The strongest MRI currently used on humans is 9.1T and a 13T MRI scanner is being built - might already be finished. Given that the 9.1T is good enough to see individual neurons, the 13T scanner might be good enough to start seeing the fine structure of the synapses. I look forward to seeing the photos that will hopefully be published once the scanner gets going.
It would be interesting to see how far you could go before the damage becomes excessive. Would it be possible to build an MRI capable of directly observing the proteins that control and form memories? Could you observe the tau protein unpeeling as Alzheimer's begins? (Long before structural changes occur, which in turn is long before symptoms appear.)
How about archaeological uses? Could a high-power MRI reveal something of the mental state of the various bog bodies that have been found? What about Otzi? If we can directly observe memory structure, could we interrogate his brain to find out what happened to him?
Given the NYPD is reportedly collecting information on anyone left-of-centre, for the crime of being leftwing, under terrorist legislation, I am not confident that any of the rules were being obeyed anyway. Since when has investigating people on the other side of the country been NYPD jurisdiction?
However, Obama is in a pickle. If he cracks down on the abuse of the rules, the Republicans will attack him for being soft on terror. If he does nothing, the Republicans will accuse him of being soft on corruption. His only option left, in an election year, is to legalize the abuses.
Hey, who said anything about "business"? Are you accusing me of being one of those capitalist types? I should hope that in the last 16-17 years of posting here, I've totally disabused people of such a notion.
Sorry, but power generation is a necessary public service and should NOT be done "for profit". It should be done to allow society to function cheaply and efficiently, which means it has to be done from a far more socialist standpoint. Business' only business in power generation should be to ensure that the absence of direct market forces does not lead to laziness or sloppiness.
(Every philosophy has its place, but mission-critical services where disasters are spectacular, deadly and have far-reaching impacts should NOT be subject to trying to wring every last dime out of them.)
Uhhh, covered that by talking about the industrial uses of the waste isotopes. Anything that can be recycled economically would both offset decommissioning costs (by bringing in money) and reduce those costs (you don't have to pay for multi-millenia storage of something you're selling).
There is no fundamental requirement to use water in the heat exchange process. Water is convenient, as it takes an enormous amount of heat to raise it one degree Celsius, but there are other options. Given that the article is concerned with the hidden decommission costs at the end of the lifetime, it seems reasonable enough to consider the initial outlay to be a very small part of the total cost. Given that, it also seems reasonable enough to consider whether you can simply get away with using a greater volume of some inferior (from a heat exchange standpoint) liquid per unit time in order to be able to get the same amount of usable work out of the heat at the end.
If you can show that indeed you can, then the diagrams you've seen aren't important since you would then know that the water can be replaced with something that is not going to react with the sodium.
However, perhaps you end up deciding that water does indeed need to be used. Can it be used safely? Well, heat exchangers don't need to be thin or a single block. They simply need to be efficient. They also need to be easy to monitor and maintain, so that cracks can be rapidly detected and fixed whilst trivial - regardless of where in the structure they form - rather than being so cumbersome to repair that operators have every incentive to wait until they become a major threat. That means they need to be thick enough to be able to provide a very high level of structural integrity under normal operating conditions no matter what part of the heat exchanger you have to replace.
Normal operating conditions? Yes. Even though you probably wouldn't want to have the system running when doing maintenance, you would want it designed to be resilient enough that you actually could.
However, I've already mentioned that I'm stipulating triple redundancy as a minimum for any truly safe design, so you've two complete replacement heat exchange systems that are offline at any given time. You find a crack in the one in use, you switch to one of the backups and then conduct the repairs. If there's a crisis during maintenance, that still gives you an alternative backup - you can either switch to it OR use both to halve the stresses experienced by either.
Of course, that sort of "load balancing" might be what you want anyway - design each heat exchange system to handle the full load and then split the actual load across all three to minimize stresses. If one needs to go offline, the pressure gradient is then somewhat shallower for your backups than it would be if you were to go from zero to max in one step.
Ok, let's take the worst-case scenario - a catastrophic crack develops as a result of a magnitude elebenty earthquake. Is it possible to handle this scenario?
It depends somewhat on the volume of hydrogen we're talking. For moderate amounts per unit of time, I'd have said yes. You want a reservoir that has an oxygen-free "air gap" (any exceptionally heavy inert gas will do) where the hydrogen can be outgassed into and float above. You then either want a way to be able to perform a controlled burn OR have a catalyst that can safely lock it up.
