To some people having a nice warm spectrum from a bulb doesn't matter to them. But to others, inhabiting in a space lit by these new bulbs is like living in a morgue. [...] I am glad halogen bulbs will still be available because they are the only acceptable option right now.
Me also. I grew up in yellow afternoon sunlight choose to bathe my home in smooth afternoon sunlight because blue-heavy spectral light and/or any hint of flicker gives me an instant headache. Even book-reading is unsatisfying without a warm yellow page.
Technology has afforded me a choice and that is my choice. I dimmer my lights and wear Winter clothes inside to save energy (which is same thing as money) and I have only a brusquely-thrust middle finger for those who do not think it would suffice to suggest CFL/LED bulbs, anything else must be destroyed.
This all happened in 2006. RSA adopted DUAL_EC. RSA was sold to EMC. NIST released the standard. Microsoft researchers showed the flaws in DUAL_EC. The flaws in DUAL_EC have been known since 2006, the only thing we didn't know was that they were deliberate.
So... IF there was indeed a ~$10 million move afoot to slide Dual EC_DRBG into BSAFE and common use, why then was its implementation in the OpenSSL library left unattended? I can easily imagine that a bit of firm anonymous advocacy or subtle pressure on developers would have yielded results -- in the least a segfault-free product.
This empirically suggests that no such move was afoot. There are enough real controversies facing us today, we should be careful when going out on limbs.
Perhaps Snowden caught wind of someone in NSA who bloviated on RSA/BSAFE's default PRNG setting, misrepresenting a fortunate occurrence (for them) as if it was some deliberate operation...? In the comfoirtable world of internal memoranda such a 'fib' is possible. Just sayin'.
So yer gonna let us know when Sheriff Brown's men come knockin' with bench warrants because Daisie Mae's been kitin' checks around town again. And when Agent Orange and Agent Pink ("pink? Why do I have to be pink??") from the Dee Eee Aye are trollin' emails trying to find Bobby Joe who made it big back East sellin' loco weed to the uptight Beltway folks. And Officer Green from the Eff Bee Eye who is stalkin' 'ol Abdul and thinkin' he is tryin' to build a bomb just 'cause his momma named him after his Arab Daddy and he bought all this extra fertilizer for his farm to share with the Bransons who want to keep farmin' but they're on Social Securitty 'an they can't afford none. Well that's real special.
Well shucks, why don't you tell us about ROOM 641A and how many like it there are out there. You can Meet Me At Your Telecom Riser where the fiber optics are split, and show us which circuits have been tapped to give the spooks access to full Internet and full-voice. And show us a map so we can see how domestic it is.
While you're at it, tell us when this stuff started to be installed too. Because we are coming to believe that the current President is merely a Puppet on a Chain and the spooks have some blackmail on him even worse than the Choom Gang. They say dance, he dances. Knowing when this domestic vacuum cleaner was turned on the citizens of the US would help us to discover who and what policies are responsible for this.
You're off Scott Free now, AT&T. For awhile you were quakin' in your boots as Hepting vs. AT&T was rising through the courts, "in which the EFF alleges that AT&T permitted and assisted the National Security Agency (NSA) in unlawfully monitoring the communications of the United States, including AT&T customers, businesses and third parties whose communications were routed through AT&T's network, as well as voice over IP telephone calls routed via the Internet."
But right around the time Hepting vs. AT&T made it to the Ninth Circuit. And wouldn't you know, in July 2008 the Senate (I wonder what Choom Gang blackmail the spooks have on them!) decided it was a great time to pass the FISA Amendments Act which is all about the tappin' of foreigners, all about keepin' the Republic safe, right? Well the Act also granted 'retroactive immunity' to telecomm employees who participate in un-Constitutional surveillance at the request of the government.
The Senate, and that Ninth Circuit Judge, and the Supreme Court (who refused the appeal) really got your ass out of the fire, AT&T. Because you were losing the case, after all. You were caught red-handed assisting spooks to connect their backbone slurp-taps on the domestic communications links between Americans, and no fancy lawyer could ever argue you did not know what was happening.
Well too bad that Congress sprinkled 'retroactive immunity' pixie dust on you. Your ultimate embarrassment in losing Hepting vs. AT&T would have been a small price to pay for blowing the lid off this turn-key Police State you are helping to build. Fortunately there are heroes like Snowden who have the balls to do it for you.
So AT&T, tell us about Room 641A. We don't give a flying fuck about law enforcement warrants.
And also, please shoot that male voice "I didn't get that. Did you say... my pickle is not working...?" stupid robot who answers for customer support. He's an abomination of microchips.
[OP] "disappearing into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices, a Canadian study (abstract, article paywalled) indicated
Well so much for the study. Money changes everything. Eventually one hundred thousand copies of the abstract will exist on the Internet, but the authors' future descendants will find only only one actual link that leads to content, which terminates at a page saying "this domain is for sale".
You'd think that even science data of extremely low bit rate such as original weather station temperature data should be out there somewhere. A lot of other people did too... but all that is available now might be "value added" ajusted data. Not an evil conspiracy per se, it's human nature at it's best and worst.
A handy chronology of the history of data retention:
[2500BC] King Fuckemup boldly slew the enemy and I, Scribe Asskissus hath inscribed it in stone. He is an asshole who owes me back wages." [1500] "With quivering quill I will write mine own data." [1866] "Data published at great expense into leather-bound volumes. Dust sold separately." [1970] "This is really important. we should print it and store it in a binder." [1971] They didn't. [1983] "I'll write it to floppy disk with a notsosticky label" [1985] "After a long and desperate search, the label has been found!" [1987] "Unlabeled floppy disk keeps coffeemaker level." [1995] "Roxio CD storage is forever, and Real Scientists don't close their data sessions." [2003] "Microsoft Word has experienced a problem updating from an older document format and will now close. Save your work as soon as possible." [2005] "I'll just email it to myself and shut the computer off immediately, then pick it up at work." [2009] "Yes, three copies! In the safe. There was a fire. Yes, inside the safe. It was a fireproof safe, so no one noticed." [2010] "This is really important. I should print it and store it in a binder. But my ink cartridge is dry." [2013] "Our data has been uploaded to the Cloud where it will live forever." [2500] "King Grapeape slew the primitive humans and buried their statue on the beach. I, Scribe Anthopoapologus hath incribed it in stone."
Perhaps the most mystiying data retention escapade of Modern Times is the missing Apollo 11 SSTV moon tapes which contained a multiplexed stream of raw telemetry and the original slow-scan TV signal broadcast from the moon. Not 'missing' really, rather we know they were re-used and recorded over because everyone assumed it was someone else's job to ensure that at least one copy was in a safe place. While the earth station operators dutifully sent their tapes to NASA where the sharpest signal of the moon landing was sure to be perserved for posterity (not), fortunately there were some librarians on duty, and you can aquire DVDs of the moonwalk with better quality than the recordings you've seen in countless movies -- an 8mm film camera pointed at an original SSTV monitor at Honeysuckle Creek, and the best quality scan-converted version.
In the Foundation series, Asimov envisioned Gaia, a world in which a telepathic network of sentient (and sensuous) beings kept a 'working set' retrievable data in-memory -- but also via access to progressively less and non-sentient objects, such as plants and even rocks -- a vast archive. Ask the mountain, it will answer in time, a long time.
The backbone tapping mechanisms that make large scale surveillance on Americans must be completely disclosed and dismantled. An egregious capital crime has been committed by NSA for which no clemency or 're-structuring' is possible.
If a new spy agency is built, it must be from pieces of the smoking wreckage of NSA.
If we can execute the Rosenbergs we can try and execute the NSA, which has done more to put us in harm's way than the Soviet's possession (and ultimate non-use) of nuclear weapons.
Building turn-key mechanisms for a Police State is a capital crime. It provides aid and comfort to our enemies. All of them at once.
Full dissolution, full dismantling of taps, dark fiber and facilities. That is how the Balance is kept. Our move.
Proteins are not just building blocks, they are Rubik Cubes of the organic world, and this learning process of real-time signalling has reached the [inverse] stage as when we realized that with transistor amplification in a complementary balanced pair a bistable multivibrator was possible. The bit 'state' storage when joined with the plumbing of NAND gates is the basis for the computer.
With Life we have been reverse engineering, poking things with sharp sticks to see where and how they break, in medicine retarding or advancing chemical mechanisms to bring a patient's complex system back to natural equilibrium (health).
Even simple computer models can be capable of astonishing behavior, and it is already possible to construct systems in which parallel (but inherently different to our own) evolution may occur. The challenge is to be able to model the mechanics of life on all practical scales simultaneously to the point where we could join software gametes in a virtual crucible and grow a model embryo. Or at least an e.coli.
Note to scientists: please do not turn off e.coli. It's important to me.
