I can't quote you a number, since there's very little commercial experience with them, and research into them has been quashed by every president and congress since Carter.
I think I know where you're going with this - are they more expensive? Probably. Are they ready for prime time right this instant? Probably not. Should we invest in research? Absolutely.
Until the external costs of having terrorist-desirable spent fuel sitting around in pools at 100's of sites across the country, the costs of mining new fuel, and the danger of having all the waste eventually buried in one gigantic pit are all tallied up, they're going to seem more expensive than they really are.
My take on it is that the value of the problems they solve (burning up spent fuel, _reducing_ proliferation risk, reducing by several orders of magnitude the half lives of the waste, using 100x the energy from the same fuel, etc) far outweigh the actual dollar cost of designing/building them.
IFR facilities would use electrorefining and pyroprocessing, not PUREX, so there's never any useful, accessible Plutonium created.
Please read this article, particularly the Reprocessing & Proliferation section. A quote from that article:
"The IFR's pyroprocessing and electrorefining method is not capable of making plutonium that is pure enough for weapons. If a proliferator were to start with IFR material, he or she would have to employ an extra chemical separation step.... expert bomb designers at Livermore National Laboratory... looked at the problem in detail, and concluded that plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle was so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today's reactor-grade plutonium."
I agree 100% regarding the futility of one-off designs; the industry also agrees with us, and are applying for type-acceptance on several reactor designs like the ESBWR and the US-APWR. (See the left sidebar for more issued and pending Design Certifications).
Pebble bed reactors, while novel and relatively safe, are not, IMHO, scalable enough or efficient enough for large-scale power production. There are other criticisms, as well.
That figure likely does not include the losses incurred when generating the very high voltage DC from AC and converting it back to AC for consumption.
I've toured the Dalles dam and the Celilo power station - very impressive. Rectifiers that stand 20 feet tall with sci-fi looking knobs and disks, straight out of 50's movies.
If you read thesearticles, you'll see that modern IFR reactors can be started on the existing nuclear WASTE from our current reactors, and need only a milkcrate-sized chunk of essentially unrefined uranium metal per month to continue operating ad infinitum.
The air in the 70's wasn't lethal over a week's time. Didn't you learn about the great smogs and killerfogs in London? In 1952 upwards of 12,000 people died, and back in the 19th century it was a relatively common occurrence.
"1873 -- London fog kills 1,150. Similar incidents in 1880, 1882, 1891 and 1892."
If you could build a 1 kW handheld, you're free to use it.
Maybe. In 1996 Amateurs came under the jurisdiction of RF exposure limits, so a 1kW handheld, depending on frequency, would likely put you over the limit. I don't know for sure that the exposure laws pertain to yourself or just others, come to think of it.
"However, the FCC presumes that certain stations are safe without an evaluation. Those are:
* Amateur stations using a transmitter power of less than 50 W PEP at the transmitter output terminal.
* Mobile or portable stations using a transmitter with push-to-talk control."
So if your 1kW handheld uses a PTT, you'd be exempt from a mandatory evaluation, but would still be required to be in compliance.
Semantics. To the muggles it means the same thing.
No kidding. I was having it out with some nutcases in another slashdot thread that thought any radio transmission was a 'broadcast' and that they should be able to receive it legally. I tried to explain the difference, but it didn't work. To them broadcast was defined by the medium and not the intent. Sad, actually.
... "make sure the escape sequences cant be confused with notmal [sic] characters"...
That was figured out _long_ before UTF-8. In fact, having been born in 1956, Rob Pike was probably exposed to the concepts of Control Codes and bisync as well as all the other framing methods that use escape characters to indicate in-band signalling.
Have you ever wondered what all those control characters are doing wasting space down there under decimal 32? Link management, that's what. Start of Header, Start of Text, End of Text, End of Transmission, etc. They were all used to keep systems in sync across the (nasty) comm lines of the day. Even [XYZ]-modem used a similar setup.
It's very hard to transmit Radio Frequency energy over fiber.:-)
You could use fiber for the control and data signals, but then you'd still have to run power up for the transmitter, and your baseband signal would also have to be sent up that way. Audio could be modulated directly onto the fiber or digitized, but you'd still need an awful lot of (custom?) hardware up the pole to do the light->electronic->light translations. With all that up the pole, why not stick it all up there? That way you don't need a secure 'shack' at the bottom of the pole.
It sounds like the original poster is doing AX.25, which is 1200 baud FSK over a voice width channel. You can either do AFSK (using audio tones to modulate an FM or PM transmitter), or 'real' FSK, where the actual carrier is modulated. Most TNCs (terminal node controllers) do the audio deal - they take RS-232 in and emit the right tones for over the air and vice versa. An RS-232->fiber->RS-232 converter setup would work, but now you've got the TNC and transmitter up the pole, and you'll need a safe ground-level place for the PC.
