A huge part of the film production chain is in distribution. It is so critical that, for non-major studio pictures, distributors must be found before the film is started. Independent films can get made, find no real distribution, and are never heard from again.
So saying that you are distributing you film over bittorrent is like saying that you are self publishing a book. Good luck with that. You have about as much chance as success with no theatrical release as a self published book has of getting on the NY Times best seller list.
A group of former astronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program,
So the Obama administration was in charge when the program ended. He's been in office the last three years of a thirty year program. Is it credible to blame it all on him? Of course not.
These programs have huge momentum. They take a long time to ramp up and to ramp down. Years. If the Bush administration had enabled a meaningful strategy then the future at NASA, including manned missions, would be well defined. They are responsible for the lack of a clear path for US manned space flight.
It's not really surprising, given the Bush track record. The Wall St. meltdown, the failed Katrina response, the invasion of Iraq. Leaving NASA in the lurch is small potatoes compared to the big time screw ups. Still, they were consistent in screwing up everything they touched.
On June 11, a dairy farmer in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, chalked a note on the wall of his cattle shed. "If only there wasn't a nuclear power plant," the message read, in reference to the damaged Fukushima No. 1 plant just 45 km away, which had effectively ended his livelihood.
The man already had culled his livestock after raw milk shipments from the area where he lived had been stopped. Now, he chose to end his own life, too. "I have lost the energy to carry on working," he added in what would be his final words.
In March, a cabbage farmer in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture, hanged himself after radioactive substances detected in the soil resulted in restrictions being placed on local produce
The current number of displaced people is around 90000. Not all of these are because of radiation. There are many older people in shelters, and the living conditions are harsh. This is taking a physical and mental toll. Some vulnerable people have already died, and the suicide rate is up. Those evacuated because of radiation are among the most effected because of increased health worries and uncertainty about the future. I was unable to find any online figures, but it is clear the survivors have a lower life expectancy.
TEPCO has been criticized in providing safety equipment for its workers. After NISA warned TEPCO that workers were sharing dosimeters, since most of the devices were lost in the disaster, the utility sent more to the plant. Japanese media has reported that that workers indicate that standard decontamination procedures are not being observed. Others reports suggest that contract workers are given more dangerous work than TEPCO employees. TEPCO is also seeking workers willing to risk high radiation levels for short periods of time in exchange for high pay. Confidential documents acquired by the Japanese Asahi newspaper suggest that TEPCO hid high levels of radioactive contamination from employees in the days following the accident. In particular, the Asahi reported that radiation levels of 300 mSv/h were detected at least twice on 13 March, but that "the workers who were trying to bring the situation under control at the plant were not informed of the levels."
In the Japanese press these people are being referred to as "disposable employees".
So I guess these people don't count. Not the ones who are already dead, or the ones who will be dying sooner or later. Or maybe you don't think these people are humans, and their lives don't count?
By the way, who is this bozo Herring? i looked him up on Google, and all I got was "Author, Husband, Father, Grandfather and avid golfer. Rabid Husker football fan as well. I'm a proud Constitutional Conservative in the mold of Reagan."
So his credentials are that he is a "Constitutional Conservative". No civil engineering or technology background? Did he ever work in water management? I did find books on Amazon on wildlife management by Joe Herring from 1962, so that info is about 50 years out of date. It's not clear if this is the same guy. As far as we know, he has absolutely no meaningful qualifications.
So this is an opinion piece based on political ideology, not facts. I have observed that when died in the wool conservatives make arguments about technical subjects, they are completely fact free. Why do they need facts, when their political philosophy tells them that their uninformed opinion is God's absolute truth?
This flood has similar characteristics to large wildfires. We know that there are "natural disasters" that overwhelm any attempt at human control.We also know that human intervention can make these events worse. "Protecting" forests by suppressing natural fires makes larger more destructive fires inevitable. Farming and flood control alter the landscape, and certainly have an impact on these large rare events.
I'm not familiar with flooding, so I can't comment on the impact of human intervention on this disaster. I do know that Herring says nothing about the issue, but is using this as a cynical opportunity to blame environmentalists (i.e. damn hippies). His piece is political propaganda masquerading as a rational critique. It's reasonable to have this on Slashdot, but don't pretend that it's objective or has any factual contents.
