Sadly no commercial power reactor in the US has ever produced nuclear grade material.
The DOD after demanding we go uranium (over the cheaper and more plentiful thorium) to make weapons found it would be difficult to securely and covertly build bombs with commercial reactor output.
Instead they found it far more effective to build dedicated "bomb reactors". We build a dozen or so plutonium piles which dutifully converted uranium into plutonium under the optimum conditions to boost weapons grade yield. Those reactors ran for roughly 3 decades.. Today we have roughly 20,000 dismantled plutonium pits (from obsolete weapons) plus a couple metric tons of bulk plutonium. Once produced and refined the plutonium lasts very very very long time. The US could arm not just itself but the entire world w/ nuclear weapons just from our dismantled pits. There is no need for uranium reactors to produce weapons.
Sadly we are stuck w/ a different kind of legacy. Because of the DOD insistence (for the option they never used) ALL our expertise, knowledge, operateing experience, processes, and ancillary businesses are 100% focused on uranium. Going to thorium would be like starting all over. No company is going to take that kind of multi billion dollar risk without govt support.
If we want to make the switch to thorium it would require a $50 - $100B commitment from US govt to build the research reactors, the testing, the build out to commercial grade plants, then build a dozen or so plants so we get economies of scale plus the training, and the support businesses (fuel processing, etc).
You can't build a single nuclear reactor. The overhead is too large. You need a minimum critical mass of reactors to get economies of scale. There is no way to switch to thorium using free market principles (at least not at current energy prices). The risk vs reward simply isn't there.
Thanks horribly designed menu then. I mean if it is on and used by default at least inform the user. Even a ? next to the SSL v2.0 option which leads to help html page would be useful.
Thanks for digging that up though. I feel better about using Chrome.
I think a lot of it is trust and acceptance. I would be willing to start small.
Imagine if the leftmost highway lane was designed "auto drive lane". This would greatly simplify the potential scenarios. Vehicle would only auto drive when in the auto drive lane.
The ability to read, or surf the web, or watch a movie/TV show durring my commute would be wonderful. Almost like getting a free hour everyday. 52 * 5 * 1 = 250 free hours a year.
That would work but the United States (and entire globe) has a LOT of area.
If you are tracking a relatively few (thousands) number of objects in a large area (millions of square miles).
Essentially it comes down to the "density" of the tracked. More tracked objects in a fixed area the more it makes sense to use fixed station tracking.
The less tracked objects in an area the more it makes sense for each object to simply know where it is and "phone home".
Fixed station tracking (reactive tracker) makes more sense in something like inventory tracking in a warehouse. You may have millions of objects you want to track within a small area.
Well the issue is what happens if you lose the vehicle? You can look at your tracker to determine where the vehicle is. Oh wait the tracker is on the vehicle you just lost. So now you lost your suspect AND the tracker.
Much cheaper to use a device that essentially "keeps tabs" on the location of the vehicle at all times. With some fuzzy logic you could even have it only notify you if the vehicle goes somewhere outside it's normal routine.
You have to think an organization like the FBI isn't tracking one vehicle. They likely are tracking tens of thousands of vehicles. Lot of manpower (and chances to alert the suspect) to continually going to thousands of vehicles and downloading their locations.
For less critical applications (like determine where your teenage son took the car last night) an "offline tracker" is viable.
A GPS receiver knows where the GPS receiver is but doesn't have a mechanism to send that information to a remote location. It doesn't do the FBI any good.
A GPS tracker contains a GPS receiver but also some communication method (cellular, sat, other wireless technology) to periodically or continually send location information to a remote location.
I mean as is the ET would be uncontrolled but no reason they couldn't be collected, secured together and boosted to higher orbit. Periodically the tanks could be boosted via space shuttle to higher orbit (just like space shuttle routinely does w/ ISS to avoid re-entry).
I wasn't suggesting it was "Free" or that it could be done with no changes but rather we boosted 3 million kg to the edge of space only to crash them back into the earth. Seems highly wasteful.
