But that's not alpha radiation from an external source. It's ingesting a large atom that becomes an alpha emitter. Radioactive iodine and cesium, for instance, which are the elements being discussed in these reactor accidents. That of course is a very bad thing, and a known vector for directly putting alpha particles into your lungs.
Sorry to contradict you, but you are just making a semantic argument.
If you are in an environment where you detect alpha particle radiation, there is a good probability that some thing in that environment is emitting that radiation (small atom or whatever), the fact that the ambient alpha radiation itself isn't doing anything specific to you because it can't get through your skin doesn't mean that it is impossible for some of the "other" stuff that emitting that radiation to get into your lungs and cause problems as they do exactly what they would have done in the outside environment (decay and emit alpha particles).
Also just to correct any misinformation in the parent, radio Iodine and Cesium are BETA emitters, not ALPHA emitters. The problematic alpha emitters are Plutonium, Americium, Curium, and the Thorium decay series including Radon. These can be gotten into the lungs through dust or in the case of Radon, in gaseous form.
GP is confused about breathed in Alpha particles (which I agree seems very unlikely).
As you might suspect almost all the decay chains from Uranium fuel have alpha emission paths (basically tossing off protons until the nucleus is stable). Some of the decay chain byproducts can be easily inhaled by either forming oxide compounds that are dust-like or cling to dust particles, or are actually gasses themselves (e.g., Radon gas). Thus, I think it is highly probable to breathe-in radionucleotide compound(s) which accumulate in human tissue and irradiate your DNA from inside with alpha particles (see this wikipedia article about relative biological effectiveness).
This is why alpha radiation is considered one of the most dangerous for human tissue even though alpha radiation is mostly stopped by your skin. As I recall, there was an interesting spy case in london where someone was killed with ingested polonium (a heavy alpha emitter) in a sushi bar.
Sadly, radioactive water is mostly water that has dissolved or partially suspended radionuclides and compounds formed with radionuclides. The problem with evaporation is that although it removes the most of the solids, any dissolved gasses are generally carried along with the water vapor. As a simplistic example of this, consider carbonated water. The dissolved carbon dioxide gas would pretty much evaporate with the water.
If you look at few of decay products of the fuel in the reactor you might see the problem. After the radioactive Uranium decays to radioactive iodine, it then decays to radioactive Xe gas. Also there's the Radium to Radon gas decay chain, plus all the other stuff.
Unfortuantly, it isn't just highschool chemistry we are dealing with, it nuclear decay products.
Yesterday, Nocera reported devising a cheap catalyst that uses three different metals to form H2, getting around the platinum problem. Nocera didn't reveal the makeup of the new catalyst, as the work is not yet published, and he is in the process of patenting it.
Before we get too excited, apparently most of his research to date has been with cobalt, phosporus, tungstun and rhodium. Not sure where all this stuff comes from, but hopefully it is widespread enough won't turn into another middle east problem.
Also, at 5.5% efficiency, we would probably need quite a bit of this stuff which may cause some environmental issues by itself (mining, industrial polution, etc).
As a side note, many people talk about cutting back on petrol consumption as doing our part to reduce the demand for oil which comes from the problematic middle east, but I rarely hear of folks cutting back on electronics "toy" consumption to reduce the demand for coltan (the ore where much of the tantalum for capacitors comes from) which is causing huge problems for countries like the republic of congo. Haven't heard much about the coltan topic on/. Just be cause it's "electronic" and doesn't use oil doesn't mean it's better when scaled to industrial quantitites.
Not saying this proposed "artificial leaf" technology could definitly cause this kind of natural resource scarcity/extraction problem, but the sad fact is that if this becomes industrialized, it may not be much better than what we have today and most folks aren't even aware of the problems we have today (or even care).
Although the Richter scale is base 10, it is the log of the amplitude of the moment of movement, the actual energy of the earthquake is approximatly proportional to 1.5 power. So effectively the energy ratio is about base 31... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale Not that anyone uses this scale anymore (they use the very similar moment magnitude scale).
Using your argument, that's about 15.8 times which is more than an order of magnitude, but probably less than many orders of magnitude.