For large amounts, it's more of a problem. You could, of course, have a "lung" similar to the one used in Biosphere 2, where hydrogen was vented into it. So long as you didn't exceed its capacity, it would give you a way to contain hydrogen with a much lower risk of a Fukushima-style detonation.
Very large amounts, well in excess of what you can contain by these methods, would certainly be possible in a disaster if all the heat exchangers and backups suffered simultaneous structural failure. Which is certainly possible in a major earthquake. What then? Well, the obvious answer to that is to have the heat exchangers placed a significant distance from the reactor core. If an explosion cannot damage the core (because of distance) and the core can be shut down safely in the event of a coolant failure, then you've eliminated that issue.
I'm not saying anyone would actually design or build a reactor around these concepts, merely that they could and that if they did then it would meet the objections raised to that design.
I'll use his example of Daisyworld. In this abstract model, there are two types of daisy - black and white. The black daisies, by lowering the albedo of the surface, warm the local climate up. White daisies, by raising the albedo, cool the local climate down.
If black daisies increased in number when warm, the temperature would rise through a positive feedback loop and they'd cook themselves. They're stable ONLY when they prefer a relatively cool temperature. The opposite is true for white daisies.
This is a negative feedback loop. The populations will grow until the sum total is in equilibrium. Once they reach that point, the solar energy can increase or decrease and the daisies will simply alter ratio accordingly, keeping the temperature of the planet in dynamic equilibrium. You have to reach a catastrophic tipping point before the system is incapable of ever recovering.
ANY system that exhibits properties that violate this basic principle will NEVER reach a stable point, it will catapult itself into a catastrophic state almost immediately and then extinguish itself.
Lovelock's Daisyworld has no consciousness . The idea that Gaia implies consciousness (sometimes referred to as the Strong Gaia hypothesis) is an extension that does not appear to involve James Lovelock or the branches of planetary ecology that he developed. His work tends to be referred to as the Weak Gaia hypothesis in which the planet is an "organism" and "alive", but not conscious.
The short half-life stuff tends to be the isotopes with market value in industrial applications. Cleaning these places up might recover enough material to cover the cost of the cleaning plus a bit extra.
Not sure there need be any risks. I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure. The only danger is that sodium and water shouldn't mix, so avoid using water in the reactor if you're using sodium.
Radioactive dust is a major hazard, but since there's no reason to expose the fuel rods to air, there's no reason for there to be radioactive dust.
Radioactive waste is another hazard, but if you reprocess the rods and separate the different radioisotopes, you can reduce the hazard. Unspent uranium can be put into a new fuel rod, a secondary reactor for consuming plutonium shouldn't be hard, several of the other isotopes have uses in industry, some plutonium can be used in nuclear batteries for space missions, and you only need to deal with what's left. Much less space than trying to store the lot - and it's probably a lot safer.
All safety and backup systems should be triply redundant (at least), with redundant systems NOT in the same place as each other. If by the beach or in earthquake zones, redundant systems should also be behind watertight doors and not kept at ground level. (Active earthquake protection is practical these days, but you need somewhere to put the shock absorbers and protection against sheer forces.)
All this adds cost, yes, but so does leaving a reactor unused for 20+ years. I'm fairly confident that the above is a damn sight cheaper.
Gaia doesn't involve global consciousness. Gaia merely requires that life is dominated by negative feedback loops such that the positive feedback loops are totally suppressed.
Trees aren't equal. Fast-growing trees drain nutrients but absorb little CO2, for example. Very damaging to the environment, if planted in excess - which is why it is common in the US. Plantations are also not "woods" in any meaningful sense - woods aren't just trees, but complex ecosystems that include wildflowers, fungi, etc. Real woods don't generally have massive wildfires, those are almost invariably the consequence of plantations or excessively-managed areas. Not always, true, but natural forests with natural clearings and natural recycling of raw materials will tend to utilize forest fires to sweep out excessive trash and allow seedlings to grow -- this is obviously not possible when the heat destroys even the fire-resistant seed pods/cones and topsoil.
It takes a long time to build merely the infrastructure needed to house and support a fusion facility. For political reasons, the sooner fusion is on-tap after we know how to achieve it. It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if there was a massive construction job program right now, given the current slump.
Do we know enough about the needs of a fusion facility to start work on these surrounding projects?