We know that some of these objects are not very solid, but are loosely bound conglomerates of rubble. Is there any chance that this could brake into fragments due to tidal forces when it passes close to the Earth? Is there any information about it's composition?
Absolutely correct. If things are bad at the NSA because of lack of transparency, just imaging how bad they are at DHS (Homeland Security). Or as I like to think of it, the Department of Homeland Pork.
There is a false dichotomy: electronic books or paper books. Books with print are not utterly dependent on the existing paper printing infrastructure. It is absurd to assume that future manufacturing technology will not be able to turn out a physical version of a book on demand, most likely at a small price. It will be up to the user to decide if they want an ebook or a physical book.
Heck, listeners are going back to vinyl recording right now. Not a huge amount, but it is one of the growing sectors in a shrinking market. And this is without an "on demand" production model.
As I sit here I am wearing clothes with cotton fabrics. Synthetic fibers did not make cotton obsolete.
I expect that there will always be the use of printed physical books, even if paper is not the physical substrate. Will it be the majority? Most likely not, but it will still be an important component.
Look at performance critical applications: signal processing, image processing, graphics, data base implementation, operating systems. Any time performance is high on the list people pick C, C++, Fortran, and sometimes ADA. Compilation is the only feasible choice. One thing that compilers give is the ability to tune the algorithm based on real execution profiling. If you don't compile at some point you will run into language implementation decisions that are out of the coderscontrol, and you will hit a wall. This means more work, but greater effort gives better results. If other things like programmer time or ease of modification are important then non-compiled languages may be better. One size does not fit all.
How nice to know that Wikipedia is a complete failure, since it is written in PHP, a non-strongly typed language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki.
Like most Slashdot Pundits, you confuse narrow technical attributes of a tool with if it's utility in a particular situation. PHP is really good at serving pages, and is fast, robust and scalable. The success of the MidiaWiki platform is more then enough proof. The people who built it are smart and made a good choice in PHP, as the result demonstrates.
We are so fortunate to have you on Slashdot, since you can so easily dispense the absolute truth completely unencumbered by any pesky annoying real world examples. You, and the moderators who promoted you to +5 Interesting, are what makes Slashdot great. You are also the reason I post as Required Snark, because reality must occasionally make an appearance, even in Slashdot fantasy land,.
Microsoft Flight simulator was dumped in 2009. It was not only used for aircraft simulation, but also for geographic information systems. Microsoft was lying to these users even after they shut down the group supporting the project, but the truth came out from the laid off employees. Locheed picked up the professional version recently and is supporting their version. I have no idea what this new version means to the GIS projects that were using it. I assume that many of the GIS users are completely screwed at this point no matter what.
Why does anyone think that NET users are any less disposable then the GIS users?
The Bush White House e-mail controversy surfaced in 2007, during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an e-mail server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act. Over 5 million e-mails may have been lost or deleted. Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.
So your are trying to defend Palin by attacking Obama for something that hasn't happened yet, given the 12 year release cycle (see the other previous reply). Meanwhile, in the real world, the previous administration blatantly broke the law to avoid political embarrassment and likely criminal proceedings. If you wanted an example of non-compliance, the Bush example has actual relevance: Palin complied, Bush didn't. This makes Palin look OK, so you would have made you nominal point, while being factual. However, if you used this example you would be explicitly criticizing someone on your political side of the fence, which you would never do.
Instead you used this as an excuse to attack the media and the Obama administration. I expect partisan politics on Slashdot, and that is fine as long as things make sense. Your post is ignorant and contra-factual. The only thing you have acomplished is showing that your political opinions are stupid.
Today, Tetsuo Matsui at the University of Tokyo, says the limited data from Fukushima indicates that nuclear chain reactions must have reignited at Fuksuhima up to 12 days after the accident.
As Time Magazine blogger Eben Harrell pointed out on March 30th:
The IAEA has said that the Fukushima nuclear power plant may have achieved re-criticality. “There is no final assessment,” IAEA nuclear safety director Denis Flory said at a press conference on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. “This may happen locally and possibly increase the releases.”
