I like it though I'd prefer an area with a good chinese restaurant. Hint: Having a steamtable is an automatic disqualification.
It's nice and quiet, the air's clean, and I only have to walk across the street to get to the post office or restaurant/bar.
Big cities have their place, but so don't the smaller areas. Different people have different preferances. I personally enjoy not having to hear the neighbors constantly.
They installed a number of these a while back in Chicago.
If I remember right, they replaced 7 oil cooled copper lines with 3 superconducting ones, while increasing capacity something like 50% (It turns out that there are still capacity limits for superconducting lines).
They were actually going to make some money based off from the sale of the copper. As for the nitrogen requirements: The copper lines had to be oil cooled, they were shipping so much power. The energy saved by using the superconducting wires was going to be more than enough to keep them supplied with LN. The lines were extremely well insulated, and designed such that the LN could boil out of the insulation, so you didn't really need pumps, you just needed to keep the pipe topped off.
It'll be a while before they even consider running superconductor lines to your house, but for extreme power requirements, such as those of a large city, it's making more and more sense.
Most third world countries can't export agriculture products because there's no-one to export to. First world countries, (read: the US and EU) have very powerful agriculture lobbyists. Our government subsidizes agriculture production - our farmers can produce the same crop cheaper than the African farmer because the government pays most of his costs. Even if the African farmer could produce a bushel of corn or cotton or whatnot cheaper than a domestic producer, tariffs and quotas prevent him from selling there.
Not exactly. Look at it a different way: A first world farmer is likely college educated in agriculture. He has access to at least a half-dozen different specialized pieces of farming equipment. He can afford pumps to irrigate his land, tests to determine soil composition and customized fertalizers to give the plants just what they need to grow, while growing carefully selected hybrid or genemod plants. Any bug outbreaks can be handled by hundreds of pesticides.
The third world farmer may still be using animals to pull a plow and sowing by hand using shit for fertilizer, dependent upon the weather for moisture for the plants. Bug and weed control have to be accomplished by hand.
He can't compete on price or quality for 99% of items. Ones where physical labor hasn't been replaced by machines, such as coffee and vanilla beans can work.
Nuclear not being profitable today without subsidies.
What subsidies?
The only one I'm aware of is the Price-Anderson act, and that's mostly a government mandated group insurance policy. Hint: By the time the goverment starts paying out on a nuclear incident, it'd have long started paying out for other similarly damaging acts. Like Hurricanes, major chemical disasters, etc...
Now, they've recently extended the same subsidies given the renewable power to building a few nuclear plants. Even before that they were looking at building some.
Some history - after a change of government British Nuclear Fuels was forced to release it's financial details to the public and the subsidies it was given from the taxpayer were clear - but it is apparent that they are no less competant than anywhere else and have similar designs.
Look at the British rail system sometime and some of the complaints there. Meanwhile France, Japan, and the USA all manage to have safe and economical plants. I'm not saying that the plant managers are incompetant - I'm saying that the people performing the shutdowns are incompetant, or perhaps forced to be that way by politicians.
the US power industry over a range of energy types is notoriously corrupt and greedy for taxpayer money or tax cuts.
Welcome to economic reality. If you were given the option for a tax break or handout, would you take it? I'm willing to bet most would. All industries do this to one degree or another. The US steel companies and tariffs. The airlines and their writing off their pensions(picked up by the gov). Farm subsidies. Heck, tobacco subsidies. Universities, even 'private' ones, receive billions in federal and state monies.
Going off on a tangent about coal is pointless - nuclear power has to stand on it's own merits and it is worthwhile for any nuclear power advocate to know where those numbers come from and to be able to relate them to a physical plant.
To the contrary, I think that bringing in some points about coal is central to the subject.
Again, it's ORM. We need electricity(it's a net enabler of our lifespan and quality of life, after all). There are a number of sources. I've examined a number of them, gauging total cost, power availability, and pollution. Nuclear is only minorly more expensive than coal, especially when you consider the problems of wind/solar in most areas. It eliminates the vast majority of the pollution** issues. Possible install sites are extremely limited for effective wind power, and it's still more expensive than nuclear, especially when you figure in standby power requirements. Solar is orders of magnitude too expensive. Possible install sites for nuclear are actually more common than coal, as it's best to have the coal plant near the coal mine, while nuclear fuel is compact enough that transporting it is a pittance. One train car's worth is enough fuel for a year, while it can take 2-4 100 car trains a day to keep a coal plant fed. A water supply such as a river reduces costs, but is not strictly necessary.
Why do I pick on coal so much? Simple, Coal is 49.7% of the total electricity generation in the USA, it's the largest single source.
