Mandelbrute wrote:
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous
Good point. Let's design plants that can be constructed more cheaply and will last longer. The latest designs, the fourth generation reactors, can last a minimum of 60 years.
SectoidRandom wrote:
I dont believe that nuclear power is a great long term solution, all it does is changes a large amount of moderatly-harmfull polution to a small extremely-lethal amount of 'controlled' polution. Yes sure we can drum that radioactive waste up and bury it somewhere, but how long do you seriously think we can do that for?
6 billion years. The waste volume is small nd only takes 500 years to decay to less than the radioactivity level of the ore it was mined from.
What we need is either a miraculous break though, ie cold-fusion or some-such (I wont hold my breath), or a good reason to stop and SERIOUSLY make efforts find alternatives, like maybe hydrogen, fusion, microwaves from space or whatever!
CaptainCarrot wrote:
The process is called OTEC for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion,.... Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen.
You could do this much more easily and cheaply with electricity from fission plants.
ymgve wrote:
I recall some friends of mine talked about another alternative energy source - you dig a tunnel from below sealevel so far down into the earth that it starts to boil - and then lead the steam that results through generators. I don't know if this is feasible or not, but it atleast seems like it could be done.
This is called geothermal energy and we've been tapping it with geothermal power plants for years. These are some of the most pollution intensive plants around -- everything down there (yes, nasty nasty heavy metals and chemicals) gets blown out the hole up here. Ironically, the heat down there comes from the natural decay of uranium and thorium in the ground. Nuclear fission is the only real energy alternative.
Transcendent wrote:
What about fusion reactors? Now that is a pretty damn good power supply... much much much better than fission (current nuclear power plants)
Fusion doesn't exist and would be more expensive than fission if it did. If you want to put money into energy research where it will count, research how to better extract uranium from seawater.
Proposals for the use of nuclear bursts to produce electricity were made during the decades when the United States had a substantial program in peaceful nuclear expolsions, which preceded but was smaller than the Soviet effort. In particular, one plan of Los Alamos, Project Pacer, called for the production of electrical power by the explosion of thermonuclear explosives in underground cavities filled with high-pressure steam. Each day, a 60-kiloton nuclear explosive would be detonated in a cavity to keep the steam hot, while a relatively conventional steam-turbine power plant would draw on the steam reservoir to produce electrical energy. Nuclear heat from the explosion would simply replace a day's nuclear heat from a reactor.
In 1975, one of the authors (Garwin) worked on an advisory group to the U.S. government studying the whole field of peaceful nuclear explosions, and Pacer in particular. Although it had been claimed that Pacer was a cheaper road to nuclear power than the reactors that were mature at the time, side-by-side comparison with a normal nuclear power plant showed otherwise. In addition, the scale of the nuclear explosive manufacturing and transport program was almost unfathomable. Each of the 60-kiloton explosives would have had an explosive yield some 4 times that of the bombs that devastated Hiroshima Nagasaki. For each of the almost one hundred nuclear power plants operating now in the United States, 365 such explosions per year would be required, -- 36,500 per year in total. It is unreasonable to think that humanity might consider technology of this kind, while it is still searching for satisfactory methods for properly managing nuclear power plant waste and trying to reduce the number of nuclear explosives.
Major projects continue to be set forth -- most recently by the Russian nuclear weapons laboratories. In an audacious scheme, scientists have analyzed an enormous steel pressure vessel using a year's output of all of Russian steel mills for the container, to be equipped with multiple fountains of liquid sodium inside, for the purpose of shielding the steel container from the force and radiation of the 20- or 50-kiloton thermonuclear bursts. The possible attraction of such explosives in peaceful use lies in part in the fact that the only relatively small quantities of fission products and plutonium are produced. For the Russian 120-kiloton explosive used in rock crushing, it amounts to a mere 300 tons of high-explosive equivalent from fission. This results in a factor of 400 less fission products than in a nuclear reactor; the rest of the yield came from fusion of deuterium. This approach would thus compete with approaches for extending uranium fuel supplies -- e.g., a breeder reactor -- or obtaining uranium from seawater.