Arnie Gunderson says as of June 3rd:
Unit 3 may not have melted through and that means that some of the fuel certainly is lying on the bottom, but it may not have melted through and some of the fuel may still look like fuel, although it is certainly brittle. And it’s possible that when the fuel is in that configuration that you can get a re-criticality. It’s also possible in any of the fuel pools, one, two, three, and four pools, that you could get a criticality, as well. So there’s been frequent enough high iodine indications to lead me to believe that either one of the four fuel pools or the Unit 3 reactor is in fact, every once in a while starting itself up and then it gets to a point where it gets so hot that it shuts itself down and it kind of cycles.
Another recent post points out:
Radiation levels in water inside the silt fence near reactor 2 are high and rising, despite large amounts of dilution. Continued very high levels of Iodine 131 with a half life of 8 days are very hard to explain for a reactor that has been “shut down”. Normally Iodine levels would drop several orders of magnitude below cesium activity levels over the sixty day period shown in the graph, but instead they continue to track each other. The level of 10,000 Bq/liter I-131 is very problematic. It is much higher than would be expected for a reactor in cold shut down for 2 1/2 months.
The situation at Fukushima is not stable and in fact the danger is increasing. The stopgap cooling by injecting tons of water into the reactors and fuel rod storage is creating a massive burden of highly radioactive water that is a storage and disposal nightmare. There has been some limited success in providing recirculation cooling to the spent rod pool for unit 1, but that has a modest effect on the radioactive water situation.
The plan to reduce radioactivity in existing water and recirculate it for cooling is still in process. It is not clear if the capacity of this system will be able to keep up with current cooling needs, much less deal with the backlog. If the reactors and fuel storage are generating new radioactive material, the cleanup system is even less likely to be adequate.
If there is re-criticality the cleanup becomes that much harder. There is also the possibility of more fires/explosions because of radioactive decay heat sources. Continued earthquakes or typhoons could trigger other large release of radioactive material into the general environment.
The plant is leaking highly radioactive water right now and this problem is being swept under the rug. There will be a permanent exclusion zone at the plant site. Even worse, the ocean region will have long lasting radiation contamination that will cripple the seafood industry for a large area of the Japanese coast.
Things are a lot worse then anyone is willing to admit.
When your business model becomes obsolete you can try to keep going by changing the law. This has two consequences: it doesn't work and it eliminates competition. Both will eventually destroy the market.
No one has a "right" to make money. You have the right to engage in business and either succeed or fail based on your merits and the market. Using the law to prop up a no longer viable business model is the end of capitalism. However, in the current political climate it is very easy to buy this kind of legislation. In the long run it blurs the distinction between legitimate business and a protection racket.
Please don't call it capitalism, because it's not. This mislabeling adds insult to injury. It insults our intelligence.
One way to keep the cost down would be to evolve the design, rather then do a completely new version. If they stick with a compatible Cell processor, they could save a lot on software development. This would require a new cheaper version of the Cell, but now that they've done it once that would not be as huge an effort.
Note that I am not passing judgment, good or bad, on the Cell. The question is how they get to the PS4 and minimize cost and risk,
“There is a tremendous incentive to develop new reactors that have more inherent, intrinsic safety features, and we’ve been doing this for some time at ANR and at other research organizations,” said Hussein Khalil, director of Argonne’s Nuclear Energy Division.
“They’ve been developed to a fairly high degree of technical maturity, but none of them have been successfully commercialized yet because it appears they can’t yet compete on an economic basis with the existing technology.”
So we know how to build safer plants, but the nuclear industry can't afford or refuses to make the investment in protecting the public.
The bottom line is that it's a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-time disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term. Yet in financial terms, nuclear incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.
One estimate by a German think tank shows that coverage for every euro1 trillion ($1.5 trillion) in estimated damages would theoretically cost annual insurance of euro47 billion ($68.5 billion).
In Switzerland, the obligatory insurance for nuclear plants is being raised from 1 to 1.8 billion Swiss francs ($2 billion), but a government agency estimates that a Chernobyl-style disaster might cost more than 4 trillion francs — about eight times the country's annual economic output.
"Capping the insurance was a clear decision to provide a non-negligible subsidy to the technology," said Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and longtime head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said.