This calculator shows the BAC after a 185 lb man takes 4 hours to drink a quart of 95% ethanol to be 1.172%. That's way past coma, and would likely be lethal. It also shows that it would take 29 hours for your BAC to fall below 0.08% if it didn't kill you outright.
Original poster, if you're really that habituated to those sorts of BAC levels, please seek help before you kill yourself, or worse, someone else.
That's how it has been corrupted over time. The actual quote is, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
From that article:
"The full proverb is indeed the proof of the pudding is in the eating and proof has the sense of “test” (as it also has, or used to have, in phrases such as proving-ground and printer’s proof). The proverb literally says that you won’t know whether food has been cooked properly until you try it. Or, putting it figuratively, don’t assume that something is in order or believe what you are told, but judge the matter by testing it; it’s much the same philosophy as in seeing is believing and actions speak louder than words.
The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 and was popularised by Cervantes in his Don Quixote of 1605. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times."
can you say "Winch"? I'd submit to being hauled up on a cable to the top of the tower before going through all that! I've done plenty of tower work, but always in safe, warm (sometimes hot), low-wind conditions. Rohn 25 towers are scary to climb - you look down and you can't see the tower because your feet block the view. Towers look solid from the ground, but boy do they sway when you're 125' in the air!
Attenuation, plain and simple. At 145MHz, the attenuation of 200' of ok coax (LMR-400 @ $0.86/ft) is almost exactly 3dB - that's 50% of your transmitted power wasted heating the coax. Additionally that makes your receiver 3dB more deaf to weak signals.
At 450MHz, it's even worse. Attenuation is 5.4dB, which steals about 71.3% of your signal.
Stepping up to 1/2" Andrews DF4-50A heliax, you find the price jumps to $1.69/ft but the attenuation at 450MHz drops to only 2.9dB for 200'. We're still losing 50% of our signal.
Stepping up again to 7/8" hardline (3.99/ft), attenuation is 1.44dB @ 450 MHz - you _still_ lose 30% of the signal.
By putting the transmitter, computer, etc at the top of the tower, you get the best of all worlds - very low attenuation in the RF path, no long computer cables to pick up stray RF or lightning-induced surges, and fewer vandals. The downside is that you have to run power up the tower (usually 120VAC, since running 12VDC hits the same sorts of snags as coax - lots and lots of loss. Imagine 200' of welding cable - $$$ and heavy!). As long as you have a decent AC filter up the tower, you're safer than separating the components. The downside, however, is a beastly climb if anything fails catastrophically.
Remember that those equations give you the wavelength of peak intensity - there would likely be some of what we call visible light in that spectrum. There would be a lot more X- and gamma rays from that star than from the sun, through. Can you say mutation-a-go-go?
Using the percentile table here and the spectral energy density function mentioned here, I calculate that a 40000 C star has less than of 1% its radiation in wavelengths that we consider visible. Additionally, the vast majority of that visible light would be at the violet end of the spectrum - talk about blue skies! 90% of its radiation would be in wavelengths shorter than 291 nm (UV), 99% in wavelengths shorter than 710nm (deep red), and 99.9% in wavelengths shorter than 1600nm (IR). Oddly, in space you wouldn't feel warmth from the star (little IR), but would get a heck of a sunburn (lots of UV+). Conversely only about 1% of the spectrum is in visible light and longer wavelengths (800-700nm and up).
You can create graphs of the spectra by evaluating this equation over the desired wavelength range and temperature of interest (I'd suggest scaling them so that all of the irradiance values are a percentage of the max value for that object). You'll see that the spectrum of your uber star is very narrow compared to the Sun or a typical 288K planet in absolute wavelength terms, but that the spectral curves are identical when viewed with the X axis as a logarithmic scale.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot lose/loose. That one can be funny, as in "I don't want them too loose there lunch!" or "Your about two loose you're sanity."
I hate all those contests telling me to do my business in public. You know the ones - they say "void where prohibited".
I can't quote you a number, since there's very little commercial experience with them, and research into them has been quashed by every president and congress since Carter.
I think I know where you're going with this - are they more expensive? Probably. Are they ready for prime time right this instant? Probably not. Should we invest in research? Absolutely.
Until the external costs of having terrorist-desirable spent fuel sitting around in pools at 100's of sites across the country, the costs of mining new fuel, and the danger of having all the waste eventually buried in one gigantic pit are all tallied up, they're going to seem more expensive than they really are.