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." ~Douglas Adams
WE ALL forgot to do what any rational Slashdot audience would do, abandon thread for a moment to set up a Boolean decision tree and NSA morality geek code so that further discussion becomes logically precise, generally incomprehensible to outsiders and confusing in whole new ways.. so from this little sub-thread so far we have
Prefix: NSASnowJob: thouHastSinned+-: Did the NSA do something wrong? IseeSaidTheBlindMan+-: Did anyone notice? deweyDefeatsTruman+-: Did anyone report it? whoIsJohnGalt+-: Did anything change? area51+-: Did someone make shit up? texasSuicide+-: Did someone die mysteriously? itWasTheDogThatFarted+-: Does everyone do it (no big fucking deal)?
[[NSA:SnowJob::]] We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare [thouHastSinned+++] We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. [IseeSaidTheBlindMan++++] In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: [deweyDefeatsTruman++] make war together [whoIsJohnGalt++++] make peace together [Snoden=texasSuicide----] You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain [no excuse itWasTheDogThatFarted--] and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. [credibility zero area51----] Signed, ZIMMERMANN.
I like your plan. It is clear, concise and ends with the Sack of Rome, as all good plans should.
Small nuc plants As many vehicles as possible running on batteries Nuc supplied electricity to charge
These two items would be the biggest game changer. I do hope though that we will have a choice, whether to invite small nuclear into our own backyard (I certainly would being a survivalist)... or, through the grid purchase a bit of big nuke energy a good ways from someone who has a big nuke in their backyard. As shown by the Dakotas' boost in median income as the rest of us hold the line or sink, oil/energy is a path to wealth creation, one of the only now that so much manufacturing and exports have gone. All it would take are a few states of the Union to go full nuclear. My own state of Oklahoma could literally light the country coast to coast with big nuclear and HVDC conduits to render it into properly synchronized AC on the interconnects. So far I have received the standard goose egg response to this idea.
Remaining Petrochemical stocks to produce plastics and provide machinery lubrication.
Don't forget fertilizer and energy for irrigation and farming, the two greatest Achilles' heels of modern life. Here is where a larger scale nuclear approach really could help, for the amount of process heat required to knock hydrogen from water and sequester nitrogen from the air to make ammonia could not easily be accomplished by the small nuke in your backyard. Which brings us finally to
Large scale effort to produce a fuel with high energy density and transportability to replace petrofuel in military uses like jets and planes. Our world is built on cheap accessible energy. Without it we will run the industrial revolution and civilization in reverse, and only stop when we once again party with the Visigoths.
I wish I could say that ammonia was the grail but it isn't really. My current angle is hydrogen knocked from water by nuclear energy (via heat and/or direct radiation) for transportation, but elemental hydrogen is really dangerous. We'll either deal with it (boom!) or find some way to stabilize it.
Your party hearty plan had me thinking of a barbarian horde arriving in... electric Goth carts.
The cloud - Computing's version of the housing bubble.
Nope, its 45MWe. As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.
Right you are, 160MW thermal 45MW electric, I'm getting too hasty on fact-checking. Still on the small side but perfect for Alaska, especially if your city or town is already piped for steam heating.
So why is the capital cost of nuclear some 4-5 times the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant (~$1,400/KW)? Aside from the obvious reasons like being dangerous and Atomic.
In 1970-71 Consolidated Edison built the Dresden plant for $146/kW... still going today like an Energizer Bunny with ~1.7GWe. This is plant was built for ~50 times less than Moody's 2008 cost estimate.
What the hell is going on?
I found no easy answers, but plenty to ponder in Chapter 9 ("Costs of nuclear power plants -- what went wrong?") of The Nuclear Energy Option, a great little book by Bernard Cohen [full text online]. This work is dated [1990] and quaint -- he is bemoaning a plant that cost $3,326/kW in 1986 -- the whiner! But he does a good job describing the NRC practice of "regulatory ratcheting", where standard numeric metrics of safety have been codified, all the tough work is over, and every succeeding generation of regulators gains a round of applause and gets to wear festive party hats if they just plug in new (always higher: click) numbers.
This is an example of what I call "No one ever lost their job" syndrome, a creeping cancer of our society on many fronts. It is a malady that especially affects safety cultures. No one ever lost their job by announcing that things are not quite as safe as they could be, or regulation is strangling essential industries. The NRC has created plug-in metrics like requiring more concrete, more frequent inspections, margins and limits, time-tables and reporting requirements. And heavier fines (announcing a hike in fines works even when there are no infractions or violations, the public imagines this is being done to punish evil corporations who are foaming at the mouth and straining on their leashes this very moment).
Then there is outright abuse and intimidation. The recent yarn, Uneven Enforcement Suspected At [US] Nuclear Power Plants which made my eyeballs pop out on springs when I read it. It seems to say that the NRC is concerned that regulation (by the NRC) might be lacking in some (un-visited) regions for unknown reasons and the NRC is... crap, no I cannot even summarize it, it's so ridiculous. They are treating better safety record in some plants as something suspicious to be investigated. Then their 'suspicions' are released in a Senate report which the nuke-hysteria press predictably treats as some smoking gun. It should go beyond embarrassment. I feel some one should lose their job over this -- a regulatory agency releasing damaging speculation on an industry on a topic they are supposed to be sure of.
But no one will lose their job, even when they susp
On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.
But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot. By the time a steam turbine spins, maybe a couple thousand homes or a few hundred homes and a few factories, and you're done. I am sure there are remote critical use facilities and a few wealthy communities who would love one of these and could actually afford one, but I find it hard to imagine these nuclear Easy Bake Ovens as being superior in approach to stringing a reasonable amount of wire to some more distant plant of ~x20 scale.
People are thinking of small nuclear plants as safer and more do-able, and that is OK. Because they are on the way to imagining something like Robert Heinlein's 'Shipstones' that populate his novel Friday, modular forever-batteries that were available to power a wristwatch or a city. And of course it happened that the Shipstone Corporation controlled everything. Or the actual nuclear P238 Shipstone we have created to power Voyager and other deep space missions.
Part of my personal WTF factor is that I am beginning to see the same scale-down and build more and somehow we'll all survive and be all right so-called innovation for conventional nuclear as I see in other energy proposals, such as the building a couple million of these and hundreds of these. Can anyone fault the dream? No, so long as there is time to think of fun things.
I'm convinced we're running out of time. We are at a crossroads right now, because so many people in this country are enjoying this state of modern comfort and do not realize that with every passing year we approach a dangerous precipice. Not the end of all things but the end of easy choices.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Because we're not going to run out of this stuff. We will
But consider this. You and those of your ilk, believe that most people are really really stupid. It oozes out of your posts. You know how things are, and if anyone disagrees with you, they are stupid. Not just wrong. Your superiority is unquestionable.
I think you are misinterpreting my zeal for the idea as some some arrogant position of moral superiority. I feel personally pressed on the matter of nuclear energy, and I am trying to share the load in a way that it might make a difference.
Do I have some grand Atomic Utopia in mind???? HELL NO. I just know that people are not going to stop. And I KNOW that solar and wind will not work, in ways I'm weary of discussing.
Despite what you and I do or say, despite what Bill Gates or Ghandi would do, people will keep burning coal, sucking oil and natural gas out of the ground. Windmills will be built and windmills will fail, money gone. Some in positions of trust will step forward and exaggerate the amount of time we have left before these things run out. Many will believe them. Others will just as absurdly cry that the world ends tomorrow.
There will be novels written -- great novels, every day -- that portray the future as a nice comfortable place, a time when all the big problems have been solved. There will be New York bestsellers that dive into the details of imaginary crimes and brilliant detective work, ten more Harlequin romances and twenty new computer games and game startups showing us that life (as we know it) will just go on. People will eagerly and gratefully lose themselves in these things. All powered by coal and natural gas.
There will be other novels written that describe catastrophic collapse, fierry ruin and mass hysteria, focusing on that dire -- yet somehow comfortable -- moment of despair when all options have been exhausted, people are already hungry, bullets are spent. It is a fixation, this preoccupation with total despair and helplessness. Fear of the unknown and the known is great for business. People will lose themselves in these novels too, play apocalyptic games and imagine themselves as the last ones standing. What else could they do. But like the idyllic portraits, these dark scenarios are also cutting corners.
NO ONE DARES to discuss what the world would be like when we are merely three-quarters or even nine-tenths depleted of fossil fuel. Imagine a time with a few more people than it has today, a time when all gloves are off and nations are at war with one another and the transparent reason is to completely dominate and secure remaining resources. They will be met with terrible resistance by the peoples defending them, and the whole world will be drawn into it, crawling with suicide bombers. The military given one-way missions. Nations that have the power to move aggressively will do so ruthlessly, while they themselves are under siege from terrorism, because from modern technology no border is safe. All traces of the pre-war capitalist economy will be gone. Every nation will exist under a state of military and financial martial law of some sort, though it may be sugar-coated and those Harlequin romances will keep coming, though they will show men and women in battle dress with tanks in the background.
