It might be worth doing. The entire point of reprocessing is to produce highly dense highly radioactive material. It is easier to use and store than less dense less radioactive material. I do not know if it is worth it. But I DO know that freezing science in the year 1966 just because of their environmental policies is counterproductive.
Spent LWR fuel rods are are dense highly radioactive material. With the current 50 GWd/tonne burn-up rate each rod is about 1% plutonium and 5% fission products in a sealed solid package, very stable.
Using current dry cask storage practices all the spent fuel over the (extended) lifetime of all U.S. power reactors ever operated would fit in in 100 acre storage area. And since we are storing it that way right now, this costs nothing extra.
There are around 50 nuclear startups designing 4th generation reactors. Some were always going to fail. In fact most will probably fail. Some will succeed though.
NuScale is the closest to market. Their design has already passed NRC phase 1 review, and it has been certified as meltdown proof. They will be constructing their first 12 reactors in Idaho for Utah municipalities. Hopefully in a decade they will be mass producing them like airplanes.
I challenge you to back that "50 nuclear startups" with anything.
NuScale does at least exist (unlike the just shuttered Transatomic) and has done enough work to pass a design review, and to get a license to start looking for sites at the Idaho National Laboratory (but not for any actual site), and so yes, this is farther along than any of the others.
But I went Googling to check whether these projects existed anywhere but as NuScale press releases on their own website -- like on the websites of the purported buyer/owner/operator of these 12 reactors, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) the proposed site to see how real this project is. That is, has funding actually been lined up? Are there any contracts signed to buy the power, or even parties committing to it without signing a contract. Is there a start date for building the first unit? And so forth.
And in every one of these areas there is one big goose egg.
What I found is that at the beginning of this year INL reported to the state that thus far the project consists of the fact that the "DOE granted a site use permit... in February 2016 that enables UAMPS to study, license and locate a NuScale-designed SMR at INL." Further there is no indication on the UAMPS site that anything has been agreed to other than that "study" thing. No announcement about an actual site selected, funding, customers for the power, a start date, etc..
In particular this the total content on the UAMPS website about the supposed NuScale project for which they are the alleged customer:
The Carbon Free Power Project is in the first phase of investigating the feasibility of a small modular reactor project using NuScale technology. The CFPP could consist of up to twelve 50 MW reactors located at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. The feasibility analysis includes engineering and regulatory activities to complete a site selection analysis to allow the project participants the necessary information to make a decision whether to proceed with the Construction and Operating License Application.
Nothing about this blurb has been updated since it was first written about four years ago.
Other than some promotional material copied from the NuScale website (and links to same) to provide the background to this blurb, there is nothing else on the site. Their last annual report simply said that decisions would be made in 2018 about this proposal, we are most of the way through 2018 and no decisions have been made. The previous annual report said that decisions would be made in 2017 about this proposal.
There is no plan to build even one of these reactors right now. All there is is a feasibility study of the proposal in progress, and a permit to investigate and select a site at INL, but no actual sites have been selected.
Those 12 reactors are at the moment, simply a proposal, under study, with no funding or commitment to built them.
... instead of e.g. Svahnnah River which was close to 10 times the reprocessing capacity, operated for 50 years, was closed less than a decade ago, and by your accounts should have flooded half of the country in nuclear waste by now... but hasn't.
High-activity liquid waste is generated at SRS as by-products from the processing of nuclear materials for national defense, research and medical programs. The waste, totaling about 36 million gallons, is currently stored in 49 underground carbon-steel waste tanks grouped into two “tank farms” at SRS.
36 million gallons of high level liquid waste, prone to leaking and chemical reactions. Each of these one tank farm covers an area of 20 acres, or 40 acres total.
OTOH the entire lifetime output of all power reactors operating or ever operated in the U.S. could fit into a 100 acre dry cask storage field with generous cask spacing.
