Most radioactive waste from a fission power plant comes from decaying fission fragments - that is the left-over elements which are produced after the fissile material has split and released its energy in the form of the kinetic energy of the fission fragments which find themselves awfully close together with the same charge and not enough of the strong nuclear force to hold things together, plus the kinetic energy of the neutrons born from the fission process and some directly produced radiation.
These fission fragments then decay through a long decay chain up toward lead. Most of them have relatively long lives and produce high energy gamma so they create a problem.
Fusion power will also create fusion products - but those products tend to be more stable - grabbing neutrons from the stew and much more rapidly settling down into nuclides that are much less radioactive than those produced by fission.
Of course there ARE fast neutrons produced during the fission and fusion process. Neutrons born from fission are fast neutrons, very high energy. In all fission power reactors those neutrons have to be slowed into thermal equilibrium (lose a LOT of energy) by having elastic collisions with some material - say the hydrogen atoms in water (the material that slows the neutrons is called a "moderator") so they have a reasonable chance of interacting with another fuel atom and cause fission. U235 likes thermal neutrons to fission.
During the termalization process some neutrons will scatter out of the core, "leaking out" of the reactor core. And they interact with the primary shield. They make some things radioactive. The materials that go into reactor construction are choosen to reduce the nasty things that can get really radioactive - like, say, cobalt one of whose isotopes (Cobalt-60) decays giving off a very nasty gamma which lead doesn't shield particularly well. (another story).
So some materials will be irratdiated by the high energy neutron flux of a fission reactor and become radioactive. But the worst is done by the fission products of the reactor. Think one Curie of waste per watt of power at the end of core life as a thumb rule and remember that a Curie is one whale of a lot of radioactivity.
From my perspective the greatest problem we have with technology is separation: we find it more and more difficult to separate ourselves from the demands of our working environment.
Technology now enables us to take our work with us. And the demands of the economy to increase productivity demand that we KEEP our work with us all the time. So it's difficult for people to separate themselves from their work. Which causes conflict and conflict causes stress.
It doesn't HAVE to be like this but for it to happen there has to be a contract between work and leisure so one doesn't overwhelm the other. Such contracts are rare - it takes enlightened management to recognize that workers shouldn't cart their working lives into homes without great reason.
Tools are required to manage information and we're only now starting to develop those to keep us from being overwhelmed by the spam of our daily working lives.
you write: "Any implementation that has enforceable "conformance" requirements placed on it cannot be an open source implementation. Enforceable conformance requirements are intrinsically incompatible with what people mean by "open source".
I don't understand this. If you write a computer language, say C, that meets an ANSI standard, but publish it under the GPL, then haven't you created a product that is required to comply with a standard and yet which is also open source?
But PIXAR will, at least, have control over its own destiny and no longer have to put up with having each film it produces going into the Disney "great animation" hall of fame.
In fact Disney has begun to fail more often than succeed. Pixar may produce a lesser film than any so far, but they would have to sink a long way in order to reach the currest state of Disney offerings. Or any other American company's for that matter.
You are falling for the same drivel that Hollywood believes - that it's only a "hit" business.
By the late 70s PASCAL was making a direct inroad into colleges and universities for the purposes of teaching programming. FORTRAN, however, was required for engineers and the sciences.
Those "bad habits" you metion pale in comparison to "computed GOTO's" in terms of readability. Yet FORTRAN code that runs to this day still uses those.
Teaching someone to program with Javascript is actually scary to me. There are so many better languages on which to learn.
No one would really call the PDP-11 a CISC machine. You might call it a RISC VAX however (pause for audience laughter).
Also, many PDP-11's were random logic and not micro-coded. The later 11's were microcoded, of course, the 11/60 being the extreme because it had a writeable control store that let you define your own micro-coded instructions.
It's important to remember that the entire RT-11 operating system was written entirely in MACRO-11 by some amazing software engineers who knew the PDP-11 instruction set inside and out. The result was an operating system that ran very nicely in a 4K word footprint.
