There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.
Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.
If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.
The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.
I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.
In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.
If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.
I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.
It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.
Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.
Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.
I found this article courageous interesting, though it bogs down in examples it stands apart from a great many rants I see day after day.
The author is NOT just attacking "silly things"... but referring to a decline of interest in building, maintaining and improving physical infrastructure. That complacency is real, it is dangerous and ultimately fatal.
Physical infrastructure is the entirety of things that make a comfortable existence possible. Safe drinking water and the system that delivers it, affordable electricity, sufficient food with variety and the global transportation and trade that make them affordable.
The desire to deliver a modern comfortable standard of living, through innovation in the building of infrastructure, is a moral imperative. As things stand we do not seem to be equipped or even interested to deliver these things. Before long we might not even be able to deliver Frito-Lay products.
The United States is losing ground on these things because in great part, we have diverted from the path that leads to total self-sufficiency for energy. Energy is a key to all of this. Anyone who runs the numbers on wind power should realize it is a crap solution. An obscene amount of investment capital has and is being spent on it. And too many people (including these 20 and 30-somethings unfairly singled out in the article) are brushing across lone voices in the wilderness suggesting a directed focus to solve this problem and thinking maybe, gee that's interesting... and moving on... not feeling that there is any kind of existential threat.
Rumors of the planet melting and sea levels inundating the shore have been greatly exaggerated. This is part of the problem, for some of the dumbest ideas ever conceived have arisen from it. And some of the smartest ideas for providing us with enough baseload energy to --- among other things --- heal the planet or offset our impact (yes it takes additional energy!) have gone unheard.
It's time to "grow up" a little, and take some time to set in motion certain real-life initiatives that will tip the balance to lock in this modern way of life, until it is really sustainable.
May 2013: blueprints to the new Australian federal intelligence agency ASIO headquarters have been stolen
June 2013: a man in London plants a small tenant garden outside a flat in London. The peas and carrots are arranged in geometric shapes that depict the seating arrangement of the ASIO conference room. By the time this pattern is discovered in August, he will have disappeared.
June 2013: Better Bathrooms magazine June issue contains an artist's rendition of "a functional yet stylish layout, corporate washroom of the future", whose commodes and sinks are a direct match for ASIO facilities.
July 2013: A teacher presents an odd but intricate crayon drawing done by one of her students that matches the basement layout of ASIO HQ. This uncanny similarity is never explained, the parents are questioned then released.
August 2013: The first copies of ASIC HQ 3D plans are uploaded to Pastebin.
October 2013: Small 3D models of ASICHQ are being printed and displayed, feature in Wired Magazine: "Your own HQ"
February 2014: Full size scale 3D printed models of ASIC HQ are spotted all over the world, including one only a block away from the original ASIC HQ building. New employees and service companies become confused and arrive at the faux copy.
May 2018: China publishes the plans for its newest metropolis, from above the planned city's layout bears a striking resemblance to ASIC HQ.
June 2018: The jungle is cleared from around a newly discovered Aztec city abandoned around 1400AD... its network of narrow streets and communal buildings suggests...........
"I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
[shouting] "You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, [shouting] I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
Perhaps it was not a good idea to shut down nuclear plants and embark on an unsustainable energy policy that demands increasing purchases of electricity from neighboring countries, and a requisite surge in shale gas development.
I'm not sure what's going on in the article, it seems more of an artsy-fartsy place than really rugged volcano-ey belly of the beast thingy. If you are looking to trek up, over and down into a hopefully-extinct volcano will take your breath away, that is accessible and is not overrun by tourists and access roads, here's the place:
Here's my suggestion: plan a night in the crater. Everyone should be in decent shape. The hike up the mountain is not too demanding and even pleasant if you make a 4-5 hour trek of it. Take at least 1-1/2 gallon drinking water per person, compact food for a couple good meals, mosquito repellent and light tents for shelter from bugs and rain. There is a lake in the crater that you might find drinkable. I did, it was the most delicious water I have ever tasted. Make sure everything is carried on your backs or can dangle comfortably, you will need both hands and feet for the final ~400' climb down into and out of the crater. It will be a careful scramble using both hands to cling to tree roots as you face the hillside and lower yourself, there are short lengths of rope left by previous climbers. Bring 50-100' of rope to use if existing ropes are in bad condition and to leave for future adventurers. It is rigorous but I do not recall that any part of the decent as terrifyingly vertical or overhanging.
Once you're down in the crater set up camp. There are a few active fumaroles along the rim, in places you can see faint steam rising and there is a faint odor of sulfur but the crater has good air circulation within it. As a common sense precaution site your camp on high ground within the crater, and if you are particularly nerdy you can bring a gas detector to check for H2S but it's probably not a big deal.
Regardless of the weather you will be in a place like no other and will consider yourself grateful to be alive. Framed by the circular crater rim's cliffs above you a sharp celestial bowl of stars might roll above you, untainted by light pollution. Or perhaps a light rain punctuated by echoing thunder and circle of lightning along the sharp peaks of the rim.
If you camp overnight have at least one good hands-free head mounted flashlight in the group in case of emergency, for someone would need to climb up to the crater's rim to call for help. Volcanic craters tend to have bad cellphone reception.
It is a little known fact that compatible and like-minded individuals are implicitly married as they descend into the crater of hopefully-extinct volcanoes so there is no need for pomp or ceremony. Just get on with it.
The word is made of quips and quibbles, cubistic holo-bits and hobbits of brick-a-brac espoused to melanges of malarkey. A fright-night of fundamental foolery gathers in search of data to complete a theory which states that it, the theory itself, does not exist. Therefore there is no theory, which leaves itself unproven thus possible.
These two photons walked into a bar. "We're entangled!" they slurred repeatedly, making the patrons around them more annoyed than shocked. The bartender turned to face them and the bar dissolved into a branching fog of multi-way almost-events because their entanglement could not exist to be observed and a bartender's eyeball is the lighthouse of the soul. Ask anyone.
Time to pull the chain and flush your mind.
Time to bring back ARCnet gentlemen
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Ethernet Turns 40
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· Score: 1
Moving information through wires faster than a human being can write and communicate a letter is an invitation to crass waste and lewd pornography.