There were two people from Goldman Sachs hired by the Obama Administration: Gary Gensler, who chaired the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Phil Murphy, who was made U.S. ambassador to Germany, and in fact progressives did object to them, as well as the few others hired from other Wall Street firms.
But the "plenty of Goldman Sachs employees", if "plenty" is more than two is false.
The accusation of the Obama Administration being loaded with Wall Street types was a popular, and false, line of attack by right-wing propaganda groups! Talk about hypocrisy!
Which large companies are doing this is "a couple of years" (i.e. about two)?
I was going to object to the mockery of Sony taking 22 years to reach 100%, since it is arguable that a huge globe spanning operation might take that long to get to 100%. But in TFA I see this:
... up from the current level of 7%... Sony will gradually increase use of such energy, aiming first for a rate of 30% in 2030.
Gradually indeed! Taking 12 years to get from 7% to 30%? This is not an aggressive plan, to say the least.
Sort of like ISPs "stealing" error codes (which are correct responses from servers) and presenting their own meaningless, but monetized, pages instead. The Internet works the way it works, trying to "customize" it for corporate convenience are breaking changes.
You are going to need to use sunlight to grow food. Some supplemental lighting might be needed (like keeping plants from dying during the dust storms) but photosynthesis is way too inefficient to use artificial lighting to produce food for humans.
You need to actually put in some effort to learn the subject, instead of just picking random factoids out of the aether (assuming that this is a serious post, and not just being disingenuous).
Mars gets only 40% of the solar energy that Earth gets, so to get Mars to the same temperature as Earth far more heat trapping is needed. Carbon dioxide on Earth traps heat as part of system that is 160 time thicker than Mars, including a lot of water vapor, which provides most of the trapping effect. Carbon dioxide is not warming Earth all by its lonesome. There is more water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, on average, than Mars has atmosphere, period. The atmosphere of Mars is bone dry.
"The use of a bioreactor is not allowed as a component in the conversion of CO2 to products"
I would say that a greenhouse is a special case of "bioreactor."
Also note that bit about "efficient". Photosynthesis is at best 2% efficient, which assumes an optimal system and all products of the conversion counted. Any system producing glucose as the product is going to be a fraction of that.
The only way something like this works is if there's a good source of Treatable water.
If you have to run it thru a desalination plant, that likely includes perchlorates, it's going to be even that much harder.
...
Water is found in the regolith ("soil") of Mars everywhere in significant quantities. You will have to strip mine it, but as mining operations go it is easy to get. From The microbial case for Mars and its implication for human expeditions to Mars, Gerda Horneck, Acta Astronautica 63 (2008) 1015 – 1024:
From the global neutron mapping of the Mars Odyssey mission, the present distribution of water in the shallow subsurface was divided in four types of regions: (i) regions with dry soil with a water content of about 2 wt%; (ii) northern permafrost regions with a high content of water ice (up to 53 wt% of water); (iii) southern permafrost regions with high content of water ice (>60 wt% of water) covered by a dry layer of regolith; and (iv) regions with water-rich soil at moderate latitudes (about 10 wt% of water).
So we get to decide how important the water content is when selecting a site to set up operations. At worst the content would be 2%, or 20 liters per tonne, but we may prefer those "moderate latitudes" with 100 liters per tonne. Extraction would involve simply heating the soil in a retort and condensing the escaped water. You will be digging up a lot of soil (especially in the 2% case) and discarding it as the water is extracted.
Preparing regolith for use as a cultivation medium will probably take a few steps, but removing the perchlorates will be the easiest of those steps. Simply use said water to extract them as perchlorates are highly water soluble. Hydroponics is all about circulating water through a growing medium, so extraction of all soluble compounds is inherently part of the operation. I suspect that some sort of granulating/pelletizing process would be used to get an appropriate porosity. Martian regolith is naturally high in phosphorus and potassium, and trace elements, so the only thing lacking is usable nitrogen. A Haber process system to make ammonia is the most likely way of getting that, and the ammonia could be dissolved directly in the water. A bit different from how hydroponics is done on Earth, which used an inert medium with all the nutrients in solution, but not that different.