The VAX had a terrific compiler, BLISS-32, which created amazingly efficient code; code no human being would ever create but fantastic none-the-less.
When I took my first programming course for EE computer folks at UC Davis our first course was in PDP-11 assembly language. It was a great way to learn both an environment and the up-close details of how to make a machine work.
The PDP-11 has a great orthogonal instruction set which let the student explore a wealth of different addressing modes.
It was a great WELL ENGINEERED place to learn to write programs since it was engineered and didn't grow up loaded with garbage the way the 86 has. The macro assembler was excellent and RT-11 gave a great little runtime environment.
You should visit your local elections dept and discover the myriad of ways that people have marked up their ballots beyond the "normal" or correct method. Election officials have guidelines to help them discern who the person marking the ballot had intended to vote for.
They take it VERY seriously, at least in this part of California (Yolo County).
There are serious issues with the leap into electronic voting. This is just one of them.
NO! Cassini used thermo-isotope generators to provide it's electrical power using the heat to generate electricity. There was no fission reaction involved.
This project will have a nuclear reactor using a sustained nuclear chain reaction to produce heat. It's a very different thing.
As long as the fission power plant has never achieved criticality before it is launched there won't be a big problem. You can walk right up to a highly-enriched U-235 reactor core with no danger. It can be blown up with just some low-level contamination, unlike, say, the plutonium-fueled "batteries" that have been used in other deep-space probes which, if breached, would do some very ugly things. (The likelyhood of a breach being an item of religious intensity.)
If a nuclear reactor hasn't yet achieved criticality and operated at power it's very benign. Once it HAS been operated with a power history, however, it can contain about a Curie of radioactivity for ever watt of rated power. So if this plant were a few hundred kilowatts (thermal) it would have a few hundred kilo-Curies at end of core life - a LOT of radioactivity.
The space-craft's nuclear plant would therefore be designed to achieve initial criticality in (most likely) a high Earth orbit.
The head of NASA mentioned several years ago now that he was talking with NAVSEA CODE 08 (Nuclear Propulsion) to get ideas on how to make one of these puppies. One thing the Navy knows how to do right is operate and (with Bettis and KAPL) design small, high power density nuclear power plants.
You might consider a range finder camera. You can buy the body of a Leica IIIg at your price point with another $100 or so for a 50mm lens. 35mm and 90mm lenses are also available.
There are also Contax ranger finder cameras out there.
You'll need an exposure meter because these puppies are ENTIRELY manual but that's a good thing for a new photographer.
You won't be taking a lot of wild-life photos with a range finder but you can do some splendid street photography and you can do great portraiture. After all it's the glass and Leica glass is the best in the world.
You might even scrounge around and get lucky and find an early Leica M which would serve you well all your life.
These are great cameras, made like tanks and rugged.
So look around and if you have a really good camera store in your area take your time and check out lots of different cameras.
My first great camera was a Leica IIIf which now lives at the bottom of Charleston Harbor. (A submarine's weapons shipping hatch is NOT a great place to put down a camera, even for a moment.)
I cheerfully vote to end all unrequested music in stores and sports venues. Often it's loud, poorly reproduced (to make the distortion intolerable) and selected by a sick 15 year old. It could be selected by ANYONE...I just hate having music or any other unwanted sound blasted into my brain.
Although Olson couldn't see beyond the mini-computer, DEC made some brilliant software and some superior hardware to go with it. But Olson was terminal/network-centric.
His remarks about UNIX, when compared to VMS, still seem right-on. Most folks think VMS and equate it with DCL, the command language. However the internals and the driver architecture were superb.
I often regret that Apple and DEC couldn't make the obvious union - althoug it's a case of corporate cultures (and their egos at the top) being incompatible.
I think you're out of touch with the canvasing process that verifies selected parts of the hard-copy vote with the tabulated vote. It would be virtually impossible to fake.
Maybe open source is your religion, and that's okay, but don't let it disconnect you with reality.
I don't get it. You can burn your own CD from the QT files you buy from the iTunes store right? And after they are on CD you can make MP3s of them and do what you will, no DRM associated with them.