ARCnet fulfilled its promise to preserve the essential triumphs of human civilization. Through this staid networking protocol that moved with the steady and measured clip-clop of horse-drawn bits, our missive and monograph and manifesto could traverse the landscape at the calm pace of a cultured mind.
Just as the act of serious writing required a deliberation of ink-dipping and quill smoothing, so did ARCnet provide the nation's youth with cheaply wired schools whose nodes tended to work even if adjacent nodes did not.
ARCnet did also provide the engineer and the apprentice with a practical way to demonstrate man's triumph over the ether. Its bursty communications were often audible on the FM and AM radio bands. I spent many a pleasant hour lecturing students on the joy of packets and protocols as I moved from node to note probing with the antenna, its burbles underscoring my words.
When one opened up an ARCnet hub and looked inside to see by what magic connections could be shared and the words of man thus transported, one could instantly and completely grasp its nature.
"See here!" I would lecture, "how the works of man follow the same natural laws as flora and fauna, how the skeletal network branches out like the trunk of a vertebrate..." as my scalpel would clip the lead of a resistor and the radio across the room fall silent, "whose necessary conduction commands the invisible sinews of data, without which thought is impossible. But by the melding of man and machine and applied science... those sinews can be mended!"
And I'd moisten my thumb in my mouth and press it firmly across the severed connection and the radio would burst to life again, a gasp of astonishment would pass through the room. "This then is your legacy, to serve as human bridges to move these bursts of information to the far corners of the planet. Our dominion will be complete."
And my students went on to produce large scale integration with protocol and discrete components all branded into tiny chips manufactured in the Orient that either work mysteriously or fail mysteriously. This wholly Unrepairable deeply integrated all-or-nothing crap.
Because I had failed as a teacher to communicate the value of simplicity.
I don't know how they can stand it. If I was a metal detector that would drive me crazy.
Until someone is challenged to a duel and they choose the plastic pistol over the metal one, we dunna have a story here.
One of the first true memory-mapped display apps.
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Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3
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· Score: 5, Interesting
that made skillful use use of reverse characters and color (oh how we loved those beautiful 80x24 8 color character displays... sigh) to create a working environment that was comfortable to be immersed in. A proposition with. Compared to everything else the data SNAPPED onto the screen. For many of us Lotus was the first application to deliver the experience of scrolling through data vertically and horizontally so smoothly you got an actual sense of movement, without that whole-screen redraw-flicker that we had come to tolerate from software.
Of course this wasn't the only fine memory-mapped experience. I give fond greets to Vector Graphic S-100 Systems and their wonderful word processor MEMORITE, whose line jumping word wrap as you type was so smooth and flicker-free professional typists took to it easily.
I used to maintain an S-100 system at a local attorney's office and they had awful problems with dust from their brick wall being sucked into the machines. I'd get a call from the secretary saying "Get over here quick! It's changing the spelling on the screen right in front of me again!" I'd ask, "Give me an example?" And she'd say something like "all the 'p' are changing to 't'."
So I'd show up and take down the system and remove the S-100 memory card full of 4k RAM chips in sockets, say to myself "okay, bit 2" and count over from the edge of the card and pry up, re-seat the appropriate chip. Then replace and test, all good now. Then I'd ask, "Would you like me to perform general maintenance and re-seat them all?" and She'd say "No -- we're in a hurry!"
Job security. Not a bad service contract gig for a 17-year-old.
Netflix announces abandonment of Silverlight and there is this sudden grassroots interest in vamping HTML5. Netflix' existing DRM platform as well as any possible HTML5 implementation is vulnerable to video driver-level screen capture by "Replay Video Capture" and others.
So the pirates already have access to Netflix content and would continue to have access to it if HTML5 is imbibed with magick.
So why bother.
The only DRM that could possibly work (for awhile anyway) would be something like PKI certs and decryption embedded in the hardware and firmware of an HDMI monitor, where the web provider feeds an encrypted stream directly into the monitor. But as we have seen with DeCSS, such cat and mouse games often go awry.
That the human race should just call it a day, we're just not up to this (one time, pretty nasty) task of cleanup?
The article does show that they're aware of the dangers and are dealing with the problems --- and we will learn quite a bit about these materials in the process. As we must.
If everyone is too timid, perhaps they could approach the people who milk rattlesnakes day after day to obtain the venom that is desperately sought for medical research. They probably do it with a minimum of dramatic fanfare, a sensible appreciation of risk and an appropriate dash of humor.
It is possible to isotopically separate people into two distinct groups. Those who will just dig into the problem taking common sense precautions with the goal of vitrifying all of this dangerous material. There is risk and for that risk they should be amply rewarded.
And those on the sidelines who are secretly hoping for some cataclysmic disaster to occur, something exciting and scary to bring the fulfillment of hopping in circles saying I told you so. The commercial nuclear power industry in America has cheated these people of their Pyrrhic victory for decades, quietly operating at peak efficiency and responsibly (though not appropriately) storing and watching over their waste pools.
Jimmy Carter has been adequately taken to task in this thread for his decision to take the United States back into a 'dark age' of nuclear ignorance. But he was just channeling the Jane Fonda crowd.
Yeah, and if Monsanto holds the patent the plant power cells will die off after one generation and we will have re-invented disposable batteries. But this has all happened before.
[citation"a disease killed the world's cats and dogs, leaving humans with no pets. To replace them, humans began keeping plants as household pets. Realizing the plants' capacity to supply the energy to charge cell phones by subverting the mechanism of photosynthesis, humans trained them to perform simple electrical tasks. By 2020, American culture is based on plant slave labor."
Plug into an atom instead. Then run wires to it. Million to one ratio of energy density compared to any chemical (combustion or otherwise) process. Then we will also avoid the cultivation of these energy producing plants which would naturally be really ugly. And would after neural evolution and social resentment, turn on their masters and bury the Statue of Liberty on a beach.
To allow specifying a RECTangular section of the source image, so that one can place or stretch pieces of a single image that has a zillion different style elements in rectangular tiles like corners, line segments, icons etc. One image to load, one palette to manage, and all the clipped regions appear instantly, magically! Need to swap 'styles'? Change the whole image! Need to extend the style? Build out tiles within the image in the X and Y directions! Use evil tables for everything without apology.
