If you got a bunch of engineers and said "figure out how to solve our energy problem", they could throw together a nuclear power system that could power the world into the next millennium - and it would be cheap, it would be clean, and it would be safe.
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
Though accurate cost data is difficult to obtain, it is safe to say that there was no predictable relationship between the size of a nuclear power plant and its cost.
Maybe not precisely predictable, but certainly predictable in a broad and useful sense. The USN discovered this back in the 50's and 60's.
It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions.
This is true of bloggers too... Especially bloggers seeking to work backwards towards a conclusion rather than forwards from the data.
Apparently, the ideas that I pointed to fourteen years ago have also occurred to a number of nuclear plant designers and business decision makers who noticed that the estimates for the traditional sized nuclear plants kept expanding at much greater than the rate of inflation as they became more detailed and closer to reality.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on your back there bud - because the principle you 'pointed out' fourteen years ago is a principle well known in engineering circles at least half a century before that. (And encapsulated in the very old bromide - "no project gets completed on time or under budget".)
All three of the teams - NuScale, B&W and Westinghouse - have designed systems that put the entire primary plant into a single pressure vessel.
Welcome to the 1950's - when the US Navy first put the entire primary plant into a pressure vessels.
Problem with that is that the reloading capacity of these Aegis equipped ships isn't fast enough to protect against a volley of Dong Feng 21Ds.
You're a couple of decades behind the times - Aegis ships don't need to reload in combat.
Since capabilities of this missile are not fully known to US Navy, their strategy to combat it currently is SM-3 interceptor rockets launched from Aegis destroyers and cruisers that escort Aircraft Carriers.
SM-3's and also almost certainly electronic warfare and chaff to decoy or defeat whatever they're using for terminal guidance. So, not only behind the time - but less than completely informed on the defensive capabilities available to US warships.
On top of which, under such an attack, the ships will go to flank and start maneuvering - which might or might not help (depending on the capability of the terminal maneuvering system) but surely won't hurt.
Not to mention you've made the classic mistake of the armchair admiral - assigning all the advantages to one side and failing to realize the other will evolve and respond as well.
Seventy percent of the defense industry is a private set of corporations whose economic incentive is to discover (or invent) threats, and then sell the government the contract to fight this imaginary enemy.
Of course the problem with this theory is that people flying planes, firing missiles, and driving boats towards warships aren't invented threats - they're all things that have actually happened and (especially in the case of the first two) something the various armed forces of the world are actively prepared to do again.
Solid-state lasers require heavy amounts of electricity, which needs to come from somewhere.
Yeah, something like a generator down in the engineering spaces.
Seriously, you meant that to sound like a serious limitation - but to anyone who actually knows anything about warships it just makes you sound stupid.
Warships already have a large amount of electrical generation capacity, in excess of need in fact to account for battle damage. Squeezing in a dozen or two megawatts more is going to be mildly problematic, but nowhere even remotely close to being a showstopper. (Especially if they use ultracaps or flywheels or suchlike to level the load - they might not have to squeeze in all that much extra or any extra at all.) Sometime in the next generation or two, electrical generating capacity will take something like an order-of-magnitude or more jump because warships are fixing to shift to electrical propulsion (for a wide variety of reasons) which will move the minor drain represented by a laser based close in defense system moves to damn near being in the noise.
Need I remind anyone of James Kim? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim There have been several other people that have been lost in that part of Oregon before and since due to map errors.
I don't recall seeing a cloth map in a very long time.
That's because, at least in the US, Tyvek and other such materials superseded cloth decades ago. Quickly googling up "weatherproof ordnance survey maps" shows the same to be true in the UK, and there appears to be a number of suppliers and checking the Ordinance Survey site shows them to be available directly.
Re:United States Government Accountability Office?
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I do agree that Newspapers have never been fully trustworthy, however the research links posted above do quantify just how low the so called credible press sources have fallen in just the last decade vs ~a century of history
Or in short, even though you claim to agree - you don't actually agree.