The sad thing is that the fuel tanks could have been easily pushed into orbit. Imagine the cost savings of having 800+ fuel tanks to use for building a space station or orbital construction yards. When you consider the cost to put something into LEO is about $5K to $10K per kg the "value" of pushing these into orbit for future projects is massive.
The reality is that the tanks don't "fall" back to earth. They have enough velocity and altitude at the time they separate to achieve LEO. Two thrusters push the tank back to earth.
800 tanks... what a mindblowing waste of orbital construction material.
Scan and store in multiple open formats archived across multiple redundant servers (each contains multiple redundant discs).
Yeah there are technological dead-ends by staying to general purpose hardware, converting data to current formats periodically (like once every other decade) there is no reason a digital archive can't be readable forever.
There is significant cost to physical storage. Temperature & Humidity control isn't cheap and neither are fire prevention & security systems. In 100 years people will look back at how stupid it was to store things in fragile paper which degrades even under optimal conditions.
It is true that digital archives need to be refreshed to current media however the issue is overblown.
There was roughly 10 years of overlap between 8" and 5.25" discs. There was about 15 years of overlap between 5.25" and 3.5" discs, and nearly 26 years overlap between 3.5" and optical formats (3.5" was available in 1982 and Sony stopped making media in 2008).
CD and DVD can still be read in current BD drives so that window so conversion is still open.
Likewise CF debuted in 1994 and is still readable today.
The media issue is something archivers need to be aware of however it is generally overblown. The windows where older & newer formats overlap are very large and allows archivers to make decisions to only support the most "mainstream media".
For example data on an 8" disc in 1970 could have been converted to 3.5" disc in mid 80s and then to CD-ROM in mid 90s and still be readable today.
It is sad that Oxford doesn't make a digital archive. Once digitized the data can be easily stored in multiple locations, protected by redundant copies and never subject to the ravages of time, air, and the elements.
The first country to terraform mars doesn't own it. The country with the biggest guns owns it.
As to the reason why we haven't tried. 1) land on earth is still relatively cheap. Maybe when the population on earth is 30 billion, and we are suffering the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange, all fish is vat cloned because oceans are too polluted then maybe the economics is different.
2) Until we get a space elevator it is prohibitively expensive to put things into even geo transfer orbit much less shooting them all the way to mars, and then landing them. Cost to GTO is about $50K per kg. Cost to mars is hard to quantify but say somewhere in the ballpark of $500K per kg of payload (including cost of lander). 2 tons to bars is about one billion in transit cost. To terraform mars anytime in next 100K years would require thousands of tons of equipment at costs running into the trillions.
3) Uncertainty and time. Even if enough financial resources were devoted it would take thousands more like tens of thousands of years to terraform Mars. Most countries & companies don't last that long. Say the US spends $20 trillion to terraform mars. By the time it is done the US no longer even exists and the people who didn't spend resources on terraforming benefit.
4) Might makes right. There is no guarantee the country who terraforms mars will claim it. Imagine two countries. One spends $20T on terraforming Mars. The other spends $20T on warfare and just takes Mars (and space elevator, and orbital construction yards) etc.
Simply put there is no risk vs reward. Someday in 100 years or 1000 years when we are closer to a global govt (maybe somethings like the EU but globally) you could see a situation where global resources are put towards this global goal.
Couple issues. Unanimous supports is never a requirement for independence otherwise no British colony would ever be independent today.
Your concern over Blacks, poor, and native Americans is misplaced. Those minorities suffered equally under the heel of British colonists then they did under American independents.
The idea that somehow the British empire wanted to keep the 13 colonies in oder to improve the lives of poor, Blacks, and Native Americans is revisionist history at best.
The difference would be very few Americans would say they are proud of the injustices against native Americans and participating in the slave trade.
To be "proud" that at one time the British considered themselves superior to their fellow humans that they considered it moral and just to force other nations into colonies and then hold them as colonies via military power is in itself rather sad. Depriving a people of sovreignty is pretty high on the crappy things you can do with world power scale.