It's like you are driving and find your way into particularly busy interchange where too many things are happening at once. Disaster is close, it is all around you. You cannot stop, you cannot go back, no one is in a position to yield and the only way out is to accelerate suddenly and decisively in some new direction that will distance you from other drivers. By performing some unexpected and brilliant maneuver you are clear and your exit permits the others to thread the mess without incident.
A way out. That is what I perceive safer nuclear energy to be. And all the LFTR folks have done their part. I mean, they have really shined. From early concept [1950] Wigner to Weinberg to ORNL
The REAL split is between the Cities and Not the Cities. And goes back quite a while, at least half a century. The operating level of political difference is really at the County Level, not the State level
Right on. Red versus Blue is becoming less important as time goes on, yet false paradigms are used to rally them against one another like opposing teams. Bread and circuses.
Megacities and the urban sprawl which surround and connect them create zones of provincial sentiment. It really is a mind-set. At a certain point the city becomes the state (New York, California, Maryland) and views in opposition to those of the urban voting block go to margin.
The urban-rural schism is the most pervasive, but there are regional differences that also transcend party. Look at Colin Woodward's 11 Nation-States of America, which paints a few large swaths across the continent by county which represent waves of immigrant settlers, who seeded these geographic areas with attitudes that, just as with dialect, influence voters today. Even those who re-settle into those areas (and especially their children) adopt the flava. With whimsical names like Yankeedom, New Netherlands, Midlands and Tidewater one can almost imagine a Tolkienesque retelling of the American Tale, and I wish this concept may some day grow into an alternate-selection textbook of history that follows these waves without so much distracting clutter of place-names. On this map South Florida does not even make the list, it is a grey zone labelled 'Part of the Spanish Caribbean'. Hilarious!
Urbanites are more accepting of incremental erosion of personal liberty and a pattern of ever-increasing (but never abrupt) government involvement. I see this described in derogatory fashion as if they are simple sheeple or something, but I don't subscribe to such a vulgar character judgement. I think it may simply be that they are more often exposed to utopian ideals and idealists which say, we're this-close to solving this problem, all we need to do is this one more thing. Urbanites see their government as a machine that just needs a little tuning here and there. And it is a machine of sorts, one that gathers distant water rights and political power. Eventually the political sway of populous megacities will be complete, but in the United States it is not happening fast enough for them.
Which is why they are attacking the Constitution directly, seeking an end-run play to nullify the effect of electoral college via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I find this to be an insidious -- almost evil -- self-castration of a state's right to choose a President. If there is a battle between the Cities and Not the Cities, this is the front line. Look at the green (passed) and yellow (pending) states on the map. There are your cities vying for political domination.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was started by disenfranchised supporters of Al Gore who decided that if they lost it must mean that the system was broken. So now there are climate people who wish Gore would stick to politics and political people who wish he would stick to climate. I always wished he would become un-stuck from everything, and found it egregiously obnoxious that this NSA stooge who pushed the Clipper Chip was considered to be presidential material.
No matter exactly what the framers intended, the Electoral College creates a swing zone within which the growing influence of urbanized areas may (yet) reach a balance point with the desires of the sparsely populated rural peoples. This balance point, in which everyone becomes aware that the popular and electoral results diff
We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
And yes, I would be very much in favor of a small plant running in a conservative and over-engineered manner in my area. I would however fight strenuously against a megaplant. All the excuses, all the "That disaster was because of the old (and dangerous reactor that we told you was safe when we built it)" just make the rationale for the megaplants have zero credibility.
There is very little in the 'lessons' list that was not known in the days of Weinberg and Wigner. Weinberg even sacrificed his career in 1973 over his publicly expressed safety concerns (putting LFTR research into limbo). The effects of Xenon-135 buildup, which was a contributing factor to Chernobyl, had been discovered in the earliest reactor pile built and had been addressed in US designs. Fukushima was a '19th century fail' because in the 1800s the human race already had the technology to make water-tight compartments to secure precious things such as emergency backup generators. That had no business being in the basement. TEPCO really managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory there.
Didn't think so. I thought pasting in Westinghouse's own artistic rendition as background would make these folks seem glad that it was in their back yard, but they're as grumpy as ever. And that pitchfork looks threatening.
But all of the catastrophic fire, meltdown and kaboom scenarios listed involve issues associated with solid nuclear fuels, water, hydrogen gas, graphite and (temperature-hot) zirconium cladding. If a small or even large scale LFTR was built in your area there would be no towering containment building because there is no explosion/steam risk. And it is not layers of applied cooling and containment systems acting in perfect harmony that says so, it is designers' consensus that the chemistry is so. Some clever people from the 50s onward have looked at molten salts and (unlike the water reactor issues which were documented early on) no one seems to have found any serious explody life-threatening oversights. Even the Hastelloy corrosion concerns are issues of cost projection that would affect frequency of replacement, not safety. The fluorine-beryllium chemistry is weird and embodies occupationally hazardous material but it is well within our current understanding and use in industry. Under all conditions imagined thus far the salts would be content to stay in salt form.
In reactors here's hoping that history will favor a reliable deep throated Harley design over some exciting but explody Japanese screamer.
This gets funding, but the LIFTR doesnt? yeah.. seems like a great idea.
I am not an anonymous coward and I approve this message. It seems like despite the citation of this Thing as an 'answer' to anything useful... the lesson of Fukushima was not universally learned after all.
That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.'
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
The solution is to surround nuclear energy with less water, not more. None is best. Such as fissile contained in stable salts that, in case of a reactor breach, merely sit there not reacting to water or air or spreading into the environment until they can be cleaned up and recycled.
The chemistry of LFTR may seem odd and frightening to the proponents of water reactors, but if it takes ~7.5 olympic size swimming pools to thermally stabilize a 45 megawatt reactor, the idea of chaining these to provide utility levels of hundreds of megawatts is, um, just more silly?
Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now. Little things sneak up on you that way.
The most likely scenario is that this 'fortunate' community runs aground on the unforgiving shoals of 45 megawatts, cannot afford to grow even past the point where it can afford to maintain even that. And some day it is all forgotten (except the decommission cost) and CAT disels save the day. By my logic, which I invite everyone to poke holes in, micro-reactors are a trap because an insufficient ratio of watts/person is a trap.
I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
In terms of survival this is common sense, it is why some in the medical profession choose to cure diseases rather than individual patients. But there are not enough engineers tackling these 'big' problems.
Be wary of itty-bitty things that could never scale to become a big-things. Build big things that can become itty-bitty. Because molten salt fissile technology is not explosive on any scale, its minimum size is (theoretically) limited to the mass of its physical containment and the cleverness of our engineering. And our resolve to get it done.
As the beam of darkness brushes across the switch for that would turn it off, then expands to envelop us all in not-light and not-dark. Other things, rogue side-effects of tortured physics nonetheless mediated by gravity, the force nature uses to keep its mistakes firewalled from each other. Cubits and qubits swirl in maelstrom like the brief screaming hiss of a black hole drifting past you on a foul orbit around the center of the Earth leaving sublimely beautiful ellipses of not-matter as its event horizon expands by degree infinitesimal, unobserved but never unnoticed but by those for whom valuable body parts have been thus punctuated, the steady rhythm of science gone mad merging with the jeering laughter of the unquiet dead.
Until we all drown in the bile in the gullet of Schrodinger's cat.
Then nature hands up a sign near the incomprehensibly entangled remnant of our solar system which says.
I'm sitting here all warm and comfy in my home-bubble really excited about the burgeoning renaissance of intellectual prowess exhibited by today's youth as they prepare themselves to march boldly into the information age to create virtual solutions and clever apps to solve every day problems.
But I also just spent the last week fixing main breaks. It could be a small seep or a raging river, but you have to locate the main, drill holes along it and poke down to discover where the most water is escaping, then jackhammer the street and dig down beside it, careful to avoid other utilities. Once the leak is exposed you must decide whether the pump will keep up and you can clamp it under pressure or shut it down. Either way there are pitfalls -- shutting it changes pressure and direction of flow in the system, releasing internal crust buildup in pipes and making water 'dirty', and the valves might not have been operated in years and may be in the same shape as the pipes. Leaving pressure up it is possible that the pipe will blow out in front of you as you clean off the outer crust to clamp it, filling up the hole quickly. Yesterday there were two split-rounds too close to the bells where iron pipes joined, requiring a double notch to be scored at the bottom so the bottom of the pipe is broken out with a sledgehammer (releasing more water into the hole) to allow the bell section to be cut out, measured and a short pipe stub to be inserted, all held snug with a 30-inch steel and rubber clamp. Eventually as the clamp is tightened the torrent becomes a spray, then a trickle, then it stops. The pumps gain and the cold water (up to your waist) subsides and you can climb up and out to say hello to the wind chill factor. People need to do things like this in order to keep the water flowing from the tap.