Only joking! I wanted this in 1995. But instead of joining a standards committee I went and did other things for awhile. Well, I'm back.
Only joking! Instead of improving the IMG tag, why don't we create whole hidden empty html layers whose background images are the source image and make them invisible by default and slide them off the page.
Only joking! How about a web page that loads with a pile of layer:visible crap in the middle of it, menus open and obliterating the content, and load an external Javascript routine from another domain to make it invisible or skitter it out of the way? Eventually.
Only joking! How 'bout dem web pages that dynamically resize themselves so that the rightmost or bottom portion of text is always hidden at every possible window size or display resolution? Select all, paste into Notepad to read it. Or better yet, paste it into a Java code development window and read it with all the colored blinking syntax violations.
Only joking! I designed my whole site in Flash because with flash you can make round beeping web pages that have no volume controls.
I run NoScript by default. More than half of the Internet is just missing. I run WebDeveloper and turn off CSS to view pages as Jesus would.
Now awaiting the new specification for CCSS (Cascading Cascading Style Sheets). Under this progressive regime (CSS, CCSS, CCCSS etc) style is expected to overtake content by 2015, with content completely defecated by 2020.
Planet Earth and the Human Race was screwed over by Four-Star Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, that's what. Let others who are polite and diplomatic jump in to say he was a patriot or wayward visionary or product of his time or good soldier or handsome baby. When I started researching this topic and had the aha-moment, I began to feel a growing sadness but it has now passed, replaced with anger. Rickover and Chester E. Holifield, Democratic Representative of the State of California (the one who uttered the opening quote), were asshats.
To go into fast-forward... they completely snubbed Weinberg's work, pushed the plutonium fast breeder, and pushed Weinberg into the ditch. They did not even respect Weinberg's tenure to the extent of finding a place for him to continue to develop his vision with their copious funds They pushed light water reactors (by default assent), weapons production (by primary objective). They were in full knowledge of Weinberg's vision, he made it and its potential very clear. Gentlemen, this is the Voice of History judging you. You were asshats.
When I am speaking as the Voice Of History my opinions do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Has this telling of a turning point of history interested you? Do you know of which technology I am speaking?
I hope not, because it is so damned fun to learn new things. The story continues in this post.
I was hoping for more than a score:2, but the Voice Of History cannot afford to be picky.
And they did it. It was different but so much better. Two prototypes of this new reactor were built, the last operating successfully from 1965-1969. During this time they learned a great deal about the chemistry and operating conditions of this new approach. This reactor was literally "walk away safe", did not use of water as coolant and moderator, or require pressure operation, the two things which drive the design (and present the inherent dangers) of the PWR. It operates principally on a naturally occurring mineral that is so prevalent that even today, mining operations separate and discard it.
So in 1969 Weinberg and his little group are on top of the world. Weinberg has a hands-on success, he has papers describing the process, he sees it working, scaling to power the world safely. It is as weapons proliferation-resistent as any reactor could be, for its waste consists of a small volume of material that is considered undesirable for weapons. Usually a few quick napkin calculations on "wonderful" new energy sources reveal nasty pratfalls --- this will run out in a few hundred years, that won't work unless [unsolved problem], this requires a massive new mining extraction effort, that requires something absent on our continent, this relies on the weather. There are NO this-or-thats. A few small (existing today for other operations) mines here and there could literally supply the essential element to power the entire planet for the foreseeable future.A dream come true.
All this is happening back in 1969. What could possibly go wrong?
(My post continues in reply to this post. The lameness filter thinks I'm lame. I don't.)
Imagine that an influential member tells you, "If you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it may be time for you to leave nuclear energy." Someone who had just served as chair for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
And the course of history changes, for the worse. It all could have been so different.
But read on. There's still hope.
In 1973 Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg was fired from a position he had held for 18 years at Oak Ridge Labs Tennessee --- in great part because of his concern for safety. Shelving a dream that had become his own personal obsession.
Weinberg held a 1947 patent for the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) that is the basis of commercial nuclear power generation today. After the WWII his efforts turned to the peaceful use of nuclear power, and with many others he was excited by the prospect of harnessing the atom. But while these water based reactors had served the war effort so admirably, the thought of scaling them to power the country and world concerned him greatly.
I need not elaborate on the reasons, for they are the same reasons so many fear nuclear energy today. Weinberg envisioned all this in the 50s --- some 60 years ago. He realized that some radical departure from his own PWR design was called for. When a rare opportunity presented itself, a fanciful but well-funded notion for a nuclear powered airplane, Weinberg gathered a few of the most brilliant chemists of the era and set to work.
(My post continues in reply to this post. The lameness filter thinks I'm lame. I don't.)
Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs
1. If manufacturing is recovering, someone must be doing their job. 2. If Robots were introduced without adding jobs, then the robots cannot be the ones doing the jobs. 3. Then the humans must be doing what jobs they had been doing, and the robots' jobs also. 4. Therefore, Alexander The Great had an infinite number of arms.
Well technically speaking... the fish scales get stuck to the bicycle seat, the oil and guts gum up the brake lines and go rancid, become embedded in the gear train and the bones slide off the rotating spokes and poke you in the eye.
I think it would be a lot smarter to embed HTML into DRM. That way people who insist on DRM could throw a huge DRM on their screen and watch little web pages inside of it.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
I cannot much that isn't covered in Kaitiff's reply to your concern last December --- aside from pointing out we're talking about fluoride not sodium salts.
Even the most complicated designs for LFTR are simple at the bottom. Drains in the containment floor after a pipe rupture --- or at shutdown through a melted freeze plug, the liquid comes to rest in a vessel where it is already sub-critical.
Yes it's temperature-hot, for awhile. While the salts are not chemically reactive with water (or air), as long as they are hot water will flash to steam. This is days, perhaps.
The steam risk for an active or recently-dumped reactor would be related to how much water intrudes.
This industrial process like many must be sensibly contained and kept away from water. Fukushima had generators in a basement without water-tight doors. A superior level of engineering is called for. Shouldn't be too hard.