If this comes to pass, I think that someone is going to design a "fake" gps transmitter that you can wire to the devices gps antenna to that basically fools the device into thinking it's stationary (probably not too hard to create a PRN sequence generator for the signal and the rest is probably just a microcontroller with a fake satellite "almanac"). Since it's wired to the gps antenna it isn't broadcasting anything with an antenna, it probably shouldn't interfere with a hand-held GPS navigation unit in the same car.
Maybe they'll sell it like those cable descramblers, or catalytic converter bypass kits from the 70's. Instead of selling them in soldier of fortune magazine, you could buy them on craigslist or ebay and "chip" your car tracker.
I'm sure there would be other uses for this other than tax evasion, but I'll leave that to your imagination.
Gamma rays being EM waves, might be deflected by electro magnetics...
F
Actually, maybe. There's nothing in Maxwell's equations that says you need a electric field inside a volume that has no net charge (e.g., the perfect faraday cage). The incident wave in the case of a perfect faraday cage goes around the enclosed volume and thus it deflects the wave (or partially cancels the wave inside depending on how you look at it).
Of course getting that type of electromagnetic setup isn't obvious (e.g., a metallic faraday cage electrons charge cloud can't cancel something as high frequency as a gamma ray) but I don't think it violates the laws of physics, but it is also probably not a configuration that you could generate with a "star-trek" like electromagnetic field generator...
Just think about the way you can refract EM waves with objects that have a negative index of refraction at certain frequencies. It's not something that you might think would be allowed by maxwell's equations until you look at how they do it.
Alpha particles = helium nucelus Beta particles = electrons and positrons (not neutrons) Gamma rays being EM waves, might be deflected by electro magnetics...
Some others common forms of ionizing radiation... Neutron radiation = neutrons (you got that mixed up with beta), basically how current fission nuclear reactors chain and how C14 carbon dating works. Proton radiation = mostly cosmic rays, but also used for cancer treatment
The problem with cosmic rays which are mostly proton radiation (but also include all the above mentioned forms of radiation and all sorts of other charged ions of various heavier nucleic isotopes and vanilla uncharged neutron radiation) is that they are HIGHLY energetic (e.g, from 10^7 up to 10^20 eV) compared the usual sources of radiation. This makes them exceptionally hard to stop or deflect. Even cosmic alpha particles won't be stopped by a thin sheet of paper.
It seems unlikely that an electro-static shield configuration would stop this stuff (from an strictly energy point of view). But maybe a "startrek" like dynamically modulated shield would have a better chance to deflect the radiation around a small volume of space where people might be located in a ship. Still, it seems unlikley that would work either (even though it would probably take less energy to diffract the radiation than to cancel/stop the stream of radio active particles, it still seems like a lot to ask).
For example, I don't think they have even solved this problem for the moon or mars where we would get protected from about 1/2 of the radiation by being on the ground (since cosmic rays from the other side have to go through the celetial object to get to us) and there isn't that much of a weight problem. In outerspace, it's coming from all sides and would be twice as bad and we have to carry it with us.
Okay, so I read the article (so sue me)... Here's an interesting tidbit...
All of eastern Japan, including Tokyo and the disaster-struck region to the north, is standardized on 50Hz supply while the rest of the country uses 60Hz.
I wonder what the USS RR could output given the USA is on 60Hz... The history you cited was that the USA Lexington powered Tacoma, WA (a USA city that used 60Hz)...
Given the limited number of frequency converting stations in Japan, I find it hard to believe that... 1. an Aircraft carrier would carry a frequency converting unit with enough capacity OR 2. Aircraft carrier systems could use either 50Hz or 60Hz so the whole ship could run at 50Hz and supply power to the 50Hz grid in that part of japan
So I'm wondering if this is just a "would-be-nice-but" option instead of something they could actually do...
Somehow this reminds me of the STTNG "sour the milk episode"...
So I'm wondering, if the containment system can handle a meltdown just fine, why are they going to such great lengths to try to cool it despite having undergone at least a partial meltdown
IANA nuclear engineer, but this is my understanding of the current situation.
First, there is no saving the reactor now that there is a partial meltdown. The reactor cores will have to be decommisioned because of many reasons (potential damage to the reactor containment, radiation all over the place due to the damage to the fuel rods, etc, etc). In fact, I think that at least one of the reactor cores that are currently problematic was scheduled to be decommissioned anyhow (apparently after a while exposing things to a bunch of radiation causes them to wear-out, no surprise there, and you want to decommission it before it reaches the end of it's predicted lifetime).
