody's word for anything.
It's a well known phenomenon called confirmation bias. It's one of the things you have to learn not to be fooled by to do science. In fact, it's after I actually started doing scientific research of my own (in an unrelated field) that I stopped being an AGW "sceptic", as I noticed how strongly that view was affected by it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the most vocal AGW sceptics have no scientific research experience of any kind.
And what exactly does Greenpeace have to do with climate scientists?
Meh, when I started using computers (not PCs, that came later) they were a niche. Being a niche isn't a problem.
What *is* a problem is the general direction home computing is moving in - towards heavily locked down, specialist appliances rather than flexible, general purpose platforms. Which is a tragedy, because until relatively recently the trend seemed to be moving the other way. The specialist online services like Compuserve or AOL got displaced by the open internet, platforms by one manufacturer got replaced by the generic PC, even Apple seemed to be going away from their proprietary ways. What does it mean for innovation if everything's controlled by a central authority like Apple, and you can't even do things to your own property without their permission?
The green groups aren't the ones doing the research, so what they say is neither here nor there. Scientists and scientific journals do not have a political agenda - or at least no more than any other human does, and not a unified one.