Yes, it's considerably different - DSN is much more sensitive (because of the lower incoming signal strength), with considerably higher pointing accuracy and much more signal processing capability (to pick up said faint signals from the background noise). DSN also has far more transmitting power in order to ensure sufficient signal strength at the receiving end.
Iridium and TDRS aren't dumb pipes, no. But they're not anywhere near the class or capability of the the DSN antennas either.
I think a better solution is to implement store and forward, and start having craft in orbit that can queue data from deep space craft.
The problem is that the equipment required to receive and process the faint signals involved isn't trivial, neither is the antenna required. It would pretty much be beyond the current state-of-the-art.
You can than downlink it at your leisure without worrying either about contention issues on the 70-meters or a gust of wind causing a bit of data to go missing.
No, instead you'll worry about contention issues on the satellite, or a solar storm causing a bit of data to go missing, or the entire bird going dead and being beyond the reach of repair.
Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis.
I'm really starting to think you're just a troll. This is patently untrue. Asimov wrote more non-fiction science than he did fiction and many of them are considered seminal works in their fields. Arthur C. Clarke had a physics degree and made a serious proposal for a worldwide satellite communications network in the '40s. I don't have time to sit on Wikipedia all night and do this, but you're just stupid and wrong.
Well, when you get time to actually get familiar with the field of SF, you'll find I'm not wrong. (Hint: Naming the background of two of the most famous out of thousands of authors across decades doesn't make you look smart - it makes you look like an idiot. Extrapolating from just those two makes you look like an idiot whose undergone a lobotomy.)
If it weren't for the fact that that's not 'many' means, you'd have point.
Re:"No terrorist attacks since 9/11"?
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What you blockquoted at the start of the thread is roughly as relevant as the price of rice in China, as I wasn't replying to the blockquote - but your inccorect assertion that attack on US soil fall into two categories: "There have been numerous terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11, two successful (e.g., Fort Hood, Little Rock) and the rest foiled only by the attackers' own incompetence (e.g., Shoebomber, Pantybomber, Times Square)".
I can't load the linked article - but I can't help but wonder if Google spent $100 million because Google could throw that kind of money around without second thought rather than because it truly costs that much.
Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about.
Umm... no. Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.
Underground space cities aren't usually ideas authors just pulled out of their asses because they though it'd be cool.
Maybe, maybe not, but plenty of other things in SF are. (Personal jetpacks, FTL, 'atomic rockets', etc... etc...)
It tends to bug me when stories like this get written from a viewpoint (often subconscious) of 'hey, those crazy science fiction writers thought about this fifty years ago, but now someone with letters behind their name wrote about it in a Serious Publication, that makes the thought Real!'
Serioualy, most SF writes just Make Shit Up when they aren't cribbing from someone else's notes. Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis. Which is why it's interesting when someone who actually *does* have the credentials examines the idea and actually finds it plausible.
Re:"No terrorist attacks since 9/11"?
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You're missing the point - you (accidentally or deliberately) left out an entire category of incidents, and thus incorrectly evaluate the ROI.
Re:"No terrorist attacks since 9/11"?
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You forgot the once foiled by investigation - like the ones caught with explosives and plans to use them in Seattle when people were gathered to watch the fireworks at the Needle.
Re:854,000 people currently holding a TS clearance
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Clearances expire if they aren't being actively used. (although I imagine it'd be easier to reactivate an old clearance than it would be to get a new one)
Partly wrong on the first, correct on the second.
Clearances expire if you exceed the periodicity requirements for renewal (though I forget the length of the period). This can happen even if you're currently cleared at that level - my submarine got dinged hard because one guy's paperwork slipped through the cracks at the end of a yard period resulting in his clearance expiring without the command realizing it.