AFAIK, there are three main things they are trying to avoid: 1. cleaning up will be much easier if the whole core doesn't melt down. 2. nobody knows exactly how much damage the reactor containment received and the probability of how much stuff will eventually leak as a result of that damage. 3. collateral damage to the spent fuel holding area due to excessive heating from the reactor.
Out of an abundance of caution, I'm sure they are considering that the one variable they have possibly have control over is to reduce the potential additional damage that the core can do to the reactor containment by cooling it down as much as possible.
But the main issue that everyone is worried about is #3. The spent fuel is hanging around next to the reactor in a pool of water (if you believe the USA-NRC, an empty pool of water). All that spent fuel is NOT in any type of reactor containment system, but is still hot and could cause a radiological disaster if the fuel rods are damaged allowing the fuel pellets inside to be exposed to the environment. Because the reactors themselves aren't being sufficiently cooled right now, they are apparently heating the pools of water where the spent fuel is being stored (some estimates are that the water is nearly at the boiling point ere the normal temperature is around 70deg). And if you listen to the media, it probably is starting fires in the building that houses the holding ponds. If the water in the holding ponds boils away, there will be a large increase in radiation (because normally the water absorbs some of the neutrons) possibly causing damage to the spent fuel rods. That would be bad.
Of course this always brings up the issue of why are we storing the spent fuel rods in holding ponds near the reactor? Don't know if I can answer that one other than apparently the easiest thing to do from a security/safety point of view (don't have to move them very far after you take them out of the reactor because you want to keep them constantly under water while you move them) and currently, there's no other good place to put them.
Well to be fair the plant was designed and installed by GE.
Technically, although Fukushima Daiichi 1 and 2 were GE reactors, FD-3: the one that is running MOX (mixed plutonium oxide fuel), was a reactor supplied by Toshiba (a japanese company if I'm not mistaken). If you had to rank something bad happening, well, I'm pretty sure most experts would agree that having plutonium excape into the enviornment would be pretty bad in the scale of things...
Parent poster forgot about html ampersand escapes in thep copied it wrong... see missing semicolons at the end of a line? they should have & *y ; and & *i ;
Although IANAL, I believe the following is all true...
There is no obligation for an establishment to serve the entire public. The only requirement is to not descriminate based on race, color, religion, natural origin or other protected categories of the public (e.g, various handicaps).
For example, if you have a diner or restaurant and you say "pants-required", and someone doesn't have pants, you can refuse service. As a more nuanced restriction, you can say no children (no law protecting against age descrimination in public), or refuse service to potential patrons that are too rowdy, too smelly, or just about anyone that detracts from the safety or welfare of other patrons.
As another example, a bank can refuse to do business with someone as long as the reason isn't protected by public policy. For example, they can refuse to open a checking account if you don't have a street address, or aren't a resident of the state, or if your credit score is too low, etc... They can also choose to close your account at any time for any reason (e.g., low-usage, high-usage, inactivity). Ironically, they can even refuse to take cash deposits (currency is legal tender for debts, not for deposits) and often do when the amounts are high and the source is suspicious (e.g, 100 bills on pallets wrapped with cellaphane, or with purple dye splashed all over it). Also, when they freeze your account, they can just send the money to the state as unclaimed assets.
People with lawyers may disagree with the possibilities listed, so there is always potential forlegal recourse, I doubt it would be successful based on my understanding of what constitutes a public accommodation and what is protected by law.
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques."Photographic memory" is the stuff of magicians, hucksters and B movie thrillers.
Photographic, maybe not, how 'bout hyperthymesia? Just look up hyperthymesia in the wiki. Perhaps It's not a stretch to think that some OCD person could convert this into something approximating eidetic memory and just maybe that same OCD personality isn't going to memory championships because they are too busy collecting stuff (and hopefully not to the extent of a hoarder)...
Sounds like intel fessed up yesterday and stated it was a problem with a bias circuit in the PLL clocking tree. A bias circuit apparently caused a transistor to remain in a high leakage state (which over time will induce a failure mode). What makes it silly is apparently intel is saying this circuit wasn't in initial designs, added, but not needed in the design and will be disabled in the future... Back to the future!