So the lack of meaningful insurance shifts the economic risk on to the public and is effectively a huge direct subsidy for the nuclear power industry. It seems very likely that if the same level of support were put into renewable energy that it would be very competitive with fossil fuel. As well as being much less risky. But guess who has the bigger lobby and more entrenched businesses?
Thank you for pointing to the NYT article. I have been trying to get more concrete information about how core material may have entered the local environment, but all I could find was secondary sources. Everything I have heard so far about this, like the Fairwinds video, has not attributed a source.
I consider the Fairwinds site to be intrinsically a commentary site, not a news site. They are overtly anti-nuclear power, so that must be taken into consideration. Even so, they make their assertions using technically based reasoning, which is very rare. Their arguments are made with enough detail that you can decide for yourself if you agree or disagree. I respect them because of this.
The presence of any core material outside the reactor vessel is a very big deal in my opinion. It is just not supposed to happen, even in a worse case scenario. Given that the NYT report was based on an NRC document, the lack of any follow on reporting is a huge failure in journalism. I can't say if it is a cover up or just pure incompetence, but something is really wrong in the media if this did not become a major topic of reporting.
I am doubtful about the possibility of an oil based explosion. I don't see where a large amount of oil would be stored in the right place for this to happen. There is also no obvious hydrocarbon fire after the explosion, which I think would be likely. Check out this Wikipedia article about the criticality accident at the SL-1 test reactor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1_Reactor_Accident It seems to match the Fairwinds hypothesis rather well.
The explosion in Unit 3 was a criticality event in the spent fuel storage pool, according the this source http://vimeo.com/22865967
There were fuel rod pieces found two miles away from the containment structures. This fact has been completely ignored by the media.
The hypothesis is that there was explosion in the spent fuel rod storage in Unit 3, and it was strong enough to blow rods out of the pool. Unit 3 uses MOX fuel containing plutonium, so it poses a potentially greater health risk. The suggestion is that there was a "prompt criticality" event where a hydrogen explosion mechanically shifted the rods so they went critical and released additional energy resulting in a much stronger explosion.
The follow on video http://vimeo.com/23393101 says that if the fuel rods went prompt critical, that highly radioactive material was vaporized and ejected into the atmosphere. This is the black cloud that was only seen in the Unit 3 explosion. The reason this had minimal impact is that most of the material went out to sea. This is one of the reasons that there are such high levels of radiation on the sea floor by the plant. If the prevailing winds had blow over land then a Chernobyl style uninhabitable zone would have been created in a large area next to the plant.
Currently this is a hypothesis, but if it did happen it would be easy to detect based on the radioactive isotopes at the scene. Both the US and Japanese governments, and perhaps China and S. Korea would also be able to figure this out. Given that there has been almost no mention of how fuel rod components have been blown all over the landscape, It is conceivable that this situation has been kept under wraps.
The prototype shown in the pictures is a civilian aircraft with a tail number so it can be tracked. If you go to http://flightaware.com/live/ and type in the tail number N355SX you can find out where it is. I just looked and it seems to be on route as I am writing this. This must be the manned version, because UAV aircraft would not have a tail number as a civilian aircraft.
I wonder if the tracking site can stand up to Slashdot? We'll see...
The goal was to get numerical results to 1% accuracy, and the actual measurements only achieved %19 percent accuracy. This was due to a design error.
Mechanically, the spheres were the roundest objects ever manufactured, Everitt explained. Were one blown up to the size of Earth, the biggest hill on it would be 3 meters tall. However, trapped charges in the niobium made the gyroscopes far less round electrically; an Earth-sized map of a sphere's voltage landscape would sport peaks as high as Mount Everest. Interactions between those imperfections and ones in the gyroscopes' housing created tiny tugs, and to reach the final precisions, researchers spent 5 years figuring out how to correct for them.
On top of that, other researchers made better measurements using other much cheaper satellites.
Gravity Probe B fell well short of the precision developers had hoped to achieve in making the key measurement. Moreover, the project got scooped 6 years ago, when two physicists made a similar measurement using data from much cheaper satellites.
So they got scooped and their final results were not what they had planned. Not a complete failure, but not a real success either.