So, beyond the rather adolescent desire to hack the encryption, what problem does this solve? There's just no reason. Once they're on CD it's as if you bought them at the store.
I'm surprised that the slash-dot group really liked this series. I know I found it frothy, heavy on the ol' special effects (I had the feeling that SOMEONE in the production team got a new non-linear editing system and just absolutely had to play with every possible feature). The first installment was by far the strongest.
I've disliked Nova increasingly over the past few years - all the re-enactments (Gallileo for example) - they've gotten all touchy-feely. I have this awful thought that liberal-arts people, who are intrinsicly afraid of technology, would rather do dramas than do hard looks at science.
What Pixar has brought to its animation is a respect for its audience, high quality animation, and artistic integrity. And they have consistantly done something that other studios seem to do only by accident: create characters a wide spectrum of audiences can actually CARE about.
I'm happy Pixar is out there because their stories aren't cynical. They reflect an integrity that comes from imbuing their characters with a fundamental humanity we all can relate to. It's good for children. It's good for everyone.
I'm hoping they push up the rating scale and make more complex stories as well. If Pixar starts to write stories about ambiguous characters they can truly re-invent American animation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're deep in the weeds.
Most radioactive waste from a fission power plant comes from decaying fission fragments - that is the left-over elements which are produced after the fissile material has split and released its energy in the form of the kinetic energy of the fission fragments which find themselves awfully close together with the same charge and not enough of the strong nuclear force to hold things together, plus the kinetic energy of the neutrons born from the fission process and some directly produced radiation.
These fission fragments then decay through a long decay chain up toward lead. Most of them have relatively long lives and produce high energy gamma so they create a problem.
Fusion power will also create fusion products - but those products tend to be more stable - grabbing neutrons from the stew and much more rapidly settling down into nuclides that are much less radioactive than those produced by fission.
Of course there ARE fast neutrons produced during the fission and fusion process. Neutrons born from fission are fast neutrons, very high energy. In all fission power reactors those neutrons have to be slowed into thermal equilibrium (lose a LOT of energy) by having elastic collisions with some material - say the hydrogen atoms in water (the material that slows the neutrons is called a "moderator") so they have a reasonable chance of interacting with another fuel atom and cause fission. U235 likes thermal neutrons to fission.
During the termalization process some neutrons will scatter out of the core, "leaking out" of the reactor core. And they interact with the primary shield. They make some things radioactive. The materials that go into reactor construction are choosen to reduce the nasty things that can get really radioactive - like, say, cobalt one of whose isotopes (Cobalt-60) decays giving off a very nasty gamma which lead doesn't shield particularly well. (another story).
So some materials will be irratdiated by the high energy neutron flux of a fission reactor and become radioactive. But the worst is done by the fission products of the reactor. Think one Curie of waste per watt of power at the end of core life as a thumb rule and remember that a Curie is one whale of a lot of radioactivity.
From my perspective the greatest problem we have with technology is separation: we find it more and more difficult to separate ourselves from the demands of our working environment.
Technology now enables us to take our work with us. And the demands of the economy to increase productivity demand that we KEEP our work with us all the time. So it's difficult for people to separate themselves from their work. Which causes conflict and conflict causes stress.
It doesn't HAVE to be like this but for it to happen there has to be a contract between work and leisure so one doesn't overwhelm the other. Such contracts are rare - it takes enlightened management to recognize that workers shouldn't cart their working lives into homes without great reason.
Tools are required to manage information and we're only now starting to develop those to keep us from being overwhelmed by the spam of our daily working lives.
you write: "Any implementation that has enforceable "conformance" requirements placed on it cannot be an open source implementation. Enforceable conformance requirements are intrinsically incompatible with what people mean by "open source".
I don't understand this. If you write a computer language, say C, that meets an ANSI standard, but publish it under the GPL, then haven't you created a product that is required to comply with a standard and yet which is also open source?
This defies logic.