In the mid-1990s, it was the turn of the Chinese to consider the possibility of producing electricity by means of nuclear explosions. They suggested that with underground explosions within the yield range of typical thermonuclear weapons (10 to 100 kilotons), energy could be produced from uranium-238, and thorium-232 could be burned, multiplying the accessible energy of any particular uranium resource by a factor of 100 or so with respect to what can be obtained with ordinary reactors that burn only the 0.71% of natural uranium that is uranium-235. In these underground explosions, thermonuclear reactions could provide 90%, or even 99%, of the nuclear energy released. According to the authors of the project, there would remain only a few modest technological problems to solve. This was not, of course, a brand new idea, but it was being taken seriously for the first time in China.
11 platter hard driv wrote:
But with the hair movement in this film, along with the works of final fantasy and others, they are getting pretty close to making this kind of thing... look like real life.
Mac Nazgul wrote:
The...memory effect...means that if the units battery is run down (but not drained) and recharged to full repeatedly, the unit will "forget" its zero point and you get less and less battery time (i.e. 100% becomes 80% of actual battery life). No battery chemistry is capable of forgetting its zero point. The memory effect is caused by a very slight voltage depression in the discharge curve of NiCad cells that appears after a few uses.The capacity of the cell remains the same, however. In devices designed primarily designed to use battery chemistries other than NiCad, it will appear that the battery has forgotten how much energy it has in it, since now much of the discharge curve has "dipped underwater" IOW dipped below the minimal voltage level required by the device to function at all. If a NiCad is used in a device designed to use a NiCad, or a NiCad battery is designed for the purpose of porviding a suitable voltage for standard devices, no memory effcts will be observed.
Keeping the unit under consistant trickle charge (ie maintained at full) will aviod this until you use it. No comment.
When in use, allow the battery to fully discharge before charging in order to maintain battery effeciency. This will prematurely age your battery and won't add to the performance of it at all.
It's annoying because I think that the all chargers should come with a "discharge" option. Just match your cells and your application. You'll be a lot happier.
child_of_mercy wrote:
It's worth noting that Scramjets have no real civilian use.
{..mercysnip..}
Yes it's cool whizz-bang tech
But only in the same way an H-Bomb is.
H-bombs have their civilian uses. If you use a lead instead of a U-238 liner, it becomes a clean nuke (the lead absorbs the neutron radiation -- the U-238 would have absorbed the neutron radiation also and would have amplified the blast power but at the expense of creating radioactive fission products) and can be used for civil engineering projects. The former USSR used one of these to construct a reservoir, IIRC.
ramakant wrote:
Dirck had the feeling that he had seen her face before, so Time hired a researcher to dig in his archives and find the image.
A digital version of the image could have been found in the digital archive with face recognition software, saving Time from having to hire (read: make welfare payments to) flunkies to find it.
As for all the digital versions of this image being dicarded, the pro photographer should wear a wearable computer with laptop harddrives in it. The camera hooks up to the computer, images are downloaded fast through the firewire port, and storage is virtually infinite on as many 99 gram, 30GB laptop drives as he can comfortably carry. Only 34 drives (weighing ~7 pounds) would give him a terabyte of mobile storage. Is that not enough?
Re:Low IQs of muslim populations
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Anonymous Coward wrote:
that's not fair.
IQ-tests have a lot to do with culture.
And the FAMILIARITY with symbols and numbers. The subject of Bias in Mental Testing has been exhaustively reviewed.
hmm, maybe I'm wrong..
America doesn't rate that high The US's average is dragged down by Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.
-nb
Re:Low IQs of muslim populations
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
ellem wrote:
The AC is saying that the people from those countries had to take the IQ tests in English which would account for their (and apparently your) low IQs.
Why would people in non-English speaking countries be administered IQ tests in English (assuming they're verbal which isn't necessarily the case)? Don't you think that would reduce the validity of the tests?