Water solubility is another matter, you're right. Actual residual waste from normal LFTR operation is extremely small in volume compared to waste from water reactors, and should be vitrified into glass for storage. Here is another area where LFTR shines, for it would take ~300 years to decay to the harmless level of natural uranium. Small volumes of 300-year waste in glass is a can-do solution..
But would the temperature-cold solidified salts abandoned in a concrete and steel LFTR drain tank pose a threat to the water table, soil?
Eventually, slightly. Does that seem like an uncomfortable answer?
Often discussions of nuclear accidents take on some "Life After People" flavor, where the person posing the challenge to waste (or disaster!) management seems to get free license to presume no attempt at cleanup or rescue.
I challenge that license. A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Especially when it comes to the due diligence we should bring to bear to assess new technology. I hope you can agree with that, because we are all so dependent on this modern way of life. It has its good moments.
At Chernobyl radioactive graphite presented a horrible challenge, to be near certain places is deadly.
Radioactivity from fissile elements in LFTR materials will be uniform (completely mixed as liquids are) and relatively low dose, predictable in characteristic and risk. There will be no danger of 'hot pockets' and unknowns as those which plague Chernobyl and Pripyat today.
Because it's just glop in a large bucket. It will stay in the bucket, and regardless of the nature of the mishap the glop will not explode all over the biosphere or fission forever. It will wait patiently until people clean it up and recycle the useable salts into other reactors.
This is "Life With People". We should always keep our thoughts centered on that because life is fun and people are cool.
Check out this documentary on George Westinghouse to glimpse what it was like when we were building infrastructure. Then please help give Thorium the chance it deserves.
There are plenty of problems with LFTR, mostly to do with metallurgy, chemistry, toxicity (e.g. beryllium), the core freezing, etc etc etc.
Hastelloy-N and similar alloys are inert in LFTR molten salts. This problem was solved in the 60s during the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. The ~600C operating temperature of LFTR is well within the capabilities of metallurgy today.
The essential chemistry of LFTR contains no surprises, its use of flourine and beryllium presents no greater hazard then use of those substances in manufacturing. When you consider that the salts are recycled for the life of the reactor, which would be practically forever, it doesn't seem too awful when one is generating incredible amounts of electricity. Of course LFTR must contain heavy duty chemistry but the need for safe handling of these substances is pretty obvious.
Toxicity?? No, LFTR's chemistry is not edible. Solving the world's energy problems cannot be accomplished using a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
If there weren't, somebody would've built one by now. LFTR is no silver bullet, at least until all these problems are ironed out.
That type of circular 'appeal to somebody' reasoning is precisely why there is not a working production prototype right now.
LFTR will solve these problems -- but YOUR help is needed
Imagine a nuclear reactor so safe you can walk away from it or shut its internal power and it will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Imagine that this process will be scalable from local megawatts to nation-wide terawatts by a simple replication of standard industrial components, with no increase in risk or change in the overall safety factor --- because it is not just an 'improvement' over present plants, risk of explosion or radiation leakage into the atmosphere is nil. Light and heavy water reactors operate at high pressure. This one doesn't.
Imagine that it has no need to be near a body of coolant water at all. No need to site it near a lake or stream or coastline. Imagine that it can (slowly, productively) help to turn all that spent fuel presently at nuclear plants into electricity. All of it.
Imagine that it can be manufactured here in the USA. Now (my fellow Americans) imagine that it should and must be manufactured in the USA, soon, to make us completely self-sufficient for grid energy, power a new era of electric transportation. And because I would (respectfully) prefer this technology we have conceived developed here --- rather than purchase it from the Chinese.
LFTR is the golden ticket. Perhaps the thing that could transform humanity.
But your help is needed... why?
Because for one reason or another, all of the people you'd "expect" to jump on this idea are not doing so. And more tragic still, most of us are merely "expecting" to hear more about it some day. Without your help, that day may never arrive.
One hundred years ago a great many people did not have running water, access to reliable transportation or grid electricity. Even though news travelled slowly on paper, people took an active interest in the science, process and product of infrastructure building.
Today that basic aging infrastructure is in place, we enjoy our electronic gadgets, expect electricity to arrive, wait for good things to happen. We expect our politicians to be generally informed about emerging technologies (they aren't, really) and we expect smart money to go after smart ideas in the marketplace (it does not, always).
You cannot expect the people who have invested so much in water cooled nuclear reactors to drop everything and work up completely new designs. They're not doing it! With LFTR they cannot sell their solid-fuel solutions. Which is not to say that they are incapable of adapting. But why should they? So long as LFTR is not a household word their mindset need not change.
You cannot expect environmentally conscious people who are (rightfully!) afraid of Chernobyl happening in their backyard to understand how different LFTR is at first. They must be pointed in the right direction, encouraged to research it on their own.
You cannot expect big philanthropist money to deliver miracles either in any reasonable time frame. Bill Gates is backing Travelling Wave Reactors, a type of Integral Fast Reactor that is cooled by (dangerous!) liquid sodium. It is the right idea (nuclear) wrong horse (approach) but he just does not know it yet.
But the biggest issue here is the urgency with which this idea needs to be pursued. These things need to be funded --- through your active interest and by mentioning it to at least two other people. At least ten thousand people from all walks of life (such as you) need to devote a little bit of time to get up to speed on this technology.
I nominate you! I am no real expert on the subject, I've only recently begun to research LFTR and in the material available on the net I see the idea proposed directly and succinctly five years ago, but so little has happened since then... well, it's shameful. I used to assume that good things just happen. They don't. A real eye opener.
Slashdot Mirror
There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.
Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.
If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.
The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.
I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.
In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.
If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.
I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.
It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.
Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.
Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.
Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.
I found this article courageous interesting, though it bogs down in examples it stands apart from a great many rants I see day after day.
The author is NOT just attacking "silly things"... but referring to a decline of interest in building, maintaining and improving physical infrastructure. That complacency is real, it is dangerous and ultimately fatal.
Physical infrastructure is the entirety of things that make a comfortable existence possible. Safe drinking water and the system that delivers it, affordable electricity, sufficient food with variety and the global transportation and trade that make them affordable.