But PIXAR will, at least, have control over its own destiny and no longer have to put up with having each film it produces going into the Disney "great animation" hall of fame.
In fact Disney has begun to fail more often than succeed. Pixar may produce a lesser film than any so far, but they would have to sink a long way in order to reach the currest state of Disney offerings. Or any other American company's for that matter.
You are falling for the same drivel that Hollywood believes - that it's only a "hit" business.
I have to disagree.
By the late 70s PASCAL was making a direct inroad into colleges and universities for the purposes of teaching programming. FORTRAN, however, was required for engineers and the sciences.
Those "bad habits" you metion pale in comparison to "computed GOTO's" in terms of readability. Yet FORTRAN code that runs to this day still uses those.
Teaching someone to program with Javascript is actually scary to me. There are so many better languages on which to learn.
Even FORTRAN.
No one would really call the PDP-11 a CISC machine. You might call it a RISC VAX however (pause for audience laughter).
Also, many PDP-11's were random logic and not micro-coded. The later 11's were microcoded, of course, the 11/60 being the extreme because it had a writeable control store that let you define your own micro-coded instructions.
It's important to remember that the entire RT-11 operating system was written entirely in MACRO-11 by some amazing software engineers who knew the PDP-11 instruction set inside and out. The result was an operating system that ran very nicely in a 4K word footprint.
The VAX had a terrific compiler, BLISS-32, which created amazingly efficient code; code no human being would ever create but fantastic none-the-less.
When I took my first programming course for EE computer folks at UC Davis our first course was in PDP-11 assembly language. It was a great way to learn both an environment and the up-close details of how to make a machine work.
The PDP-11 has a great orthogonal instruction set which let the student explore a wealth of different addressing modes.
It was a great WELL ENGINEERED place to learn to write programs since it was engineered and didn't grow up loaded with garbage the way the 86 has. The macro assembler was excellent and RT-11 gave a great little runtime environment.
This is just so wrong. In so many ways. It's like...it's like...taking a Linux system and proudly replacing it with Windows in order to get worms.
Shuddering...
If you need an image of a banknote your central bank is required to provide you with an appropriate image. You just need to ask.
You should visit your local elections dept and discover the myriad of ways that people have marked up their ballots beyond the "normal" or correct method. Election officials have guidelines to help them discern who the person marking the ballot had intended to vote for.
They take it VERY seriously, at least in this part of California (Yolo County).
There are serious issues with the leap into electronic voting. This is just one of them.
Good web site, good company to deal with, great product. I have one, and three out of three kids have them and all of them LOVE 'em.
Get the padded case with handles for your computer. And I like the iPod case and cell phone case for the straps.
In descending order from wonderful to OMG that SUCKED SO BAD...
...
If you didn't see it at the flicks check out this first one. It's incredibly compelling. Nemo was wonderful entertainment and gorgeous. PIXAR gets it.
Winged Migration
Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation, Master and Commander
Pirates of the Carribean
Matrix II & III
These last movies demonstrate that when anything is possible nothing is interesting.
You only have to see the work that Ansel put into making his prints - the recipe for making Moonrise, Hernandez NM was HUGE and it took a long time.
Ansel wasn't a conservative artist - he was an innovator. He'd have been pushing the vendors harder and harder to improve their products.
I have no doubt at all that he'd have been totally captivated by digital and using combinations of digital an analog.
NO! Cassini used thermo-isotope generators to provide it's electrical power using the heat to generate electricity. There was no fission reaction involved.
This project will have a nuclear reactor using a sustained nuclear chain reaction to produce heat. It's a very different thing.
and a LOT safer to launch.
As long as the fission power plant has never achieved criticality before it is launched there won't be a big problem. You can walk right up to a highly-enriched U-235 reactor core with no danger. It can be blown up with just some low-level contamination, unlike, say, the plutonium-fueled "batteries" that have been used in other deep-space probes which, if breached, would do some very ugly things. (The likelyhood of a breach being an item of religious intensity.)