What you are doing is precisely what I would recommend others do - stay diversified, have many interests that are at most tangentially related, be aware of the wider world, exercise (but not to excess), etc. Stagnation is "easy" and so creates the surface illusion of comfort together with an undercurrent of depression. Based on what you've said, I'm willing to accept that that is something you've avoided in most - if not all - things. There might be areas you could tweak, where you've got a little inflexible, a little rusty, but I doubt you'd get a major boost there. If you keep on expanding the diversity, experiment with new hobbies at random when you get bored of the familiar, etc, then you'll probably find you stay at your typical level of happiness far more than you would if you didn't keep growing, but you probably do that already as well.
I'm not convinced that the majority of the middle class are anything like as mentally or physically agile. There, I would expect a dramatic emotional (and mental) boost from improving the variety in their life AND boosting the rate of change of the variety in their life. You want the first-order differential to be non-zero.
What else? I can only suggest the tediously obvious -- keep everything you do a challenge - enough of one to be interesting and stimulating but no more. Maximizes your odds of benefiting and how much you'll benefit by, which in turn will give you assorted blasts of brain chemicals, which in turn triggers neurogenesis, which in turn creates a long-term boost in your happiness. Seratonin, endorphins - all good stuff, but that gives you a buzz for a few seconds. Boost neurogenesis and the baseline happiness will be increased for the next 3-4 years.
This is part of why stagnation is depressing. The brain is extremely energy-intensive to keep going. The body, having evolved to conserve energy, won't waste it on cells that are not utilized. Of course, most of the brain IS utilized, but there is measurable shrinkage when people do stagnate. Just as cell birth (neurogenesis) raises the baseline mood, cell death lowers it. In consequence, people who are stagnant are more depressed than they would otherwise be. Not necessarily more depressed than average -- a naturally cheerful person who is stagnant may still be "cheerful" (and I'm sure you know lots of those), but it's obvious to look at that that cheer is nothing but a hollow shell of the potential the person actually has. They could be the happiest person alive and yet still be gloomier than they need be.
I was reading independently by age 4, speed-reading by age 5. ("Speed-reading" for a 5 year old means reading a Famous Five novel cover-to-cover in a lunch break without skipping anything.)
Assigned books? I was banned from the school library after I'd read through 75% of it in the first two terms. I didn't wait for anyone to assign me things to read, I read them and to hell with it. I'd finished the local public library's kid's section within the next couple of years, their sci-fi section the year after and had ploughed through virtually every other section there before I'd taken my 11+. The librarians were in a panic when I'd discovered the microfiche.
Looking back on it, I can see I was working at a fraction of the pace I could have been. Assuming relative demonstrated abilities remain the same, then if I was at potential then AVERAGE kids should have been capable of doing what I was actually managing.
So, no, I don't regard this as being about what is or is not "allowed", since motivated kids WILL do what they damn well want. This is about the kids not being motivated in the first place. That, to me, is the real crime. The rest is an excuse to avoid asking why.
Just as the Free Software Foundation carries papers that demonstrate that rewards alter behaviour to get those rewards (which is not the same thing as altering behaviour so as to be productive or meritous), one can argue that deterrents do NOT deter crime, they deter people getting CAUGHT at crime. In other words, they produce more skillful criminals, they do not produce better citizens.
What is needed is for there to be a focus on how to get people to be better citizens. You cannot do that through rewards, you cannot do that through deterrents, what isn't known is what you CAN do that through.
I wouldn't say "legitimately happy". If people were "legitimately happy", they wouldn't own SUVs, oversized televisions or other emotional props. Once you get past something being necessary, you get into the realm of useful. Once you pass the realm of useful, you enter the realm of convenient/pleasurable. Pass THAT realm as well, you get into the turf of Penis Envy.
The majority of middle class folk, these days, are in that final zone. Big Time.
However, the feeble aren't whipping themselves -- the sick are the last people to know that they aren't well. Nor are they truly suffering -- they've a surfeit of carthexis to ensure that they're just Comfortably Numb. Those who don't drug themselves on luxuries (or chemicals - they do exactly the same thing to the brain, so they are the same thing in the end) will feel some pain. But politicians are smart enough to know that there's a lot of inertia - both in individuals and society. Even if one individual exceeds the inertia, it won't do anything. The majority have to exceed their inertia before anything happens and as the Middle East has shown, it takes continuous hellish conditions for upwards of half a millenium before it becomes serious on even something as small as a subcontinent.
The US is bleeding $100 billion a year every year to fight various wars that were largely the fantasy of a mad Texan. Let's say that there's 10 fusion projects with a serious potential of actually breaking through and you fund each at $10 billion more than current - but just as a one-off. So for one additional year, the US bleeds another $100 billion but after that the bleeding stops.
