Nuclear waste from Hanford is being detected in the Columbia river. Much leakage is trapped in an aquifer that will eventually flow into the Columbia. There are many storage sites at Hanford that are not secured properly and will be a big problem in the future as the containers degrade. Nobody wants to deal with it. It's not an issue for any of our presidential candidates.
Waste heat from nuclear plants is a big problem that nobody has an answer for. They are very inefficient compared to coal-fired plants because the operating temperatures are much lower.
You forget about the waste heat. Nuclear power plants dump enormous amounts of waste heat into the the water they use for processing. Much more than coal-fired plants, because nuclear plants run at much lower temperatures and have less efficiency. Ask the folks at Vermont Yankee about their waste heat problem.
Yes, we know all about low cost nuclear power here in New Hampshire. Hah!
All power plants suck up water from a nearby body of water, heat it, and dump the waste heat. Nuclear plants are less efficient because the temperatures are much lower than fire-powered plants. They dump a lot more warm water into the river per kilowatt output because of this. What shall we do with all this warm water? Shall we dump it in the river and kill the fish? This is already a serious problem at plants like Vermont Yankee.
What shall we do with the nuclear waste? NIMBY is the battle cry! Just ask the poor slobs in Washington State who are getting radioactive waste in the river. Ask the folks in Nevada if they want to be the world's nuclear dump. I don't think so.
The real answer is to 'get off the pot' and not need power plants like this at all. We could chop power consumption by a lot. Just watch, it will happen as energy gets more expensive. People can get quite ingenious when the alternatives are grim.
Noone has mentioned anything about what to do with the waste. This is the sticking point as far as I'm concerned. I have no doubt that we can make safe nuclear power plants. But there are waste products that must be safely stored for a very long time and we don't seem to have any good answers for that. We can't even effectively store the waste we have now, it's leaking into the Columbia River. Yucca Mountain does not appear to be the safe place that some have hoped it would be.
How can you work like that? Your neck will be bothering you soon. Get a proper desk and put the display at a decent height so that you are looking straight ahead as you work. Otherwise plan on a life filled with chiropractic visits and neck pain.
I miss emacs on Multics. My first word processor, I wrote a lot of papers using it. Even today I catch myself typing emacs commands that only existed on Multics emacs.
Ahem. Let's talk about sustainable energy. Get rid of fossil fuels to generate electricity (66% of electricity is generated by fossil fuels) and your numbers prove my case. When you add in the infrastructure necessary to produce and distribute all those refrigerators, it's even worse.
If you do the math, it's not possible for every family on this planet to have a refrigerator. Not even close. There is not enough energy and not enough resources. Do you think that Americans are privileged and other people don't deserve one, too? If we had our priorities straight we would figure out how to feed people without refrigeration and do away with one of our biggest energy sinks.
If there is a household robot, it's going to have to have a much better energy source than Bender's belching fuel cell.
I know lots of musicians, and they create music, not pdfs. And none of them compose in sheet music. Many of them are linux users, but none of them use linux for composition. There is nothing on Linux that even comes close to Garage Band for the non-geek.
It must be REALLY easy to install if you can do it.
Okay, monkey-boy, but what are you gonna do after the install is over? Some of us actually do things with our computers besides install software on them.
Go ahead and compose some music with your copy of Ubuntu and get back to me when you are done.
I love linux. I use it all the time. I've been using it constantly since kernel 0.99pl12. It's on my desktop and my laptop. I install linux on headless servers with the serial port, in text mode, using PXE. Don't even dare to tell me how to install linux.
Yes, my wife uses all of those things on her computer. Not! Where is Garage Band? Are you telling me that a non-geek can compose music on Linux? Try explaining to your wife how to format and partition a drive in Linux. On the Mac you don't even need to explain it. I have linux on my desktop, but my wife cannot work with it. She needs a Mac. She is a massage therapist and has no patience for the computer crap that you and I put up with all the time.
Yes, you are not an architect. Read about FLW. A very interesting character. Sometimes brilliant with details, like his earthquake-proofing techniques, and his design for tropical hotels. He had bad problems with leaking roofs and also really horrible personal issues that kept him from achieving even more.
You would be amazed at the details that archtects overlook. Do you know why houses in the north tend to have overhanging roofs? It's so the melting snow and ice will fall away from the foundation and not cause leaks in the cellar. The lack of overhang also causes unslightly stains on the ouside of the house from the dripping water. Those "modern" buildings they have in California look really stupid here with all their water damage.
You don't have anything to do with building construction, do you?
My sister is a Civil Engineer. Her life is nothing but small details to be fixed. She tells me, for example, that building requirements change from town to town and what is perfectly acceptable in one place will not meet code at all in another. It is literally impossible to design a public rest room that meets building codes in all 50 states. It's kind of hard to develop standardized solutions when the problem is different for every building. In Cambridge, the mud changes character from one end of the building to the other, so the loading and settling, and the pile driving requirements, are different for different places in the building. In many urban areas, organized crime is a fact of life and must be factored into the construction process. My sister has many fascinating stories, some straight out of the Sopranos.
