So you could argue: they are neither english nor french as both languages adopted them from the same source. But that is incorrect in so far as english indeed adopted the words via the french invaders and not via the latin/roman invaders.
Those words in the original post were adopted into English long after Anglo-Norman was dead, so invasion can't be the answer here. They aren't native French words either - both English and French for some reason seem to like to coin new words from the classical languages. I suppose they thought telephone and television sounded grander than farspeaker and farseer (though we do have loudspeaker, oddly). This tendency seems to have greatly reduced recently though - computing terms are generally made from words already in English rather than new borrowings.
I don't think the original poster claimed that French had borrowed them from English, just that they are not native French.
Televisions were a common candidate for percussive maintenance, but it could help computers too. My old BBC Micro often wouldn't power up without a good whack on the top left (PSU).
I miss thumpable electronics. "Try turning it off and on again" just isn't the same.
Yes that's right, but the Norman words are so well integrated now that most English speakers wouldn't recognise them as foreign. The German ones still tend to look German. I doubt too many people would see this post and know that recognise, foreign, tend, recent, doubt, people and post are loanwords. "Integrate" still has a foreign feel about it though.
Prescription drug prices in the US market are much higher than the NHS negotiated prices; without the US market and the high amount of US consumer spending on drugs, drug companies would have little incentive to invest in new drugs.
Your own doctors' and hospitals' inability to negotiate a good deal isn't the NHS's fault. You don't really think that if the NHS paid more the drug companies would say "oh well, we'll charge everyone else less", do you? They'll charge as much as they can get away with, just like now.
A more likely reason for drugs being so expensive in the USA is that they spend more on sales & marketing than R&D. How much cheaper would it be if they didn't do that? Don't blame your own dysfunctional system on the NHS "not paying up" because they do, and the companies make a fat profit out of it.
For example, American consumers and taxpayers are paying for most of the medical research that the UK's single payer system would never be able to finance on its own;
What? The NHS pays for is medicines and technology at prices negotiated with the pharmaceutical companies. It doesn't get them for free.
The fact that material with less than 2% fissile content can't go critical on fast neutrons is easily calculated by looking at the well measured fission and absorption cross-sections for U-238, U-235 and Pu-239. There's a *reason* why fast reactors use fuel with fissile content of 15%-20%, despite the higher cost of doing so.
Everything that happened at Fukushima can be explained by loss of AC power -> loss of coolant -> decay heat driven meltdown -> containment failure due to containment pressure & temperature beyond design limits. The decay heat is quite large - tens of megawatts for hours to days after shutdown. There's absolutely no need to invoke criticality to explain what happened, and absolutely no evidence that there was any such criticality. And a detector at the gate certainly couldn't provide any such evidence as the cores were and are inside enough shielding to block the neutrons that result from full power operation. You know, to stop the workers from getting radiation poisoning from normal operations. Any neutron pulse large enough to be detected there would have had to come from a fission reaction large enough to pretty much level the entire site and kill everyone nearby.
And before you mention the spent fuel pools again, the fuel in those has been inspected and found to be intact. So no meltdown there.
The weird thing is that my original post was explaining why a particular nuclear solution *wasn't* a quick and easy answer. I'd have thought that'd be the kind of thing you'd agree with.
What sort of neutrons do you suppose are involved in a meltdown?
What happens in a meltdown is irrelevant to my original post, which was referring to use of spent LWR fuel in a fast reactor and had nothing to do with meltdowns of any kind. Stop moving the goalposts.
But since you ask - in a meltdown like Fukushima? No neutrons. It was subcritical and the meltdown was caused by decay heat, as was Three Mile Island. Chernobyl was driven by thermal neutrons - it would have been subcritical on fast neutrons alone.
As you would know if you put a fraction of the effort into researching a subject as you do on talking about it.
No mistake. I said "You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.". Which is true, without a moderator even fresh LWR fuel won't go critical, let alone spent fuel.
Do you even bother reading comments or just shoot off your anti-nuclear points as often and as fast as you can?
You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.
Reprocessing's been done, but it's quite messy and there's no demand for the recovered fuel. Making MOX is much more difficult and expensive than making standard uranium fuel. It's cheaper, easier and probably safer to just store the spent fuel in dry casks until a suitable disposal site is found. Fortunately, those casks last a long time.
If I were king of the world, I'd fund solar heavily because it can do good NOW.
We are funding solar heavily. Something like 37 GW of solar was installed worldwide last year. That's tens of billions spent in one year, more than an order of magnitude more than is spent on fusion development. And that's just for one type of renewable energy. R&D is cheap, deployment is expensive - so it makes sense to fund research into lots of different things in case one of them pays off.