So he went to a fossil fuel oriented convention to to talk about extracting an energy source that we don't know how to actually use. Do you think they just might have been laughing at him behind his back? Or is it possible that they were pretending to take him seriously because they love the idea of wasting resources for alternate energy development on something that is impractical for the foreseeable future?
Isn't that like saying that Windows should have fewer security holes then Linux because they charge for the product and are therefore able to put more money into it? It's nonsense.
In a weird way, your question mimics the claim made by MicroSoft: Windows is better because you have to pay for it, and so MS has a stake in providing a good and reliable user experience. In fact, this argument works in some business/government circles, because they feel that without a business organization backing up the product, there is no accountability.
So for some users, it is NOT nonsense. Even when real world experience shows MS does a worse job then open source alternatives.
Well, since there is no way to predict if a new mathematics PhD will ever generate any important new mathematics, why are we supporting anyone to get a PhD in mathematics? Most math PhDs just use what has already been proven, so they are only checking existing proofs anyway. What use would new proofs be even if they are created?
All I'm doing is applying your argument about physics to your domain, mathematics. I'm confident that you will now question math PhD programs, because application of your argument is logically based. Happy now?
Slashdot Mirror
So saying that you are distributing you film over bittorrent is like saying that you are self publishing a book. Good luck with that. You have about as much chance as success with no theatrical release as a self published book has of getting on the NY Times best seller list.
So the Obama administration was in charge when the program ended. He's been in office the last three years of a thirty year program. Is it credible to blame it all on him? Of course not.
These programs have huge momentum. They take a long time to ramp up and to ramp down. Years. If the Bush administration had enabled a meaningful strategy then the future at NASA, including manned missions, would be well defined. They are responsible for the lack of a clear path for US manned space flight.
It's not really surprising, given the Bush track record. The Wall St. meltdown, the failed Katrina response, the invasion of Iraq. Leaving NASA in the lurch is small potatoes compared to the big time screw ups. Still, they were consistent in screwing up everything they touched.
The current number of displaced people is around 90000. Not all of these are because of radiation. There are many older people in shelters, and the living conditions are harsh. This is taking a physical and mental toll. Some vulnerable people have already died, and the suicide rate is up. Those evacuated because of radiation are among the most effected because of increased health worries and uncertainty about the future. I was unable to find any online figures, but it is clear the survivors have a lower life expectancy.
The situation for people working at the plant is also uncertain. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
In the Japanese press these people are being referred to as "disposable employees".
So I guess these people don't count. Not the ones who are already dead, or the ones who will be dying sooner or later. Or maybe you don't think these people are humans, and their lives don't count?
So his credentials are that he is a "Constitutional Conservative". No civil engineering or technology background? Did he ever work in water management? I did find books on Amazon on wildlife management by Joe Herring from 1962, so that info is about 50 years out of date. It's not clear if this is the same guy. As far as we know, he has absolutely no meaningful qualifications.
So this is an opinion piece based on political ideology, not facts. I have observed that when died in the wool conservatives make arguments about technical subjects, they are completely fact free. Why do they need facts, when their political philosophy tells them that their uninformed opinion is God's absolute truth?
This flood has similar characteristics to large wildfires. We know that there are "natural disasters" that overwhelm any attempt at human control.We also know that human intervention can make these events worse. "Protecting" forests by suppressing natural fires makes larger more destructive fires inevitable. Farming and flood control alter the landscape, and certainly have an impact on these large rare events.
I'm not familiar with flooding, so I can't comment on the impact of human intervention on this disaster. I do know that Herring says nothing about the issue, but is using this as a cynical opportunity to blame environmentalists (i.e. damn hippies). His piece is political propaganda masquerading as a rational critique. It's reasonable to have this on Slashdot, but don't pretend that it's objective or has any factual contents.
We know that some of these objects are not very solid, but are loosely bound conglomerates of rubble. Is there any chance that this could brake into fragments due to tidal forces when it passes close to the Earth? Is there any information about it's composition?
Absolutely correct. If things are bad at the NSA because of lack of transparency, just imaging how bad they are at DHS (Homeland Security). Or as I like to think of it, the Department of Homeland Pork.
Heck, listeners are going back to vinyl recording right now. Not a huge amount, but it is one of the growing sectors in a shrinking market. And this is without an "on demand" production model.