10 ships a year. There are an estimated 11,000 bulk carriers in service.
And assuming 10 voyages a year this is one loss per 10,000 loads delivered. Using the Wikipedia bulk carrier article (which is quite good) and taking a large carrier of 80,000 tons that costs $40 million new, it would deliver 800 million tons per ship lost, or about 5 cents per ton as the "lost ship toll". Actual shipping fees listed are on the order of $15-70 per ton, so this is hardly even round-off error to the huge corporations that own these ships.
The crew of 20 to 30 people, almost entirely recruited from the third-world, are of course inexpensive write-offs to the corporations (their loss is much cheaper than the ship itself), so only international regulation protects them from being treated as expendables.
There is a good Wikipedia article on bulk cargo ships. It contains such useful information as this (edited excerpts from two paragraphs):
Bulk carriers are designed to be easy to build and to store cargo efficiently... Double hulls have become popular in the past ten years... One of the advantages of the double hull is to make room to place all the structural elements in the sides, removing them from the holds. This increases the volume of the holds, and simplifies their structure which helps in loading, unloading, and cleaning.
So these vessels are all about doing stuff as cheaply as possible to minimize the cost of operation, and a key strategy is to keep all obstructions out of the hold. With compartments they would then have to be loading and unloading and cleaning each compartment separately, taking more time and effort. Putting in compartments defeats the design goal of the bulk carrier. Also it might make it harder to load it evenly in the first place.
There are a total of five reactors under construction, or planned, with Gross MWe of 210 MW or less (I presume this is the standard being used here for "small scale"). They are located in China, Russia, Argentina an no where else. And only three of these (two in China, one in Argentina) is a Gen 4 design.
There's 3 or 4 going live in the next few years in the US, 4 here in Canada, 2 in S.Korea.
These reactors exist only in your imagination there are no such actual projects in any of these nations.
There are a couple of dozen power reactors operating in the world with MWe output of 220 MW or less, but not one of these is a "Gen 4" reactor. There instead old designs (>40 years old) in Russian, India and Pakistan which would not be commercially viable anywhere else.
Now there is a company called "NuScale Power" which claims to have planned projects, but no actual projects have been announced (at least, that were not later retracted.) A press release does not equate to a reactor under construction, not have a "planned" reactor.
I think that is about right - I think Season 5 was actually its high point, and was still going strong in Season 7, with the passing of Professor Proton. But the last 4 seasons have been feeling like the "dark energy" has gone away.
I wouldn't go that far, especially since the series improved after the first few seasons when the worked off some of the more obvious cliches and built the stories more around the characters.
But, as a fan of the show, I have felt that the last few seasons were tired, well past their prime, and have actually been hoping that they would give the show a good wrap-up.
The whole point of being underwater is to not reveal your position. A buoy that's directly above you is an absolute giveaway. But these signals could probably not be detected without already knowing their position.
Most of the time the "folks back home" will know the sub's route and communication rendezvous (which may or may not all be kept) so knowing where to look/listen is usually not a problem. And communication aircraft can fly lots of bogus tracks so that that does not give it away.
An antenna buoy is pretty easy to spot, if an observation platform in in sight of it. So you don't use these when that is likely (subs have a number of alternate methods of communication). But my concern is whether this acoustic signal can be detected by a sonobuoy or other hydrophone platform. Being acoustically quiet is what a submarine is all about. Most subs never uses its active sonar, ever (although it has one, just in case).
This is a real concern for submarine security, and it limits a submarine's ability to travel fast at shallow depth. Aerial submarine reconnaissance missions do look for this, and it has been of interest for radar satellites.
I think the flight recorder scenario is more a more likely scenario since a submarine can surface an antenna buoy without creating acoustic signals.
I have wondered about whether it would be possible to engineer a back-up flight data recorder buoy that would be released in a crash (possibly by water pressure activation?). It might be hard to ensure that it would escape and surface under every possible scenario, but if it did so 95% of the time that would very useful.