My educated guess is that the SATA Input/Output Pads have a digital timing compensation circuit that tries to center the data sampling window (e.g., the clock edge where data is sampled). Since the appropriate data sampling window that won't cause a setup/hold violation changes with process variation and temperature it needs to have lots of potential settings in a large window and may need automatic tracking.
Probably someone didn't design that window large enough to center the data sampling timing offset (or the step size isn't small enough or the auto adjustment circuit that tracks temperature and adjusts the window appropriatly has an algorithmic flaw in some cases, etc). It might be okay now (in early production tests), but as the part ages, the required data sampling window can shift significantly, and if the chip can't adjust the data sampling window appropriatly, then data errors are inevitable.
As a silly example, let's say a hw engineer put in a clock trim circuit that could adjust +-100ps in steps of 10ps. No driver update can make that adjustment -110ps.
Conversely, if the hw control algorithm that tracks temperature and adjusts the window has a postive temperature coefficient over time (say gets slower), but the actual I/O circuit has a negative coefficient over time (say gets faster), after a while, that feedback algorithm may become unstable, that might not be fixable with a driver update either (if the control algorithm is in hw).
Of course, I have no real infomation, but it's my guess having designed high speed I/Os in the past...
If you look at WebM's VP8 codec (the only one that matters), you'll see it's quite similar to MPEG4-pt2 (the original MPEG4 instead of pt10 which is H.264). If you look at the MPEG-LA (the patent-pool/licensing authority for the "patented" codecs), you might notice a few patents that seem to cover some aspects for the VP8 algorithm. Well, it's never been tested in court to see if VP8 actually reads on any those patents (or even ones that aren't part of the patent-pool), so it a bit premature to assert that WebM's VP8 is somehow non-patented and allowing for greater innovation than H.264.
As usual, the headlines aren't really the whole story. This whole thing may just be FUD, but making this about free-vs-paid is really just a disservice. Both are currently free, both have a patent cloud. The only thing that is true is that some corporations like MPEG-LA's business model, and some other folks want to go it with Google on their side (even though both sides said that they aren't indemnifying anyone for patent infringement). Both MPEG-LA and Google are out to make money. They just want to do it a different way.
Sadly Google's move doesn't really help consumers much at all. H.264 isn't going away overnight so for the forseeable future, consumer devices will probably all have to support H.264 and thus the potential "free-ness" of the WebM/VP8 doesn't reduce anyone's cost basis, but it adds to it (now they will just have to support H.264 and WebM/VP8 on their devices). It probably saves Google some money (maybe they don't have to support both), but this is just like Apple not supporting Flash to try to save a few bucks and strong arm the marketplace, replace Apple with Google and Flash with H.264. How is this additional cost fostering growth and innovation? There may be other principles involved, but growth, innovation, and paid are all red herrings in this fight...
Perhaps we should see how fast the "Watson" computer can search when given an energy budget of 2500 Kcal/day (~10MJ/day ~120W). Or conversely, we should penalize the reaction time accordingly (probably would have to wait days for the computer to answer). Or maybe allow an additional team member for every 120W...
Now that would be a real challenge, I'd be willing to see. Given the human energy conversion efficiency is only about 20% and a typical computer power supply is about 70%, that still giving the computer a significant advantage...
Not sure that you can equate certain marine organism host requirements to enslave certain species of Zooanthalla forcing them to photosynthesis food (sugars) for the host with having a native ability of an organism to harvest solar energy directly, but nice try...
The only reason why ATK is "cheap" is because nobody else would bother with fitting the specifications as required for the SRB contract. See also "Cost-plus contract" for further details.
Even if some other enterprising company might attempt it, they would get squashed in the contract and appropriations phase. Let's face it the SRB was/is an earmark for Sen. Oren Hatch. The reason nobody else would bother is because they know that even to succeed would be to fail politically...
AFAIK, the nozzle is actually pretty thin and designed to "glow" (some sort of niobium metal alloy) and as a result a little bit wobbly. Apparently, they have a stiffening ring "glued" to it, but that they burn it away after the second stage ignites.
That being said, the visual blowing up effect may however be a camera infrared light color bleeding artifact rather than any mechanical bellowing...
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not alpha radiation from an external source. It's ingesting a large atom that becomes an alpha emitter. Radioactive iodine and cesium, for instance, which are the elements being discussed in these reactor accidents. That of course is a very bad thing, and a known vector for directly putting alpha particles into your lungs.