Without any further changes, the net result would be that the money saved would exceed the interest paid on the deficit. Not by much, but by enough. This prevents your fear of a US shutdown. Well, unless a Republican gets into office and destroys the economy again. (Don't blame fusion for your financial problems, blame your own greed for tax cuts. Fusion scientists aren't to blame, you are.) The economy would not only stabilize, but grow. In growing, more revenue is generated, reducing the deficit further. You get positive feedback. The nation will return to where it was before Bush took office.
Not only that, but the cash injection would likely lead to major developments in fusion technology, leading to cheaper power, cleaner power, fewer industrial accidents (and lower healthcare costs as a result), fewer rolling blackouts (if any) in power-hungry cities (and therefore greater productivity, leading to more money earned and thus a stronger economy).
Of course, we could choose your option. Do nothing, go nowhere, watch as the third world overtakes the US in technology (it already has overtaken the US in life expectancy and is running neck-and-neck on education), watch as the US disintegrates and plunges into a national Dark Age (it's dangerously close to one as it is, between the DMCA, current US patent laws and the near-total disintegration of the public infrastructure).
Don't waste my time, or anyone else's, with "reasons" why that won't happen. It is not merely likely, it is inevitable. The decisions over the next couple of years will decide if the US is doomed to mimic every Dark Age that has ever happened OR if it will choose a path of sustainable enlightenment. Just as a star without a core will implode, an empire without a drive to progress will implode. Stagnate and you die.
The US could afford to pay for all of the major fusion ventures on Earth, if not in full then close to it, for the next 5-10 years without even being a measurable blip in the accounts. I don't think we'll have fusion by 2020, but if the US actually did put hard cash on the table to the tune of $10 billion extra per project, we might well be in line for large-scale conversion to fusion by 2025.
The taxpayers just spent $100 billion a year every year for the last 11 years, on average. It took that long to get tired of forking over that kind of extra cash. I think spending one tenth of that in a one-off bill isn't too much to ask.
Thorium isn't good. Much lower energies than conventional fission reactors, the mining isn't cheap or safe and produces just as much pollution and industrial accidents, ignition still requires uranium and there's still waste products - maybe not as radioactive, but still deadly for many decades.
Thorium reactors would be good in space, because the primary fuel is basically inert and you need only a small amount of power to get them started. They could therefore be put into a hibernation state and activated at a remote destination without loss of power. For deep space work, thorium would be superb.
However, given that conventional nuclear power is about equal in cost efficiency to alternative energy sources, when total cost is considered, having something that's less efficient is a losing proposition. Fusion is the best option, cost per watt, we just have to get past the apathy and nihilism.
$4 bln is nothing. The US could fully fund this AND fully fund ITER (as opposed to the dribble they're giving) AND fully fund that joint US-EU project to Mars that's at risk, just by taking the money out of senseless earmarks or by pulling just one thousand extra troops home a few months early.
There's probably more than $4 bln wasted by officials leaving lights on or taps dripping.
You have, however, not just to consider the immediate costs and benefits. There's the long-term as well. Mining uranium and/or coal isn't cheap. Neither is safe disposal of waste from either. Extracting hydrogen is very inexpensive by comparison. Running a traditional or fission-based nuclear power station is labour-intensive, harmful to health and damaging to the environment. Fusion is simpler, so would require fewer experts, and is essentially harm-free. In consequence, fusion isn't just cheap for users, it's cheap for the government. Lower medicare/medicaid costs, experts doing useful things that need experts, reduced demands on emergency services, etc. The savings for government in the long-haul would swamp the development costs completely.
My take is that the US should plunge serious backing into all the major fusion schemes for, say, 5-6 years, then do a bake-off and seriously fund the top two for a further 5-6 years, followed by a second-round bake-off. Last man standing gets serious funding to completion.
(By serious, I mean 100% of the remainder - for the project to operate at maximum benefit - after all commitments by others have been paid up.)
It's not their target, per se. It's earlier than that, but after you take into account vacation time, funding delays and an unexpected blackout due to solar flares, Dec 21 will be when ignition is actually reached.
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Would the Edison use Imperial or Metric units?
The strongest MRI currently used on humans is 9.1T and a 13T MRI scanner is being built - might already be finished. Given that the 9.1T is good enough to see individual neurons, the 13T scanner might be good enough to start seeing the fine structure of the synapses. I look forward to seeing the photos that will hopefully be published once the scanner gets going.