My take on it is that the value of the problems they solve (burning up spent fuel, _reducing_ proliferation risk, reducing by several orders of magnitude the half lives of the waste, using 100x the energy from the same fuel, etc) far outweigh the actual dollar cost of designing/building them.
IFR facilities would use electrorefining and pyroprocessing, not PUREX, so there's never any useful, accessible Plutonium created.
Please read this article, particularly the Reprocessing & Proliferation section. A quote from that article:
"The IFR's pyroprocessing and electrorefining method is not capable of making plutonium that is pure enough for weapons. If a proliferator were to start with IFR material, he or she would have to employ an extra chemical separation step. ... expert bomb designers at Livermore National Laboratory ... looked at the problem in detail, and concluded that plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle was so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today's reactor-grade plutonium."
I agree 100% regarding the futility of one-off designs; the industry also agrees with us, and are applying for type-acceptance on several reactor designs like the ESBWR and the US-APWR. (See the left sidebar for more issued and pending Design Certifications).
Pebble bed reactors, while novel and relatively safe, are not, IMHO, scalable enough or efficient enough for large-scale power production. There are other criticisms, as well.
That figure likely does not include the losses incurred when generating the very high voltage DC from AC and converting it back to AC for consumption.
I've toured the Dalles dam and the Celilo power station - very impressive. Rectifiers that stand 20 feet tall with sci-fi looking knobs and disks, straight out of 50's movies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
http://www.abb.com/cawp/gad02181/c1256d71001e0037c1256b8000371e41.aspx
If you read these articles, you'll see that modern IFR reactors can be started on the existing nuclear WASTE from our current reactors, and need only a milkcrate-sized chunk of essentially unrefined uranium metal per month to continue operating ad infinitum.
We've had proof-of-concept plants that show breeders, particularly the IFR to be pretty efficient and safe. The last US attempt was canceled by Clinton and his cronies.
You may find this article to be informative.
If you've never read it, the account of Thor Heyerdahl's trip is a fascinating read. How little they knew about the oceans (didn't know about the zooplankton coming to the surface to feed at night, etc) and how much fortitude was required and how many hardships would be endured to make such a journey.
Sadly, I'm not too sure we know an awful lot more about the oceans now, except that we're killing them.
What amazes me is that I, also a non-druggie, was the first slashdotter to catch it.
...2 million doses of LCD...
Are those 22 inch 'doses', or 25 inch?
Are you sure the Kraft dinner wouldn't kill them _sooner_?
shoe-in
That's "shoo-in".
The air in the 70's wasn't lethal over a week's time. Didn't you learn about the great smogs and killer fogs in London? In 1952 upwards of 12,000 people died, and back in the 19th century it was a relatively common occurrence.
"1873 -- London fog kills 1,150. Similar incidents in 1880, 1882, 1891 and 1892."
Consider the Cuyahoga River. It was so polluted it caught fire - several times.
If you could build a 1 kW handheld, you're free to use it.
Maybe. In 1996 Amateurs came under the jurisdiction of RF exposure limits, so a 1kW handheld, depending on frequency, would likely put you over the limit. I don't know for sure that the exposure laws pertain to yourself or just others, come to think of it.
There are a pair of exceptions to requiring an evaluation:
"However, the FCC presumes that certain stations are safe without an evaluation. Those are:
* Amateur stations using a transmitter power of less than 50 W PEP at the transmitter output terminal.
* Mobile or portable stations using a transmitter with push-to-talk control."
So if your 1kW handheld uses a PTT, you'd be exempt from a mandatory evaluation, but would still be required to be in compliance.
Semantics. To the muggles it means the same thing.
No kidding. I was having it out with some nutcases in another slashdot thread that thought any radio transmission was a 'broadcast' and that they should be able to receive it legally. I tried to explain the difference, but it didn't work. To them broadcast was defined by the medium and not the intent. Sad, actually.
... "make sure the escape sequences cant be confused with notmal [sic] characters"...
That was figured out _long_ before UTF-8. In fact, having been born in 1956, Rob Pike was probably exposed to the concepts of Control Codes and bisync as well as all the other framing methods that use escape characters to indicate in-band signalling.
Have you ever wondered what all those control characters are doing wasting space down there under decimal 32? Link management, that's what. Start of Header, Start of Text, End of Text, End of Transmission, etc. They were all used to keep systems in sync across the (nasty) comm lines of the day. Even [XYZ]-modem used a similar setup.