I read a NASA report on this fire last year, so I know the detailed sequence of events, and the conditions of the accident.
In space the Apollo command module was supposed to be at 0.2 bar pure oxygen, since the one-component gas at low pressure made the capsule engineering easier. Since the system set up to only handle oxygen, on the ground it was filled with pure oxygen at 1.0 bar. The exercise the crew was going through was supposed to be as close to launch configuration as possible. NASA had not spent much effort analyzing the module furnishings for flammability, and there was widespread use of Velcro, which was the primary fuel for the fire.
The capsule door opened inward, and the pressure was equalized with the outside so that there was no pressure on the door.
When the fire started the heat rapidly increased the pressure in the module so that it was not possible to open the hatch. There were pressure relief valves, but they were too small to handle the rising pressure. The timeline was extremely short.
Stage one (0 to 24 seconds) - start of the fire and initial spread:
0 seconds: voltage surge that is believed to correspond with the short that ignited the fire
10 seconds: the first voice indication of the crew of a fire.
24 seconds: the pressure blew open the hatch (which did not open outward, it was a gross integrity failure). The pressure had risen to almost 2 bars at that point.
Stage two (24 to 30 seconds) - "This stage was characterized by the period of greatest conflagration due to the forced convection that resulted from the outrush of gases through the rupture in the pressure vessel... Evidence of the intensity of the fire includes burst and burned aluminum tubes in the oxygen and coolant systems at floor level.":
28 seconds: last voice signal from the crew.
Stage three (30 to 36 seconds) - "characterized by rapid production of high concentrations of carbon monoxide... unlike the earlier stages where the flame was relatively smokeless, heavy smoke now formed":
The fire burned out due to lack of oxygen at this point. During this stage, less than half a minute from when the fire was first noticed the crew would have inhaled a lethal dose of carbon monoxide.
Eisenhower was great, and Republican, but he has nothing in common with the current Republican Party, any more than does Abraham Lincoln. Over the last 40 years Republicans have come to oppose any and all infrastructure spending. Ten years ago Republicans would have labeled Eisenhower a RINO (Republican In Name Only) -- now he would be dismissed as a Marxist Deep State Conspirator.
The next step is completing the Valley segment and getting an operating system connected to San Jose. Yes, it costs lots of money but it is still cheaper and more convenient than expanding airports and building new freeways to meet the growing demand. It will be fast, quiet and powered by renewable electricity and last for a hundred years.
To the non-ideologically blinded, this is easy to understand. He says that the train system will "last for a hundred years" (I would expect it really to last indefinitely, with proper maintenance). It is not possible to read this and honestly believe it to say that it wall take over a hundred years to build it.
You can read the actual business plan here. It states that the San Francisco to Anaheim main line is scheduled for completion in 2033, 15 years from now. Might it slip? Sure. In fact I expect it will. But it is insane to think that it will take >100 years.
As Brown points out any major transportation project costs many billions. LAX is currently undergoing a $14 billion renovation, which is about 20% of the current baseline estimate for the entire bullet train line.
BTW, California as a GDP of $2.5 trillion. Transportation improvements are essential to maintaining a high tech, high growth, high end economy and the cost of this runs around $6 billion a year for 15 years. California can afford it easily.
And if you actually read the news about this you know that the $98 billion is the high end estimate of the total project ($77 billion is the current projection, which is an increase), but that 119 miles is only one smallish part of the project. That part of the project is currently estimated at $10.6 billion, or roughly 1/10 of what you are claiming. Still more that $50 million a mile ($89 million), true.
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NOW we are having a discussion! :-)
It might be worth doing. The entire point of reprocessing is to produce highly dense highly radioactive material. It is easier to use and store than less dense less radioactive material. I do not know if it is worth it. But I DO know that freezing science in the year 1966 just because of their environmental policies is counterproductive.