Now, I think that fusion is probably going to be just too tricky - but I might be wrong, and there are helpful spinoffs in superconductor technology, etc.
I'm from Europe myself (well, Britain), so I know about the kind of models we get. It's not clear what "fault rate" means - does this refer to number of faults discovered at legally required inspections (like the UK MOT)? A simple percentage is a bit vague as it doesn't give any indication of how costly the faults are to fix.
I was basing my original comments partly from the figures from here,as that tries to take into account cost of repairs too.
Do you have a link to those statistics? I'd genuinely like to know, because everything I've seen suggests that the German brands are not as good as Ford for reliability these days. Especially BMW, which may be nice to drive but can have some expensive problems (cooling systems that break after 60k miles, high pressure fuel pumps, diesel engine swirl flaps which can come loose and destroy the entire engine...). The Japnnese brands are typically better than both though.
It's debatable to what extent Ford of Europe can be considered American cars anyway - they have traditionally had completely different models and manufacturing plants.
Especially in this case since Windscale was also gas-cooled.
Air-cooled. Which is indeed a gas, but very different to the CO2-cooled reactors described here. Windscale was an air-cooled, open-loop plutonium production reactor designed in the 1940s. It didn't generate electricity and has very little relation to the later electricity-generating reactors.
I didn't complain about them, I was making a more general point. Jealousy is indeed not a good reason to stop someone from earning money, but accusations of jealousy are often used to stifle legitimate complaints about wealth distribution in the world. Few people would expect everyone to be paid the same, but having CEOs earning 1000 times an average employee is hardly reasonable either, given that that money only exists thanks to the work of those lower down. It's not jealousy to question that.
Most wealth inequality is far from natural - it's the result of it being easier to get more money when you already have it, thus favouring those from wealthy backgrounds. It's no more natural than the old feudal system, where those who inherited land and titles had the power.
True, but it certainly doesn't sound like natural laughter. What's the betting they manipulate the laughs a lot - increasing the amount, adding them where there weren't any before, etc.
Power purchase agreement prices are not the whole story as they ignore the effects of any extra, separate subsidies (such as the federal tax credit for wind). If the PPA was the whole story, why is there such a large variation (factor of 3) in prices for the same year? The nuclear price is an "all-in" levelised cost of electricity (plus an element of profit for EDF) - the relevant comparison is to the equivalent for wind, which your own link shows to be $80 to $100 per MWh. Unless the Energy Information Administration have got it wrong, but I trust them more than the AWEA's carefully selected figures. Would you trust nuclear figures from Areva?
And as I said before, what they can *sell* power for isn't necessarily what it costs to produce. Germany often now has negative wholesale electricity prices - is that because they can genuinely afford to pay people to take it away? No, it's because they get a separate feed in tariff for anything produced. There are many factors determining the sale price, which is why I'm trying to compare based on the actual costs of installation. And that shows nowhere near as rosy a picture as you're trying to paint.
With the cost of wind falling, the fairer comparison would be for future wind PPA's where we might see a factor of 12 or 14 rather than seven.
Can I borrow your crystal ball when you've finished with it? Your own link shows that the cost does *not* consistently fall - there's a significant increase from 2000-2008, for example. There's a recent fall since that peak, but if it went up before it can do so again.
Your link shows a chart (under "Cost of New Generation Resources") which gives the cost of wind power as 4 to 5 times the figure Amory Lovins was presumably working from. Not sure how that's supposed to be proving me wrong.
If you think there's a flaw in them - or you know of somewhere where you can install wind for about $500 per kW - then please feel free to point it out. Your profile says you're an astronomer, so finding the flaws in such a simple calculation shouldn't be too hard for you.
Lovins does seem to have his facts straight on wind and nuclear costs that you object to taking 1.68 dollars to the pound we get about 2.3 cents/kWh which is mid-range for recent wind contracts in the Midwest.
In which case that's the amount they can sell the power for, not the amount it costs to produce. 2.3 cents per kWh -> $200 per year at 100% capacity factor, $60 per year at a more realistic one, implying a needed installed cost of ~ $600 per kW to get a commercially acceptable rate of return. With maintenance costs, that'll need to be much lower still.
A leak - even a big leak - isn't exactly "blowing up" though is it? That phrase implies severe (irreparable) damage, possible injuries and a big release of radioactive material.
Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 will never take off.
According to Google, it is. Slowly, admittedly, but about 5% of Google users now have IPv6.
So you could argue: they are neither english nor french as both languages adopted them from the same source. But that is incorrect in so far as english indeed adopted the words via the french invaders and not via the latin/roman invaders.