Nuclear is the second largest, at 19.3%, followed by NG at 18.7%. Hydro is a mere 6.5%. 'Other renewables" is only 2.3%. Petroleum sources is actually larger, at 3%.
In various posts I believe that I've touched on most of those sources, but I'll cover them again. Coal is cheap but incredibly polluting. I've seen signs that we're burning our sources of NG* faster than we're burning our oil. It's certainly on of the more expensive sources at this time. Hydro faces more problems than nuke plants for any significant expansions. We've actually blown up a number of dams due to the ecological damage they were causing. Petroleum(oil)? Just look at the pump to see how economical that is at the moment...
*While it's cheap and fast to build a NG power plant, it also has the highest operating costs, and increases in the price of NG isn't helping. Thus, except in California it's mostly used to satisfy peak demands only. **It's not pollution if it's contained.
There are a lot of ways to cook the books - for instance adding in the output for plants that are offline, assuming that all fuel costs are the same as for the best unit and assuming all capital costs are the same as for the most recent unit of it's type.
It may be less than what factory workers make, but it's still better than what they had previously, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
It's kinda like how years ago I read a story about the true results of a sneaker factory in some third world nation; After five years of operation elementary school graduations had shot up to above 50%(from something like 10%), there were five times the stores and businesses in the local area. Many of the factory workers were riding bikes or even scooters.
While the workers were paid relativly nothing in comparison with US jobs, it was still enough to substantially raise their quality of life, part of which they promptly put into the next generation. Elementary level education might not seem like much here, but there? Increased education would also allow the next generation to get even better jobs, allowing them to keep their kids in school longer. It's a positive cycle.
After dodging the question we get to the childish but common cry of "coal is bad so why can't we be bad too" argument, a bit odd since I originally mentioned hydro.
Recycle them? I've looked up the research myself. As for the 'childish' cry, it's called ORM. Operational Risk Management. It means that rather than suck on our thumb in the closet we assess the risks and attempt to minimize them while still getting work done. Coal kills thousands of people a year. It's a big event when nuclear power kills someone; anywhere in the world. I'm not talking about CO2 emissions here, I'm talking about all the other stuff, such as uranium, thorium, sulfer dioxide, NOx, etc... I tend to mention CO2 because that's a big buzzword today, gotta stop global warming.
Sorry about missing the british question. My answer would be that there's evidence of massive incompetence. It happens in government all the time(just look at the Big Dig). Excessive paranoia, cumbersome regulations, and changing plans in the middle don't help.
Would it be possible to name one of these new reactors? Are they new designs or the old ones we know are uneconomic? Are they actually new reactors or just modifications to the existing ones - that is the question that will really get to the heart of it.
Last reactor online: Watt's Bar, in Tennessee, it became operational in 1996. Comanche Peak 2 was also a late build. Sometime this year Brown Ferry 1 is expected to be re-activated, shut down over a decade ago. It's a 1.1GW reactor.
They're expecting new construction to begin around 2010 on a whole bunch of new reactors; but are keeping details close to their chest(less worry about greenpeace that way I guess).
Now we are getting somewhere - but to see what I mean you will have to see what the assumptions applied to get those numbers are, wonder why the British experience is vastly different in economic terms despite doing everything the same way, and wonder why private enterprise never builds these things even though they are portrayed as being the winning option. Once you've done that you'll understand what I mean and realise you have been conned.
We are seeing a number of new reactor construction projects - it's just that they're all taking place on existing plants.
It's a massive case of 'who's first?'. Current estimates place the first new plant of a type at $1400 per kilowatt, dropping to $1000 for subsequent installs.
As for PR - many people are calling something toxic and radioactive that comes out of the ground with a processing process involving large quanitites of highly toxic chemicals "clean" - since I'd only use that to describe washing powder I think the PR is working.
This is different from coal how? Oh yeah - It's not routinely released into the enviroment. Remember acid rain? Heck, mercury emissions? If you want to see something scary - take a look at the death rate atrributed to coal power. Hint: It's close to that of smoking.
A kid who is texting that frantically all the time has *problems*.
It's not quite that bad, after all it's.15 to receive one as well - Assume a 50-50 split, that's 8.6 minutes between texts. Still a big issue.
What's also suprising is that she'd manage this high of a bill so quickly. If my parents had given me something similar when I was a kid I'd of gotten a lecture about features and minutes. IE no texting.
Even missing that, I'd find it suprising that they'd text that much quickly enough that the parents don't realize something's up when their phone bill is $100 higher than normal, not $1100.
Yes, I think that texting is a scam right now, thus I refuse to use it.
Frankly, you could give a movie studio a five year copyright term, and while I bet they would bitch about it to no end, it would still be quite profitable for them (offhand I'd guess around 95% of what their profits are now for any given movie) and they'd still make movies. This doesn't mean that I propose a five year term, just that there's no need whatsoever to give them a century or so, as you propose! That's a vast overpayment, and it doesn't produce significantly more or better movies, it just makes them more expensive in terms of the public interest.