Once you have a TS clearance, you always have a TS clearance so long as you keep up the paperwork, even if you don't currently have TS access. Your current access is determined by your current command. For example, when I was attached to a submarine I had a TS clearance *and* TS access as it was required for my duties, and that access expired when I detached from the command. At my next command, a shore facility, I still has a TS clearance - but only S access because S was the highest material used in my job at that command. Had I gone back to sea, regaining a TS would have been a matter of a little paperwork on the boat and nothing more.
Re:854,000 people currently holding a TS clearance
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It also likely includes anyone who was ever stationed at a SAC base.
Only if the USAF exceeds normal standards, as a TS clearance is only required if you have access to TS equipment. (And I don't believe they do, as TS costs money.) My submarine was crammed to the gills with TS material and equipment, yet less than a quarter of the crew held TS clearances.
it may sinply be the people still living who were investigated, cleared, and trained (you have to get training to get a TS clearance).
No, you don't have to have training to get a TS clearance. (Again, this sounds USAF unique.)
Thing is that the US offers a "bounty" on contaminated SEAWATER, not on reclaimed oil. So this technology has been of little intrest in the country where it was born.
Given that 99.999% of the oil spilled annually is best recovered by that method, it's pretty much unsurprising that's the method that has been concentrated on.
I guess writing really clear laws that have no doubt as to their intent and then letting human beings sort out the nuances rather than trying to describe everything in the law perfectly would probably help.
The idealistic notion you describe in the first part is exactly how laws started out. We ended up with the situation you describe in the second part because idealistic notions rarely, if ever, work in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to the average civilian plant? No, they aren't. They come in somewhere in the low-middle end of the range.
Nor are the particularly suitable for civilian usage as they are designed very differently.
ADM Rickover thinks differently:
From TFA:
Maybe not precisely predictable, but certainly predictable in a broad and useful sense. The USN discovered this back in the 50's and 60's.
This is true of bloggers too... Especially bloggers seeking to work backwards towards a conclusion rather than forwards from the data.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on your back there bud - because the principle you 'pointed out' fourteen years ago is a principle well known in engineering circles at least half a century before that. (And encapsulated in the very old bromide - "no project gets completed on time or under budget".)
Welcome to the 1950's - when the US Navy first put the entire primary plant into a pressure vessels.
You really do live in a universe disconnected from reality don't you?
Because it fails to encapsulate the true nature of the differences - which is color, not reflectiveness.
You're a couple of decades behind the times - Aegis ships don't need to reload in combat.
SM-3's and also almost certainly electronic warfare and chaff to decoy or defeat whatever they're using for terminal guidance. So, not only behind the time - but less than completely informed on the defensive capabilities available to US warships.
On top of which, under such an attack, the ships will go to flank and start maneuvering - which might or might not help (depending on the capability of the terminal maneuvering system) but surely won't hurt.
Not to mention you've made the classic mistake of the armchair admiral - assigning all the advantages to one side and failing to realize the other will evolve and respond as well.
Of course the problem with this theory is that people flying planes, firing missiles, and driving boats towards warships aren't invented threats - they're all things that have actually happened and (especially in the case of the first two) something the various armed forces of the world are actively prepared to do again.
Yeah, something like a generator down in the engineering spaces.
Seriously, you meant that to sound like a serious limitation - but to anyone who actually knows anything about warships it just makes you sound stupid.
Warships already have a large amount of electrical generation capacity, in excess of need in fact to account for battle damage. Squeezing in a dozen or two megawatts more is going to be mildly problematic, but nowhere even remotely close to being a showstopper. (Especially if they use ultracaps or flywheels or suchlike to level the load - they might not have to squeeze in all that much extra or any extra at all.) Sometime in the next generation or two, electrical generating capacity will take something like an order-of-magnitude or more jump because warships are fixing to shift to electrical propulsion (for a wide variety of reasons) which will move the minor drain represented by a laser based close in defense system moves to damn near being in the noise.
Efficiently, but incorrectly.