Sorry to contradict you, but you are just making a semantic argument.
If you are in an environment where you detect alpha particle radiation, there is a good probability that some thing in that environment is emitting that radiation (small atom or whatever), the fact that the ambient alpha radiation itself isn't doing anything specific to you because it can't get through your skin doesn't mean that it is impossible for some of the "other" stuff that emitting that radiation to get into your lungs and cause problems as they do exactly what they would have done in the outside environment (decay and emit alpha particles).
Also just to correct any misinformation in the parent, radio Iodine and Cesium are BETA emitters, not ALPHA emitters. The problematic alpha emitters are Plutonium, Americium, Curium, and the Thorium decay series including Radon. These can be gotten into the lungs through dust or in the case of Radon, in gaseous form.
GP is confused about breathed in Alpha particles (which I agree seems very unlikely).
As you might suspect almost all the decay chains from Uranium fuel have alpha emission paths (basically tossing off protons until the nucleus is stable). Some of the decay chain byproducts can be easily inhaled by either forming oxide compounds that are dust-like or cling to dust particles, or are actually gasses themselves (e.g., Radon gas).
Thus, I think it is highly probable to breathe-in radionucleotide compound(s) which accumulate in human tissue and irradiate your DNA from inside with alpha particles (see this wikipedia article about relative biological effectiveness).
This is why alpha radiation is considered one of the most dangerous for human tissue even though alpha radiation is mostly stopped by your skin. As I recall, there was an interesting spy case in london where someone was killed with ingested polonium (a heavy alpha emitter) in a sushi bar.
Sadly, radioactive water is mostly water that has dissolved or partially suspended radionuclides and compounds formed with radionuclides. The problem with evaporation is that although it removes the most of the solids, any dissolved gasses are generally carried along with the water vapor. As a simplistic example of this, consider carbonated water. The dissolved carbon dioxide gas would pretty much evaporate with the water.
If you look at few of decay products of the fuel in the reactor you might see the problem. After the radioactive Uranium decays to radioactive iodine, it then decays to radioactive Xe gas. Also there's the Radium to Radon gas decay chain, plus all the other stuff.
Unfortuantly, it isn't just highschool chemistry we are dealing with, it nuclear decay products.
Eliminating adverbs works.
Before we get too excited, apparently most of his research to date has been with cobalt, phosporus, tungstun and rhodium. Not sure where all this stuff comes from, but hopefully it is widespread enough won't turn into another middle east problem.
Also, at 5.5% efficiency, we would probably need quite a bit of this stuff which may cause some environmental issues by itself (mining, industrial polution, etc).
As a side note, many people talk about cutting back on petrol consumption as doing our part to reduce the demand for oil which comes from the problematic middle east, but I rarely hear of folks cutting back on electronics "toy" consumption to reduce the demand for coltan (the ore where much of the tantalum for capacitors comes from) which is causing huge problems for countries like the republic of congo. Haven't heard much about the coltan topic on /. Just be cause it's "electronic" and doesn't use oil doesn't mean it's better when scaled to industrial quantitites.
Not saying this proposed "artificial leaf" technology could definitly cause this kind of natural resource scarcity/extraction problem, but the sad fact is that if this becomes industrialized, it may not be much better than what we have today and most folks aren't even aware of the problems we have today (or even care).
Although the Richter scale is base 10, it is the log of the amplitude of the moment of movement, the actual energy of the earthquake is approximatly proportional to 1.5 power. So effectively the energy ratio is about base 31... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
Not that anyone uses this scale anymore (they use the very similar moment magnitude scale).
Using your argument, that's about 15.8 times which is more than an order of magnitude, but probably less than many orders of magnitude.
If this comes to pass, I think that someone is going to design a "fake" gps transmitter that you can wire to the devices gps antenna to that basically fools the device into thinking it's stationary (probably not too hard to create a PRN sequence generator for the signal and the rest is probably just a microcontroller with a fake satellite "almanac"). Since it's wired to the gps antenna it isn't broadcasting anything with an antenna, it probably shouldn't interfere with a hand-held GPS navigation unit in the same car.
Maybe they'll sell it like those cable descramblers, or catalytic converter bypass kits from the 70's. Instead of selling them in soldier of fortune magazine, you could buy them on craigslist or ebay and "chip" your car tracker.