Personally, I was thinking a 20 year term for movies and music. That's enough to pull 99.9% of the profit out of it, while releasing it soon enough that you'll still have fans willing to preserve it.
A second rule would be that the copyright holder *HAS* to offer it for sale in order to continue enjoying copyright. Why? If it's not available, it's not improving society. I'd stick a 'reasonable' standard in there, they'd be allowed to be 'expensive' but not excessive. IE Disney's 'Cinderella' would be allowed to sell copies for $50, but not $5000.
Another idea I liked was a sliding cost for keeping protection on an item. Free for the first 5 years, $100 for the next 5, $200 after that, doubling each time. Disney wants to pay a million bucks to keep the old rat-looking Micky Mouse under copyright? Let them.
The problem with the parent's proposal for life+25 or flat 100 would be that pretty much everybody who was old enough to remember it's creation would be dead by the time it's released into the public domain. Even if it's a 'great' work; the odds that the company holding the copyright has depreciated it and aren't offering it for sale would be pretty high. Tracking down the holder of the copyright would be impossible in many cases.
Right now there are many books out of print, a couple of which I'd love to have again, but since they're out of print I have to depend upon used booksellers and luck to get a copy. Under the accellerated scheme I'd probably be able to get them online in a few years.
As for costs - you can't just conveniently ignore capital costs.
Who says that I'm ignoring them? Referenced site is for European power, and nuclear comes in cheaper at 23.7 E/MWh, vs 28.1 for coal. That's including capital costs, but not including CO2 tax, which raises coal to 44.3.
If you could hydro, wind, solar etc would win every time even in those places where it would be a stupid idea or where the capital costs are far too large for the return.
In the USA, hydro is considered 'overutilized' IE we can't install much more hydro power without negative ecological effects. Solar is orders of magnitude more expensive. A recent thread showed that they expected costs to be $300 million for a 40MW plant. Ten plants and you haven't even gotten half a GW, yet for the same capital you could have 3GW of nuclear plant going. Even wind has limited areas where it's truly usefull - You need a fairly strong and steady wind for it to work, and areas like that aren't everywhere. While you can ship power a long ways, you try to limit that.
Personally, I find the pebble bed to be missing a couple points - Personally, I want the fuel to be easy to recycle, or better yet burned more or less completely in the reactor, such as an IFR(yes, more research needed).
The mainstream is just chasing taxpayer supplied pork. If they were after more than a handout they would be putting in some effort - instead they spend orders of magnitaude in PR, advertising and outright bribes than R&D.
Hmmm.... Haven't seem much PR. Sure, there's a number of websites, but that's peanuts in comparison with nuclear research costs. On the other hand, at least in the USA they need the PR. NIMBY, nuke scares and outright stupidity* have stopped plant construction for years(well, high interest rates for a while helped). Today, they should be able to get lower interest rate loans, which makes the whole thing much more affordable.
As for the research, you do realize that we've managed to keep increasing the power produced by our reactors to the point it's been like building three new plants a decade?
and the "new generation" designs from companies like Westinghouse are just tweaked 1950s designs painted green.
In some ways that's like saying a Ford Focus is a Model-T painted green. The new generation designs, while still using the same basic technology, are far safer, more productive, and hopefully cheaper to build, since one of the 'safety' features was design simplification; fewer parts that can break.
*Why are we trying to build a million year shelter for stuff that's still 90+% fuel?
As one of those who would like to see hundreds of new nuke plants, I'll point out that nuclear power has actually slipped slightly below coal for production costs. In addition, new pollution control requirements and the possibility for CO2 sequestration requirements substantially increase the cost and slightly reduce efficiency in coal plants.
I try to always point out that I'd use the nuclear power to replace coal power, which takes nearly as long to cycle up or down, not to try to replace more responsive power systems such as gas-turbine or even hydro. For peak leveling, I'd suggest using the plant's excess power output during non-peak times to produce hydrogen or ethanol or whatever, so you do have that spinning reserve.
Having to work with a seperated network myself, I'd have to agree about doing as little as possible with it.
In my case it's for two reasons. One, the disconnected network is considered the critical one, and is far more locked down than the one connected to the internet. Second, the one connected to the internet is the one used 99% of the time.
Anytime we touch a system there's a chance we'll screw it up/break it. Our treatment of the isolated network is pretty much 'don't fix what isn't broken'. It wasn't too long ago that we had a P200 still acting as a PDC on it. It worked, we didn't touch it.
Google thumbnails are just that - thumbnails. I would most certainly not count them as 'complete'. While they do potray the overall image, much information has been lost.
