C14 has a half-life of only a few thousand years. Coal is much, much older than that, and thus has virtually no C14 at all.
Coal does contain other radioactive isotopes, though, from various minerals that percolated through the organics over the eons. A few writers on this subject have observed that a coal plant, in normal operation, emits more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear power plant is permitted to.
Proven reserves of uranium assuming the current insanely wasteful once-through no-reprocessing fuel cycle are about 40 years worth.
Simple reprocessing expands that to a few hundred years. Proven reserves.
Breeder reactors expand that to over a thousand years proven reserves.
That's not counting thorium. My CRC handbook says thorium is about as common as lead, and "there's probably more energy available from thorium in the Earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
And if that's not enough, in the 70s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion-exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of about $200/pound (1970 dollars). Which is as close to infinity as a resource as anything gets.
The one thing I can think of that his crystal balls got wrong was Multivac, yet with its "terminals in every home and business" it was the closest of any pre-internet science fiction story I ever read to predicting the internet.
Check out Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" from 1946. I think that was a lot closer. Computers, not terminals (he called them "Logics") in every home, all networked together.
He was really off with the concept that the Internet would be a public utility that restricted what sorts of questions you were permitted to ask - but the UK and Australia are going that way, China's already there. And who knows what the next administration will do?
I believe I recall that there weren't central servers; it was all peer-to-peer, but it's been a while.
At least two other people thought the same thing. My first reaction was that both the artwork and the tone reminded me very much of a Chick Tract, and someone in the comments on the web site said the same thing.
How about we don't let our civilization collapse? A collapse that's most likely to be caused by us running out of energy because we wouldn't build nuclear power plants.
Heck, I have some friends from Germany, and they've told me about devices you can buy there which are designed to "shut off power if they detect electricity from nuclear plants". Yes, I don't even think that's possible.
Sure, it's possible. Here's a device you can get at any hardware store that'll do the job.
This should get both "funny" and "insightful" upgrades.
I do think the intent of Usenet and Slashdot are somewhat different -- Usenet discussions can continue for a long time; Slashdot discussions generally are limited to a couple of days.
Feature or bug? Feature, I think. After all, Slashdot is primarily a news site.
If Yucca Mountain is in your back yard, you've got a whole lot worse problems than carefully encapsulated, isolated, reprocessed waste.
That's the Nevada Test Site, where what was "tested" was nuclear weapons. Lots of 'em, as that lunar landscape will attest. All the fission products and unburned uranium and plutonium just sitting in those holes completely uncontained.
No, there are plenty of viable solutions. The omni-obstructionists obstruct them all.
France is taking care of their wastes very nicely, thank you very much. So are other countries which don't let the tiny minority of omni-obstructionists have their way.
The storage in Oregon -- Are you talking about Hanford? That was WWII-Cold War era weapons production wastes. Yes, they were handled improperly. Given the perceived situation at the time (Do we get The Bomb first, or do the Nazis get The Bomb first?) I'm not sure it was obviously the wrong decision, even if they did have today's sensibilities about the environmental hazard.
The relevance of what used to be done in weapons production to anything that anyone is proposing for modern power plants is precisely zero.
What one president decrees, another can un-decree.
It's very disappointing that no president has yet undone the Carter decree on reprocessing.
But as for the availability of uranium, there's as close to an infinite supply as you want if the price goes high enough. Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of $200/pound in 1970something dollars. So that price (What, about $1000/pound in today's dollars?) is as expensive as uranium can get, for as much of it as anyone wants.
Uranium enriched for power plant fuel rods is typically only a few percent. It has to be an order of magnitude more enriched to make a bomb. Anyone who can do that can just as easily start with natural uranium.
Plutonium from reprocessing fuel rods? Power plant plutonium is not all Pu239; it contains a lot of Pu240 and Pu242. This stuff fissions spontaneously, giving you a constant high neutron background. It's somewhere between very, very difficult and flat-out impossible to implode this stuff fast enough to get more than a fizzle out of it. The difference between Pu239 and Pu240 is only one AMU, which makes it a lot harder to separate than uranium. Anyone who can do that, you're back to "they could more easily start with natural uranium."
I've read "Ubik".
It's hard to fully express how much I hated this book. He pretty much wrapped the whole thing up with "It was all a dream." Actually, everything from the explosion to the end was the dying hallucinations of the point-of-view character. Nothing ever mattered, nothing was ever real, ha ha ha, you who were trying to make sense of it, I sure fooled you.
Some people are very fond of this sort of thing. I, emphatically, am not.
Wow. I sure hope they can collect enough of this stuff to investigate its chemical properties.