Most of North America's drinkable water is delivered through pressure systems with iron pipes such as these. There is a move to plastic pipe (which is more chemically stable but has its own issues with taps and joints)...
I am not trying to be incorrigible here, I would just like to remind everyone that there was a time less then 100 years ago when the building of water and sewer and electrical infrastructure was the exciting topic of the day. As often discussed by every day people as data communication is today. The pipes and wires that deliver our infrastructure are aging, and often the tools and techniques available to repair them are little changed from when they were first built out into the wilderness.
To the young coders of tomorrow I would suggest this: while you honing your analytical skills in the information age, take a walk through your city or town and try to see it as it was 50, 100 years ago. This is only yesterday in human terms. There are amazing feats of engineering surrounding you that have been achieved by those who have come before, and in some critical areas innovation has slowed or stopped.
If only one or two in ten of you should choose a path that leads into some practical engineering field, bringing new thinking (and a good measure of resolve) it might stem the signs of decay that are only now becoming evident. Look for them and you will find these signs. They are merely problems, help us to solve them.
In order to do this you will have to develop prowess with electrics and electronics and fluids and chemicals and tools, materials science. You will need to find a way to bring industrial manufacture back to our shores, because (for what ever reason) it has mostly left, and that is not a good thing. You will have to devote a considerable amount of effort to develop energy sources that will work for everyone, not just the few who can afford to buy some this-or-that thing.
In short, if Modern Civilization follows you home and you decide to keep it... make sure you have the necessary skill and motivation to keep it alive and healthy. Or some day in the not-too-distant future the lights (and Internet) might go out, and we might spill out of
That type of thinking never crossed my mind till I started hauling horses.
What goes through the mind of a horse traveling at 40-60 miles an hour? Does he go 'Vrooom...' in his head or does he think 'clippity-cloppity-clippity-clop' sped up four times?
The other day I was driving a fully loaded dump truck descending a slightly banked dirt track covered with sleet and mud. At one point it mattered not what the forward speed was, and it was slow indeed, the side-slip matched it. Turn in the direction of the skid they say, only that direction did not lead to a happy place. At that point only a gentle but firm acceleration prevented trouble because I could see that if I reached a certain point up ahead road conditions would improve and traction would return.
Unless there was a helicopter hovering up ahead with a LIDAR terrain mapping unit feeding 3d simulations to some on-board computer and it happened to be running the right simulation model, I cannot see how any cyber-widget could have come to the same conclusion as I did.
I have found this thread to be very instructive, I never realized that you were supposed to avoid small animals.
So, despite its long and productive pre-history as a Black Chamber and special-ops division during the Cold War -- before the dawn of the Internet -- now the NSA claims that the only way they can do their job is to do things we find to be unacceptable.
I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; [â¦] total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
Thanks for the excellent breakout. Okay, hrrrmph. Perhaps my 'no growth' napkin math was an attempt to illustrate in simple snapshot-fashion what the geographical waste-footprint of this technology would be, in a way that could be grasped easily and took a minimum of work.
Or was my failure to to factor exponential growth due to laziness? I'd rather take the short answer and say yes, rather than muse on which exponents to use. Start with people. Which projected population curve should I use: the red 'rabbits-R-us' or the green 'UN releases contraceptives into water supply' curve? For the US population growth has been 0.75%, fertility rate of 1.88 children per woman, less than the 2.1 'replacement rate'. As a clumsy social commentator I have to conclude that choice has something to do with it. I cannot really suggest that there could be a natural plateau to population growth rate where your average woman wants a reasonable number of children without running afoul of Catholic seed bank or some future Pol Pot's depopulation agenda.
What about energy use? Should I take the position that the developing world has no right to a level of energy use equal to the most use-heavy? Could there be some future plateau to worldwide per-capita energy use once (reasonable) conservation measures are in place AND Africa is completely wired for electricity as is North America? Perhaps!
All in all 30,000 football fields for a World -- with a continuous removal of decayed safe-matter from the bottom of the stack, doesn't faze me on a planet of some 50 million square land-miles. That's probably all the football fields in the United States. Oh well, there's always baseball.
I'm not trying to straw-man you here, the use of exponents, some times taken from thin air for planning purposes has always been wise for planning. My assertiveness arises from the same utopian dream as the people who would sincerely wish Africa would and could do it all with windmills and solar farms. But it won't work for us, and would never work for them. My utopian dream is to see Africa covered with grids and base load energy production to US levels. Because that is what they want, and I am morally obligated to want it on their behalf. Because most women in the world today still wash clothes by hand.
What about the Apollo project? They made HUGE progress (at HUGE cost), but met their goal in less than a decade, having to develop almost all the technology from scratch!
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe
Okay, world installed generation capacity 20105,067 gigawatts Let's replace it all with LFTRs.
Let's pick a hypothetical 1Gw LFTR design, most of the LFTR folks think there would be no advantage to scale larger.
5,067 of these LFTRs produce (5067*0.17) ~861 tons of waste per year requiring 300 year storage.
So with no increase in LFTRs from the 2008 power capacity, as much as (861*300)~258,300 tons of waste would be stored in this single (hypothetical) depot, which represents the waste of 300 years' total world electricity generation. Using density of lead (arbitrary) I get ~ 729,700 cubic feet, or a an array of foot-cubes 855 feet square. Or ~38 American football fields, that is if there is no stacking of these cubes. It all could fit into Yucca Mountain with room for a few more thousand years' worth to spare. That is, IF it was necessary to store it long. But really only ~300 years.
The world's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain with LOTS of room to spare.
On second thought, let's reserve Yucca Mountain for tourism and grab 40 football fields at random.
There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
I reserve my deliberate deceptions for less important topics than Thorium.
One of the reasons I sing the praises of Kirk Sorensen's two fluid LFTR idea is that there is really no practical life-limit envisioned for the fluoride salts themselves. Even the Hastelloy-N plumbing is potentially recyclable. While others like David LeBlanc are pursuing interesting variations such as the Denatured MSR which delays processing as might be desired in a small reactor, I believe Sorensen has decided to pursue the 'endgame' and produce the most useful and logical embodiment to the concept. His active processing column is (in my opinion as a layman) a best-fit for the scale of 1GW reactors that could power our world.
I do not completely believe the Chinese Thorium time window feint. I think there might be tactics in play to dupe world investors into thinking that Thorium energy is on the really slow boat from China, so they have plenty of time to lollygag and burn more coal. Then (I think) one day, sooner rather than later, it will be suddenly announced there is a working prototype and the Chinese firms are looking for capital.
Regardless of the Chinese effort (they really NEED this technology as do we) I'd rather see some US investors in play to build this thing that we have invested developed.
"Reactor type: In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR) or PHWRs (e.g., Candu reactors). Thorium fuel concepts which require frst the construction of new reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach commercial maturity."
It seems they are discussing what would be necessary to retrofit LWR to burn solid fuel Thorium instead of Uranium. Molten salt suspension designs not even being considered. I agree, until available Uranium is an endangered specie (hundreds of years even generating all the world's electricity at 0.5% efficiency even with limited or no recycling) there is little incentive to use solid fuel Thorium in these reactors.
It's a very specific conclusion drawn from a very specific set of requirements. The 20/40 year time frames seem a little relaxed. These people should drink more coffee. Then they could get a good buzz and consider ways to burn almost 100% of the Uranium (of Thorium).
Slashdot Mirror
To some people having a nice warm spectrum from a bulb doesn't matter to them. But to others, inhabiting in a space lit by these new bulbs is like living in a morgue. [...] I am glad halogen bulbs will still be available because they are the only acceptable option right now.
Me also. I grew up in yellow afternoon sunlight choose to bathe my home in smooth afternoon sunlight because blue-heavy spectral light and/or any hint of flicker gives me an instant headache. Even book-reading is unsatisfying without a warm yellow page.
Technology has afforded me a choice and that is my choice. I dimmer my lights and wear Winter clothes inside to save energy (which is same thing as money) and I have only a brusquely-thrust middle finger for those who do not think it would suffice to suggest CFL/LED bulbs, anything else must be destroyed.
This all happened in 2006. RSA adopted DUAL_EC. RSA was sold to EMC. NIST released the standard. Microsoft researchers showed the flaws in DUAL_EC. The flaws in DUAL_EC have been known since 2006, the only thing we didn't know was that they were deliberate.