I'm sure there would be other uses for this other than tax evasion, but I'll leave that to your imagination.
Gamma rays being EM waves, might be deflected by electro magnetics...
F
Actually, maybe. There's nothing in Maxwell's equations that says you need a electric field inside a volume that has no net charge (e.g., the perfect faraday cage). The incident wave in the case of a perfect faraday cage goes around the enclosed volume and thus it deflects the wave (or partially cancels the wave inside depending on how you look at it).
Of course getting that type of electromagnetic setup isn't obvious (e.g., a metallic faraday cage electrons charge cloud can't cancel something as high frequency as a gamma ray) but I don't think it violates the laws of physics, but it is also probably not a configuration that you could generate with a "star-trek" like electromagnetic field generator...
Just think about the way you can refract EM waves with objects that have a negative index of refraction at certain frequencies. It's not something that you might think would be allowed by maxwell's equations until you look at how they do it.
Alpha particles = helium nucelus
Beta particles = electrons and positrons (not neutrons)
Gamma rays being EM waves, might be deflected by electro magnetics...
Some others common forms of ionizing radiation...
Neutron radiation = neutrons (you got that mixed up with beta), basically how current fission nuclear reactors chain and how C14 carbon dating works.
Proton radiation = mostly cosmic rays, but also used for cancer treatment
The problem with cosmic rays which are mostly proton radiation (but also include all the above mentioned forms of radiation and all sorts of other charged ions of various heavier nucleic isotopes and vanilla uncharged neutron radiation) is that they are HIGHLY energetic (e.g, from 10^7 up to 10^20 eV) compared the usual sources of radiation. This makes them exceptionally hard to stop or deflect. Even cosmic alpha particles won't be stopped by a thin sheet of paper.
It seems unlikely that an electro-static shield configuration would stop this stuff (from an strictly energy point of view). But maybe a "startrek" like dynamically modulated shield would have a better chance to deflect the radiation around a small volume of space where people might be located in a ship. Still, it seems unlikley that would work either (even though it would probably take less energy to diffract the radiation than to cancel/stop the stream of radio active particles, it still seems like a lot to ask).
For example, I don't think they have even solved this problem for the moon or mars where we would get protected from about 1/2 of the radiation by being on the ground (since cosmic rays from the other side have to go through the celetial object to get to us) and there isn't that much of a weight problem. In outerspace, it's coming from all sides and would be twice as bad and we have to carry it with us.
Okay, so I read the article (so sue me)... Here's an interesting tidbit...
All of eastern Japan, including Tokyo and the disaster-struck region to the north, is standardized on 50Hz supply while the rest of the country uses 60Hz.
I wonder what the USS RR could output given the USA is on 60Hz... The history you cited was that the USA Lexington powered Tacoma, WA (a USA city that used 60Hz)...
Given the limited number of frequency converting stations in Japan, I find it hard to believe that...
1. an Aircraft carrier would carry a frequency converting unit with enough capacity OR
2. Aircraft carrier systems could use either 50Hz or 60Hz so the whole ship could run at 50Hz and supply power to the 50Hz grid in that part of japan
So I'm wondering if this is just a "would-be-nice-but" option instead of something they could actually do...
Somehow this reminds me of the STTNG "sour the milk episode"...
So I'm wondering, if the containment system can handle a meltdown just fine, why are they going to such great lengths to try to cool it despite having undergone at least a partial meltdown
IANA nuclear engineer, but this is my understanding of the current situation.
First, there is no saving the reactor now that there is a partial meltdown. The reactor cores will have to be decommisioned because of many reasons (potential damage to the reactor containment, radiation all over the place due to the damage to the fuel rods, etc, etc). In fact, I think that at least one of the reactor cores that are currently problematic was scheduled to be decommissioned anyhow (apparently after a while exposing things to a bunch of radiation causes them to wear-out, no surprise there, and you want to decommission it before it reaches the end of it's predicted lifetime).
AFAIK, there are three main things they are trying to avoid: 1. cleaning up will be much easier if the whole core doesn't melt down. 2. nobody knows exactly how much damage the reactor containment received and the probability of how much stuff will eventually leak as a result of that damage. 3. collateral damage to the spent fuel holding area due to excessive heating from the reactor.