If a nuclear reactor hasn't yet achieved criticality and operated at power it's very benign. Once it HAS been operated with a power history, however, it can contain about a Curie of radioactivity for ever watt of rated power. So if this plant were a few hundred kilowatts (thermal) it would have a few hundred kilo-Curies at end of core life - a LOT of radioactivity.
The space-craft's nuclear plant would therefore be designed to achieve initial criticality in (most likely) a high Earth orbit.
The head of NASA mentioned several years ago now that he was talking with NAVSEA CODE 08 (Nuclear Propulsion) to get ideas on how to make one of these puppies. One thing the Navy knows how to do right is operate and (with Bettis and KAPL) design small, high power density nuclear power plants.
You might consider a range finder camera. You can buy the body of a Leica IIIg at your price point with another $100 or so for a 50mm lens. 35mm and 90mm lenses are also available.
There are also Contax ranger finder cameras out there.
You'll need an exposure meter because these puppies are ENTIRELY manual but that's a good thing for a new photographer.
You won't be taking a lot of wild-life photos with a range finder but you can do some splendid street photography and you can do great portraiture. After all it's the glass and Leica glass is the best in the world.
You might even scrounge around and get lucky and find an early Leica M which would serve you well all your life.
These are great cameras, made like tanks and rugged.
So look around and if you have a really good camera store in your area take your time and check out lots of different cameras.
My first great camera was a Leica IIIf which now lives at the bottom of Charleston Harbor. (A submarine's weapons shipping hatch is NOT a great place to put down a camera, even for a moment.)
I cheerfully vote to end all unrequested music in stores and sports venues. Often it's loud, poorly reproduced (to make the distortion intolerable) and selected by a sick 15 year old. It could be selected by ANYONE...I just hate having music or any other unwanted sound blasted into my brain.
My vote for worst offender: Circuit City.
You should be such a dumbass.
Although Olson couldn't see beyond the mini-computer, DEC made some brilliant software and some superior hardware to go with it. But Olson was terminal/network-centric.
His remarks about UNIX, when compared to VMS, still seem right-on. Most folks think VMS and equate it with DCL, the command language. However the internals and the driver architecture were superb.
I often regret that Apple and DEC couldn't make the obvious union - althoug it's a case of corporate cultures (and their egos at the top) being incompatible.
I think you're out of touch with the canvasing process that verifies selected parts of the hard-copy vote with the tabulated vote. It would be virtually impossible to fake.
Maybe open source is your religion, and that's okay, but don't let it disconnect you with reality.
I don't get it. You can burn your own CD from the QT files you buy from the iTunes store right? And after they are on CD you can make MP3s of them and do what you will, no DRM associated with them.
So, beyond the rather adolescent desire to hack the encryption, what problem does this solve? There's just no reason. Once they're on CD it's as if you bought them at the store.
It's just ego.
I'm surprised that the slash-dot group really liked this series. I know I found it frothy, heavy on the ol' special effects (I had the feeling that SOMEONE in the production team got a new non-linear editing system and just absolutely had to play with every possible feature). The first installment was by far the strongest.
I've disliked Nova increasingly over the past few years - all the re-enactments (Gallileo for example) - they've gotten all touchy-feely. I have this awful thought that liberal-arts people, who are intrinsicly afraid of technology, would rather do dramas than do hard looks at science.
You might want to try Gordon Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams" to get a different experience. I found the visions compelling.
What Pixar has brought to its animation is a respect for its audience, high quality animation, and artistic integrity. And they have consistantly done something that other studios seem to do only by accident: create characters a wide spectrum of audiences can actually CARE about.
I'm happy Pixar is out there because their stories aren't cynical. They reflect an integrity that comes from imbuing their characters with a fundamental humanity we all can relate to. It's good for children. It's good for everyone.
I'm hoping they push up the rating scale and make more complex stories as well. If Pixar starts to write stories about ambiguous characters they can truly re-invent American animation.
Wow - I'd love one of THOSE if it came with a VMS license.
Once the music has been burned to a CD it's beyond Apple's reach to make it "not playable."