So... IF there was indeed a ~$10 million move afoot to slide Dual EC_DRBG into BSAFE and common use, why then was its implementation in the OpenSSL library left unattended? I can easily imagine that a bit of firm anonymous advocacy or subtle pressure on developers would have yielded results -- in the least a segfault-free product.
This empirically suggests that no such move was afoot. There are enough real controversies facing us today, we should be careful when going out on limbs.
Perhaps Snowden caught wind of someone in NSA who bloviated on RSA/BSAFE's default PRNG setting, misrepresenting a fortunate occurrence (for them) as if it was some deliberate operation...? In the comfoirtable world of internal memoranda such a 'fib' is possible. Just sayin'.
So yer gonna let us know when Sheriff Brown's men come knockin' with bench warrants because Daisie Mae's been kitin' checks around town again. And when Agent Orange and Agent Pink ("pink? Why do I have to be pink??") from the Dee Eee Aye are trollin' emails trying to find Bobby Joe who made it big back East sellin' loco weed to the uptight Beltway folks. And Officer Green from the Eff Bee Eye who is stalkin' 'ol Abdul and thinkin' he is tryin' to build a bomb just 'cause his momma named him after his Arab Daddy and he bought all this extra fertilizer for his farm to share with the Bransons who want to keep farmin' but they're on Social Securitty 'an they can't afford none. Well that's real special.
Well shucks, why don't you tell us about ROOM 641A and how many like it there are out there. You can Meet Me At Your Telecom Riser where the fiber optics are split, and show us which circuits have been tapped to give the spooks access to full Internet and full-voice. And show us a map so we can see how domestic it is.
While you're at it, tell us when this stuff started to be installed too. Because we are coming to believe that the current President is merely a Puppet on a Chain and the spooks have some blackmail on him even worse than the Choom Gang. They say dance, he dances. Knowing when this domestic vacuum cleaner was turned on the citizens of the US would help us to discover who and what policies are responsible for this.
You're off Scott Free now, AT&T. For awhile you were quakin' in your boots as Hepting vs. AT&T was rising through the courts, "in which the EFF alleges that AT&T permitted and assisted the National Security Agency (NSA) in unlawfully monitoring the communications of the United States, including AT&T customers, businesses and third parties whose communications were routed through AT&T's network, as well as voice over IP telephone calls routed via the Internet."
But right around the time Hepting vs. AT&T made it to the Ninth Circuit. And wouldn't you know, in July 2008 the Senate (I wonder what Choom Gang blackmail the spooks have on them!) decided it was a great time to pass the FISA Amendments Act which is all about the tappin' of foreigners, all about keepin' the Republic safe, right? Well the Act also granted 'retroactive immunity' to telecomm employees who participate in un-Constitutional surveillance at the request of the government.
The Senate, and that Ninth Circuit Judge, and the Supreme Court (who refused the appeal) really got your ass out of the fire, AT&T. Because you were losing the case, after all. You were caught red-handed assisting spooks to connect their backbone slurp-taps on the domestic communications links between Americans, and no fancy lawyer could ever argue you did not know what was happening.
Well too bad that Congress sprinkled 'retroactive immunity' pixie dust on you. Your ultimate embarrassment in losing Hepting vs. AT&T would have been a small price to pay for blowing the lid off this turn-key Police State you are helping to build. Fortunately there are heroes like Snowden who have the balls to do it for you.
So AT&T, tell us about Room 641A. We don't give a flying fuck about law enforcement warrants.
And also, please shoot that male voice "I didn't get that. Did you say... my pickle is not working...?" stupid robot who answers for customer support. He's an abomination of microchips.
Thank you.
Thar be dragins in our midst. Slay them.
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
[OP] "disappearing into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices, a Canadian study (abstract, article paywalled) indicated
Well so much for the study. Money changes everything. Eventually one hundred thousand copies of the abstract will exist on the Internet, but the authors' future descendants will find only only one actual link that leads to content, which terminates at a page saying "this domain is for sale".
You'd think that even science data of extremely low bit rate such as original weather station temperature data should be out there somewhere. A lot of other people did too... but all that is available now might be "value added" ajusted data. Not an evil conspiracy per se, it's human nature at it's best and worst.
A handy chronology of the history of data retention:
[2500BC] King Fuckemup boldly slew the enemy and I, Scribe Asskissus hath inscribed it in stone. He is an asshole who owes me back wages."
[1500] "With quivering quill I will write mine own data."
[1866] "Data published at great expense into leather-bound volumes. Dust sold separately."
[1970] "This is really important. we should print it and store it in a binder."
[1971] They didn't.
[1983] "I'll write it to floppy disk with a notsosticky label"
[1985] "After a long and desperate search, the label has been found!"
[1987] "Unlabeled floppy disk keeps coffeemaker level."
[1995] "Roxio CD storage is forever, and Real Scientists don't close their data sessions."
[2003] "Microsoft Word has experienced a problem updating from an older document format and will now close. Save your work as soon as possible."
[2005] "I'll just email it to myself and shut the computer off immediately, then pick it up at work."
[2009] "Yes, three copies! In the safe. There was a fire. Yes, inside the safe. It was a fireproof safe, so no one noticed."
[2010] "This is really important. I should print it and store it in a binder. But my ink cartridge is dry."
[2013] "Our data has been uploaded to the Cloud where it will live forever."
[2500] "King Grapeape slew the primitive humans and buried their statue on the beach. I, Scribe Anthopoapologus hath incribed it in stone."
Perhaps the most mystiying data retention escapade of Modern Times is the missing Apollo 11 SSTV moon tapes which contained a multiplexed stream of raw telemetry and the original slow-scan TV signal broadcast from the moon. Not 'missing' really, rather we know they were re-used and recorded over because everyone assumed it was someone else's job to ensure that at least one copy was in a safe place. While the earth station operators dutifully sent their tapes to NASA where the sharpest signal of the moon landing was sure to be perserved for posterity (not), fortunately there were some librarians on duty, and you can aquire DVDs of the moonwalk with better quality than the recordings you've seen in countless movies -- an 8mm film camera pointed at an original SSTV monitor at Honeysuckle Creek, and the best quality scan-converted version.
In the Foundation series, Asimov envisioned Gaia, a world in which a telepathic network of sentient (and sensuous) beings kept a 'working set' retrievable data in-memory -- but also via access to progressively less and non-sentient objects, such as plants and even rocks -- a vast archive. Ask the mountain, it will answer in time, a long time.
Our own Earth has a Gaia storage mechanism, a record of its magnetic field over geologic time stored as polarization in crystallized lava floes. But it i
I vote we skip directly to Chapter 7 of the United States Moral Bankruptcy Code.
The backbone tapping mechanisms that make large scale surveillance on Americans must be completely disclosed and dismantled. An egregious capital crime has been committed by NSA for which no clemency or 're-structuring' is possible.
If a new spy agency is built, it must be from pieces of the smoking wreckage of NSA.
If we can execute the Rosenbergs we can try and execute the NSA, which has done more to put us in harm's way than the Soviet's possession (and ultimate non-use) of nuclear weapons.
Building turn-key mechanisms for a Police State is a capital crime. It provides aid and comfort to our enemies. All of them at once.
Full dissolution, full dismantling of taps, dark fiber and facilities.
That is how the Balance is kept.
Our move.
Proteins are not just building blocks, they are Rubik Cubes of the organic world, and this learning process of real-time signalling has reached the [inverse] stage as when we realized that with transistor amplification in a complementary balanced pair a bistable multivibrator was possible. The bit 'state' storage when joined with the plumbing of NAND gates is the basis for the computer.
With Life we have been reverse engineering, poking things with sharp sticks to see where and how they break, in medicine retarding or advancing chemical mechanisms to bring a patient's complex system back to natural equilibrium (health).
Even simple computer models can be capable of astonishing behavior, and it is already possible to construct systems in which parallel (but inherently different to our own) evolution may occur. The challenge is to be able to model the mechanics of life on all practical scales simultaneously to the point where we could join software gametes in a virtual crucible and grow a model embryo. Or at least an e.coli.
Note to scientists: please do not turn off e.coli. It's important to me.
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." ~Douglas Adams
You forgot these possibilities:
WE ALL forgot to do what any rational Slashdot audience would do, abandon thread for a moment to set up a Boolean decision tree and NSA morality geek code so that further discussion becomes logically precise, generally incomprehensible to outsiders and confusing in whole new ways.. so from this little sub-thread so far we have
Prefix: NSASnowJob:
thouHastSinned+-: Did the NSA do something wrong?
IseeSaidTheBlindMan+-: Did anyone notice?
deweyDefeatsTruman+-: Did anyone report it?
whoIsJohnGalt+-: Did anything change?
area51+-: Did someone make shit up?
texasSuicide+-: Did someone die mysteriously?
itWasTheDogThatFarted+-: Does everyone do it (no big fucking deal)?