It would be interesting to see how far you could go before the damage becomes excessive. Would it be possible to build an MRI capable of directly observing the proteins that control and form memories? Could you observe the tau protein unpeeling as Alzheimer's begins? (Long before structural changes occur, which in turn is long before symptoms appear.)
How about archaeological uses? Could a high-power MRI reveal something of the mental state of the various bog bodies that have been found? What about Otzi? If we can directly observe memory structure, could we interrogate his brain to find out what happened to him?
The protein structures behind memory are beginning to be understood:
(Discovery of mBDNF) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3747716.stm
(CaMKII association) http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/25/9170.abstract?sid=e8ce0965-4b50-4ee4-913b-16d422f25230
(RNA handling of the proteins) http://www.newswise.com/articles/making-memories-how-one-protein-does-it
We're now very close to understanding how memories form and are activated.
Given the NYPD is reportedly collecting information on anyone left-of-centre, for the crime of being leftwing, under terrorist legislation, I am not confident that any of the rules were being obeyed anyway. Since when has investigating people on the other side of the country been NYPD jurisdiction?
However, Obama is in a pickle. If he cracks down on the abuse of the rules, the Republicans will attack him for being soft on terror. If he does nothing, the Republicans will accuse him of being soft on corruption. His only option left, in an election year, is to legalize the abuses.
Hey, who said anything about "business"? Are you accusing me of being one of those capitalist types? I should hope that in the last 16-17 years of posting here, I've totally disabused people of such a notion.
Sorry, but power generation is a necessary public service and should NOT be done "for profit". It should be done to allow society to function cheaply and efficiently, which means it has to be done from a far more socialist standpoint. Business' only business in power generation should be to ensure that the absence of direct market forces does not lead to laziness or sloppiness.
(Every philosophy has its place, but mission-critical services where disasters are spectacular, deadly and have far-reaching impacts should NOT be subject to trying to wring every last dime out of them.)
Uhhh, covered that by talking about the industrial uses of the waste isotopes. Anything that can be recycled economically would both offset decommissioning costs (by bringing in money) and reduce those costs (you don't have to pay for multi-millenia storage of something you're selling).
There is no fundamental requirement to use water in the heat exchange process. Water is convenient, as it takes an enormous amount of heat to raise it one degree Celsius, but there are other options. Given that the article is concerned with the hidden decommission costs at the end of the lifetime, it seems reasonable enough to consider the initial outlay to be a very small part of the total cost. Given that, it also seems reasonable enough to consider whether you can simply get away with using a greater volume of some inferior (from a heat exchange standpoint) liquid per unit time in order to be able to get the same amount of usable work out of the heat at the end.
If you can show that indeed you can, then the diagrams you've seen aren't important since you would then know that the water can be replaced with something that is not going to react with the sodium.
However, perhaps you end up deciding that water does indeed need to be used. Can it be used safely? Well, heat exchangers don't need to be thin or a single block. They simply need to be efficient. They also need to be easy to monitor and maintain, so that cracks can be rapidly detected and fixed whilst trivial - regardless of where in the structure they form - rather than being so cumbersome to repair that operators have every incentive to wait until they become a major threat. That means they need to be thick enough to be able to provide a very high level of structural integrity under normal operating conditions no matter what part of the heat exchanger you have to replace.
Normal operating conditions? Yes. Even though you probably wouldn't want to have the system running when doing maintenance, you would want it designed to be resilient enough that you actually could.
However, I've already mentioned that I'm stipulating triple redundancy as a minimum for any truly safe design, so you've two complete replacement heat exchange systems that are offline at any given time. You find a crack in the one in use, you switch to one of the backups and then conduct the repairs. If there's a crisis during maintenance, that still gives you an alternative backup - you can either switch to it OR use both to halve the stresses experienced by either.
Of course, that sort of "load balancing" might be what you want anyway - design each heat exchange system to handle the full load and then split the actual load across all three to minimize stresses. If one needs to go offline, the pressure gradient is then somewhat shallower for your backups than it would be if you were to go from zero to max in one step.
Ok, let's take the worst-case scenario - a catastrophic crack develops as a result of a magnitude elebenty earthquake. Is it possible to handle this scenario?
It depends somewhat on the volume of hydrogen we're talking. For moderate amounts per unit of time, I'd have said yes. You want a reservoir that has an oxygen-free "air gap" (any exceptionally heavy inert gas will do) where the hydrogen can be outgassed into and float above. You then either want a way to be able to perform a controlled burn OR have a catalyst that can safely lock it up.