Nobody is saying British citizens today should be publicly flogged for those actions, however to be proud of what the British empire did well that in itself is sad.
As the price rises the default rate also rises and this ends up creating a viscous cycle.
Say average response cost is $10,000. Now at $10,000 maybe you get on average $2,000 collected (some pay in full, some partially pay, a lot don't pay a dime). So simply you just increase the cost to $50,000 per response call right so on average you get $10,000 from each response (some will pay full $50K, some a fraction, and many none)?
I think you can see the problem with that. The repayment rate at $50,000 will be a tiny fraction of it at $10,000. Thus as your raise price the expected return doesn't rise linearly. Once you get to extreme prices the "benefit" to default begins rising rapidly and consumer behavior will respond. You stack the deck against the consumer enough and they will take the optimal option no matter how morally gray it is.
No business works where the cost of defaults is only borne by those who default.
If it did for example you would see 3% credit cards for people who have never defaulted. Risk free return is about 1% of short term interest however even among those with spotless lifetime long credit records they pay 7%, 8%, even 12% on balances.
Another example would be hospitals. The insured pay for the cost of the uninsured. Collections on uninsured as so pathetically low that to full collect the cost of treatment from them is impossible.
Medical debt often collects less than $0.01 on the dollar. To full collect the cost of procedures only from the uninsured the "cash" price would need to be 100x the actual cost. The problem with that is you give someone a bill for $1.8 million and most people will simply file bankruptcy. You can never collect enough to have the uninsured "pay their way".
The idea that you can pay for non covered customers only from non covered customers without the help of the pre-insured customers isn't based on any economic or pricing theory. In reality it is a good way for the fire dept to go bankrupt.
You pay you are covered. Given the media spotlight it is entirely possible than insurance companies will make $75 fee a requirement for coverage. While the homeowner lost the real loser was insurance company. They insured a property against fire when in the event of fire no fire service would be provided.
In essence the town's residence have the same arrangement (pay for service) however they simply have no option to opt out. The cost is collected as part of their taxes.
The town sent him a letter when his coverage lapsed, and then called him to inform him he wouldn't be protected. There is no free lunch.
Well I am glad you see that bankruptcy losses have a cost.
The bankruptcy loss rate for prepaid service ($75 annual fee in advance) is 0%. So by accepting postpaid service the fire department will incur additional costs.
Now the question becomes WHY should the fire department accept that cost and as a result pass that cost on to all their consumers?
By only accepting prepaid annual contracts the fire dept is able to keep their costs down. All those purchasing service (and those living in town paying taxes) benefit from this lower cost.
So once again why should 99%+ pay higher costs to protect this guy from himself?
Since when is not fighting a fire on a property outside their jurisdiction arson?
As far as the insurance company. Well maybe this loss will cause them to tighten their underwriting standards. It is entirely possible that in the future the ins company will pay the $75 fee themselves (to ensure protection) and pass that cost on to the consumer.
If I were writing hundred thousand dollar policies covering destruction by fire I think it might be material to check to see if property being insured is covered by fire dept. Wouldn't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly no commercial power reactor in the US has ever produced nuclear grade material.
The DOD after demanding we go uranium (over the cheaper and more plentiful thorium) to make weapons found it would be difficult to securely and covertly build bombs with commercial reactor output.
Instead they found it far more effective to build dedicated "bomb reactors". We build a dozen or so plutonium piles which dutifully converted uranium into plutonium under the optimum conditions to boost weapons grade yield. Those reactors ran for roughly 3 decades.. Today we have roughly 20,000 dismantled plutonium pits (from obsolete weapons) plus a couple metric tons of bulk plutonium. Once produced and refined the plutonium lasts very very very long time. The US could arm not just itself but the entire world w/ nuclear weapons just from our dismantled pits. There is no need for uranium reactors to produce weapons.