[[NSA:SnowJob::]] We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare [thouHastSinned+++] We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. [IseeSaidTheBlindMan++++] In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: [deweyDefeatsTruman++] make war together [whoIsJohnGalt++++] make peace together [Snoden=texasSuicide----] You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain [no excuse itWasTheDogThatFarted--] and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. [credibility zero area51----] Signed, ZIMMERMANN.
I like your plan. It is clear, concise and ends with the Sack of Rome, as all good plans should.
Small nuc plants
As many vehicles as possible running on batteries
Nuc supplied electricity to charge
These two items would be the biggest game changer. I do hope though that we will have a choice, whether to invite small nuclear into our own backyard (I certainly would being a survivalist) ... or, through the grid purchase a bit of big nuke energy a good ways from someone who has a big nuke in their backyard. As shown by the Dakotas' boost in median income as the rest of us hold the line or sink, oil/energy is a path to wealth creation, one of the only now that so much manufacturing and exports have gone. All it would take are a few states of the Union to go full nuclear. My own state of Oklahoma could literally light the country coast to coast with big nuclear and HVDC conduits to render it into properly synchronized AC on the interconnects. So far I have received the standard goose egg response to this idea.
Remaining Petrochemical stocks to produce plastics and provide machinery lubrication.
Don't forget fertilizer and energy for irrigation and farming, the two greatest Achilles' heels of modern life. Here is where a larger scale nuclear approach really could help, for the amount of process heat required to knock hydrogen from water and sequester nitrogen from the air to make ammonia could not easily be accomplished by the small nuke in your backyard. Which brings us finally to
Large scale effort to produce a fuel with high energy density and transportability to replace petrofuel in military uses like jets and planes. Our world is built on cheap accessible energy. Without it we will run the industrial revolution and civilization in reverse, and only stop when we once again party with the Visigoths.
I wish I could say that ammonia was the grail but it isn't really. My current angle is hydrogen knocked from water by nuclear energy (via heat and/or direct radiation) for transportation, but elemental hydrogen is really dangerous. We'll either deal with it (boom!) or find some way to stabilize it.
Your party hearty plan had me thinking of a barbarian horde arriving in... electric Goth carts.
The cloud - Computing's version of the housing bubble.
The Cloud Is My Master. I've been chosen.
Nope, its 45MWe. As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.
Right you are, 160MW thermal 45MW electric, I'm getting too hasty on fact-checking. Still on the small side but perfect for Alaska, especially if your city or town is already piped for steam heating.
NuScale is projecting less than $5,000 cost per KW for these which is comparable to a recent utility sized 2010 capital cost estimate of $5,339/KW. In 2008 Moody's had really spoiled the mood by projecting $7,000/KW as the cost of new nuclear power and warning investors away.
So why is the capital cost of nuclear some 4-5 times the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant (~$1,400/KW)? Aside from the obvious reasons like being dangerous and Atomic.
In 1970-71 Consolidated Edison built the Dresden plant for $146/kW ... still going today like an Energizer Bunny with ~1.7GWe. This is plant was built for ~50 times less than Moody's 2008 cost estimate.
What the hell is going on?
I found no easy answers, but plenty to ponder in Chapter 9 ("Costs of nuclear power plants -- what went wrong?") of The Nuclear Energy Option, a great little book by Bernard Cohen [full text online]. This work is dated [1990] and quaint -- he is bemoaning a plant that cost $3,326/kW in 1986 -- the whiner! But he does a good job describing the NRC practice of "regulatory ratcheting", where standard numeric metrics of safety have been codified, all the tough work is over, and every succeeding generation of regulators gains a round of applause and gets to wear festive party hats if they just plug in new (always higher: click) numbers.
This is an example of what I call "No one ever lost their job" syndrome, a creeping cancer of our society on many fronts. It is a malady that especially affects safety cultures. No one ever lost their job by announcing that things are not quite as safe as they could be, or regulation is strangling essential industries. The NRC has created plug-in metrics like requiring more concrete, more frequent inspections, margins and limits, time-tables and reporting requirements. And heavier fines (announcing a hike in fines works even when there are no infractions or violations, the public imagines this is being done to punish evil corporations who are foaming at the mouth and straining on their leashes this very moment).
Then there is outright abuse and intimidation. The recent yarn, Uneven Enforcement Suspected At [US] Nuclear Power Plants which made my eyeballs pop out on springs when I read it. It seems to say that the NRC is concerned that regulation (by the NRC) might be lacking in some (un-visited) regions for unknown reasons and the NRC is ... crap, no I cannot even summarize it, it's so ridiculous. They are treating better safety record in some plants as something suspicious to be investigated. Then their 'suspicions' are released in a Senate report which the nuke-hysteria press predictably treats as some smoking gun. It should go beyond embarrassment. I feel some one should lose their job over this -- a regulatory agency releasing damaging speculation on an industry on a topic they are supposed to be sure of.
But no one will lose their job, even when they susp
On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.
But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot. By the time a steam turbine spins, maybe a couple thousand homes or a few hundred homes and a few factories, and you're done. I am sure there are remote critical use facilities and a few wealthy communities who would love one of these and could actually afford one, but I find it hard to imagine these nuclear Easy Bake Ovens as being superior in approach to stringing a reasonable amount of wire to some more distant plant of ~x20 scale.
People are thinking of small nuclear plants as safer and more do-able, and that is OK. Because they are on the way to imagining something like Robert Heinlein's 'Shipstones' that populate his novel Friday, modular forever-batteries that were available to power a wristwatch or a city. And of course it happened that the Shipstone Corporation controlled everything. Or the actual nuclear P238 Shipstone we have created to power Voyager and other deep space missions.
Part of my personal WTF factor is that I am beginning to see the same scale-down and build more and somehow we'll all survive and be all right so-called innovation for conventional nuclear as I see in other energy proposals, such as the building a couple million of these and hundreds of these. Can anyone fault the dream? No, so long as there is time to think of fun things.
I'm convinced we're running out of time. We are at a crossroads right now, because so many people in this country are enjoying this state of modern comfort and do not realize that with every passing year we approach a dangerous precipice. Not the end of all things but the end of easy choices.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Because we're not going to run out of this stuff. We will
But consider this. You and those of your ilk, believe that most people are really really stupid. It oozes out of your posts. You know how things are, and if anyone disagrees with you, they are stupid. Not just wrong. Your superiority is unquestionable.
I think you are misinterpreting my zeal for the idea as some some arrogant position of moral superiority. I feel personally pressed on the matter of nuclear energy, and I am trying to share the load in a way that it might make a difference.
Do I have some grand Atomic Utopia in mind????
HELL NO.
I just know that people are not going to stop.
And I KNOW that solar and wind will not work, in ways I'm weary of discussing.
Despite what you and I do or say, despite what Bill Gates or Ghandi would do, people will keep burning coal, sucking oil and natural gas out of the ground. Windmills will be built and windmills will fail, money gone. Some in positions of trust will step forward and exaggerate the amount of time we have left before these things run out. Many will believe them. Others will just as absurdly cry that the world ends tomorrow.
There will be novels written -- great novels, every day -- that portray the future as a nice comfortable place, a time when all the big problems have been solved. There will be New York bestsellers that dive into the details of imaginary crimes and brilliant detective work, ten more Harlequin romances and twenty new computer games and game startups showing us that life (as we know it) will just go on. People will eagerly and gratefully lose themselves in these things. All powered by coal and natural gas.
There will be other novels written that describe catastrophic collapse, fierry ruin and mass hysteria, focusing on that dire -- yet somehow comfortable -- moment of despair when all options have been exhausted, people are already hungry, bullets are spent. It is a fixation, this preoccupation with total despair and helplessness. Fear of the unknown and the known is great for business. People will lose themselves in these novels too, play apocalyptic games and imagine themselves as the last ones standing. What else could they do. But like the idyllic portraits, these dark scenarios are also cutting corners.
NO ONE DARES to discuss what the world would be like when we are merely three-quarters or even nine-tenths depleted of fossil fuel. Imagine a time with a few more people than it has today, a time when all gloves are off and nations are at war with one another and the transparent reason is to completely dominate and secure remaining resources. They will be met with terrible resistance by the peoples defending them, and the whole world will be drawn into it, crawling with suicide bombers. The military given one-way missions. Nations that have the power to move aggressively will do so ruthlessly, while they themselves are under siege from terrorism, because from modern technology no border is safe. All traces of the pre-war capitalist economy will be gone. Every nation will exist under a state of military and financial martial law of some sort, though it may be sugar-coated and those Harlequin romances will keep coming, though they will show men and women in battle dress with tanks in the background.