It's very hard to transmit Radio Frequency energy over fiber. :-)
You could use fiber for the control and data signals, but then you'd still have to run power up for the transmitter, and your baseband signal would also have to be sent up that way. Audio could be modulated directly onto the fiber or digitized, but you'd still need an awful lot of (custom?) hardware up the pole to do the light->electronic->light translations. With all that up the pole, why not stick it all up there? That way you don't need a secure 'shack' at the bottom of the pole.
It sounds like the original poster is doing AX.25, which is 1200 baud FSK over a voice width channel. You can either do AFSK (using audio tones to modulate an FM or PM transmitter), or 'real' FSK, where the actual carrier is modulated. Most TNCs (terminal node controllers) do the audio deal - they take RS-232 in and emit the right tones for over the air and vice versa. An RS-232->fiber->RS-232 converter setup would work, but now you've got the TNC and transmitter up the pole, and you'll need a safe ground-level place for the PC.
It always comes down to tradeoffs, doesn't it?
This calculator shows the BAC after a 185 lb man takes 4 hours to drink a quart of 95% ethanol to be 1.172%. That's way past coma, and would likely be lethal. It also shows that it would take 29 hours for your BAC to fall below 0.08% if it didn't kill you outright.
Original poster, if you're really that habituated to those sorts of BAC levels, please seek help before you kill yourself, or worse, someone else.
What the hell is Taba Coo? Sounds vaguely Jamaican.
As they say, "the proof's in the pudding."
That's how it has been corrupted over time. The actual quote is, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
From that article:
"The full proverb is indeed the proof of the pudding is in the eating and proof has the sense of “test” (as it also has, or used to have, in phrases such as proving-ground and printer’s proof). The proverb literally says that you won’t know whether food has been cooked properly until you try it. Or, putting it figuratively, don’t assume that something is in order or believe what you are told, but judge the matter by testing it; it’s much the same philosophy as in seeing is believing and actions speak louder than words.
The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 and was popularised by Cervantes in his Don Quixote of 1605. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times."
can you say "Winch"? I'd submit to being hauled up on a cable to the top of the tower before going through all that! I've done plenty of tower work, but always in safe, warm (sometimes hot), low-wind conditions. Rohn 25 towers are scary to climb - you look down and you can't see the tower because your feet block the view. Towers look solid from the ground, but boy do they sway when you're 125' in the air!
Attenuation, plain and simple. At 145MHz, the attenuation of 200' of ok coax (LMR-400 @ $0.86/ft) is almost exactly 3dB - that's 50% of your transmitted power wasted heating the coax. Additionally that makes your receiver 3dB more deaf to weak signals.
At 450MHz, it's even worse. Attenuation is 5.4dB, which steals about 71.3% of your signal.
Stepping up to 1/2" Andrews DF4-50A heliax, you find the price jumps to $1.69/ft but the attenuation at 450MHz drops to only 2.9dB for 200'. We're still losing 50% of our signal.
Stepping up again to 7/8" hardline (3.99/ft), attenuation is 1.44dB @ 450 MHz - you _still_ lose 30% of the signal.
By putting the transmitter, computer, etc at the top of the tower, you get the best of all worlds - very low attenuation in the RF path, no long computer cables to pick up stray RF or lightning-induced surges, and fewer vandals. The downside is that you have to run power up the tower (usually 120VAC, since running 12VDC hits the same sorts of snags as coax - lots and lots of loss. Imagine 200' of welding cable - $$$ and heavy!). As long as you have a decent AC filter up the tower, you're safer than separating the components. The downside, however, is a beastly climb if anything fails catastrophically.
Remember that those equations give you the wavelength of peak intensity - there would likely be some of what we call visible light in that spectrum. There would be a lot more X- and gamma rays from that star than from the sun, through. Can you say mutation-a-go-go?
Using the percentile table here and the spectral energy density function mentioned here, I calculate that a 40000 C star has less than of 1% its radiation in wavelengths that we consider visible. Additionally, the vast majority of that visible light would be at the violet end of the spectrum - talk about blue skies! 90% of its radiation would be in wavelengths shorter than 291 nm (UV), 99% in wavelengths shorter than 710nm (deep red), and 99.9% in wavelengths shorter than 1600nm (IR). Oddly, in space you wouldn't feel warmth from the star (little IR), but would get a heck of a sunburn (lots of UV+). Conversely only about 1% of the spectrum is in visible light and longer wavelengths (800-700nm and up).
You can create graphs of the spectra by evaluating this equation over the desired wavelength range and temperature of interest (I'd suggest scaling them so that all of the irradiance values are a percentage of the max value for that object). You'll see that the spectrum of your uber star is very narrow compared to the Sun or a typical 288K planet in absolute wavelength terms, but that the spectral curves are identical when viewed with the X axis as a logarithmic scale.