Out of an abundance of caution, I'm sure they are considering that the one variable they have possibly have control over is to reduce the potential additional damage that the core can do to the reactor containment by cooling it down as much as possible.
But the main issue that everyone is worried about is #3. The spent fuel is hanging around next to the reactor in a pool of water (if you believe the USA-NRC, an empty pool of water). All that spent fuel is NOT in any type of reactor containment system, but is still hot and could cause a radiological disaster if the fuel rods are damaged allowing the fuel pellets inside to be exposed to the environment. Because the reactors themselves aren't being sufficiently cooled right now, they are apparently heating the pools of water where the spent fuel is being stored (some estimates are that the water is nearly at the boiling point ere the normal temperature is around 70deg). And if you listen to the media, it probably is starting fires in the building that houses the holding ponds. If the water in the holding ponds boils away, there will be a large increase in radiation (because normally the water absorbs some of the neutrons) possibly causing damage to the spent fuel rods. That would be bad.
Of course this always brings up the issue of why are we storing the spent fuel rods in holding ponds near the reactor? Don't know if I can answer that one other than apparently the easiest thing to do from a security/safety point of view (don't have to move them very far after you take them out of the reactor because you want to keep them constantly under water while you move them) and currently, there's no other good place to put them.
Well to be fair the plant was designed and installed by GE.
Technically, although Fukushima Daiichi 1 and 2 were GE reactors, FD-3: the one that is running MOX (mixed plutonium oxide fuel), was a reactor supplied by Toshiba (a japanese company if I'm not mistaken). If you had to rank something bad happening, well, I'm pretty sure most experts would agree that having plutonium excape into the enviornment would be pretty bad in the scale of things...
Parent poster forgot about html ampersand escapes in thep copied it wrong...
see missing semicolons at the end of a line? they should have & *y ; and & *i ;
FYI, White is the most popular color for car in Japan
Yes, but silver is a close second in japan and the world-wide favorite...
http://www2.dupont.com/Automotive/en_US/news_events/article20101207.html
If you look at the picture more closely, there are probably a similar number of silver colored cars floating there too...
Although IANAL, I believe the following is all true...
There is no obligation for an establishment to serve the entire public. The only requirement is to not descriminate based on race, color, religion, natural origin or other protected categories of the public (e.g, various handicaps).
For example, if you have a diner or restaurant and you say "pants-required", and someone doesn't have pants, you can refuse service. As a more nuanced restriction, you can say no children (no law protecting against age descrimination in public), or refuse service to potential patrons that are too rowdy, too smelly, or just about anyone that detracts from the safety or welfare of other patrons.
As another example, a bank can refuse to do business with someone as long as the reason isn't protected by public policy. For example, they can refuse to open a checking account if you don't have a street address, or aren't a resident of the state, or if your credit score is too low, etc... They can also choose to close your account at any time for any reason (e.g., low-usage, high-usage, inactivity). Ironically, they can even refuse to take cash deposits (currency is legal tender for debts, not for deposits) and often do when the amounts are high and the source is suspicious (e.g, 100 bills on pallets wrapped with cellaphane, or with purple dye splashed all over it). Also, when they freeze your account, they can just send the money to the state as unclaimed assets.
People with lawyers may disagree with the possibilities listed, so there is always potential forlegal recourse, I doubt it would be successful based on my understanding of what constitutes a public accommodation and what is protected by law.
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques."Photographic memory" is the stuff of magicians, hucksters and B movie thrillers.
Photographic, maybe not, how 'bout hyperthymesia? Just look up hyperthymesia in the wiki.
Perhaps It's not a stretch to think that some OCD person could convert this into something approximating eidetic memory and just maybe that same OCD personality isn't going to memory championships because they are too busy collecting stuff (and hopefully not to the extent of a hoarder)...
Wait, what? VP8 is a video codec. AAC is an audio codec. You can't abandon one in favor of the other.
s/AAC/AVC/
Take your meds please, most folks knew what that meant...
AVC = H.264 = MPEG4 part10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
Sounds like intel fessed up yesterday and stated it was a problem with a bias circuit in the PLL clocking tree. A bias circuit apparently caused a transistor to remain in a high leakage state (which over time will induce a failure mode). What makes it silly is apparently intel is saying this circuit wasn't in initial designs, added, but not needed in the design and will be disabled in the future... Back to the future!