It's like you are driving and find your way into particularly busy interchange where too many things are happening at once. Disaster is close, it is all around you. You cannot stop, you cannot go back, no one is in a position to yield and the only way out is to accelerate suddenly and decisively in some new direction that will distance you from other drivers. By performing some unexpected and brilliant maneuver you are clear and your exit permits the others to thread the mess without incident.
A way out. That is what I perceive safer nuclear energy to be. And all the LFTR folks have done their part. I mean, they have really shined. From early concept [1950] Wigner to Weinberg to ORNL
[[snip]] far greater percentage of racist, homophone, bigoted, redneck assholes[[snip]]
C'mon, let's all sing along with Homophone Monkey
The REAL split is between the Cities and Not the Cities. And goes back quite a while, at least half a century. The operating level of political difference is really at the County Level, not the State level
Right on. Red versus Blue is becoming less important as time goes on, yet false paradigms are used to rally them against one another like opposing teams. Bread and circuses.
Megacities and the urban sprawl which surround and connect them create zones of provincial sentiment. It really is a mind-set. At a certain point the city becomes the state (New York, California, Maryland) and views in opposition to those of the urban voting block go to margin.
The urban-rural schism is the most pervasive, but there are regional differences that also transcend party. Look at Colin Woodward's 11 Nation-States of America, which paints a few large swaths across the continent by county which represent waves of immigrant settlers, who seeded these geographic areas with attitudes that, just as with dialect, influence voters today. Even those who re-settle into those areas (and especially their children) adopt the flava. With whimsical names like Yankeedom, New Netherlands, Midlands and Tidewater one can almost imagine a Tolkienesque retelling of the American Tale, and I wish this concept may some day grow into an alternate-selection textbook of history that follows these waves without so much distracting clutter of place-names. On this map South Florida does not even make the list, it is a grey zone labelled 'Part of the Spanish Caribbean'. Hilarious!
Urbanites are more accepting of incremental erosion of personal liberty and a pattern of ever-increasing (but never abrupt) government involvement. I see this described in derogatory fashion as if they are simple sheeple or something, but I don't subscribe to such a vulgar character judgement. I think it may simply be that they are more often exposed to utopian ideals and idealists which say, we're this-close to solving this problem, all we need to do is this one more thing. Urbanites see their government as a machine that just needs a little tuning here and there. And it is a machine of sorts, one that gathers distant water rights and political power. Eventually the political sway of populous megacities will be complete, but in the United States it is not happening fast enough for them.
Which is why they are attacking the Constitution directly, seeking an end-run play to nullify the effect of electoral college via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I find this to be an insidious -- almost evil -- self-castration of a state's right to choose a President. If there is a battle between the Cities and Not the Cities, this is the front line. Look at the green (passed) and yellow (pending) states on the map. There are your cities vying for political domination.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was started by disenfranchised supporters of Al Gore who decided that if they lost it must mean that the system was broken. So now there are climate people who wish Gore would stick to politics and political people who wish he would stick to climate. I always wished he would become un-stuck from everything, and found it egregiously obnoxious that this NSA stooge who pushed the Clipper Chip was considered to be presidential material.
No matter exactly what the framers intended, the Electoral College creates a swing zone within which the growing influence of urbanized areas may (yet) reach a balance point with the desires of the sparsely populated rural peoples. This balance point, in which everyone becomes aware that the popular and electoral results diff
We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
Here is a good list of nuclear energy lessons learned [1952-2011]. Also have a look at some NRC uptime data for 104 US reactors [2006-2013].
All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
And yes, I would be very much in favor of a small plant running in a conservative and over-engineered manner in my area. I would however fight strenuously against a megaplant. All the excuses, all the "That disaster was because of the old (and dangerous reactor that we told you was safe when we built it)" just make the rationale for the megaplants have zero credibility.
There is very little in the 'lessons' list that was not known in the days of Weinberg and Wigner. Weinberg even sacrificed his career in 1973 over his publicly expressed safety concerns (putting LFTR research into limbo). The effects of Xenon-135 buildup, which was a contributing factor to Chernobyl, had been discovered in the earliest reactor pile built and had been addressed in US designs. Fukushima was a '19th century fail' because in the 1800s the human race already had the technology to make water-tight compartments to secure precious things such as emergency backup generators. That had no business being in the basement. TEPCO really managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory there.
The Westinghouse AP1000 is a "best of breed" which would make a fine addition to Our Town. If you dispute that fact perhaps this will convince you.
Didn't think so. I thought pasting in Westinghouse's own artistic rendition as background would make these folks seem glad that it was in their back yard, but they're as grumpy as ever. And that pitchfork looks threatening.
But all of the catastrophic fire, meltdown and kaboom scenarios listed involve issues associated with solid nuclear fuels, water, hydrogen gas, graphite and (temperature-hot) zirconium cladding. If a small or even large scale LFTR was built in your area there would be no towering containment building because there is no explosion/steam risk. And it is not layers of applied cooling and containment systems acting in perfect harmony that says so, it is designers' consensus that the chemistry is so. Some clever people from the 50s onward have looked at molten salts and (unlike the water reactor issues which were documented early on) no one seems to have found any serious explody life-threatening oversights. Even the Hastelloy corrosion concerns are issues of cost projection that would affect frequency of replacement, not safety. The fluorine-beryllium chemistry is weird and embodies occupationally hazardous material but it is well within our current understanding and use in industry. Under all conditions imagined thus far the salts would be content to stay in salt form.
In reactors here's hoping that history will favor a reliable deep throated Harley design over some exciting but explody Japanese screamer.
Did you know that McMurdo base in Antarctica operated a small (1.2MW) nuclear micro-reactor from 1962-1972? It had a disappointing but uneventful service record -- until it reached sudden end-of-life when cracks were discovered at welds in the pressure vessel. That is why I really said "CAT diesels to the rescue" but forgot to add the context.
To avoid weld vulnerabilities at any stage of life, modern light water reactor designs call for a single-casted pressure vessel of 'nuclear grade steel'. Nuclear Grade Steel is to Steel as Superman is to Man.
This gets funding, but the LIFTR doesnt? yeah.. seems like a great idea.
I am not an anonymous coward and I approve this message. It seems like despite the citation of this Thing as an 'answer' to anything useful... the lesson of Fukushima was not universally learned after all.
That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue ... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.'
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
The solution is to surround nuclear energy with less water, not more. None is best. Such as fissile contained in stable salts that, in case of a reactor breach, merely sit there not reacting to water or air or spreading into the environment until they can be cleaned up and recycled.
The chemistry of LFTR may seem odd and frightening to the proponents of water reactors, but if it takes ~7.5 olympic size swimming pools to thermally stabilize a 45 megawatt reactor, the idea of chaining these to provide utility levels of hundreds of megawatts is, um, just more silly?
Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now. Little things sneak up on you that way.
The most likely scenario is that this 'fortunate' community runs aground on the unforgiving shoals of 45 megawatts, cannot afford to grow even past the point where it can afford to maintain even that. And some day it is all forgotten (except the decommission cost) and CAT disels save the day. By my logic, which I invite everyone to poke holes in, micro-reactors are a trap because an insufficient ratio of watts/person is a trap.
I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
In terms of survival this is common sense, it is why some in the medical profession choose to cure diseases rather than individual patients. But there are not enough engineers tackling these 'big' problems.
Be wary of itty-bitty things that could never scale to become a big-things. Build big things that can become itty-bitty. Because molten salt fissile technology is not explosive on any scale, its minimum size is (theoretically) limited to the mass of its physical containment and the cleverness of our engineering. And our resolve to get it done.
___
Obligatory bump to Thorium Alliance and my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
As the beam of darkness brushes across the switch for that would turn it off, then expands to envelop us all in not-light and not-dark. Other things, rogue side-effects of tortured physics nonetheless mediated by gravity, the force nature uses to keep its mistakes firewalled from each other. Cubits and qubits swirl in maelstrom like the brief screaming hiss of a black hole drifting past you on a foul orbit around the center of the Earth leaving sublimely beautiful ellipses of not-matter as its event horizon expands by degree infinitesimal, unobserved but never unnoticed but by those for whom valuable body parts have been thus punctuated, the steady rhythm of science gone mad merging with the jeering laughter of the unquiet dead.
Until we all drown in the bile in the gullet of Schrodinger's cat.
Then nature hands up a sign near the incomprehensibly entangled remnant of our solar system which says.
THIS RIDE IS CLOSED
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
I'm sitting here all warm and comfy in my home-bubble really excited about the burgeoning renaissance of intellectual prowess exhibited by today's youth as they prepare themselves to march boldly into the information age to create virtual solutions and clever apps to solve every day problems.