The decay chain ought to be really interesting. One little decay, and it'll be out of the island of stability and start popping like a chain of firecrackers until it gets down into the more familiar long-lived actinides. That ought to be a pretty good fingerprint of the stuff, if that's what it really is.
This is a good point -- Do real power-sellers really need EBay? How many people come to EBay because they did a Google search for an item, and the EBay listing just happened to be among the results? How much does it cost to get special treatment from Google, and how does this compare with EBay's fee structure?
I subscribed to some services from The Phone Company that ended my problems with telemarketing calls, even the ones that get through the Do Not Call list.
Caller ID. That one's been mentioned by others.
Privacy Manager. This one says if the caller doesn't have any Caller ID information, whether because they're blocking or because their exchange doesn't have that feature, your phone does not ring. They get a recorded message saying release the Caller ID information for this call, or say who they are. If they select the second option, they get about two seconds to say who they are, your phone rings "Caller: Privacy Manager", you hear what they recorded, and decide whether to answer or send them a recorded "No one is available to take your call" message. Telemarketers never go through this. Ever. The predictive dialers don't even send these calls to an agent; their computer talks to TPC's computer, and hangs up.
More and more political/charity/polling telemarketers now send Caller ID information. So I get to see who they are -- and hear it; I have a "Talking Caller ID" box, so I don't have to get up out of my chair. I just don't answer those.
The telemarketroiding thing that torques me off today is those political phone spammers who are wardialing 800 numbers. Yes, they're calling all your favorite infomercials with a pitch for one of the presidential candidates. I work at a company that handles a lot of these incoming 800 numbers, and I've blocked dozens of callers for calling hundreds of times with campaign pitches.
I will say, though, that based on the quality of these calls, I doubt it's the candidates' organizations doing this. They sound way, way too amateurish.
"Supplied Saddam with weaponry to wage war with Iran"
Uh... What weaponry, exactly?
Iraqi weapons systems:
Aircraft -- MiGs. Soviet Union.
Tanks -- TU72. Soviet Union.
Ballistic missiles -- SCUD. Soviet Union.
Anti-ship missiles -- Exocet. France.
Infantry weapon -- AK47. Soviet Untion.
Again... Just what, exactly, Iraqi arms were supplied by the U.S.?
The only aid I recall the U.S. giving Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war was some satellite imagery, and some of that was disinformation.
I was hoping against hope that in Episode 2 or 3, we'd find out that the midichlorians were bad guys with a Dark Side agenda opposing the Jedi directly through their Sith pawns, while at the same time corrupting the Jedi from the inside. That it would turn out that the whole "bringing balance to the force" thing was that Anakin would be key in the defeating the midichlorians, and finding a way to access The Force without them. Alas, at the last minute, though he succeeds in mostly defeating the midiclorians, he gets corrupted by them himself, becoming Darth Vader.
But no.
There were just so many horrible things in the prequel trilogy that it's hard to keep track of them all. Most of all, Anakin walking into the Jedi school and slicing up all the little kids makes him, to my feeling, an irredeemable character, making me retroactively hate the ending of RotJ, which I used to love.
That's assuming the U.S.'s insanely wasteful once-through no-reprocessing fuel cycle. Just reprocessing expands that time immensely. Breeder reactors bump it up a couple of orders of magnitude. Thorium breeders by a few orders of magnitude over that. ("There is probably more energy available in the Earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together" -- CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.)
Beyond that, back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process that could extract uranium from seawater at a cost of about $200/pound (1970 dollars). That can be considered a very-long-term ceiling on the price of uranium.
Slashdot Mirror
C14 has a half-life of only a few thousand years. Coal is much, much older than that, and thus has virtually no C14 at all.
Coal does contain other radioactive isotopes, though, from various minerals that percolated through the organics over the eons. A few writers on this subject have observed that a coal plant, in normal operation, emits more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear power plant is permitted to.
Proven reserves of uranium assuming the current insanely wasteful once-through no-reprocessing fuel cycle are about 40 years worth.
Simple reprocessing expands that to a few hundred years. Proven reserves.
Breeder reactors expand that to over a thousand years proven reserves.
That's not counting thorium. My CRC handbook says thorium is about as common as lead, and "there's probably more energy available from thorium in the Earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
And if that's not enough, in the 70s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion-exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of about $200/pound (1970 dollars). Which is as close to infinity as a resource as anything gets.
The one thing I can think of that his crystal balls got wrong was Multivac, yet with its "terminals in every home and business" it was the closest of any pre-internet science fiction story I ever read to predicting the internet.
Check out Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" from 1946. I think that was a lot closer. Computers, not terminals (he called them "Logics") in every home, all networked together.
