What this guy said. Thorium reactors are the way forward, IMHO. Hell, even India is conducting ground breaking research into these. (No offence intended, just making a point.)
Just because an accident happened, doesn't make it less safe. That is not how statistics work.
By "country-worth of mess" do you mean the 20km exclusion zone? The biggest mess to come from Fukushima is the political mess from TEPCO trying to cover stuff up.
And, to answer you question, absolutely nothing (nobody?). However, they don't tend to build power plants on fault lines, so the probability is very low. Similarly low, in fact, to a Magnitude 9 'quake happening directly under Tokyo, and I can guarantee that that would cause a bigger mess.
I agree that were a natural disaster to strike a nuclear plant (you seem to have misspelled this, by the way), there is a possibility of radiation leakage, and possibly even casualties.
However, a coal fire power plant is continuously pumping soot, CO2, and a whole host of other unfriendly substances into the atmosphere. A report from last year estimated that coal power kills roughly 13,000 Americans each year.
So, yes, nuclear power is not perfect, but the perceived risk is far greater than the actual risk. This can be blamed, in part, to the scaremongering of the media, but mostly stems from the the fact that the general public does not understand radiation, so is naturally scared of it.
Could this be the answer to cooling 3D ICs too? Layers of this stuff inbetween the layers of silicon. The thermal regulation seems to be where most 3D ICs fall down.
The main problem with CNT is the health concerns. Because it's such a new material, nobody really knows what will happen if it gets released into the environment. It's already widely accepted that they might be carcinogenic if inhaled, but obviously nobody wants to do studies. Most of these projects fall down at the H&S hurdle.
I used to use Dasher on my old iPAQ from 2004. For the first couple of weeks, it was only slightly better than the OSK. Then as its dictionary of my words (and my practice) grew, I could eventually use it at speeds rivalling a QWERTY keyboard, probably after a couple of months or so.
It also looked awesome while you 'typed'. Like some sort of bizarre arcade game.
While similar in effect to an interference patter type experiment, the actual physics behind the experiment in the article is subtly different. A 'Newtons Rings' type pattern emerges when the distance between the two (partially) reflective surfaces are a certain distance apart, coinciding with an integer value of wavelengths of the light involved. This can can, in theory, be any distance, as long as exact number of wavelengths fit inside. For example, standard interferometers can have distances as large as a centimetre, which is huge compared to the wavelength of visible light.
The effect described is based on the distance between two very reflective surfaces being smaller than the wavelength of light involved, thus preventing the light from travelling further down the waveguide. The taper on the waveguide means that as you go to shorter wavelengths of light, it can travel further, thus generating a 'trapped rainbow' of visible light inside the waveguide.
A key difference to note is that the fringe pattern generated by an interferometer type setup repeats itself as you increase/decrease the distance between the two reflective surfaces, so generating a series of lines or concentric circles. The setup with the 'trapped rainbow' will create a single rainbow pattern.
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FACTS.
FACTS.
FACTS.
FACTS.
Pro-Nuke news is out there, it's just nobody will report on it, because it won't attract as much viewers/readers.
What this guy said. Thorium reactors are the way forward, IMHO. Hell, even India is conducting ground breaking research into these. (No offence intended, just making a point.)
Just because an accident happened, doesn't make it less safe. That is not how statistics work.
By "country-worth of mess" do you mean the 20km exclusion zone? The biggest mess to come from Fukushima is the political mess from TEPCO trying to cover stuff up.
And, to answer you question, absolutely nothing (nobody?). However, they don't tend to build power plants on fault lines, so the probability is very low. Similarly low, in fact, to a Magnitude 9 'quake happening directly under Tokyo, and I can guarantee that that would cause a bigger mess.
I agree that were a natural disaster to strike a nuclear plant (you seem to have misspelled this, by the way), there is a possibility of radiation leakage, and possibly even casualties.
However, a coal fire power plant is continuously pumping soot, CO2, and a whole host of other unfriendly substances into the atmosphere. A report from last year estimated that coal power kills roughly 13,000 Americans each year.
So, yes, nuclear power is not perfect, but the perceived risk is far greater than the actual risk. This can be blamed, in part, to the scaremongering of the media, but mostly stems from the the fact that the general public does not understand radiation, so is naturally scared of it.
(Source)
... planetary-scale hazardous installations ...
Are you aware that nuclear power is safer, in terms of death toll and environmental impact, than both fossil fuels and hydroelectric power? Source
Oh great, more ammunition for the protest against nuclear power. Just what this planet needs.
Fortunately Fortran hasn't stood still. Later versions are a bit more lenient, as they are no longer need to be set as punch cards!
You can even have comments in your code, radical!
"How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"
By using a language that has lasted through that time to this one: Fortran.
Fortran is still one of the most widely used languages in scientific applications, and is a great starting point for beginners.
No, I can see why they chose that. SpongeBob's a fun guy.
People in the next century are going to seriously question the sanity of this one if this sort of stuff continues.
It's like XKCD, but without the funny.
While this is a very impressive piece of engineering, how exactly is a rolling robot supposed to fix satellites?
Surely the car wouldn't send the data anywhere; it would just be used to disable the ignition. How is this an invasion of privacy?
Could this be the answer to cooling 3D ICs too? Layers of this stuff inbetween the layers of silicon. The thermal regulation seems to be where most 3D ICs fall down.
The main problem with CNT is the health concerns. Because it's such a new material, nobody really knows what will happen if it gets released into the environment. It's already widely accepted that they might be carcinogenic if inhaled, but obviously nobody wants to do studies. Most of these projects fall down at the H&S hurdle.
That just raises a nasty cause/effect paradox.
I used to use Dasher on my old iPAQ from 2004. For the first couple of weeks, it was only slightly better than the OSK. Then as its dictionary of my words (and my practice) grew, I could eventually use it at speeds rivalling a QWERTY keyboard, probably after a couple of months or so.
It also looked awesome while you 'typed'. Like some sort of bizarre arcade game.
While similar in effect to an interference patter type experiment, the actual physics behind the experiment in the article is subtly different. A 'Newtons Rings' type pattern emerges when the distance between the two (partially) reflective surfaces are a certain distance apart, coinciding with an integer value of wavelengths of the light involved. This can can, in theory, be any distance, as long as exact number of wavelengths fit inside. For example, standard interferometers can have distances as large as a centimetre, which is huge compared to the wavelength of visible light.
The effect described is based on the distance between two very reflective surfaces being smaller than the wavelength of light involved, thus preventing the light from travelling further down the waveguide. The taper on the waveguide means that as you go to shorter wavelengths of light, it can travel further, thus generating a 'trapped rainbow' of visible light inside the waveguide.
A key difference to note is that the fringe pattern generated by an interferometer type setup repeats itself as you increase/decrease the distance between the two reflective surfaces, so generating a series of lines or concentric circles. The setup with the 'trapped rainbow' will create a single rainbow pattern.