Sadly we are stuck w/ a different kind of legacy. Because of the DOD insistence (for the option they never used) ALL our expertise, knowledge, operateing experience, processes, and ancillary businesses are 100% focused on uranium. Going to thorium would be like starting all over. No company is going to take that kind of multi billion dollar risk without govt support.
If we want to make the switch to thorium it would require a $50 - $100B commitment from US govt to build the research reactors, the testing, the build out to commercial grade plants, then build a dozen or so plants so we get economies of scale plus the training, and the support businesses (fuel processing, etc).
You can't build a single nuclear reactor. The overhead is too large. You need a minimum critical mass of reactors to get economies of scale. There is no way to switch to thorium using free market principles (at least not at current energy prices). The risk vs reward simply isn't there.
Thanks horribly designed menu then. I mean if it is on and used by default at least inform the user. Even a ? next to the SSL v2.0 option which leads to help html page would be useful.
Thanks for digging that up though. I feel better about using Chrome.
While most people use the term "SSL" to refer to "secure internet" most https connections today use TLS.
TLS uses pseudo random element in the handshake which prevents the MITM scenario you described.
Sadly Google Chrome doesn't support TLS (no friggin idea why) so server will negotitate down to the less secure SSL v2 or SSL v1 standard.
IE 8 or later, Firefox 2.0 or later. and Safari (no idea what version) all support TLS but obviously google thinks security is over-rated.
I think a lot of it is trust and acceptance. I would be willing to start small.
Imagine if the leftmost highway lane was designed "auto drive lane". This would greatly simplify the potential scenarios. Vehicle would only auto drive when in the auto drive lane.
even if initially only on highways.
The ability to read, or surf the web, or watch a movie/TV show durring my commute would be wonderful. Almost like getting a free hour everyday. 52 * 5 * 1 = 250 free hours a year.
That would work but the United States (and entire globe) has a LOT of area.
If you are tracking a relatively few (thousands) number of objects in a large area (millions of square miles).
Essentially it comes down to the "density" of the tracked. More tracked objects in a fixed area the more it makes sense to use fixed station tracking.
The less tracked objects in an area the more it makes sense for each object to simply know where it is and "phone home".
Fixed station tracking (reactive tracker) makes more sense in something like inventory tracking in a warehouse. You may have millions of objects you want to track within a small area.
Well the issue is what happens if you lose the vehicle? You can look at your tracker to determine where the vehicle is. Oh wait the tracker is on the vehicle you just lost. So now you lost your suspect AND the tracker.
Much cheaper to use a device that essentially "keeps tabs" on the location of the vehicle at all times. With some fuzzy logic you could even have it only notify you if the vehicle goes somewhere outside it's normal routine.
You have to think an organization like the FBI isn't tracking one vehicle. They likely are tracking tens of thousands of vehicles. Lot of manpower (and chances to alert the suspect) to continually going to thousands of vehicles and downloading their locations.
For less critical applications (like determine where your teenage son took the car last night) an "offline tracker" is viable.
That may be true.
Which is why I wrap my TomTom in a Faraday cage.
The good news is the location signals can't get out. The bad news is the GPS signals can't get in significantly reducing the effectiveness.
Or mail it to China via Fedex.
Your TomTom is a GPS receiver not a GPS tracker.
A GPS receiver knows where the GPS receiver is but doesn't have a mechanism to send that information to a remote location.
It doesn't do the FBI any good.
A GPS tracker contains a GPS receiver but also some communication method (cellular, sat, other wireless technology) to periodically or continually send location information to a remote location.
Why would they have to be uncontrolled?
I mean as is the ET would be uncontrolled but no reason they couldn't be collected, secured together and boosted to higher orbit. Periodically the tanks could be boosted via space shuttle to higher orbit (just like space shuttle routinely does w/ ISS to avoid re-entry).
I wasn't suggesting it was "Free" or that it could be done with no changes but rather we boosted 3 million kg to the edge of space only to crash them back into the earth. Seems highly wasteful.