The desire to deliver a modern comfortable standard of living, through innovation in the building of infrastructure, is a moral imperative. As things stand we do not seem to be equipped or even interested to deliver these things. Before long we might not even be able to deliver Frito-Lay products.
The United States is losing ground on these things because in great part, we have diverted from the path that leads to total self-sufficiency for energy. Energy is a key to all of this. Anyone who runs the numbers on wind power should realize it is a crap solution. An obscene amount of investment capital has and is being spent on it. And too many people (including these 20 and 30-somethings unfairly singled out in the article) are brushing across lone voices in the wilderness suggesting a directed focus to solve this problem and thinking maybe, gee that's interesting... and moving on... not feeling that there is any kind of existential threat.
Rumors of the planet melting and sea levels inundating the shore have been greatly exaggerated. This is part of the problem, for some of the dumbest ideas ever conceived have arisen from it. And some of the smartest ideas for providing us with enough baseload energy to --- among other things --- heal the planet or offset our impact (yes it takes additional energy!) have gone unheard.
It's time to "grow up" a little, and take some time to set in motion certain real-life initiatives that will tip the balance to lock in this modern way of life, until it is really sustainable.
Then back to the fun and games.
In other words, clean your room.
May 2013: blueprints to the new Australian federal intelligence agency ASIO headquarters have been stolen
June 2013: a man in London plants a small tenant garden outside a flat in London. The peas and carrots are arranged in geometric shapes that depict the seating arrangement of the ASIO conference room. By the time this pattern is discovered in August, he will have disappeared.
June 2013: Better Bathrooms magazine June issue contains an artist's rendition of "a functional yet stylish layout, corporate washroom of the future", whose commodes and sinks are a direct match for ASIO facilities.
July 2013: A teacher presents an odd but intricate crayon drawing done by one of her students that matches the basement layout of ASIO HQ. This uncanny similarity is never explained, the parents are questioned then released.
August 2013: The first copies of ASIC HQ 3D plans are uploaded to Pastebin.
October 2013: Small 3D models of ASICHQ are being printed and displayed, feature in Wired Magazine: "Your own HQ"
February 2014: Full size scale 3D printed models of ASIC HQ are spotted all over the world, including one only a block away from the original ASIC HQ building. New employees and service companies become confused and arrive at the faux copy.
May 2018: China publishes the plans for its newest metropolis, from above the planned city's layout bears a striking resemblance to ASIC HQ.
June 2018: The jungle is cleared from around a newly discovered Aztec city abandoned around 1400AD... its network of narrow streets and communal buildings suggests...........
Great rant hairyfeet. Fkin' a.
"I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
[shouting] "You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, [shouting] I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
~Howard Beale Network [1976]
and put up a parking lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94bdMSCdw20
Perhaps it was not a good idea to shut down nuclear plants and embark on an unsustainable energy policy that demands increasing purchases of electricity from neighboring countries, and a requisite surge in shale gas development.
I would hope that my ancestral country chooses a more pragmatic approach to help us crack this existential energy problem once and for all instead of castrating itself as an industrial power.
The same thing is happening in the United States, people are jousting one another with windmills.
I'm not sure what's going on in the article, it seems more of an artsy-fartsy place than really rugged volcano-ey belly of the beast thingy. If you are looking to trek up, over and down into a hopefully-extinct volcano will take your breath away, that is accessible and is not overrun by tourists and access roads, here's the place:
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=17.369741&lon=-62.80873&z=14.2&r=0&src=yh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Liamuiga
http://www.peakware.com/peaks.html?pk=2174
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g147374-d147557-r157740414-Mount_Liamuiga-St_Kitts_St_Kitts_and_Nevis.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/18/travel/climbing-a-st-kitts-volcano.html
Here's my suggestion: plan a night in the crater. Everyone should be in decent shape. The hike up the mountain is not too demanding and even pleasant if you make a 4-5 hour trek of it. Take at least 1-1/2 gallon drinking water per person, compact food for a couple good meals, mosquito repellent and light tents for shelter from bugs and rain. There is a lake in the crater that you might find drinkable. I did, it was the most delicious water I have ever tasted. Make sure everything is carried on your backs or can dangle comfortably, you will need both hands and feet for the final ~400' climb down into and out of the crater. It will be a careful scramble using both hands to cling to tree roots as you face the hillside and lower yourself, there are short lengths of rope left by previous climbers. Bring 50-100' of rope to use if existing ropes are in bad condition and to leave for future adventurers. It is rigorous but I do not recall that any part of the decent as terrifyingly vertical or overhanging.
Once you're down in the crater set up camp. There are a few active fumaroles along the rim, in places you can see faint steam rising and there is a faint odor of sulfur but the crater has good air circulation within it. As a common sense precaution site your camp on high ground within the crater, and if you are particularly nerdy you can bring a gas detector to check for H2S but it's probably not a big deal.
Regardless of the weather you will be in a place like no other and will consider yourself grateful to be alive. Framed by the circular crater rim's cliffs above you a sharp celestial bowl of stars might roll above you, untainted by light pollution. Or perhaps a light rain punctuated by echoing thunder and circle of lightning along the sharp peaks of the rim.
If you camp overnight have at least one good hands-free head mounted flashlight in the group in case of emergency, for someone would need to climb up to the crater's rim to call for help. Volcanic craters tend to have bad cellphone reception.
It is a little known fact that compatible and like-minded individuals are implicitly married as they descend into the crater of hopefully-extinct volcanoes so there is no need for pomp or ceremony. Just get on with it.
The word is made of quips and quibbles, cubistic holo-bits and hobbits of brick-a-brac espoused to melanges of malarkey. A fright-night of fundamental foolery gathers in search of data to complete a theory which states that it, the theory itself, does not exist. Therefore there is no theory, which leaves itself unproven thus possible.
These two photons walked into a bar. "We're entangled!" they slurred repeatedly, making the patrons around them more annoyed than shocked. The bartender turned to face them and the bar dissolved into a branching fog of multi-way almost-events because their entanglement could not exist to be observed and a bartender's eyeball is the lighthouse of the soul. Ask anyone.
Time to pull the chain and flush your mind.