For large amounts, it's more of a problem. You could, of course, have a "lung" similar to the one used in Biosphere 2, where hydrogen was vented into it. So long as you didn't exceed its capacity, it would give you a way to contain hydrogen with a much lower risk of a Fukushima-style detonation.
Very large amounts, well in excess of what you can contain by these methods, would certainly be possible in a disaster if all the heat exchangers and backups suffered simultaneous structural failure. Which is certainly possible in a major earthquake. What then? Well, the obvious answer to that is to have the heat exchangers placed a significant distance from the reactor core. If an explosion cannot damage the core (because of distance) and the core can be shut down safely in the event of a coolant failure, then you've eliminated that issue.
I'm not saying anyone would actually design or build a reactor around these concepts, merely that they could and that if they did then it would meet the objections raised to that design.
That is correct.
I'll use his example of Daisyworld. In this abstract model, there are two types of daisy - black and white. The black daisies, by lowering the albedo of the surface, warm the local climate up. White daisies, by raising the albedo, cool the local climate down.
If black daisies increased in number when warm, the temperature would rise through a positive feedback loop and they'd cook themselves. They're stable ONLY when they prefer a relatively cool temperature. The opposite is true for white daisies.
This is a negative feedback loop. The populations will grow until the sum total is in equilibrium. Once they reach that point, the solar energy can increase or decrease and the daisies will simply alter ratio accordingly, keeping the temperature of the planet in dynamic equilibrium. You have to reach a catastrophic tipping point before the system is incapable of ever recovering.
ANY system that exhibits properties that violate this basic principle will NEVER reach a stable point, it will catapult itself into a catastrophic state almost immediately and then extinguish itself.
Lovelock's Daisyworld has no consciousness . The idea that Gaia implies consciousness (sometimes referred to as the Strong Gaia hypothesis) is an extension that does not appear to involve James Lovelock or the branches of planetary ecology that he developed. His work tends to be referred to as the Weak Gaia hypothesis in which the planet is an "organism" and "alive", but not conscious.
The short half-life stuff tends to be the isotopes with market value in industrial applications. Cleaning these places up might recover enough material to cover the cost of the cleaning plus a bit extra.
Not sure there need be any risks. I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure. The only danger is that sodium and water shouldn't mix, so avoid using water in the reactor if you're using sodium.
Radioactive dust is a major hazard, but since there's no reason to expose the fuel rods to air, there's no reason for there to be radioactive dust.
Radioactive waste is another hazard, but if you reprocess the rods and separate the different radioisotopes, you can reduce the hazard. Unspent uranium can be put into a new fuel rod, a secondary reactor for consuming plutonium shouldn't be hard, several of the other isotopes have uses in industry, some plutonium can be used in nuclear batteries for space missions, and you only need to deal with what's left. Much less space than trying to store the lot - and it's probably a lot safer.
All safety and backup systems should be triply redundant (at least), with redundant systems NOT in the same place as each other. If by the beach or in earthquake zones, redundant systems should also be behind watertight doors and not kept at ground level. (Active earthquake protection is practical these days, but you need somewhere to put the shock absorbers and protection against sheer forces.)
All this adds cost, yes, but so does leaving a reactor unused for 20+ years. I'm fairly confident that the above is a damn sight cheaper.
Gaia doesn't involve global consciousness. Gaia merely requires that life is dominated by negative feedback loops such that the positive feedback loops are totally suppressed.
Trees aren't equal. Fast-growing trees drain nutrients but absorb little CO2, for example. Very damaging to the environment, if planted in excess - which is why it is common in the US. Plantations are also not "woods" in any meaningful sense - woods aren't just trees, but complex ecosystems that include wildflowers, fungi, etc. Real woods don't generally have massive wildfires, those are almost invariably the consequence of plantations or excessively-managed areas. Not always, true, but natural forests with natural clearings and natural recycling of raw materials will tend to utilize forest fires to sweep out excessive trash and allow seedlings to grow -- this is obviously not possible when the heat destroys even the fire-resistant seed pods/cones and topsoil.
It takes a long time to build merely the infrastructure needed to house and support a fusion facility. For political reasons, the sooner fusion is on-tap after we know how to achieve it. It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if there was a massive construction job program right now, given the current slump.
Do we know enough about the needs of a fusion facility to start work on these surrounding projects?