Spent LWR fuel rods are are dense highly radioactive material. With the current 50 GWd/tonne burn-up rate each rod is about 1% plutonium and 5% fission products in a sealed solid package, very stable.
Using current dry cask storage practices all the spent fuel over the (extended) lifetime of all U.S. power reactors ever operated would fit in in 100 acre storage area. And since we are storing it that way right now, this costs nothing extra.
Canada itself has stopped building CANDU reactors. Its last one (Darlington 4) was started construction 30 June 1985, which is 1/3 of a century ago.
There are around 50 nuclear startups designing 4th generation reactors. Some were always going to fail. In fact most will probably fail. Some will succeed though.
NuScale is the closest to market. Their design has already passed NRC phase 1 review, and it has been certified as meltdown proof. They will be constructing their first 12 reactors in Idaho for Utah municipalities. Hopefully in a decade they will be mass producing them like airplanes.
I challenge you to back that "50 nuclear startups" with anything.
NuScale does at least exist (unlike the just shuttered Transatomic) and has done enough work to pass a design review, and to get a license to start looking for sites at the Idaho National Laboratory (but not for any actual site), and so yes, this is farther along than any of the others.
But I went Googling to check whether these projects existed anywhere but as NuScale press releases on their own website -- like on the websites of the purported buyer/owner/operator of these 12 reactors, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) the proposed site to see how real this project is. That is, has funding actually been lined up? Are there any contracts signed to buy the power, or even parties committing to it without signing a contract. Is there a start date for building the first unit? And so forth.
And in every one of these areas there is one big goose egg.
What I found is that at the beginning of this year INL reported to the state that thus far the project consists of the fact that the "DOE granted a site use permit... in February 2016 that enables UAMPS to study, license and locate a NuScale-designed SMR at INL." Further there is no indication on the UAMPS site that anything has been agreed to other than that "study" thing. No announcement about an actual site selected, funding, customers for the power, a start date, etc..
In particular this the total content on the UAMPS website about the supposed NuScale project for which they are the alleged customer:
The Carbon Free Power Project is in the first phase of investigating the feasibility of a small modular reactor project using NuScale technology. The CFPP could consist of up to twelve 50 MW reactors located at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. The feasibility analysis includes engineering and regulatory activities to complete a site selection analysis to allow the project participants the necessary information to make a decision whether to proceed with the Construction and Operating License Application.
Nothing about this blurb has been updated since it was first written about four years ago.
Other than some promotional material copied from the NuScale website (and links to same) to provide the background to this blurb, there is nothing else on the site. Their last annual report simply said that decisions would be made in 2018 about this proposal, we are most of the way through 2018 and no decisions have been made. The previous annual report said that decisions would be made in 2017 about this proposal.
There is no plan to build even one of these reactors right now. All there is is a feasibility study of the proposal in progress, and a permit to investigate and select a site at INL, but no actual sites have been selected.
Those 12 reactors are at the moment, simply a proposal, under study, with no funding or commitment to built them.
... instead of e.g. Svahnnah River which was close to 10 times the reprocessing capacity, operated for 50 years, was closed less than a decade ago, and by your accounts should have flooded half of the country in nuclear waste by now ... but hasn't.
Yeah, lets look at Savannah River Site:
High-activity liquid waste is generated at SRS as by-products from the processing of nuclear materials for national defense, research and medical programs. The waste, totaling about 36 million gallons, is currently stored in 49 underground carbon-steel waste tanks grouped into two “tank farms” at SRS.
36 million gallons of high level liquid waste, prone to leaking and chemical reactions. Each of these one tank farm covers an area of 20 acres, or 40 acres total.
OTOH the entire lifetime output of all power reactors operating or ever operated in the U.S. could fit into a 100 acre dry cask storage field with generous cask spacing.
There were two people from Goldman Sachs hired by the Obama Administration: Gary Gensler, who chaired the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Phil Murphy, who was made U.S. ambassador to Germany, and in fact progressives did object to them, as well as the few others hired from other Wall Street firms.