Moving information through wires faster than a human being can write and communicate a letter is an invitation to crass waste and lewd pornography.
ARCnet fulfilled its promise to preserve the essential triumphs of human civilization. Through this staid networking protocol that moved with the steady and measured clip-clop of horse-drawn bits, our missive and monograph and manifesto could traverse the landscape at the calm pace of a cultured mind.
Just as the act of serious writing required a deliberation of ink-dipping and quill smoothing, so did ARCnet provide the nation's youth with cheaply wired schools whose nodes tended to work even if adjacent nodes did not.
ARCnet did also provide the engineer and the apprentice with a practical way to demonstrate man's triumph over the ether. Its bursty communications were often audible on the FM and AM radio bands. I spent many a pleasant hour lecturing students on the joy of packets and protocols as I moved from node to note probing with the antenna, its burbles underscoring my words.
When one opened up an ARCnet hub and looked inside to see by what magic connections could be shared and the words of man thus transported, one could instantly and completely grasp its nature.
"See here!" I would lecture, "how the works of man follow the same natural laws as flora and fauna, how the skeletal network branches out like the trunk of a vertebrate..." as my scalpel would clip the lead of a resistor and the radio across the room fall silent, "whose necessary conduction commands the invisible sinews of data, without which thought is impossible. But by the melding of man and machine and applied science... those sinews can be mended!"
And I'd moisten my thumb in my mouth and press it firmly across the severed connection and the radio would burst to life again, a gasp of astonishment would pass through the room. "This then is your legacy, to serve as human bridges to move these bursts of information to the far corners of the planet. Our dominion will be complete."
And my students went on to produce large scale integration with protocol and discrete components all branded into tiny chips manufactured in the Orient that either work mysteriously or fail mysteriously. This wholly Unrepairable deeply integrated all-or-nothing crap.
Because I had failed as a teacher to communicate the value of simplicity.
Now with a wet thumb you can't fix shit.
Metal detectors contain metal parts!
I don't know how they can stand it. If I was a metal detector that would drive me crazy.
Until someone is challenged to a duel and they choose the plastic pistol over the metal one, we dunna have a story here.
that made skillful use use of reverse characters and color (oh how we loved those beautiful 80x24 8 color character displays... sigh) to create a working environment that was comfortable to be immersed in. A proposition with. Compared to everything else the data SNAPPED onto the screen. For many of us Lotus was the first application to deliver the experience of scrolling through data vertically and horizontally so smoothly you got an actual sense of movement, without that whole-screen redraw-flicker that we had come to tolerate from software.
Of course this wasn't the only fine memory-mapped experience. I give fond greets to Vector Graphic S-100 Systems and their wonderful word processor MEMORITE, whose line jumping word wrap as you type was so smooth and flicker-free professional typists took to it easily.
I used to maintain an S-100 system at a local attorney's office and they had awful problems with dust from their brick wall being sucked into the machines. I'd get a call from the secretary saying "Get over here quick! It's changing the spelling on the screen right in front of me again!" I'd ask, "Give me an example?" And she'd say something like "all the 'p' are changing to 't'."
So I'd show up and take down the system and remove the S-100 memory card full of 4k RAM chips in sockets, say to myself "okay, bit 2" and count over from the edge of the card and pry up, re-seat the appropriate chip. Then replace and test, all good now. Then I'd ask, "Would you like me to perform general maintenance and re-seat them all?" and She'd say "No -- we're in a hurry!"
Job security. Not a bad service contract gig for a 17-year-old.
If we don't ban them now eventually we'll have Google Cars Driving Violent Crime Across US
Netflix announces abandonment of Silverlight and there is this sudden grassroots interest in vamping HTML5. Netflix' existing DRM platform as well as any possible HTML5 implementation is vulnerable to video driver-level screen capture by "Replay Video Capture" and others.
So the pirates already have access to Netflix content and would continue to have access to it if HTML5 is imbibed with magick.
So why bother.
The only DRM that could possibly work (for awhile anyway) would be something like PKI certs and decryption embedded in the hardware and firmware of an HDMI monitor, where the web provider feeds an encrypted stream directly into the monitor. But as we have seen with DeCSS, such cat and mouse games often go awry.
That the human race should just call it a day, we're just not up to this (one time, pretty nasty) task of cleanup?
The article does show that they're aware of the dangers and are dealing with the problems --- and we will learn quite a bit about these materials in the process. As we must.
If everyone is too timid, perhaps they could approach the people who milk rattlesnakes day after day to obtain the venom that is desperately sought for medical research. They probably do it with a minimum of dramatic fanfare, a sensible appreciation of risk and an appropriate dash of humor.
It is possible to isotopically separate people into two distinct groups. Those who will just dig into the problem taking common sense precautions with the goal of vitrifying all of this dangerous material. There is risk and for that risk they should be amply rewarded.
And those on the sidelines who are secretly hoping for some cataclysmic disaster to occur, something exciting and scary to bring the fulfillment of hopping in circles saying I told you so. The commercial nuclear power industry in America has cheated these people of their Pyrrhic victory for decades, quietly operating at peak efficiency and responsibly (though not appropriately) storing and watching over their waste pools.
Jimmy Carter has been adequately taken to task in this thread for his decision to take the United States back into a 'dark age' of nuclear ignorance. But he was just channeling the Jane Fonda crowd.
Admiral Rickover is another person who should carry blame. He presided directly over the Atoms For War program but even that does not arouse my ire so much as he directly sabotaged research and development of safer and more sustainable nuclear technology.
Yeah, and if Monsanto holds the patent the plant power cells will die off after one generation and we will have re-invented disposable batteries. But this has all happened before.
[citation "a disease killed the world's cats and dogs, leaving humans with no pets. To replace them, humans began keeping plants as household pets. Realizing the plants' capacity to supply the energy to charge cell phones by subverting the mechanism of photosynthesis, humans trained them to perform simple electrical tasks. By 2020, American culture is based on plant slave labor."
Plug into an atom instead. Then run wires to it. Million to one ratio of energy density compared to any chemical (combustion or otherwise) process. Then we will also avoid the cultivation of these energy producing plants which would naturally be really ugly. And would after neural evolution and social resentment, turn on their masters and bury the Statue of Liberty on a beach.