The first image displayed is 1024x768, 316k. 786432 pixels.
The google image is 150x113, 3.27kb, 16950 pixels.
Detail wise, you can's see the scales of the dragon in the downscaled picture, the details of the granite in the mountain, didn't even notice that the image was signed on the thumbnail, much less read it. In short, all the complaints about downscaled pictures, or high-def vs standard-def.
So the displayed thumbnail is 1% of the original size and has 2% of the pixels. In photographic terms, this would be like photographing a painting in a gallery and printing it in a magazine.
Now, the difference isn't as large for many images - Google seems to scale them down to ~16k pixels, to keep porportions correct while still making the images the same 'size'. Or maybe it has a number of scaling 'profiles', IE keep proportions the same, scale down until it fits into a specified rectangle(150x120?). Maybe somebody with more knowledge of thumbnail generation would be able to nail down their system.
I'd have to agree. I mean, just think about how much 'incompetence' would be seen if we examined businesses and people's personal lives to this degree.
It'd be like pulling out a first draft of a term paper collected from the trash as 'proof' that a student can't write properly.
I've seen shooting competitions where a guy firing a single-action pistol pops six ballons in under two seconds.
That's six aimed shots at a half second each, from a gun that you have to manually cock the trigger for each shot.
His reload time is something like a second too. He's literally firing again before the casings have time to hit the ground.
Oswald was a marine, and what he did was essentially part of the standard training for the time. Wikipedia mentions that he qualified(if barely) for marksman and sharpshooter at different shooting events while in the Marines. Please note that these are *exceptional* categories and not easy to obtain, especially for Marines.
I don't find the rate of fire extreme, just 'excellent'.
here are significant differences between the freeway collapse and the WTC collapse. The fire in California was fueled by gasoline. The fires in WTC7 were fueled by diesel. Gas burns MUCH faster than diesel releasing energy at a higher rate.
Diesel is harder to light, but it also contains more energy. Contained structure? From what I've read, there are indications that the building might of acted like a furnace - The hallways and such creating a draft. This would increase oxygen flow, increasing burn rate and heat.
As others have said, you don't have to melt steel, simply weaken it sufficiently. They didn't place support structures willy-nilly, and while there was a substantial safety factor, it's not 100%. Combine a fire weakening structures with damage taking some others out and putting more load on it, well, the building is probably coming down.
As for falling straight down - for buildings of the size of the WTC, that's about the only way they can come down. They're so huge you can't get enough angular momentum for them to fall sideways, even if you take out the supports on one side only. They'll break and fall (straight) down first.
Irrelevant. Good ol' uncle George was itchin' to go into Iraq since day 1 of his presidency, looking to finish what his pa started. 9-11 gave him a convenient excuse. Honestly, you people call GWB an idiot, then you claim he pulled off all these grand conspiracies.
Agreed. I personally figure that 9-11 delayed our attack on Iraq. I'm still mad about the continued operation of the Saudi extremist religious schools. Saudi Arabia is a country with very little middle class. You have a few super-rich families, the vast majority of the rest are poverty stricken and dependant upon welfare to live. Not a good combination with the religious schools - you get desperate men with nothing to lose combined with religious beliefs. Due to polygamy, they can't even look forward to getting married in many cases.
That's part of the reason why so many terrorists come from Saudi. Our friendly relations with them also made it easier to smuggle Saudis into the country.
Problem 1: You only have 10 seconds of 900hp at a time before you have to let the motor cool Problem 2: You likely only have 50 miles or so range at that speed Problem 3: You're still slower than the radio
Semi's are a fucking disgusting abomination, and are horribly dangerous.
They're horribly dangerous much in the same way that 'evil black rifles',.50BMG and such are horribly dangerous: Mostly in potential only.
Due to the fact that drivers of Semis are normally professionals, they're statistically less likely to kill somebody than your average soccer-mom's SUV.
Far better to get the bad drivers(and criminals in the case of EBRs) off the road...
Personally, I'd like to get people off the road as well and onto rails, I'm a fan of PRT. The ability to go to work while reading a book or surfing the internet safely, for half the cost of driving it, would be a great joy to me.
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I like it though I'd prefer an area with a good chinese restaurant. Hint: Having a steamtable is an automatic disqualification.
It's nice and quiet, the air's clean, and I only have to walk across the street to get to the post office or restaurant/bar.
Big cities have their place, but so don't the smaller areas. Different people have different preferances. I personally enjoy not having to hear the neighbors constantly.
I think that the easiest explanation for that would be AC. New York and San Francisco are both in cooler areas than Dallas.
They installed a number of these a while back in Chicago.