As I sit here I am wearing clothes with cotton fabrics. Synthetic fibers did not make cotton obsolete.
I expect that there will always be the use of printed physical books, even if paper is not the physical substrate. Will it be the majority? Most likely not, but it will still be an important component.
Look at performance critical applications: signal processing, image processing, graphics, data base implementation, operating systems. Any time performance is high on the list people pick C, C++, Fortran, and sometimes ADA. Compilation is the only feasible choice. One thing that compilers give is the ability to tune the algorithm based on real execution profiling. If you don't compile at some point you will run into language implementation decisions that are out of the coderscontrol, and you will hit a wall. This means more work, but greater effort gives better results. If other things like programmer time or ease of modification are important then non-compiled languages may be better. One size does not fit all.
Like most Slashdot Pundits, you confuse narrow technical attributes of a tool with if it's utility in a particular situation. PHP is really good at serving pages, and is fast, robust and scalable. The success of the MidiaWiki platform is more then enough proof. The people who built it are smart and made a good choice in PHP, as the result demonstrates.
We are so fortunate to have you on Slashdot, since you can so easily dispense the absolute truth completely unencumbered by any pesky annoying real world examples. You, and the moderators who promoted you to +5 Interesting, are what makes Slashdot great. You are also the reason I post as Required Snark, because reality must occasionally make an appearance, even in Slashdot fantasy land,.
Why does anyone think that NET users are any less disposable then the GIS users?
So your are trying to defend Palin by attacking Obama for something that hasn't happened yet, given the 12 year release cycle (see the other previous reply). Meanwhile, in the real world, the previous administration blatantly broke the law to avoid political embarrassment and likely criminal proceedings. If you wanted an example of non-compliance, the Bush example has actual relevance: Palin complied, Bush didn't. This makes Palin look OK, so you would have made you nominal point, while being factual. However, if you used this example you would be explicitly criticizing someone on your political side of the fence, which you would never do.
Instead you used this as an excuse to attack the media and the Obama administration. I expect partisan politics on Slashdot, and that is fine as long as things make sense. Your post is ignorant and contra-factual. The only thing you have acomplished is showing that your political opinions are stupid.
As Time Magazine blogger Eben Harrell pointed out on March 30th:
Arnie Gunderson says as of June 3rd:
Another recent post points out:
The situation at Fukushima is not stable and in fact the danger is increasing. The stopgap cooling by injecting tons of water into the reactors and fuel rod storage is creating a massive burden of highly radioactive water that is a storage and disposal nightmare. There has been some limited success in providing recirculation cooling to the spent rod pool for unit 1, but that has a modest effect on the radioactive water situation.
The plan to reduce radioactivity in existing water and recirculate it for cooling is still in process. It is not clear if the capacity of this system will be able to keep up with current cooling needs, much less deal with the backlog. If the reactors and fuel storage are generating new radioactive material, the cleanup system is even less likely to be adequate.
If there is re-criticality the cleanup becomes that much harder. There is also the possibility of more fires/explosions because of radioactive decay heat sources. Continued earthquakes or typhoons could trigger other large release of radioactive material into the general environment.
The plant is leaking highly radioactive water right now and this problem is being swept under the rug. There will be a permanent exclusion zone at the plant site. Even worse, the ocean region will have long lasting radiation contamination that will cripple the seafood industry for a large area of the Japanese coast. Things are a lot worse then anyone is willing to admit.
No one has a "right" to make money. You have the right to engage in business and either succeed or fail based on your merits and the market. Using the law to prop up a no longer viable business model is the end of capitalism. However, in the current political climate it is very easy to buy this kind of legislation. In the long run it blurs the distinction between legitimate business and a protection racket.
Please don't call it capitalism, because it's not. This mislabeling adds insult to injury. It insults our intelligence.
Now that you have the idea, you can add any other place where there are no effective civil rights.
There are people in the US government to want to add the US to this list. You're known by the company you keep.
Note that I am not passing judgment, good or bad, on the Cell. The question is how they get to the PS4 and minimize cost and risk,
Please!
http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/22/safer-nuclear-reactors-impeded-by-marketplace-expert-says/
So we know how to build safer plants, but the nuclear industry can't afford or refuses to make the investment in protecting the public.