But the "plenty of Goldman Sachs employees", if "plenty" is more than two is false.
The accusation of the Obama Administration being loaded with Wall Street types was a popular, and false, line of attack by right-wing propaganda groups! Talk about hypocrisy!
Which large companies are doing this is "a couple of years" (i.e. about two)?
I was going to object to the mockery of Sony taking 22 years to reach 100%, since it is arguable that a huge globe spanning operation might take that long to get to 100%. But in TFA I see this:
... up from the current level of 7% ... Sony will gradually increase use of such energy, aiming first for a rate of 30% in 2030.
Gradually indeed! Taking 12 years to get from 7% to 30%? This is not an aggressive plan, to say the least.
Yes, they should just put an embossed message on the screen bezel.
Sort of like ISPs "stealing" error codes (which are correct responses from servers) and presenting their own meaningless, but monetized, pages instead. The Internet works the way it works, trying to "customize" it for corporate convenience are breaking changes.
You are going to need to use sunlight to grow food. Some supplemental lighting might be needed (like keeping plants from dying during the dust storms) but photosynthesis is way too inefficient to use artificial lighting to produce food for humans.
You need to actually put in some effort to learn the subject, instead of just picking random factoids out of the aether (assuming that this is a serious post, and not just being disingenuous).
Mars gets only 40% of the solar energy that Earth gets, so to get Mars to the same temperature as Earth far more heat trapping is needed. Carbon dioxide on Earth traps heat as part of system that is 160 time thicker than Mars, including a lot of water vapor, which provides most of the trapping effect. Carbon dioxide is not warming Earth all by its lonesome. There is more water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, on average, than Mars has atmosphere, period. The atmosphere of Mars is bone dry.
The competition states:
"The use of a bioreactor is not allowed as a component in the conversion of CO2 to products"
I would say that a greenhouse is a special case of "bioreactor."
Also note that bit about "efficient". Photosynthesis is at best 2% efficient, which assumes an optimal system and all products of the conversion counted. Any system producing glucose as the product is going to be a fraction of that.
The only way something like this works is if there's a good source of Treatable water.
If you have to run it thru a desalination plant, that likely includes perchlorates, it's going to be even that much harder.
...
Water is found in the regolith ("soil") of Mars everywhere in significant quantities. You will have to strip mine it, but as mining operations go it is easy to get. From The microbial case for Mars and its implication for human expeditions to Mars, Gerda Horneck, Acta Astronautica 63 (2008) 1015 – 1024:
From the global neutron mapping of the Mars Odyssey mission, the present distribution of water in the shallow subsurface was divided in four types of regions: (i) regions with dry soil with a water content of about 2 wt%; (ii) northern permafrost regions with a high content of water ice (up to 53 wt% of water); (iii) southern permafrost regions with high content of water ice (>60 wt% of water) covered by a dry layer of regolith; and (iv) regions with water-rich soil at moderate latitudes (about 10 wt% of water).
So we get to decide how important the water content is when selecting a site to set up operations. At worst the content would be 2%, or 20 liters per tonne, but we may prefer those "moderate latitudes" with 100 liters per tonne. Extraction would involve simply heating the soil in a retort and condensing the escaped water. You will be digging up a lot of soil (especially in the 2% case) and discarding it as the water is extracted.
Preparing regolith for use as a cultivation medium will probably take a few steps, but removing the perchlorates will be the easiest of those steps. Simply use said water to extract them as perchlorates are highly water soluble. Hydroponics is all about circulating water through a growing medium, so extraction of all soluble compounds is inherently part of the operation. I suspect that some sort of granulating/pelletizing process would be used to get an appropriate porosity. Martian regolith is naturally high in phosphorus and potassium, and trace elements, so the only thing lacking is usable nitrogen. A Haber process system to make ammonia is the most likely way of getting that, and the ammonia could be dissolved directly in the water. A bit different from how hydroponics is done on Earth, which used an inert medium with all the nutrients in solution, but not that different.