James Kim wasn't lost because of a map error.
That's because, at least in the US, Tyvek and other such materials superseded cloth decades ago. Quickly googling up "weatherproof ordnance survey maps" shows the same to be true in the UK, and there appears to be a number of suppliers and checking the Ordinance Survey site shows them to be available directly.
Or in short, even though you claim to agree - you don't actually agree.
Yes, it's considerably different - DSN is much more sensitive (because of the lower incoming signal strength), with considerably higher pointing accuracy and much more signal processing capability (to pick up said faint signals from the background noise). DSN also has far more transmitting power in order to ensure sufficient signal strength at the receiving end.
Iridium and TDRS aren't dumb pipes, no. But they're not anywhere near the class or capability of the the DSN antennas either.
The problem is that the equipment required to receive and process the faint signals involved isn't trivial, neither is the antenna required. It would pretty much be beyond the current state-of-the-art.
No, instead you'll worry about contention issues on the satellite, or a solar storm causing a bit of data to go missing, or the entire bird going dead and being beyond the reach of repair.
Well, when you get time to actually get familiar with the field of SF, you'll find I'm not wrong. (Hint: Naming the background of two of the most famous out of thousands of authors across decades doesn't make you look smart - it makes you look like an idiot. Extrapolating from just those two makes you look like an idiot whose undergone a lobotomy.)
If it weren't for the fact that that's not 'many' means, you'd have point.
What you blockquoted at the start of the thread is roughly as relevant as the price of rice in China, as I wasn't replying to the blockquote - but your inccorect assertion that attack on US soil fall into two categories: "There have been numerous terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11, two successful (e.g., Fort Hood, Little Rock) and the rest foiled only by the attackers' own incompetence (e.g., Shoebomber, Pantybomber, Times Square)".
I can't load the linked article - but I can't help but wonder if Google spent $100 million because Google could throw that kind of money around without second thought rather than because it truly costs that much.
Umm... no. Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.
Maybe, maybe not, but plenty of other things in SF are. (Personal jetpacks, FTL, 'atomic rockets', etc... etc...)
Serioualy, most SF writes just Make Shit Up when they aren't cribbing from someone else's notes. Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis. Which is why it's interesting when someone who actually *does* have the credentials examines the idea and actually finds it plausible.
You're missing the point - you (accidentally or deliberately) left out an entire category of incidents, and thus incorrectly evaluate the ROI.
You forgot the once foiled by investigation - like the ones caught with explosives and plans to use them in Seattle when people were gathered to watch the fireworks at the Needle.
Partly wrong on the first, correct on the second.
Clearances expire if you exceed the periodicity requirements for renewal (though I forget the length of the period). This can happen even if you're currently cleared at that level - my submarine got dinged hard because one guy's paperwork slipped through the cracks at the end of a yard period resulting in his clearance expiring without the command realizing it.
Once you have a TS clearance, you always have a TS clearance so long as you keep up the paperwork, even if you don't currently have TS access. Your current access is determined by your current command. For example, when I was attached to a submarine I had a TS clearance *and* TS access as it was required for my duties, and that access expired when I detached from the command. At my next command, a shore facility, I still has a TS clearance - but only S access because S was the highest material used in my job at that command. Had I gone back to sea, regaining a TS would have been a matter of a little paperwork on the boat and nothing more.
Only if the USAF exceeds normal standards, as a TS clearance is only required if you have access to TS equipment. (And I don't believe they do, as TS costs money.) My submarine was crammed to the gills with TS material and equipment, yet less than a quarter of the crew held TS clearances.
No, you don't have to have training to get a TS clearance. (Again, this sounds USAF unique.)
Given that 99.999% of the oil spilled annually is best recovered by that method, it's pretty much unsurprising that's the method that has been concentrated on.
The idealistic notion you describe in the first part is exactly how laws started out. We ended up with the situation you describe in the second part because idealistic notions rarely, if ever, work in the real world.