If I remember right, they replaced 7 oil cooled copper lines with 3 superconducting ones, while increasing capacity something like 50% (It turns out that there are still capacity limits for superconducting lines).
They were actually going to make some money based off from the sale of the copper. As for the nitrogen requirements: The copper lines had to be oil cooled, they were shipping so much power. The energy saved by using the superconducting wires was going to be more than enough to keep them supplied with LN. The lines were extremely well insulated, and designed such that the LN could boil out of the insulation, so you didn't really need pumps, you just needed to keep the pipe topped off.
It'll be a while before they even consider running superconductor lines to your house, but for extreme power requirements, such as those of a large city, it's making more and more sense.
Most third world countries can't export agriculture products because there's no-one to export to. First world countries, (read: the US and EU) have very powerful agriculture lobbyists. Our government subsidizes agriculture production - our farmers can produce the same crop cheaper than the African farmer because the government pays most of his costs. Even if the African farmer could produce a bushel of corn or cotton or whatnot cheaper than a domestic producer, tariffs and quotas prevent him from selling there.
Not exactly. Look at it a different way: A first world farmer is likely college educated in agriculture. He has access to at least a half-dozen different specialized pieces of farming equipment. He can afford pumps to irrigate his land, tests to determine soil composition and customized fertalizers to give the plants just what they need to grow, while growing carefully selected hybrid or genemod plants. Any bug outbreaks can be handled by hundreds of pesticides.
The third world farmer may still be using animals to pull a plow and sowing by hand using shit for fertilizer, dependent upon the weather for moisture for the plants. Bug and weed control have to be accomplished by hand.
He can't compete on price or quality for 99% of items. Ones where physical labor hasn't been replaced by machines, such as coffee and vanilla beans can work.
I drive such a commute. I also track my milage carefully. My mpg at 75 is ~32 mpg. MPG at 65-70 is ~30.
Of course, I also drive a relatively streamlined car. Results will vary for the SUV/Truck drivers.
Nuclear not being profitable today without subsidies.
What subsidies?
The only one I'm aware of is the Price-Anderson act, and that's mostly a government mandated group insurance policy. Hint: By the time the goverment starts paying out on a nuclear incident, it'd have long started paying out for other similarly damaging acts. Like Hurricanes, major chemical disasters, etc...
Now, they've recently extended the same subsidies given the renewable power to building a few nuclear plants. Even before that they were looking at building some.
Some history - after a change of government British Nuclear Fuels was forced to release it's financial details to the public and the subsidies it was given from the taxpayer were clear - but it is apparent that they are no less competant than anywhere else and have similar designs.
Look at the British rail system sometime and some of the complaints there. Meanwhile France, Japan, and the USA all manage to have safe and economical plants. I'm not saying that the plant managers are incompetant - I'm saying that the people performing the shutdowns are incompetant, or perhaps forced to be that way by politicians.
the US power industry over a range of energy types is notoriously corrupt and greedy for taxpayer money or tax cuts.
Welcome to economic reality. If you were given the option for a tax break or handout, would you take it? I'm willing to bet most would. All industries do this to one degree or another. The US steel companies and tariffs. The airlines and their writing off their pensions(picked up by the gov). Farm subsidies. Heck, tobacco subsidies. Universities, even 'private' ones, receive billions in federal and state monies.
Going off on a tangent about coal is pointless - nuclear power has to stand on it's own merits and it is worthwhile for any nuclear power advocate to know where those numbers come from and to be able to relate them to a physical plant.
To the contrary, I think that bringing in some points about coal is central to the subject.
Again, it's ORM. We need electricity(it's a net enabler of our lifespan and quality of life, after all). There are a number of sources. I've examined a number of them, gauging total cost, power availability, and pollution. Nuclear is only minorly more expensive than coal, especially when you consider the problems of wind/solar in most areas. It eliminates the vast majority of the pollution** issues. Possible install sites are extremely limited for effective wind power, and it's still more expensive than nuclear, especially when you figure in standby power requirements. Solar is orders of magnitude too expensive. Possible install sites for nuclear are actually more common than coal, as it's best to have the coal plant near the coal mine, while nuclear fuel is compact enough that transporting it is a pittance. One train car's worth is enough fuel for a year, while it can take 2-4 100 car trains a day to keep a coal plant fed. A water supply such as a river reduces costs, but is not strictly necessary.
Why do I pick on coal so much? Simple, Coal is 49.7% of the total electricity generation in the USA, it's the largest single source.
Nuclear is the second largest, at 19.3%, followed by NG at 18.7%. Hydro is a mere 6.5%. 'Other renewables" is only 2.3%. Petroleum sources is actually larger, at 3%.