They will start doing that the first time a major archive w/ 10,000 out of print books burned up in a fire.
Oops that 136 tanks not 800.
Leaving 800 people who build the tanks in space would just be cruel.
The sad thing is that the fuel tanks could have been easily pushed into orbit. Imagine the cost savings of having 800+ fuel tanks to use for building a space station or orbital construction yards. When you consider the cost to put something into LEO is about $5K to $10K per kg the "value" of pushing these into orbit for future projects is massive.
The reality is that the tanks don't "fall" back to earth. They have enough velocity and altitude at the time they separate to achieve LEO. Two thrusters push the tank back to earth.
800 tanks... what a mindblowing waste of orbital construction material.
Why would you rescan?
Scan and store in multiple open formats archived across multiple redundant servers (each contains multiple redundant discs).
Yeah there are technological dead-ends by staying to general purpose hardware, converting data to current formats periodically (like once every other decade) there is no reason a digital archive can't be readable forever.
There is significant cost to physical storage. Temperature & Humidity control isn't cheap and neither are fire prevention & security systems. In 100 years people will look back at how stupid it was to store things in fragile paper which degrades even under optimal conditions.
It is true that digital archives need to be refreshed to current media however the issue is overblown.
There was roughly 10 years of overlap between 8" and 5.25" discs.
There was about 15 years of overlap between 5.25" and 3.5" discs, and nearly 26 years overlap between 3.5" and optical formats (3.5" was available in 1982 and Sony stopped making media in 2008).
CD and DVD can still be read in current BD drives so that window so conversion is still open.
Likewise CF debuted in 1994 and is still readable today.
The media issue is something archivers need to be aware of however it is generally overblown. The windows where older & newer formats overlap are very large and allows archivers to make decisions to only support the most "mainstream media".
For example data on an 8" disc in 1970 could have been converted to 3.5" disc in mid 80s and then to CD-ROM in mid 90s and still be readable today.
It is sad that Oxford doesn't make a digital archive. Once digitized the data can be easily stored in multiple locations, protected by redundant copies and never subject to the ravages of time, air, and the elements.
Yup.
With current technology (and unsubsidized cost) PV simply isn't ready for prime time.
However solar thermal certainly is. Very simply designs, low tech, high efficiency, and lasts decades.
However PV is "cooler" - it makes my meter run backwards so it gets the bulk or PR, newscoverage, and funding.
However once produced, installed, and wired that is all sunk cost (or sunk energy).
No matter how little energy they produced that energy was in essence already "paid for" both on a cost and energy basis.
Removing the panels did nothing "undo" the sunk cost.
The first country to terraform mars doesn't own it. The country with the biggest guns owns it.
As to the reason why we haven't tried.
1) land on earth is still relatively cheap. Maybe when the population on earth is 30 billion, and we are suffering the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange, all fish is vat cloned because oceans are too polluted then maybe the economics is different.
2) Until we get a space elevator it is prohibitively expensive to put things into even geo transfer orbit much less shooting them all the way to mars, and then landing them. Cost to GTO is about $50K per kg. Cost to mars is hard to quantify but say somewhere in the ballpark of $500K per kg of payload (including cost of lander). 2 tons to bars is about one billion in transit cost. To terraform mars anytime in next 100K years would require thousands of tons of equipment at costs running into the trillions.
3) Uncertainty and time.
Even if enough financial resources were devoted it would take thousands more like tens of thousands of years to terraform Mars. Most countries & companies don't last that long. Say the US spends $20 trillion to terraform mars. By the time it is done the US no longer even exists and the people who didn't spend resources on terraforming benefit.
4) Might makes right. There is no guarantee the country who terraforms mars will claim it. Imagine two countries. One spends $20T on terraforming Mars. The other spends $20T on warfare and just takes Mars (and space elevator, and orbital construction yards) etc.