Those words in the original post were adopted into English long after Anglo-Norman was dead, so invasion can't be the answer here. They aren't native French words either - both English and French for some reason seem to like to coin new words from the classical languages. I suppose they thought telephone and television sounded grander than farspeaker and farseer (though we do have loudspeaker, oddly). This tendency seems to have greatly reduced recently though - computing terms are generally made from words already in English rather than new borrowings.
I don't think the original poster claimed that French had borrowed them from English, just that they are not native French.
Televisions were a common candidate for percussive maintenance, but it could help computers too. My old BBC Micro often wouldn't power up without a good whack on the top left (PSU).
I miss thumpable electronics. "Try turning it off and on again" just isn't the same.
Yes that's right, but the Norman words are so well integrated now that most English speakers wouldn't recognise them as foreign. The German ones still tend to look German. I doubt too many people would see this post and know that recognise, foreign, tend, recent, doubt, people and post are loanwords. "Integrate" still has a foreign feel about it though.
Did not know that the english speak a celtic dialect
Most Scots don't either - less than 2% speak any Scottish Gaelic.
Prescription drug prices in the US market are much higher than the NHS negotiated prices; without the US market and the high amount of US consumer spending on drugs, drug companies would have little incentive to invest in new drugs.
Your own doctors' and hospitals' inability to negotiate a good deal isn't the NHS's fault. You don't really think that if the NHS paid more the drug companies would say "oh well, we'll charge everyone else less", do you? They'll charge as much as they can get away with, just like now.
A more likely reason for drugs being so expensive in the USA is that they spend more on sales & marketing than R&D. How much cheaper would it be if they didn't do that? Don't blame your own dysfunctional system on the NHS "not paying up" because they do, and the companies make a fat profit out of it.
For example, American consumers and taxpayers are paying for most of the medical research that the UK's single payer system would never be able to finance on its own;
What? The NHS pays for is medicines and technology at prices negotiated with the pharmaceutical companies. It doesn't get them for free.
The fact that material with less than 2% fissile content can't go critical on fast neutrons is easily calculated by looking at the well measured fission and absorption cross-sections for U-238, U-235 and Pu-239. There's a *reason* why fast reactors use fuel with fissile content of 15%-20%, despite the higher cost of doing so.
Everything that happened at Fukushima can be explained by loss of AC power -> loss of coolant -> decay heat driven meltdown -> containment failure due to containment pressure & temperature beyond design limits. The decay heat is quite large - tens of megawatts for hours to days after shutdown. There's absolutely no need to invoke criticality to explain what happened, and absolutely no evidence that there was any such criticality. And a detector at the gate certainly couldn't provide any such evidence as the cores were and are inside enough shielding to block the neutrons that result from full power operation. You know, to stop the workers from getting radiation poisoning from normal operations. Any neutron pulse large enough to be detected there would have had to come from a fission reaction large enough to pretty much level the entire site and kill everyone nearby.
And before you mention the spent fuel pools again, the fuel in those has been inspected and found to be intact. So no meltdown there.
The weird thing is that my original post was explaining why a particular nuclear solution *wasn't* a quick and easy answer. I'd have thought that'd be the kind of thing you'd agree with.
What sort of neutrons do you suppose are involved in a meltdown?
What happens in a meltdown is irrelevant to my original post, which was referring to use of spent LWR fuel in a fast reactor and had nothing to do with meltdowns of any kind. Stop moving the goalposts.
But since you ask - in a meltdown like Fukushima? No neutrons. It was subcritical and the meltdown was caused by decay heat, as was Three Mile Island. Chernobyl was driven by thermal neutrons - it would have been subcritical on fast neutrons alone.
As you would know if you put a fraction of the effort into researching a subject as you do on talking about it.
No mistake. I said "You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.". Which is true, without a moderator even fresh LWR fuel won't go critical, let alone spent fuel.
Do you even bother reading comments or just shoot off your anti-nuclear points as often and as fast as you can?
Unlikely, and definitely not on fast neutrons which is what's relevant for a fast reactor.
You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.
Reprocessing's been done, but it's quite messy and there's no demand for the recovered fuel. Making MOX is much more difficult and expensive than making standard uranium fuel. It's cheaper, easier and probably safer to just store the spent fuel in dry casks until a suitable disposal site is found. Fortunately, those casks last a long time.
If I were king of the world, I'd fund solar heavily because it can do good NOW.