What you are doing is precisely what I would recommend others do - stay diversified, have many interests that are at most tangentially related, be aware of the wider world, exercise (but not to excess), etc. Stagnation is "easy" and so creates the surface illusion of comfort together with an undercurrent of depression. Based on what you've said, I'm willing to accept that that is something you've avoided in most - if not all - things. There might be areas you could tweak, where you've got a little inflexible, a little rusty, but I doubt you'd get a major boost there. If you keep on expanding the diversity, experiment with new hobbies at random when you get bored of the familiar, etc, then you'll probably find you stay at your typical level of happiness far more than you would if you didn't keep growing, but you probably do that already as well.
I'm not convinced that the majority of the middle class are anything like as mentally or physically agile. There, I would expect a dramatic emotional (and mental) boost from improving the variety in their life AND boosting the rate of change of the variety in their life. You want the first-order differential to be non-zero.
What else? I can only suggest the tediously obvious -- keep everything you do a challenge - enough of one to be interesting and stimulating but no more. Maximizes your odds of benefiting and how much you'll benefit by, which in turn will give you assorted blasts of brain chemicals, which in turn triggers neurogenesis, which in turn creates a long-term boost in your happiness. Seratonin, endorphins - all good stuff, but that gives you a buzz for a few seconds. Boost neurogenesis and the baseline happiness will be increased for the next 3-4 years.
This is part of why stagnation is depressing. The brain is extremely energy-intensive to keep going. The body, having evolved to conserve energy, won't waste it on cells that are not utilized. Of course, most of the brain IS utilized, but there is measurable shrinkage when people do stagnate. Just as cell birth (neurogenesis) raises the baseline mood, cell death lowers it. In consequence, people who are stagnant are more depressed than they would otherwise be. Not necessarily more depressed than average -- a naturally cheerful person who is stagnant may still be "cheerful" (and I'm sure you know lots of those), but it's obvious to look at that that cheer is nothing but a hollow shell of the potential the person actually has. They could be the happiest person alive and yet still be gloomier than they need be.
I was reading independently by age 4, speed-reading by age 5. ("Speed-reading" for a 5 year old means reading a Famous Five novel cover-to-cover in a lunch break without skipping anything.)
Assigned books? I was banned from the school library after I'd read through 75% of it in the first two terms. I didn't wait for anyone to assign me things to read, I read them and to hell with it. I'd finished the local public library's kid's section within the next couple of years, their sci-fi section the year after and had ploughed through virtually every other section there before I'd taken my 11+. The librarians were in a panic when I'd discovered the microfiche.
Looking back on it, I can see I was working at a fraction of the pace I could have been. Assuming relative demonstrated abilities remain the same, then if I was at potential then AVERAGE kids should have been capable of doing what I was actually managing.
So, no, I don't regard this as being about what is or is not "allowed", since motivated kids WILL do what they damn well want. This is about the kids not being motivated in the first place. That, to me, is the real crime. The rest is an excuse to avoid asking why.
Just as the Free Software Foundation carries papers that demonstrate that rewards alter behaviour to get those rewards (which is not the same thing as altering behaviour so as to be productive or meritous), one can argue that deterrents do NOT deter crime, they deter people getting CAUGHT at crime. In other words, they produce more skillful criminals, they do not produce better citizens.
What is needed is for there to be a focus on how to get people to be better citizens. You cannot do that through rewards, you cannot do that through deterrents, what isn't known is what you CAN do that through.
I wouldn't say "legitimately happy". If people were "legitimately happy", they wouldn't own SUVs, oversized televisions or other emotional props. Once you get past something being necessary, you get into the realm of useful. Once you pass the realm of useful, you enter the realm of convenient/pleasurable. Pass THAT realm as well, you get into the turf of Penis Envy.
The majority of middle class folk, these days, are in that final zone. Big Time.
However, the feeble aren't whipping themselves -- the sick are the last people to know that they aren't well. Nor are they truly suffering -- they've a surfeit of carthexis to ensure that they're just Comfortably Numb. Those who don't drug themselves on luxuries (or chemicals - they do exactly the same thing to the brain, so they are the same thing in the end) will feel some pain. But politicians are smart enough to know that there's a lot of inertia - both in individuals and society. Even if one individual exceeds the inertia, it won't do anything. The majority have to exceed their inertia before anything happens and as the Middle East has shown, it takes continuous hellish conditions for upwards of half a millenium before it becomes serious on even something as small as a subcontinent.