In various posts I believe that I've touched on most of those sources, but I'll cover them again. Coal is cheap but incredibly polluting. I've seen signs that we're burning our sources of NG* faster than we're burning our oil. It's certainly on of the more expensive sources at this time. Hydro faces more problems than nuke plants for any significant expansions. We've actually blown up a number of dams due to the ecological damage they were causing. Petroleum(oil)? Just look at the pump to see how economical that is at the moment...
*While it's cheap and fast to build a NG power plant, it also has the highest operating costs, and increases in the price of NG isn't helping. Thus, except in California it's mostly used to satisfy peak demands only.
**It's not pollution if it's contained.
There are a lot of ways to cook the books - for instance adding in the output for plants that are offline, assuming that all fuel costs are the same as for the best unit and assuming all capital costs are the same as for the most recent unit of it's type.
Uhh.. Have you looked at t
It may be less than what factory workers make, but it's still better than what they had previously, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
It's kinda like how years ago I read a story about the true results of a sneaker factory in some third world nation; After five years of operation elementary school graduations had shot up to above 50%(from something like 10%), there were five times the stores and businesses in the local area. Many of the factory workers were riding bikes or even scooters.
While the workers were paid relativly nothing in comparison with US jobs, it was still enough to substantially raise their quality of life, part of which they promptly put into the next generation. Elementary level education might not seem like much here, but there? Increased education would also allow the next generation to get even better jobs, allowing them to keep their kids in school longer. It's a positive cycle.
I agree with you, and I'll note that I've read about several methodologies for performing seperation automatically.
One was based on some sort of pressure system and produced water, oil, and purified minerals.
The process was so extreme that it'd easily render chemical weapons safe. I think that I read about it in discover magazine.
Another used a plasma jet to reduce the stuff to molten glass and produce power.
After dodging the question we get to the childish but common cry of "coal is bad so why can't we be bad too" argument, a bit odd since I originally mentioned hydro.
Recycle them? I've looked up the research myself. As for the 'childish' cry, it's called ORM. Operational Risk Management. It means that rather than suck on our thumb in the closet we assess the risks and attempt to minimize them while still getting work done. Coal kills thousands of people a year. It's a big event when nuclear power kills someone; anywhere in the world. I'm not talking about CO2 emissions here, I'm talking about all the other stuff, such as uranium, thorium, sulfer dioxide, NOx, etc... I tend to mention CO2 because that's a big buzzword today, gotta stop global warming.
Sorry about missing the british question. My answer would be that there's evidence of massive incompetence. It happens in government all the time(just look at the Big Dig). Excessive paranoia, cumbersome regulations, and changing plans in the middle don't help.
Would it be possible to name one of these new reactors? Are they new designs or the old ones we know are uneconomic? Are they actually new reactors or just modifications to the existing ones - that is the question that will really get to the heart of it.
Last reactor online: Watt's Bar, in Tennessee, it became operational in 1996. Comanche Peak 2 was also a late build. Sometime this year Brown Ferry 1 is expected to be re-activated, shut down over a decade ago. It's a 1.1GW reactor.
They're expecting new construction to begin around 2010 on a whole bunch of new reactors; but are keeping details close to their chest(less worry about greenpeace that way I guess).
Now we are getting somewhere - but to see what I mean you will have to see what the assumptions applied to get those numbers are, wonder why the British experience is vastly different in economic terms despite doing everything the same way, and wonder why private enterprise never builds these things even though they are portrayed as being the winning option. Once you've done that you'll understand what I mean and realise you have been conned.
We are seeing a number of new reactor construction projects - it's just that they're all taking place on existing plants.
It's a massive case of 'who's first?'. Current estimates place the first new plant of a type at $1400 per kilowatt, dropping to $1000 for subsequent installs.
As for PR - many people are calling something toxic and radioactive that comes out of the ground with a processing process involving large quanitites of highly toxic chemicals "clean" - since I'd only use that to describe washing powder I think the PR is working.
This is different from coal how? Oh yeah - It's not routinely released into the enviroment. Remember acid rain? Heck, mercury emissions? If you want to see something scary - take a look at the death rate atrributed to coal power. Hint: It's close to that of smoking.
A kid who is texting that frantically all the time has *problems*.
.15 to receive one as well - Assume a 50-50 split, that's 8.6 minutes between texts. Still a big issue.
It's not quite that bad, after all it's
What's also suprising is that she'd manage this high of a bill so quickly. If my parents had given me something similar when I was a kid I'd of gotten a lecture about features and minutes. IE no texting.
Even missing that, I'd find it suprising that they'd text that much quickly enough that the parents don't realize something's up when their phone bill is $100 higher than normal, not $1100.
Yes, I think that texting is a scam right now, thus I refuse to use it.