We are funding solar heavily. Something like 37 GW of solar was installed worldwide last year. That's tens of billions spent in one year, more than an order of magnitude more than is spent on fusion development. And that's just for one type of renewable energy. R&D is cheap, deployment is expensive - so it makes sense to fund research into lots of different things in case one of them pays off.
Now, I think that fusion is probably going to be just too tricky - but I might be wrong, and there are helpful spinoffs in superconductor technology, etc.
I'm from Europe myself (well, Britain), so I know about the kind of models we get. It's not clear what "fault rate" means - does this refer to number of faults discovered at legally required inspections (like the UK MOT)? A simple percentage is a bit vague as it doesn't give any indication of how costly the faults are to fix.
I was basing my original comments partly from the figures from here,as that tries to take into account cost of repairs too.
Do you have a link to those statistics? I'd genuinely like to know, because everything I've seen suggests that the German brands are not as good as Ford for reliability these days. Especially BMW, which may be nice to drive but can have some expensive problems (cooling systems that break after 60k miles, high pressure fuel pumps, diesel engine swirl flaps which can come loose and destroy the entire engine...). The Japnnese brands are typically better than both though.
It's debatable to what extent Ford of Europe can be considered American cars anyway - they have traditionally had completely different models and manufacturing plants.
mdsolar accusing someone else of being a fanboy. Now I've seen it all.
Especially in this case since Windscale was also gas-cooled.
Air-cooled. Which is indeed a gas, but very different to the CO2-cooled reactors described here. Windscale was an air-cooled, open-loop plutonium production reactor designed in the 1940s. It didn't generate electricity and has very little relation to the later electricity-generating reactors.
I didn't complain about them, I was making a more general point. Jealousy is indeed not a good reason to stop someone from earning money, but accusations of jealousy are often used to stifle legitimate complaints about wealth distribution in the world. Few people would expect everyone to be paid the same, but having CEOs earning 1000 times an average employee is hardly reasonable either, given that that money only exists thanks to the work of those lower down. It's not jealousy to question that.
Unequality is not a bad thing - it's natural
Most wealth inequality is far from natural - it's the result of it being easier to get more money when you already have it, thus favouring those from wealthy backgrounds. It's no more natural than the old feudal system, where those who inherited land and titles had the power.
True, but it certainly doesn't sound like natural laughter. What's the betting they manipulate the laughs a lot - increasing the amount, adding them where there weren't any before, etc.
Power purchase agreement prices are not the whole story as they ignore the effects of any extra, separate subsidies (such as the federal tax credit for wind). If the PPA was the whole story, why is there such a large variation (factor of 3) in prices for the same year? The nuclear price is an "all-in" levelised cost of electricity (plus an element of profit for EDF) - the relevant comparison is to the equivalent for wind, which your own link shows to be $80 to $100 per MWh. Unless the Energy Information Administration have got it wrong, but I trust them more than the AWEA's carefully selected figures. Would you trust nuclear figures from Areva?
And as I said before, what they can *sell* power for isn't necessarily what it costs to produce. Germany often now has negative wholesale electricity prices - is that because they can genuinely afford to pay people to take it away? No, it's because they get a separate feed in tariff for anything produced. There are many factors determining the sale price, which is why I'm trying to compare based on the actual costs of installation. And that shows nowhere near as rosy a picture as you're trying to paint.
With the cost of wind falling, the fairer comparison would be for future wind PPA's where we might see a factor of 12 or 14 rather than seven.
Can I borrow your crystal ball when you've finished with it? Your own link shows that the cost does *not* consistently fall - there's a significant increase from 2000-2008, for example. There's a recent fall since that peak, but if it went up before it can do so again.
Your link shows a chart (under "Cost of New Generation Resources") which gives the cost of wind power as 4 to 5 times the figure Amory Lovins was presumably working from. Not sure how that's supposed to be proving me wrong.
If you think there's a flaw in them - or you know of somewhere where you can install wind for about $500 per kW - then please feel free to point it out. Your profile says you're an astronomer, so finding the flaws in such a simple calculation shouldn't be too hard for you.
Lovins does seem to have his facts straight on wind and nuclear costs that you object to taking 1.68 dollars to the pound we get about 2.3 cents/kWh which is mid-range for recent wind contracts in the Midwest.
In which case that's the amount they can sell the power for, not the amount it costs to produce. 2.3 cents per kWh -> $200 per year at 100% capacity factor, $60 per year at a more realistic one, implying a needed installed cost of ~ $600 per kW to get a commercially acceptable rate of return. With maintenance costs, that'll need to be much lower still.
A leak - even a big leak - isn't exactly "blowing up" though is it? That phrase implies severe (irreparable) damage, possible injuries and a big release of radioactive material.