I thought Xenocide was when you killed a virtual Linux server.
The US is bleeding $100 billion a year every year to fight various wars that were largely the fantasy of a mad Texan. Let's say that there's 10 fusion projects with a serious potential of actually breaking through and you fund each at $10 billion more than current - but just as a one-off. So for one additional year, the US bleeds another $100 billion but after that the bleeding stops.
Without any further changes, the net result would be that the money saved would exceed the interest paid on the deficit. Not by much, but by enough. This prevents your fear of a US shutdown. Well, unless a Republican gets into office and destroys the economy again. (Don't blame fusion for your financial problems, blame your own greed for tax cuts. Fusion scientists aren't to blame, you are.) The economy would not only stabilize, but grow. In growing, more revenue is generated, reducing the deficit further. You get positive feedback. The nation will return to where it was before Bush took office.
Not only that, but the cash injection would likely lead to major developments in fusion technology, leading to cheaper power, cleaner power, fewer industrial accidents (and lower healthcare costs as a result), fewer rolling blackouts (if any) in power-hungry cities (and therefore greater productivity, leading to more money earned and thus a stronger economy).
Of course, we could choose your option. Do nothing, go nowhere, watch as the third world overtakes the US in technology (it already has overtaken the US in life expectancy and is running neck-and-neck on education), watch as the US disintegrates and plunges into a national Dark Age (it's dangerously close to one as it is, between the DMCA, current US patent laws and the near-total disintegration of the public infrastructure).
Don't waste my time, or anyone else's, with "reasons" why that won't happen. It is not merely likely, it is inevitable. The decisions over the next couple of years will decide if the US is doomed to mimic every Dark Age that has ever happened OR if it will choose a path of sustainable enlightenment. Just as a star without a core will implode, an empire without a drive to progress will implode. Stagnate and you die.
The US could afford to pay for all of the major fusion ventures on Earth, if not in full then close to it, for the next 5-10 years without even being a measurable blip in the accounts. I don't think we'll have fusion by 2020, but if the US actually did put hard cash on the table to the tune of $10 billion extra per project, we might well be in line for large-scale conversion to fusion by 2025.
The taxpayers just spent $100 billion a year every year for the last 11 years, on average. It took that long to get tired of forking over that kind of extra cash. I think spending one tenth of that in a one-off bill isn't too much to ask.
Thorium isn't good. Much lower energies than conventional fission reactors, the mining isn't cheap or safe and produces just as much pollution and industrial accidents, ignition still requires uranium and there's still waste products - maybe not as radioactive, but still deadly for many decades.
Thorium reactors would be good in space, because the primary fuel is basically inert and you need only a small amount of power to get them started. They could therefore be put into a hibernation state and activated at a remote destination without loss of power. For deep space work, thorium would be superb.
However, given that conventional nuclear power is about equal in cost efficiency to alternative energy sources, when total cost is considered, having something that's less efficient is a losing proposition. Fusion is the best option, cost per watt, we just have to get past the apathy and nihilism.
$4 bln is nothing. The US could fully fund this AND fully fund ITER (as opposed to the dribble they're giving) AND fully fund that joint US-EU project to Mars that's at risk, just by taking the money out of senseless earmarks or by pulling just one thousand extra troops home a few months early.
There's probably more than $4 bln wasted by officials leaving lights on or taps dripping.
You have, however, not just to consider the immediate costs and benefits. There's the long-term as well. Mining uranium and/or coal isn't cheap. Neither is safe disposal of waste from either. Extracting hydrogen is very inexpensive by comparison. Running a traditional or fission-based nuclear power station is labour-intensive, harmful to health and damaging to the environment. Fusion is simpler, so would require fewer experts, and is essentially harm-free. In consequence, fusion isn't just cheap for users, it's cheap for the government. Lower medicare/medicaid costs, experts doing useful things that need experts, reduced demands on emergency services, etc. The savings for government in the long-haul would swamp the development costs completely.
My take is that the US should plunge serious backing into all the major fusion schemes for, say, 5-6 years, then do a bake-off and seriously fund the top two for a further 5-6 years, followed by a second-round bake-off. Last man standing gets serious funding to completion.
(By serious, I mean 100% of the remainder - for the project to operate at maximum benefit - after all commitments by others have been paid up.)
It's not their target, per se. It's earlier than that, but after you take into account vacation time, funding delays and an unexpected blackout due to solar flares, Dec 21 will be when ignition is actually reached.