Frankly, you could give a movie studio a five year copyright term, and while I bet they would bitch about it to no end, it would still be quite profitable for them (offhand I'd guess around 95% of what their profits are now for any given movie) and they'd still make movies. This doesn't mean that I propose a five year term, just that there's no need whatsoever to give them a century or so, as you propose! That's a vast overpayment, and it doesn't produce significantly more or better movies, it just makes them more expensive in terms of the public interest.
Personally, I was thinking a 20 year term for movies and music. That's enough to pull 99.9% of the profit out of it, while releasing it soon enough that you'll still have fans willing to preserve it.
A second rule would be that the copyright holder *HAS* to offer it for sale in order to continue enjoying copyright. Why? If it's not available, it's not improving society. I'd stick a 'reasonable' standard in there, they'd be allowed to be 'expensive' but not excessive. IE Disney's 'Cinderella' would be allowed to sell copies for $50, but not $5000.
Another idea I liked was a sliding cost for keeping protection on an item. Free for the first 5 years, $100 for the next 5, $200 after that, doubling each time. Disney wants to pay a million bucks to keep the old rat-looking Micky Mouse under copyright? Let them.
The problem with the parent's proposal for life+25 or flat 100 would be that pretty much everybody who was old enough to remember it's creation would be dead by the time it's released into the public domain. Even if it's a 'great' work; the odds that the company holding the copyright has depreciated it and aren't offering it for sale would be pretty high. Tracking down the holder of the copyright would be impossible in many cases.
Right now there are many books out of print, a couple of which I'd love to have again, but since they're out of print I have to depend upon used booksellers and luck to get a copy. Under the accellerated scheme I'd probably be able to get them online in a few years.
As for costs - you can't just conveniently ignore capital costs.
Who says that I'm ignoring them? Referenced site is for European power, and nuclear comes in cheaper at 23.7 E/MWh, vs 28.1 for coal. That's including capital costs, but not including CO2 tax, which raises coal to 44.3.
If you could hydro, wind, solar etc would win every time even in those places where it would be a stupid idea or where the capital costs are far too large for the return.
In the USA, hydro is considered 'overutilized' IE we can't install much more hydro power without negative ecological effects. Solar is orders of magnitude more expensive. A recent thread showed that they expected costs to be $300 million for a 40MW plant. Ten plants and you haven't even gotten half a GW, yet for the same capital you could have 3GW of nuclear plant going. Even wind has limited areas where it's truly usefull - You need a fairly strong and steady wind for it to work, and areas like that aren't everywhere. While you can ship power a long ways, you try to limit that.
Personally, I find the pebble bed to be missing a couple points - Personally, I want the fuel to be easy to recycle, or better yet burned more or less completely in the reactor, such as an IFR(yes, more research needed).
The mainstream is just chasing taxpayer supplied pork. If they were after more than a handout they would be putting in some effort - instead they spend orders of magnitaude in PR, advertising and outright bribes than R&D.
Hmmm.... Haven't seem much PR. Sure, there's a number of websites, but that's peanuts in comparison with nuclear research costs. On the other hand, at least in the USA they need the PR. NIMBY, nuke scares and outright stupidity* have stopped plant construction for years(well, high interest rates for a while helped). Today, they should be able to get lower interest rate loans, which makes the whole thing much more affordable.
As for the research, you do realize that we've managed to keep increasing the power produced by our reactors to the point it's been like building three new plants a decade?
and the "new generation" designs from companies like Westinghouse are just tweaked 1950s designs painted green.
In some ways that's like saying a Ford Focus is a Model-T painted green. The new generation designs, while still using the same basic technology, are far safer, more productive, and hopefully cheaper to build, since one of the 'safety' features was design simplification; fewer parts that can break.
*Why are we trying to build a million year shelter for stuff that's still 90+% fuel?
As one of those who would like to see hundreds of new nuke plants, I'll point out that nuclear power has actually slipped slightly below coal for production costs. In addition, new pollution control requirements and the possibility for CO2 sequestration requirements substantially increase the cost and slightly reduce efficiency in coal plants.
I try to always point out that I'd use the nuclear power to replace coal power, which takes nearly as long to cycle up or down, not to try to replace more responsive power systems such as gas-turbine or even hydro. For peak leveling, I'd suggest using the plant's excess power output during non-peak times to produce hydrogen or ethanol or whatever, so you do have that spinning reserve.
Having to work with a seperated network myself, I'd have to agree about doing as little as possible with it.
In my case it's for two reasons. One, the disconnected network is considered the critical one, and is far more locked down than the one connected to the internet. Second, the one connected to the internet is the one used 99% of the time.
Anytime we touch a system there's a chance we'll screw it up/break it. Our treatment of the isolated network is pretty much 'don't fix what isn't broken'. It wasn't too long ago that we had a P200 still acting as a PDC on it. It worked, we didn't touch it.