Simply put there is no risk vs reward. Someday in 100 years or 1000 years when we are closer to a global govt (maybe somethings like the EU but globally) you could see a situation where global resources are put towards this global goal.
Couple issues. Unanimous supports is never a requirement for independence otherwise no British colony would ever be independent today.
Your concern over Blacks, poor, and native Americans is misplaced. Those minorities suffered equally under the heel of British colonists then they did under American independents.
The idea that somehow the British empire wanted to keep the 13 colonies in oder to improve the lives of poor, Blacks, and Native Americans is revisionist history at best.
The difference would be very few Americans would say they are proud of the injustices against native Americans and participating in the slave trade.
To be "proud" that at one time the British considered themselves superior to their fellow humans that they considered it moral and just to force other nations into colonies and then hold them as colonies via military power is in itself rather sad. Depriving a people of sovreignty is pretty high on the crappy things you can do with world power scale.
Nobody is saying British citizens today should be publicly flogged for those actions, however to be proud of what the British empire did well that in itself is sad.
You really think that will work.
As the price rises the default rate also rises and this ends up creating a viscous cycle.
Say average response cost is $10,000. Now at $10,000 maybe you get on average $2,000 collected (some pay in full, some partially pay, a lot don't pay a dime). So simply you just increase the cost to $50,000 per response call right so on average you get $10,000 from each response (some will pay full $50K, some a fraction, and many none)?
I think you can see the problem with that. The repayment rate at $50,000 will be a tiny fraction of it at $10,000. Thus as your raise price the expected return doesn't rise linearly. Once you get to extreme prices the "benefit" to default begins rising rapidly and consumer behavior will respond. You stack the deck against the consumer enough and they will take the optimal option no matter how morally gray it is.
No business works where the cost of defaults is only borne by those who default.
If it did for example you would see 3% credit cards for people who have never defaulted. Risk free return is about 1% of short term interest however even among those with spotless lifetime long credit records they pay 7%, 8%, even 12% on balances.
Another example would be hospitals. The insured pay for the cost of the uninsured. Collections on uninsured as so pathetically low that to full collect the cost of treatment from them is impossible.
Medical debt often collects less than $0.01 on the dollar. To full collect the cost of procedures only from the uninsured the "cash" price would need to be 100x the actual cost. The problem with that is you give someone a bill for $1.8 million and most people will simply file bankruptcy. You can never collect enough to have the uninsured "pay their way".
The idea that you can pay for non covered customers only from non covered customers without the help of the pre-insured customers isn't based on any economic or pricing theory. In reality it is a good way for the fire dept to go bankrupt.
How does it invite abuse?
You pay you are covered. Given the media spotlight it is entirely possible than insurance companies will make $75 fee a requirement for coverage. While the homeowner lost the real loser was insurance company. They insured a property against fire when in the event of fire no fire service would be provided.
In essence the town's residence have the same arrangement (pay for service) however they simply have no option to opt out. The cost is collected as part of their taxes.
The town sent him a letter when his coverage lapsed, and then called him to inform him he wouldn't be protected. There is no free lunch.
Well I am glad you see that bankruptcy losses have a cost.
The bankruptcy loss rate for prepaid service ($75 annual fee in advance) is 0%. So by accepting postpaid service the fire department will incur additional costs.
Now the question becomes WHY should the fire department accept that cost and as a result pass that cost on to all their consumers?
By only accepting prepaid annual contracts the fire dept is able to keep their costs down. All those purchasing service (and those living in town paying taxes) benefit from this lower cost.
So once again why should 99%+ pay higher costs to protect this guy from himself?
Arson really?
Since when is not fighting a fire on a property outside their jurisdiction arson?
As far as the insurance company. Well maybe this loss will cause them to tighten their underwriting standards. It is entirely possible that in the future the ins company will pay the $75 fee themselves (to ensure protection) and pass that cost on to the consumer.
If I were writing hundred thousand dollar policies covering destruction by fire I think it might be material to check to see if property being insured is covered by fire dept. Wouldn't you?