-nb
Re:Low IQs of muslim populations
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Anonymous Coward wrote:
yeah but they had to take the tests in English...
What are you talking about?
-nb
Low IQs of muslim populations
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
The, _without exception_, existence of low average IQs of countries with large muslim populations might help explain the _behavior_ of muslim populations:
With two of these HDTV hardware codecs, one could make an SVGA Head-Mounted-Display _wireless_ cheaply. Just combine your HDTV hard codecs with the Interstil Prism Indigo, a 54Mb/s wireless LAN, and you're ready to rock.
Slashdot Mirror
Mandelbrute wrote:
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous
Good point. Let's design plants that can be constructed more cheaply and will last longer. The latest designs, the fourth generation reactors, can last a minimum of 60 years.
-nukebuddy
SectoidRandom wrote:
I dont believe that nuclear power is a great long term solution, all it does is changes a large amount of moderatly-harmfull polution to a small extremely-lethal amount of 'controlled' polution. Yes sure we can drum that radioactive waste up and bury it somewhere, but how long do you seriously think we can do that for?
6 billion years. The waste volume is small nd only takes 500 years to decay to less than the radioactivity level of the ore it was mined from.
What we need is either a miraculous break though, ie cold-fusion or some-such (I wont hold my breath), or a good reason to stop and SERIOUSLY make efforts find alternatives, like maybe hydrogen, fusion, microwaves from space or whatever!
We have a serious alternative: nuclear fission.
-nukebuddy
CaptainCarrot wrote:
The process is called OTEC for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion,.... Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen.
You could do this much more easily and cheaply with electricity from fission plants.
-nukebuddy
ymgve wrote:
I recall some friends of mine talked about another alternative energy source - you dig a tunnel from below sealevel so far down into the earth that it starts to boil - and then lead the steam that results through generators. I don't know if this is feasible or not, but it atleast seems like it could be done.
This is called geothermal energy and we've been tapping it with geothermal power plants for years. These are some of the most pollution intensive plants around -- everything down there (yes, nasty nasty heavy metals and chemicals) gets blown out the hole up here. Ironically, the heat down there comes from the natural decay of uranium and thorium in the ground. Nuclear fission is the only real energy alternative.
-nukebuddy
dbCooper0 wrote:
I have a first-born son in the Navy, and he (thankfully) is not on a nuke-ship.
Why are you thankful he's not on an environmentally friendly ship?
-nukebuddy
Transcendent wrote:
What about fusion reactors? Now that is a pretty damn good power supply... much much much better than fission (current nuclear power plants)
Fusion doesn't exist and would be more expensive than fission if it did. If you want to put money into energy research where it will count, research how to better extract uranium from seawater.
-nukebuddy
Not really. Fusion "containers" are massive electromagnetic coils which are themselves suspended in a vacuum chamber.
There are other types, as described in the very recent book _Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?_ (pp. 254-255):
-nukebuddy
AC wrote:
I'm just thinking that with 50 rds/sec you're shooting $2.50 worth of paint every second.
I must be missing something here. Why not just use a powered spray paint gun? Paint's cheaper by the gallon.
-nb
Why do people purchase junk like this? The best thing to do with a used HD is throw it in the garbage. If you want a cheap HD, you can buy a brand new 10GB Travelstar for $81 shipped:. jsp?ProductCode=712553-017
http://www.googlegear.com/ggweb/jsp/ProductDetail
-nb
Angry Black Man wrote:
Pixar's style is a lot different than what we've seen in other full-CG movies...
Dude, you must be seriously pissed. I would have said "Pixar's style is a lot different from what we've seen" but what the fuck do I know?
-nb
11 platter hard driv wrote:
But with the hair movement in this film, along with the works of final fantasy and others, they are getting pretty close to making this kind of thing... look like real life.
What do you mean? My hair doesn't move.
-nb
maxpublic wrote:
The third world isn't in the pickle that it's in because the people who populate it are stupid
Well, you're right in a way. It _isn't_ the third world that's in a pickle because the people who populate the third world are stupid, it's the _whole_ world that's in a pickle because the people who populate the third world are stupid.