The other part of the economic equation is insurance. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h6m6Z-A7ZI8TAPBRy35Dlp_z8oiA?docId=6274d45186a24d978d43b1dff293cea4
So the lack of meaningful insurance shifts the economic risk on to the public and is effectively a huge direct subsidy for the nuclear power industry. It seems very likely that if the same level of support were put into renewable energy that it would be very competitive with fossil fuel. As well as being much less risky. But guess who has the bigger lobby and more entrenched businesses?
I consider the Fairwinds site to be intrinsically a commentary site, not a news site. They are overtly anti-nuclear power, so that must be taken into consideration. Even so, they make their assertions using technically based reasoning, which is very rare. Their arguments are made with enough detail that you can decide for yourself if you agree or disagree. I respect them because of this.
The presence of any core material outside the reactor vessel is a very big deal in my opinion. It is just not supposed to happen, even in a worse case scenario. Given that the NYT report was based on an NRC document, the lack of any follow on reporting is a huge failure in journalism. I can't say if it is a cover up or just pure incompetence, but something is really wrong in the media if this did not become a major topic of reporting.
I am doubtful about the possibility of an oil based explosion. I don't see where a large amount of oil would be stored in the right place for this to happen. There is also no obvious hydrocarbon fire after the explosion, which I think would be likely. Check out this Wikipedia article about the criticality accident at the SL-1 test reactor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1_Reactor_Accident It seems to match the Fairwinds hypothesis rather well.
There were fuel rod pieces found two miles away from the containment structures. This fact has been completely ignored by the media.
The hypothesis is that there was explosion in the spent fuel rod storage in Unit 3, and it was strong enough to blow rods out of the pool. Unit 3 uses MOX fuel containing plutonium, so it poses a potentially greater health risk. The suggestion is that there was a "prompt criticality" event where a hydrogen explosion mechanically shifted the rods so they went critical and released additional energy resulting in a much stronger explosion.
The follow on video http://vimeo.com/23393101 says that if the fuel rods went prompt critical, that highly radioactive material was vaporized and ejected into the atmosphere. This is the black cloud that was only seen in the Unit 3 explosion. The reason this had minimal impact is that most of the material went out to sea. This is one of the reasons that there are such high levels of radiation on the sea floor by the plant. If the prevailing winds had blow over land then a Chernobyl style uninhabitable zone would have been created in a large area next to the plant.
Currently this is a hypothesis, but if it did happen it would be easy to detect based on the radioactive isotopes at the scene. Both the US and Japanese governments, and perhaps China and S. Korea would also be able to figure this out. Given that there has been almost no mention of how fuel rod components have been blown all over the landscape, It is conceivable that this situation has been kept under wraps.
To give another take on how bad thinks are http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105120189.html
That's right, the contaminated water in just one of the units, by itself, is enough to warrant the same international severity level as Chernobyl.
I wonder if the tracking site can stand up to Slashdot? We'll see...
The goal was to get numerical results to 1% accuracy, and the actual measurements only achieved %19 percent accuracy. This was due to a design error.
On top of that, other researchers made better measurements using other much cheaper satellites.
So they got scooped and their final results were not what they had planned. Not a complete failure, but not a real success either.
The HeeChee are science fiction, in case you hadn't noticed. Using them to postulate about actual physics isn't very meaningful.
So he went to a fossil fuel oriented convention to to talk about extracting an energy source that we don't know how to actually use. Do you think they just might have been laughing at him behind his back? Or is it possible that they were pretending to take him seriously because they love the idea of wasting resources for alternate energy development on something that is impractical for the foreseeable future?
Isn't that like saying that Windows should have fewer security holes then Linux because they charge for the product and are therefore able to put more money into it? It's nonsense.
In a weird way, your question mimics the claim made by MicroSoft: Windows is better because you have to pay for it, and so MS has a stake in providing a good and reliable user experience. In fact, this argument works in some business/government circles, because they feel that without a business organization backing up the product, there is no accountability.
So for some users, it is NOT nonsense. Even when real world experience shows MS does a worse job then open source alternatives.
All I'm doing is applying your argument about physics to your domain, mathematics. I'm confident that you will now question math PhD programs, because application of your argument is logically based. Happy now?