You can say KISS all day long, but the reality is that modern building construction is a nightmare of details.
It's not "Keep It Simple", it's "Sweat The Details". It's not possible to design a big building in Cambridge, MA and have it be simple. For one, there is no soil to speak of. It's all Charles River mud. Every building in that part of Cambridge is basically a concrete boat floating on the mud, sometimes supported by piles down to bedrock, sometimes not.
For another, the extreme temperature changes from summer to winter, and the requirement that the building be heated and cooled from MIT's central steam plant.
Add into that the security, networking, and social interaction requirements, and you have a really complex building before the architect even picks up his light pen. Simplicity is just out. "Managed Complexity" is necessary.
MIT knows a lot about preserving its buildings. Many of its buildings are landmarks and are carefullly preserved. It used to let ivy grow on the outsides of some buildings, in the traditional manner, except the ivy destroys the mortar between the bricks. It's very expensive to replace, so they just ripped out all the ivy. Harvard has also done this.
The external form of a building is really a rather minor point and has little to do with how well it is designed or executed. MIT has parking garages with leaky roofs, You don't need Frank Gehry to design a building with a leaky roof.
You are mighty good at typing but I still don't see how a pipe with bits in it is any different than a pipe with water in it.
So you are saying that because Internet usage is not metered, therefore it should be run privately? What if they metered your Internet usage, like, say, Comcast does? One could very well meter Internet usage and charge for it. Poof goes your argument.
You've put yourself on a slippery slope and even provided your own grease. Your argument about wasteful government is unsubstantiated drivel. The government can run things very efficiently if it wants to; take a look at many small towns these days. They are running their water, fire, and school departments on ahoestring budgets, without fatcat CEO's skimming off the top.
We should tear out our water and sewer lines, fire all of our police and firemen, and let corporate America run all of these things. I'm sure they will do a much better job.
We have a phone that's not done yet, a wind-up car that uses air for a spring, and a bus that stole its gear from the local railroad's maintenance vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear waste from Hanford is being detected in the Columbia river. Much leakage is trapped in an aquifer that will eventually flow into the Columbia. There are many storage sites at Hanford that are not secured properly and will be a big problem in the future as the containers degrade. Nobody wants to deal with it. It's not an issue for any of our presidential candidates.
Waste heat from nuclear plants is a big problem that nobody has an answer for. They are very inefficient compared to coal-fired plants because the operating temperatures are much lower.
You forget about the waste heat. Nuclear power plants dump enormous amounts of waste heat into the the water they use for processing. Much more than coal-fired plants, because nuclear plants run at much lower temperatures and have less efficiency. Ask the folks at Vermont Yankee about their waste heat problem.
Yes, we know all about low cost nuclear power here in New Hampshire. Hah!
All power plants suck up water from a nearby body of water, heat it, and dump the waste heat. Nuclear plants are less efficient because the temperatures are much lower than fire-powered plants. They dump a lot more warm water into the river per kilowatt output because of this. What shall we do with all this warm water? Shall we dump it in the river and kill the fish? This is already a serious problem at plants like Vermont Yankee.
What shall we do with the nuclear waste? NIMBY is the battle cry! Just ask the poor slobs in Washington State who are getting radioactive waste in the river. Ask the folks in Nevada if they want to be the world's nuclear dump. I don't think so.
The real answer is to 'get off the pot' and not need power plants like this at all. We could chop power consumption by a lot. Just watch, it will happen as energy gets more expensive. People can get quite ingenious when the alternatives are grim.
Noone has mentioned anything about what to do with the waste. This is the sticking point as far as I'm concerned. I have no doubt that we can make safe nuclear power plants. But there are waste products that must be safely stored for a very long time and we don't seem to have any good answers for that. We can't even effectively store the waste we have now, it's leaking into the Columbia River. Yucca Mountain does not appear to be the safe place that some have hoped it would be.
How can you work like that? Your neck will be bothering you soon. Get a proper desk and put the display at a decent height so that you are looking straight ahead as you work. Otherwise plan on a life filled with chiropractic visits and neck pain.
I miss emacs on Multics. My first word processor, I wrote a lot of papers using it. Even today I catch myself typing emacs commands that only existed on Multics emacs.
Ahem. Let's talk about sustainable energy. Get rid of fossil fuels to generate electricity (66% of electricity is generated by fossil fuels) and your numbers prove my case. When you add in the infrastructure necessary to produce and distribute all those refrigerators, it's even worse.
If you do the math, it's not possible for every family on this planet to have a refrigerator. Not even close. There is not enough energy and not enough resources. Do you think that Americans are privileged and other people don't deserve one, too? If we had our priorities straight we would figure out how to feed people without refrigeration and do away with one of our biggest energy sinks.
If there is a household robot, it's going to have to have a much better energy source than Bender's belching fuel cell.
You can get a soekris board with the same processor and 4 network ports if you want to make a router.