So, I agree with you completely...and so does Richard Lynn.
-nb
Table copied from a review of the book _IQ and the Wealth of Nations_ at:
http://home.att.net/~eugenics/lynn.htm
Country average IQ GDP fitted GDP
Hong Kong 107 20,763 19,817
Korea, South 106 13,478 19,298
Japan 105 23,257 18,779
Taiwan 104 13,000 18,260
Singapore 103 24,210 17,740
Austria 102 23,166 17,221
Germany 102 22,169 17,221
Italy 102 20,585 17,221
Netherlands 102 22,176 17,221
Sweden 101 20,659 16,702
Switzerland 101 25,512 16,702
Belgium 100 23,223 16,183
China 100 3,105 16,183
NewZealand 100 17,288 16,183
U. Kingdom 100 20,336 16,183
Hungary 99 10,232 15,664
Poland 99 7,619 15,664
Australia 98 22,452 15,145
Denmark 98 24,218 15,145
France 98 21,175 15,145
Norway 98 26,342 15,145
United States 98 29,605 15,145
Canada 97 23,582 14,626
Czech Rep. 97 12,362 14,626
Finland 97 20,847 14,626
Spain 97 16,212 14,626
Argentina 96 12,013 14,107
Russia 96 6,460 14,107
Slovakia 96 9,699 14,107
Uruguay 96 8,623 14,107
Portugal 95 14,701 13,589
Slovenia 95 14,293 13,588
Israel 94 17,301 13,069
Romania 94 5,648 13,069
Bulgaria 93 4,809 12,550
Ireland 93 21,482 12,550
Greece 92 13,943 12,031
Malaysia 92 8,137 12,031
Thailand 91 5,456 11,512
Croatia 90 6,749 10,993
Peru 90 4,282 10,993
Turkey 90 6,422 10,993
Colombia 89 6,006 10,474
Indonesia 89 2,651 10,474
Suriname 89 5,161 10,474
Brazil 87 6,625 9,436
Iraq 87 3,197 9,436
Mexico 87 7,704 9,436
Samoa (West) 87 3,832 9,436
Tonga 87 3,000 9,436
Lebanon 86 4,326 8,917
Philippines 86 3,555 8,917
Cuba 85 3,967 8,398
Morocco 85 3,305 8,398
Fiji 84 4,231 7,879
Iran 84 5,121 7,879
Marshall Islds84 3,000 7,879
Puerto Rico 84 8,000 7,879
Egypt 83 3,041 7,360
India 81 2,077 6,322
Ecuador 80 3,003 5,803
Guatemala 79 3,505 5,284
Barbados 78 12,001 4,765
Nepal 78 1,157 4,765
Qatar 78 20,987 4,765
Zambia 77 719 4,246
Congo (Brazz) 73 995 2,170
Uganda 73 1,074 2,170
Jamaica 72 3,389 1,651
Kenya 72 980 1,651
South Africa 72 8,488 1,651
Sudan 72 1,394 1,651
Tanzania 72 480 1,651
Ghana 71 1,735 1,132
Nigeria 67 795 -944
Guinea 66 1,782 -1,463
Zimbabwe 66 2,669 -1,463
Congo (Zaire) 65 822 -1,982
Sierra Leone 64 458 -2,501
Ethiopia 63 574 -3,020
Equatorial
Guinea 59 1,817 -5,096
-nb
Dude, I'm rolling on the floor. Literally. Good thing I'm using a Twiddler2(tm) or I wouldn't even be able to type.
-nb
Mac Nazgul wrote:
The...memory effect...means that if the units battery is run down (but not drained) and recharged to full repeatedly, the unit will "forget" its zero point and you get less and less battery time (i.e. 100% becomes 80% of actual battery life).