I'd feel a lot more sympathy for them if they could come up with one non-shill who actually wanted the Zango software installed.
Google thumbnails are just that - thumbnails. I would most certainly not count them as 'complete'. While they do potray the overall image, much information has been lost.
For the heck of it, I did a google image search for 'dragon'.
The first image displayed is 1024x768, 316k. 786432 pixels.
The google image is 150x113, 3.27kb, 16950 pixels.
Detail wise, you can's see the scales of the dragon in the downscaled picture, the details of the granite in the mountain, didn't even notice that the image was signed on the thumbnail, much less read it. In short, all the complaints about downscaled pictures, or high-def vs standard-def.
So the displayed thumbnail is 1% of the original size and has 2% of the pixels. In photographic terms, this would be like photographing a painting in a gallery and printing it in a magazine.
Now, the difference isn't as large for many images - Google seems to scale them down to ~16k pixels, to keep porportions correct while still making the images the same 'size'. Or maybe it has a number of scaling 'profiles', IE keep proportions the same, scale down until it fits into a specified rectangle(150x120?). Maybe somebody with more knowledge of thumbnail generation would be able to nail down their system.
I'd have to agree. I mean, just think about how much 'incompetence' would be seen if we examined businesses and people's personal lives to this degree.
It'd be like pulling out a first draft of a term paper collected from the trash as 'proof' that a student can't write properly.
I've seen shooting competitions where a guy firing a single-action pistol pops six ballons in under two seconds.
That's six aimed shots at a half second each, from a gun that you have to manually cock the trigger for each shot.
His reload time is something like a second too. He's literally firing again before the casings have time to hit the ground.
Oswald was a marine, and what he did was essentially part of the standard training for the time. Wikipedia mentions that he qualified(if barely) for marksman and sharpshooter at different shooting events while in the Marines. Please note that these are *exceptional* categories and not easy to obtain, especially for Marines.
I don't find the rate of fire extreme, just 'excellent'.
here are significant differences between the freeway collapse and the WTC collapse. The fire in California was fueled by gasoline. The fires in WTC7 were fueled by diesel. Gas burns MUCH faster than diesel releasing energy at a higher rate.
Diesel is harder to light, but it also contains more energy. Contained structure? From what I've read, there are indications that the building might of acted like a furnace - The hallways and such creating a draft. This would increase oxygen flow, increasing burn rate and heat.
As others have said, you don't have to melt steel, simply weaken it sufficiently. They didn't place support structures willy-nilly, and while there was a substantial safety factor, it's not 100%. Combine a fire weakening structures with damage taking some others out and putting more load on it, well, the building is probably coming down.
As for falling straight down - for buildings of the size of the WTC, that's about the only way they can come down. They're so huge you can't get enough angular momentum for them to fall sideways, even if you take out the supports on one side only. They'll break and fall (straight) down first.
Irrelevant. Good ol' uncle George was itchin' to go into Iraq since day 1 of his presidency, looking to finish what his pa started. 9-11 gave him a convenient excuse. Honestly, you people call GWB an idiot, then you claim he pulled off all these grand conspiracies.
Agreed. I personally figure that 9-11 delayed our attack on Iraq. I'm still mad about the continued operation of the Saudi extremist religious schools. Saudi Arabia is a country with very little middle class. You have a few super-rich families, the vast majority of the rest are poverty stricken and dependant upon welfare to live. Not a good combination with the religious schools - you get desperate men with nothing to lose combined with religious beliefs. Due to polygamy, they can't even look forward to getting married in many cases.
That's part of the reason why so many terrorists come from Saudi. Our friendly relations with them also made it easier to smuggle Saudis into the country.
Can you say "Catch me if you can!"? ;-)
Problem 1: You only have 10 seconds of 900hp at a time before you have to let the motor cool
Problem 2: You likely only have 50 miles or so range at that speed
Problem 3: You're still slower than the radio
Semi's are a fucking disgusting abomination, and are horribly dangerous.
.50BMG and such are horribly dangerous: Mostly in potential only.
They're horribly dangerous much in the same way that 'evil black rifles',
Due to the fact that drivers of Semis are normally professionals, they're statistically less likely to kill somebody than your average soccer-mom's SUV.
Far better to get the bad drivers(and criminals in the case of EBRs) off the road...
Personally, I'd like to get people off the road as well and onto rails, I'm a fan of PRT. The ability to go to work while reading a book or surfing the internet safely, for half the cost of driving it, would be a great joy to me.
I'd imagine that it's still mostly a manual transmission; less power loss and lower weight.
Where the automatic part would come in is having the shifting acomplished by computer controlled servos rather than a stick and clutch.
Of course, when I see 'automatic transmission' I tend to assume slushbox...