Yes, the BMI says that Lance Armstrong is quite overweight. No kidding.
I know lots of musicians, and they create music, not pdfs. And none of them compose in sheet music. Many of them are linux users, but none of them use linux for composition. There is nothing on Linux that even comes close to Garage Band for the non-geek.
It must be REALLY easy to install if you can do it.
Okay, monkey-boy, but what are you gonna do after the install is over? Some of us actually do things with our computers besides install software on them.
Go ahead and compose some music with your copy of Ubuntu and get back to me when you are done.
I love linux. I use it all the time. I've been using it constantly since kernel 0.99pl12. It's on my desktop and my laptop. I install linux on headless servers with the serial port, in text mode, using PXE. Don't even dare to tell me how to install linux.
Yes, my wife uses all of those things on her computer. Not! Where is Garage Band? Are you telling me that a non-geek can compose music on Linux? Try explaining to your wife how to format and partition a drive in Linux. On the Mac you don't even need to explain it. I have linux on my desktop, but my wife cannot work with it. She needs a Mac. She is a massage therapist and has no patience for the computer crap that you and I put up with all the time.
You need to reconsider the use of the word "only" in your description. Time Machine is waaay more than what you have there.
Okay, one feature down, only 9999 more to go. I'm sure your Leopard-killer will be ready before the end of the universe.
For stimulating the design of the new Linux backup system.
All linux users should tip their hat to Apple for renewing the interest in better backup solutions.
This is why free software rules.
And also why we need companies like Apple who raise the bar.
Yes, you are not an architect. Read about FLW. A very interesting character. Sometimes brilliant with details, like his earthquake-proofing techniques, and his design for tropical hotels. He had bad problems with leaking roofs and also really horrible personal issues that kept him from achieving even more.
You would be amazed at the details that archtects overlook. Do you know why houses in the north tend to have overhanging roofs? It's so the melting snow and ice will fall away from the foundation and not cause leaks in the cellar. The lack of overhang also causes unslightly stains on the ouside of the house from the dripping water. Those "modern" buildings they have in California look really stupid here with all their water damage.
Who do you think picks all the apples up here in the fall? They don't pick themselves!
You don't have anything to do with building construction, do you?
My sister is a Civil Engineer. Her life is nothing but small details to be fixed. She tells me, for example, that building requirements change from town to town and what is perfectly acceptable in one place will not meet code at all in another. It is literally impossible to design a public rest room that meets building codes in all 50 states. It's kind of hard to develop standardized solutions when the problem is different for every building. In Cambridge, the mud changes character from one end of the building to the other, so the loading and settling, and the pile driving requirements, are different for different places in the building. In many urban areas, organized crime is a fact of life and must be factored into the construction process. My sister has many fascinating stories, some straight out of the Sopranos.
You can say KISS all day long, but the reality is that modern building construction is a nightmare of details.
rms lives in a slop-sink closet. At least he smells like he does.
It's not "Keep It Simple", it's "Sweat The Details". It's not possible to design a big building in Cambridge, MA and have it be simple. For one, there is no soil to speak of. It's all Charles River mud. Every building in that part of Cambridge is basically a concrete boat floating on the mud, sometimes supported by piles down to bedrock, sometimes not.
For another, the extreme temperature changes from summer to winter, and the requirement that the building be heated and cooled from MIT's central steam plant.
Add into that the security, networking, and social interaction requirements, and you have a really complex building before the architect even picks up his light pen. Simplicity is just out. "Managed Complexity" is necessary.
MIT knows a lot about preserving its buildings. Many of its buildings are landmarks and are carefullly preserved. It used to let ivy grow on the outsides of some buildings, in the traditional manner, except the ivy destroys the mortar between the bricks. It's very expensive to replace, so they just ripped out all the ivy. Harvard has also done this.
The external form of a building is really a rather minor point and has little to do with how well it is designed or executed. MIT has parking garages with leaky roofs, You don't need Frank Gehry to design a building with a leaky roof.
Frank Lloyd Wright was also plagued by leaks in the roofs of his buildings.
Mies Van Der Rohe designed houses in Connecticut that are unlivable due to terrible cold drafts.
I'll take a competent architect over a famous one any day.
You are mighty good at typing but I still don't see how a pipe with bits in it is any different than a pipe with water in it.
So you are saying that because Internet usage is not metered, therefore it should be run privately? What if they metered your Internet usage, like, say, Comcast does? One could very well meter Internet usage and charge for it. Poof goes your argument.
You've put yourself on a slippery slope and even provided your own grease. Your argument about wasteful government is unsubstantiated drivel. The government can run things very efficiently if it wants to; take a look at many small towns these days. They are running their water, fire, and school departments on ahoestring budgets, without fatcat CEO's skimming off the top.
You are right.
We should tear out our water and sewer lines, fire all of our police and firemen, and let corporate America run all of these things. I'm sure they will do a much better job.
We have a phone that's not done yet, a wind-up car that uses air for a spring, and a bus that stole its gear from the local railroad's maintenance vehicles.