To allow specifying a RECTangular section of the source image, so that one can place or stretch pieces of a single image that has a zillion different style elements in rectangular tiles like corners, line segments, icons etc. One image to load, one palette to manage, and all the clipped regions appear instantly, magically! Need to swap 'styles'? Change the whole image! Need to extend the style? Build out tiles within the image in the X and Y directions! Use evil tables for everything without apology.
Only joking! I wanted this in 1995. But instead of joining a standards committee I went and did other things for awhile. Well, I'm back.
Only joking! Instead of improving the IMG tag, why don't we create whole hidden empty html layers whose background images are the source image and make them invisible by default and slide them off the page.
Only joking! How about a web page that loads with a pile of layer:visible crap in the middle of it, menus open and obliterating the content, and load an external Javascript routine from another domain to make it invisible or skitter it out of the way? Eventually.
Only joking! How 'bout dem web pages that dynamically resize themselves so that the rightmost or bottom portion of text is always hidden at every possible window size or display resolution? Select all, paste into Notepad to read it. Or better yet, paste it into a Java code development window and read it with all the colored blinking syntax violations.
Only joking! I designed my whole site in Flash because with flash you can make round beeping web pages that have no volume controls.
I run NoScript by default. More than half of the Internet is just missing. I run WebDeveloper and turn off CSS to view pages as Jesus would.
Now awaiting the new specification for CCSS (Cascading Cascading Style Sheets). Under this progressive regime (CSS, CCSS, CCCSS etc) style is expected to overtake content by 2015, with content completely defecated by 2020.
(continued from parent)
Planet Earth and the Human Race was screwed over by Four-Star Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, that's what. Let others who are polite and diplomatic jump in to say he was a patriot or wayward visionary or product of his time or good soldier or handsome baby. When I started researching this topic and had the aha-moment, I began to feel a growing sadness but it has now passed, replaced with anger. Rickover and Chester E. Holifield, Democratic Representative of the State of California (the one who uttered the opening quote), were asshats.
To go into fast-forward... they completely snubbed Weinberg's work, pushed the plutonium fast breeder, and pushed Weinberg into the ditch. They did not even respect Weinberg's tenure to the extent of finding a place for him to continue to develop his vision with their copious funds They pushed light water reactors (by default assent), weapons production (by primary objective). They were in full knowledge of Weinberg's vision, he made it and its potential very clear. Gentlemen, this is the Voice of History judging you. You were asshats.
When I am speaking as the Voice Of History my opinions do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Has this telling of a turning point of history interested you? Do you know of which technology I am speaking?
I hope not, because it is so damned fun to learn new things. The story continues in this post.
I was hoping for more than a score:2, but the Voice Of History cannot afford to be picky.
(continued from parent)
And they did it. It was different but so much better. Two prototypes of this new reactor were built, the last operating successfully from 1965-1969. During this time they learned a great deal about the chemistry and operating conditions of this new approach. This reactor was literally "walk away safe", did not use of water as coolant and moderator, or require pressure operation, the two things which drive the design (and present the inherent dangers) of the PWR. It operates principally on a naturally occurring mineral that is so prevalent that even today, mining operations separate and discard it.
So in 1969 Weinberg and his little group are on top of the world. Weinberg has a hands-on success, he has papers describing the process, he sees it working, scaling to power the world safely. It is as weapons proliferation-resistent as any reactor could be, for its waste consists of a small volume of material that is considered undesirable for weapons. Usually a few quick napkin calculations on "wonderful" new energy sources reveal nasty pratfalls --- this will run out in a few hundred years, that won't work unless [unsolved problem], this requires a massive new mining extraction effort, that requires something absent on our continent, this relies on the weather. There are NO this-or-thats. A few small (existing today for other operations) mines here and there could literally supply the essential element to power the entire planet for the foreseeable future.A dream come true.
All this is happening back in 1969. What could possibly go wrong?
(My post continues in reply to this post. The lameness filter thinks I'm lame. I don't.)
Imagine that an influential member tells you, "If you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it may be time for you to leave nuclear energy." Someone who had just served as chair for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
And the course of history changes, for the worse. It all could have been so different.
But read on. There's still hope.
In 1973 Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg was fired from a position he had held for 18 years at Oak Ridge Labs Tennessee --- in great part because of his concern for safety. Shelving a dream that had become his own personal obsession.
Weinberg held a 1947 patent for the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) that is the basis of commercial nuclear power generation today. After the WWII his efforts turned to the peaceful use of nuclear power, and with many others he was excited by the prospect of harnessing the atom. But while these water based reactors had served the war effort so admirably, the thought of scaling them to power the country and world concerned him greatly.
I need not elaborate on the reasons, for they are the same reasons so many fear nuclear energy today. Weinberg envisioned all this in the 50s --- some 60 years ago. He realized that some radical departure from his own PWR design was called for. When a rare opportunity presented itself, a fanciful but well-funded notion for a nuclear powered airplane, Weinberg gathered a few of the most brilliant chemists of the era and set to work.
(My post continues in reply to this post. The lameness filter thinks I'm lame. I don't.)
Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs
1. If manufacturing is recovering, someone must be doing their job.
2. If Robots were introduced without adding jobs, then the robots cannot be the ones doing the jobs.
3. Then the humans must be doing what jobs they had been doing, and the robots' jobs also.
4. Therefore, Alexander The Great had an infinite number of arms.
What's Actually Wrong With DRM in HTML5?
Well technically speaking... the fish scales get stuck to the bicycle seat, the oil and guts gum up the brake lines and go rancid, become embedded in the gear train and the bones slide off the rotating spokes and poke you in the eye.
I think it would be a lot smarter to embed HTML into DRM. That way people who insist on DRM could throw a huge DRM on their screen and watch little web pages inside of it.
a robotic arm coupled with a camera system, a microphone and laser pointer
If the robotic arm picks up the microphone this could herald the birth of Robot Karaoke.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
I cannot much that isn't covered in Kaitiff's reply to your concern last December --- aside from pointing out we're talking about fluoride not sodium salts.