But I also just spent the last week fixing main breaks. It could be a small seep or a raging river, but you have to locate the main, drill holes along it and poke down to discover where the most water is escaping, then jackhammer the street and dig down beside it, careful to avoid other utilities. Once the leak is exposed you must decide whether the pump will keep up and you can clamp it under pressure or shut it down. Either way there are pitfalls -- shutting it changes pressure and direction of flow in the system, releasing internal crust buildup in pipes and making water 'dirty', and the valves might not have been operated in years and may be in the same shape as the pipes. Leaving pressure up it is possible that the pipe will blow out in front of you as you clean off the outer crust to clamp it, filling up the hole quickly. Yesterday there were two split-rounds too close to the bells where iron pipes joined, requiring a double notch to be scored at the bottom so the bottom of the pipe is broken out with a sledgehammer (releasing more water into the hole) to allow the bell section to be cut out, measured and a short pipe stub to be inserted, all held snug with a 30-inch steel and rubber clamp. Eventually as the clamp is tightened the torrent becomes a spray, then a trickle, then it stops. The pumps gain and the cold water (up to your waist) subsides and you can climb up and out to say hello to the wind chill factor. People need to do things like this in order to keep the water flowing from the tap.
Most of North America's drinkable water is delivered through pressure systems with iron pipes such as these. There is a move to plastic pipe (which is more chemically stable but has its own issues with taps and joints)...
I am not trying to be incorrigible here, I would just like to remind everyone that there was a time less then 100 years ago when the building of water and sewer and electrical infrastructure was the exciting topic of the day. As often discussed by every day people as data communication is today. The pipes and wires that deliver our infrastructure are aging, and often the tools and techniques available to repair them are little changed from when they were first built out into the wilderness.
To the young coders of tomorrow I would suggest this: while you honing your analytical skills in the information age, take a walk through your city or town and try to see it as it was 50, 100 years ago. This is only yesterday in human terms. There are amazing feats of engineering surrounding you that have been achieved by those who have come before, and in some critical areas innovation has slowed or stopped.
If only one or two in ten of you should choose a path that leads into some practical engineering field, bringing new thinking (and a good measure of resolve) it might stem the signs of decay that are only now becoming evident. Look for them and you will find these signs. They are merely problems, help us to solve them.
In order to do this you will have to develop prowess with electrics and electronics and fluids and chemicals and tools, materials science. You will need to find a way to bring industrial manufacture back to our shores, because (for what ever reason) it has mostly left, and that is not a good thing. You will have to devote a considerable amount of effort to develop energy sources that will work for everyone, not just the few who can afford to buy some this-or-that thing.
In short, if Modern Civilization follows you home and you decide to keep it... make sure you have the necessary skill and motivation to keep it alive and healthy. Or some day in the not-too-distant future the lights (and Internet) might go out, and we might spill out of
That type of thinking never crossed my mind till I started hauling horses.
What goes through the mind of a horse traveling at 40-60 miles an hour? Does he go 'Vrooom...' in his head or does he think 'clippity-cloppity-clippity-clop' sped up four times?
The other day I was driving a fully loaded dump truck descending a slightly banked dirt track covered with sleet and mud. At one point it mattered not what the forward speed was, and it was slow indeed, the side-slip matched it. Turn in the direction of the skid they say, only that direction did not lead to a happy place. At that point only a gentle but firm acceleration prevented trouble because I could see that if I reached a certain point up ahead road conditions would improve and traction would return.
Unless there was a helicopter hovering up ahead with a LIDAR terrain mapping unit feeding 3d simulations to some on-board computer and it happened to be running the right simulation model, I cannot see how any cyber-widget could have come to the same conclusion as I did.
I have found this thread to be very instructive, I never realized that you were supposed to avoid small animals.
So, despite its long and productive pre-history as a Black Chamber and special-ops division during the Cold War -- before the dawn of the Internet -- now the NSA claims that the only way they can do their job is to do things we find to be unacceptable.
Turn. It. Off.
Thanks for making it easy.
My favorite COBOL line ever,
PERFORM LOBOTOMY 3 TIMES.
LOBOTOMY rang the bell on the printer without printing anything, we placed the above line at the end of long running procedures to alert the operator.
I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; [â¦] total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
Thanks for the excellent breakout. Okay, hrrrmph. Perhaps my 'no growth' napkin math was an attempt to illustrate in simple snapshot-fashion what the geographical waste-footprint of this technology would be, in a way that could be grasped easily and took a minimum of work.
Or was my failure to to factor exponential growth due to laziness? I'd rather take the short answer and say yes, rather than muse on which exponents to use. Start with people. Which projected population curve should I use: the red 'rabbits-R-us' or the green 'UN releases contraceptives into water supply' curve? For the US population growth has been 0.75%, fertility rate of 1.88 children per woman, less than the 2.1 'replacement rate'. As a clumsy social commentator I have to conclude that choice has something to do with it. I cannot really suggest that there could be a natural plateau to population growth rate where your average woman wants a reasonable number of children without running afoul of Catholic seed bank or some future Pol Pot's depopulation agenda.
What about energy use? Should I take the position that the developing world has no right to a level of energy use equal to the most use-heavy? Could there be some future plateau to worldwide per-capita energy use once (reasonable) conservation measures are in place AND Africa is completely wired for electricity as is North America? Perhaps!
All in all 30,000 football fields for a World -- with a continuous removal of decayed safe-matter from the bottom of the stack, doesn't faze me on a planet of some 50 million square land-miles. That's probably all the football fields in the United States. Oh well, there's always baseball.
I'm not trying to straw-man you here, the use of exponents, some times taken from thin air for planning purposes has always been wise for planning. My assertiveness arises from the same utopian dream as the people who would sincerely wish Africa would and could do it all with windmills and solar farms. But it won't work for us, and would never work for them. My utopian dream is to see Africa covered with grids and base load energy production to US levels. Because that is what they want, and I am morally obligated to want it on their behalf. Because most women in the world today still wash clothes by hand.
What about the Apollo project? They made HUGE progress (at HUGE cost), but met their goal in less than a decade, having to develop almost all the technology from scratch!
This is ALL TRUE!
I covered this recent discovery in this [failed] Slashdot submission,
Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 40-Year Old Technology
TheRealHocusLocus writes
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe
Okay, world installed generation capacity 2010 5,067 gigawatts Let's replace it all with LFTRs.
Let's pick a hypothetical 1Gw LFTR design, most of the LFTR folks think there would be no advantage to scale larger.
5,067 of these LFTRs produce (5067*0.17) ~861 tons of waste per year requiring 300 year storage.
So with no increase in LFTRs from the 2008 power capacity, as much as (861*300)~258,300 tons of waste would be stored in this single (hypothetical) depot, which represents the waste of 300 years' total world electricity generation. Using density of lead (arbitrary) I get ~ 729,700 cubic feet, or a an array of foot-cubes 855 feet square. Or ~38 American football fields, that is if there is no stacking of these cubes. It all could fit into Yucca Mountain with room for a few more thousand years' worth to spare. That is, IF it was necessary to store it long. But really only ~300 years.
The world's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain with LOTS of room to spare.
On second thought, let's reserve Yucca Mountain for tourism and grab 40 football fields at random.
There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
I reserve my deliberate deceptions for less important topics than Thorium.
One of the reasons I sing the praises of Kirk Sorensen's two fluid LFTR idea is that there is really no practical life-limit envisioned for the fluoride salts themselves. Even the Hastelloy-N plumbing is potentially recyclable. While others like David LeBlanc are pursuing interesting variations such as the Denatured MSR which delays processing as might be desired in a small reactor, I believe Sorensen has decided to pursue the 'endgame' and produce the most useful and logical embodiment to the concept. His active processing column is (in my opinion as a layman) a best-fit for the scale of 1GW reactors that could power our world.
I do not completely believe the Chinese Thorium time window feint. I think there might be tactics in play to dupe world investors into thinking that Thorium energy is on the really slow boat from China, so they have plenty of time to lollygag and burn more coal. Then (I think) one day, sooner rather than later, it will be suddenly announced there is a working prototype and the Chinese firms are looking for capital.
Regardless of the Chinese effort (they really NEED this technology as do we) I'd rather see some US investors in play to build this thing that we have invested developed.
See this report.
"Reactor type: In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR) or PHWRs (e.g., Candu reactors). Thorium fuel concepts which require frst the construction of new reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach commercial maturity."
It seems they are discussing what would be necessary to retrofit LWR to burn solid fuel Thorium instead of Uranium. Molten salt suspension designs not even being considered. I agree, until available Uranium is an endangered specie (hundreds of years even generating all the world's electricity at 0.5% efficiency even with limited or no recycling) there is little incentive to use solid fuel Thorium in these reactors.
It's a very specific conclusion drawn from a very specific set of requirements. The 20/40 year time frames seem a little relaxed. These people should drink more coffee. Then they could get a good buzz and consider ways to burn almost 100% of the Uranium (of Thorium).