No battery chemistry is capable of forgetting its zero point. The memory effect is caused by a very slight voltage depression in the discharge curve of NiCad cells that appears after a few uses. The capacity of the cell remains the same, however. In devices designed primarily designed to use battery chemistries other than NiCad, it will appear that the battery has forgotten how much energy it has in it, since now much of the discharge curve has "dipped underwater" IOW dipped below the minimal voltage level required by the device to function at all. If a NiCad is used in a device designed to use a NiCad, or a NiCad battery is designed for the purpose of porviding a suitable voltage for standard devices, no memory effcts will be observed.
Keeping the unit under consistant trickle charge (ie maintained at full) will aviod this until you use it.
No comment.
When in use, allow the battery to fully discharge before charging in order to maintain battery effeciency.
This will prematurely age your battery and won't add to the performance of it at all.
It's annoying because I think that the all chargers should come with a "discharge" option.
Just match your cells and your application. You'll be a lot happier.
-nb
Neither Ni-Cad nor Li-Pol cells suffer from memory effects.
-nb
duffbear703 wrote:
The only problem with Toughbooks is that they are still shipping with Pentium I chips, and still cost like $5000
PIII 600MHz Toughbook, $1700:
nb
child_of_mercy wrote:
It's worth noting that Scramjets have no real civilian use.
{..mercysnip..}
Yes it's cool whizz-bang tech
But only in the same way an H-Bomb is.
H-bombs have their civilian uses. If you use a lead instead of a U-238 liner, it becomes a clean nuke (the lead absorbs the neutron radiation -- the U-238 would have absorbed the neutron radiation also and would have amplified the blast power but at the expense of creating radioactive fission products) and can be used for civil engineering projects. The former USSR used one of these to construct a reservoir, IIRC.
-nb
ramakant wrote:
Dirck had the feeling that he had seen her face before, so Time hired a researcher to dig in his archives and find the image.
A digital version of the image could have been found in the digital archive with face recognition software, saving Time from having to hire (read: make welfare payments to) flunkies to find it.
As for all the digital versions of this image being dicarded, the pro photographer should wear a wearable computer with laptop harddrives in it. The camera hooks up to the computer, images are downloaded fast through the firewire port, and storage is virtually infinite on as many 99 gram, 30GB laptop drives as he can comfortably carry. Only 34 drives (weighing ~7 pounds) would give him a terabyte of mobile storage. Is that not enough?
-nb
There is no dark matter of the universe.
It's all dark.
-nb
Anonymous Coward wrote:
that's not fair.
IQ-tests have a lot to do with culture.
And the FAMILIARITY with symbols and numbers.
The subject of Bias in Mental Testing has been exhaustively reviewed.
hmm, maybe I'm wrong..
America doesn't rate that high
The US's average is dragged down by Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.
-nb
ellem wrote:
The AC is saying that the people from those countries had to take the IQ tests in English which would account for their (and apparently your) low IQs.
Why would people in non-English speaking countries be administered IQ tests in English (assuming they're verbal which isn't necessarily the case)? Don't you think that would reduce the validity of the tests?
-nb
Anonymous Coward wrote:
yeah but they had to take the tests in English...
What are you talking about?
-nb
The, _without exception_, existence of low average IQs of countries with large muslim populations might help explain the _behavior_ of muslim populations:
f /i rf_rpt/1999/irf_malaysia99.html
Country IQ % Muslim
Malaysia 92 59*
Turkey 90 100
Indonesia 89 88
Iraq 87 97
Lebanon 86 70
Morocco 85 99
Iran 84 99
Egypt 83 94
Qatar 78 95
Sudan 72 70
Tanzania 72 35
Ghana 71 30
Nigeria 67 50
Guinea 66 85
Sierra Leone 64 60
Ethiopia 63 50
Country average IQs from:
http://home.att.net/~eugenics/lynn.htm
Religious statistics from:
http://www.xist.org/global/religion.htm
* Religious statistics for Malaysia:
http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/ir
-nb
With two of these HDTV hardware codecs, one could make an SVGA Head-Mounted-Display _wireless_ cheaply. Just combine your HDTV hard codecs with the Interstil Prism Indigo, a 54Mb/s wireless LAN, and you're ready to rock.
-nb