10 ships a year. There are an estimated 11,000 bulk carriers in service.
And assuming 10 voyages a year this is one loss per 10,000 loads delivered. Using the Wikipedia bulk carrier article (which is quite good) and taking a large carrier of 80,000 tons that costs $40 million new, it would deliver 800 million tons per ship lost, or about 5 cents per ton as the "lost ship toll". Actual shipping fees listed are on the order of $15-70 per ton, so this is hardly even round-off error to the huge corporations that own these ships.
The crew of 20 to 30 people, almost entirely recruited from the third-world, are of course inexpensive write-offs to the corporations (their loss is much cheaper than the ship itself), so only international regulation protects them from being treated as expendables.
There is a good Wikipedia article on bulk cargo ships. It contains such useful information as this (edited excerpts from two paragraphs):
Bulk carriers are designed to be easy to build and to store cargo efficiently... Double hulls have become popular in the past ten years... One of the advantages of the double hull is to make room to place all the structural elements in the sides, removing them from the holds. This increases the volume of the holds, and simplifies their structure which helps in loading, unloading, and cleaning.
So these vessels are all about doing stuff as cheaply as possible to minimize the cost of operation, and a key strategy is to keep all obstructions out of the hold. With compartments they would then have to be loading and unloading and cleaning each compartment separately, taking more time and effort. Putting in compartments defeats the design goal of the bulk carrier. Also it might make it harder to load it evenly in the first place.
Links?
Please mod this guy down - he is simply making stuff up.
Here is a list of every power reactor under construction or planned in the world.
There are a total of five reactors under construction, or planned, with Gross MWe of 210 MW or less (I presume this is the standard being used here for "small scale"). They are located in China, Russia, Argentina an no where else. And only three of these (two in China, one in Argentina) is a Gen 4 design.
There's 3 or 4 going live in the next few years in the US, 4 here in Canada, 2 in S.Korea.
These reactors exist only in your imagination there are no such actual projects in any of these nations.
There are a couple of dozen power reactors operating in the world with MWe output of 220 MW or less, but not one of these is a "Gen 4" reactor. There instead old designs (>40 years old) in Russian, India and Pakistan which would not be commercially viable anywhere else.
Now there is a company called "NuScale Power" which claims to have planned projects, but no actual projects have been announced (at least, that were not later retracted.) A press release does not equate to a reactor under construction, not have a "planned" reactor.
I think that is about right - I think Season 5 was actually its high point, and was still going strong in Season 7, with the passing of Professor Proton. But the last 4 seasons have been feeling like the "dark energy" has gone away.
I wouldn't go that far, especially since the series improved after the first few seasons when the worked off some of the more obvious cliches and built the stories more around the characters.
But, as a fan of the show, I have felt that the last few seasons were tired, well past their prime, and have actually been hoping that they would give the show a good wrap-up.
Are you sure you don't want to post about LUDDITE cows going MOOOO?
You must have lots of mines since an airplane can fly hundreds of fake track miles.
As you say - "genious" (sic).
The whole point of being underwater is to not reveal your position. A buoy that's directly above you is an absolute giveaway. But these signals could probably not be detected without already knowing their position.
Most of the time the "folks back home" will know the sub's route and communication rendezvous (which may or may not all be kept) so knowing where to look/listen is usually not a problem. And communication aircraft can fly lots of bogus tracks so that that does not give it away.
An antenna buoy is pretty easy to spot, if an observation platform in in sight of it. So you don't use these when that is likely (subs have a number of alternate methods of communication). But my concern is whether this acoustic signal can be detected by a sonobuoy or other hydrophone platform. Being acoustically quiet is what a submarine is all about. Most subs never uses its active sonar, ever (although it has one, just in case).
This is a real concern for submarine security, and it limits a submarine's ability to travel fast at shallow depth. Aerial submarine reconnaissance missions do look for this, and it has been of interest for radar satellites.