Even the most complicated designs for LFTR are simple at the bottom. Drains in the containment floor after a pipe rupture --- or at shutdown through a melted freeze plug, the liquid comes to rest in a vessel where it is already sub-critical.
Yes it's temperature-hot, for awhile. While the salts are not chemically reactive with water (or air), as long as they are hot water will flash to steam. This is days, perhaps.
The steam risk for an active or recently-dumped reactor would be related to how much water intrudes.
This industrial process like many must be sensibly contained and kept away from water. Fukushima had generators in a basement without water-tight doors. A superior level of engineering is called for. Shouldn't be too hard.
Water solubility is another matter, you're right. Actual residual waste from normal LFTR operation is extremely small in volume compared to waste from water reactors, and should be vitrified into glass for storage. Here is another area where LFTR shines, for it would take ~300 years to decay to the harmless level of natural uranium. Small volumes of 300-year waste in glass is a can-do solution..
But would the temperature-cold solidified salts abandoned in a concrete and steel LFTR drain tank pose a threat to the water table, soil?
Eventually, slightly. Does that seem like an uncomfortable answer?
Often discussions of nuclear accidents take on some "Life After People" flavor, where the person posing the challenge to waste (or disaster!) management seems to get free license to presume no attempt at cleanup or rescue.
I challenge that license. A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Especially when it comes to the due diligence we should bring to bear to assess new technology. I hope you can agree with that, because we are all so dependent on this modern way of life. It has its good moments.
At Chernobyl radioactive graphite presented a horrible challenge, to be near certain places is deadly.
Radioactivity from fissile elements in LFTR materials will be uniform (completely mixed as liquids are) and relatively low dose, predictable in characteristic and risk. There will be no danger of 'hot pockets' and unknowns as those which plague Chernobyl and Pripyat today.
Because it's just glop in a large bucket. It will stay in the bucket, and regardless of the nature of the mishap the glop will not explode all over the biosphere or fission forever. It will wait patiently until people clean it up and recycle the useable salts into other reactors.
This is "Life With People". We should always keep our thoughts centered on that because life is fun and people are cool.
Check out this documentary on George Westinghouse to glimpse what it was like when we were building infrastructure. Then please help give Thorium the chance it deserves.
There are plenty of problems with LFTR, mostly to do with metallurgy, chemistry, toxicity (e.g. beryllium), the core freezing, etc etc etc.
Hastelloy-N and similar alloys are inert in LFTR molten salts. This problem was solved in the 60s during the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. The ~600C operating temperature of LFTR is well within the capabilities of metallurgy today.
The essential chemistry of LFTR contains no surprises, its use of flourine and beryllium presents no greater hazard then use of those substances in manufacturing. When you consider that the salts are recycled for the life of the reactor, which would be practically forever, it doesn't seem too awful when one is generating incredible amounts of electricity. Of course LFTR must contain heavy duty chemistry but the need for safe handling of these substances is pretty obvious.
Toxicity?? No, LFTR's chemistry is not edible. Solving the world's energy problems cannot be accomplished using a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
If there weren't, somebody would've built one by now. LFTR is no silver bullet, at least until all these problems are ironed out.
That type of circular 'appeal to somebody' reasoning is precisely why there is not a working production prototype right now.
As I said etc etc etc.
LFTR will solve these problems -- but YOUR help is needed
Imagine a nuclear reactor so safe you can walk away from it or shut its internal power and it will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Imagine that this process will be scalable from local megawatts to nation-wide terawatts by a simple replication of standard industrial components, with no increase in risk or change in the overall safety factor --- because it is not just an 'improvement' over present plants, risk of explosion or radiation leakage into the atmosphere is nil. Light and heavy water reactors operate at high pressure. This one doesn't.
Imagine that it has no need to be near a body of coolant water at all. No need to site it near a lake or stream or coastline. Imagine that it can (slowly, productively) help to turn all that spent fuel presently at nuclear plants into electricity. All of it.
Imagine that it can be manufactured here in the USA. Now (my fellow Americans) imagine that it should and must be manufactured in the USA, soon, to make us completely self-sufficient for grid energy, power a new era of electric transportation. And because I would (respectfully) prefer this technology we have conceived developed here --- rather than purchase it from the Chinese.
LFTR is the golden ticket. Perhaps the thing that could transform humanity.
But your help is needed... why?
Because for one reason or another, all of the people you'd "expect" to jump on this idea are not doing so. And more tragic still, most of us are merely "expecting" to hear more about it some day. Without your help, that day may never arrive.
One hundred years ago a great many people did not have running water, access to reliable transportation or grid electricity. Even though news travelled slowly on paper, people took an active interest in the science, process and product of infrastructure building.
Today that basic aging infrastructure is in place, we enjoy our electronic gadgets, expect electricity to arrive, wait for good things to happen. We expect our politicians to be generally informed about emerging technologies (they aren't, really) and we expect smart money to go after smart ideas in the marketplace (it does not, always).
You cannot expect the people who have invested so much in water cooled nuclear reactors to drop everything and work up completely new designs. They're not doing it! With LFTR they cannot sell their solid-fuel solutions. Which is not to say that they are incapable of adapting. But why should they? So long as LFTR is not a household word their mindset need not change.
You cannot expect environmentally conscious people who are (rightfully!) afraid of Chernobyl happening in their backyard to understand how different LFTR is at first. They must be pointed in the right direction, encouraged to research it on their own.
You cannot expect big philanthropist money to deliver miracles either in any reasonable time frame. Bill Gates is backing Travelling Wave Reactors, a type of Integral Fast Reactor that is cooled by (dangerous!) liquid sodium. It is the right idea (nuclear) wrong horse (approach) but he just does not know it yet.
But the biggest issue here is the urgency with which this idea needs to be pursued. These things need to be funded --- through your active interest and by mentioning it to at least two other people. At least ten thousand people from all walks of life (such as you) need to devote a little bit of time to get up to speed on this technology.
I nominate you! I am no real expert on the subject, I've only recently begun to research LFTR and in the material available on the net I see the idea proposed directly and succinctly five years ago, but so little has happened since then... well, it's shameful. I used to assume that good things just happen. They don't. A real eye opener.
So I am reaching out to you. It begins right here: Thorium Remix 2011