My educated guess is that the SATA Input/Output Pads have a digital timing compensation circuit that tries to center the data sampling window (e.g., the clock edge where data is sampled). Since the appropriate data sampling window that won't cause a setup/hold violation changes with process variation and temperature it needs to have lots of potential settings in a large window and may need automatic tracking.
Probably someone didn't design that window large enough to center the data sampling timing offset (or the step size isn't small enough or the auto adjustment circuit that tracks temperature and adjusts the window appropriatly has an algorithmic flaw in some cases, etc). It might be okay now (in early production tests), but as the part ages, the required data sampling window can shift significantly, and if the chip can't adjust the data sampling window appropriatly, then data errors are inevitable.
As a silly example, let's say a hw engineer put in a clock trim circuit that could adjust +-100ps in steps of 10ps. No driver update can make that adjustment -110ps.
Conversely, if the hw control algorithm that tracks temperature and adjusts the window has a postive temperature coefficient over time (say gets slower), but the actual I/O circuit has a negative coefficient over time (say gets faster), after a while, that feedback algorithm may become unstable, that might not be fixable with a driver update either (if the control algorithm is in hw).
Of course, I have no real infomation, but it's my guess having designed high speed I/Os in the past...
If you look at WebM's VP8 codec (the only one that matters), you'll see it's quite similar to MPEG4-pt2 (the original MPEG4 instead of pt10 which is H.264). If you look at the MPEG-LA (the patent-pool/licensing authority for the "patented" codecs), you might notice a few patents that seem to cover some aspects for the VP8 algorithm. Well, it's never been tested in court to see if VP8 actually reads on any those patents (or even ones that aren't part of the patent-pool), so it a bit premature to assert that WebM's VP8 is somehow non-patented and allowing for greater innovation than H.264.
As usual, the headlines aren't really the whole story. This whole thing may just be FUD, but making this about free-vs-paid is really just a disservice. Both are currently free, both have a patent cloud. The only thing that is true is that some corporations like MPEG-LA's business model, and some other folks want to go it with Google on their side (even though both sides said that they aren't indemnifying anyone for patent infringement). Both MPEG-LA and Google are out to make money. They just want to do it a different way.
Sadly Google's move doesn't really help consumers much at all. H.264 isn't going away overnight so for the forseeable future, consumer devices will probably all have to support H.264 and thus the potential "free-ness" of the WebM/VP8 doesn't reduce anyone's cost basis, but it adds to it (now they will just have to support H.264 and WebM/VP8 on their devices). It probably saves Google some money (maybe they don't have to support both), but this is just like Apple not supporting Flash to try to save a few bucks and strong arm the marketplace, replace Apple with Google and Flash with H.264. How is this additional cost fostering growth and innovation? There may be other principles involved, but growth, innovation, and paid are all red herrings in this fight...
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3758862.html
(except it's patented)...
Perhaps we should see how fast the "Watson" computer can search when given an energy budget of 2500 Kcal/day (~10MJ/day ~120W). Or conversely, we should penalize the reaction time accordingly (probably would have to wait days for the computer to answer). Or maybe allow an additional team member for every 120W...
Now that would be a real challenge, I'd be willing to see. Given the human energy conversion efficiency is only about 20% and a typical computer power supply is about 70%, that still giving the computer a significant advantage...
Not sure that you can equate certain marine organism host requirements to enslave certain species of Zooanthalla forcing them to photosynthesis food (sugars) for the host with having a native ability of an organism to harvest solar energy directly, but nice try...
The only reason why ATK is "cheap" is because nobody else would bother with fitting the specifications as required for the SRB contract. See also "Cost-plus contract" for further details.
Even if some other enterprising company might attempt it, they would get squashed in the contract and appropriations phase. Let's face it the SRB was/is an earmark for Sen. Oren Hatch. The reason nobody else would bother is because they know that even to succeed would be to fail politically...
AFAIK, the nozzle is actually pretty thin and designed to "glow" (some sort of niobium metal alloy) and as a result a little bit wobbly. Apparently, they have a stiffening ring "glued" to it, but that they burn it away after the second stage ignites.
That being said, the visual blowing up effect may however be a camera infrared light color bleeding artifact rather than any mechanical bellowing...