I think the flight recorder scenario is more a more likely scenario since a submarine can surface an antenna buoy without creating acoustic signals.
I have wondered about whether it would be possible to engineer a back-up flight data recorder buoy that would be released in a crash (possibly by water pressure activation?). It might be hard to ensure that it would escape and surface under every possible scenario, but if it did so 95% of the time that would very useful.
I read a NASA report on this fire last year, so I know the detailed sequence of events, and the conditions of the accident.
In space the Apollo command module was supposed to be at 0.2 bar pure oxygen, since the one-component gas at low pressure made the capsule engineering easier. Since the system set up to only handle oxygen, on the ground it was filled with pure oxygen at 1.0 bar. The exercise the crew was going through was supposed to be as close to launch configuration as possible. NASA had not spent much effort analyzing the module furnishings for flammability, and there was widespread use of Velcro, which was the primary fuel for the fire.
The capsule door opened inward, and the pressure was equalized with the outside so that there was no pressure on the door.
When the fire started the heat rapidly increased the pressure in the module so that it was not possible to open the hatch. There were pressure relief valves, but they were too small to handle the rising pressure. The timeline was extremely short.
Stage one (0 to 24 seconds) - start of the fire and initial spread:
0 seconds: voltage surge that is believed to correspond with the short that ignited the fire
10 seconds: the first voice indication of the crew of a fire.
24 seconds: the pressure blew open the hatch (which did not open outward, it was a gross integrity failure). The pressure had risen to almost 2 bars at that point.
Stage two (24 to 30 seconds) - "This stage was characterized by the period of greatest conflagration due to the forced convection that resulted from the outrush of gases through the rupture in the pressure vessel... Evidence of the intensity of the fire includes burst and burned aluminum tubes in the oxygen and coolant systems at floor level.": 28 seconds: last voice signal from the crew.
Stage three (30 to 36 seconds) - "characterized by rapid production of high concentrations of carbon monoxide... unlike the earlier stages where the flame was relatively smokeless, heavy smoke now formed": The fire burned out due to lack of oxygen at this point. During this stage, less than half a minute from when the fire was first noticed the crew would have inhaled a lethal dose of carbon monoxide.
See this summary.
Eisenhower was great, and Republican, but he has nothing in common with the current Republican Party, any more than does Abraham Lincoln. Over the last 40 years Republicans have come to oppose any and all infrastructure spending. Ten years ago Republicans would have labeled Eisenhower a RINO (Republican In Name Only) -- now he would be dismissed as a Marxist Deep State Conspirator.
This is the paragraph from Brown's speech:
The next step is completing the Valley segment and getting an operating system connected to San Jose. Yes, it costs lots of money but it is still cheaper and more convenient than expanding airports and building new freeways to meet the growing demand. It will be fast, quiet and powered by renewable electricity and last for a hundred years.
To the non-ideologically blinded, this is easy to understand. He says that the train system will "last for a hundred years" (I would expect it really to last indefinitely, with proper maintenance). It is not possible to read this and honestly believe it to say that it wall take over a hundred years to build it.
You can read the actual business plan here. It states that the San Francisco to Anaheim main line is scheduled for completion in 2033, 15 years from now. Might it slip? Sure. In fact I expect it will. But it is insane to think that it will take >100 years.
As Brown points out any major transportation project costs many billions. LAX is currently undergoing a $14 billion renovation, which is about 20% of the current baseline estimate for the entire bullet train line.
BTW, California as a GDP of $2.5 trillion. Transportation improvements are essential to maintaining a high tech, high growth, high end economy and the cost of this runs around $6 billion a year for 15 years. California can afford it easily.
And if you actually read the news about this you know that the $98 billion is the high end estimate of the total project ($77 billion is the current projection, which is an increase), but that 119 miles is only one smallish part of the project. That part of the project is currently estimated at $10.6 billion, or roughly 1/10 of what you are claiming. Still more that $50 million a mile ($89 million), true.