He was really off with the concept that the Internet would be a public utility that restricted what sorts of questions you were permitted to ask - but the UK and Australia are going that way, China's already there. And who knows what the next administration will do?
I believe I recall that there weren't central servers; it was all peer-to-peer, but it's been a while.
At least two other people thought the same thing. My first reaction was that both the artwork and the tone reminded me very much of a Chick Tract, and someone in the comments on the web site said the same thing.
David Duchovny's theory (which he expounded on on "The Tonight Show" recently) makes more sense than any of the other UFOlogist theories I've heard --
They put their undesirables -- sexual deviants and dentists -- onto a spaceship to wander aimlessly in the galaxy.
They ended up here.
The truth is out there ... Really out there.
So, what do the alien undesirables do when they get their paws on any of the local wildlife?
Drill their teeth and probe their .. er, orifices.
The truth is out there ... Really out there.
How about this modest proposal?
How about we don't let our civilization collapse? A collapse that's most likely to be caused by us running out of energy because we wouldn't build nuclear power plants.
Heck, I have some friends from Germany, and they've told me about devices you can buy there which are designed to "shut off power if they detect electricity from nuclear plants". Yes, I don't even think that's possible.
Sure, it's possible. Here's a device you can get at any hardware store that'll do the job.
This should get both "funny" and "insightful" upgrades.
I do think the intent of Usenet and Slashdot are somewhat different -- Usenet discussions can continue for a long time; Slashdot discussions generally are limited to a couple of days.
Feature or bug? Feature, I think. After all, Slashdot is primarily a news site.
Argh... "One my high school" Chemistry teacher "did". Curse the typos that are invisible until the "Submit" button is pressed.
Being very very sure that the tube was covered with plenty of water, light the bubbles with a burning splint.
Bang! It sounded almost like a .22 rifle.
As you can well imagine, this attracted law enforcement notice.
That's the Nevada Test Site, where what was "tested" was nuclear weapons. Lots of 'em, as that lunar landscape will attest. All the fission products and unburned uranium and plutonium just sitting in those holes completely uncontained.
France is taking care of their wastes very nicely, thank you very much. So are other countries which don't let the tiny minority of omni-obstructionists have their way.
The storage in Oregon -- Are you talking about Hanford? That was WWII-Cold War era weapons production wastes. Yes, they were handled improperly. Given the perceived situation at the time (Do we get The Bomb first, or do the Nazis get The Bomb first?) I'm not sure it was obviously the wrong decision, even if they did have today's sensibilities about the environmental hazard.
The relevance of what used to be done in weapons production to anything that anyone is proposing for modern power plants is precisely zero.
It's very disappointing that no president has yet undone the Carter decree on reprocessing.
But as for the availability of uranium, there's as close to an infinite supply as you want if the price goes high enough. Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of $200/pound in 1970something dollars. So that price (What, about $1000/pound in today's dollars?) is as expensive as uranium can get, for as much of it as anyone wants.
How?
What fuel?
Uranium enriched for power plant fuel rods is typically only a few percent. It has to be an order of magnitude more enriched to make a bomb. Anyone who can do that can just as easily start with natural uranium.
Plutonium from reprocessing fuel rods? Power plant plutonium is not all Pu239; it contains a lot of Pu240 and Pu242. This stuff fissions spontaneously, giving you a constant high neutron background. It's somewhere between very, very difficult and flat-out impossible to implode this stuff fast enough to get more than a fizzle out of it. The difference between Pu239 and Pu240 is only one AMU, which makes it a lot harder to separate than uranium. Anyone who can do that, you're back to "they could more easily start with natural uranium."
Some people are very fond of this sort of thing. I, emphatically, am not.
I expect to stay far, far away from the movie.
The decay chain ought to be really interesting. One little decay, and it'll be out of the island of stability and start popping like a chain of firecrackers until it gets down into the more familiar long-lived actinides. That ought to be a pretty good fingerprint of the stuff, if that's what it really is.
This is a good point -- Do real power-sellers really need EBay? How many people come to EBay because they did a Google search for an item, and the EBay listing just happened to be among the results? How much does it cost to get special treatment from Google, and how does this compare with EBay's fee structure?
Complete with the sale of indulgences. (See "Carbon Credits.")
The telemarketroiding thing that torques me off today is those political phone spammers who are wardialing 800 numbers. Yes, they're calling all your favorite infomercials with a pitch for one of the presidential candidates. I work at a company that handles a lot of these incoming 800 numbers, and I've blocked dozens of callers for calling hundreds of times with campaign pitches.
I will say, though, that based on the quality of these calls, I doubt it's the candidates' organizations doing this. They sound way, way too amateurish.
Correction: Those are Cthulhu worshipers
Ha! No correction needed.Those are not noodles.
Those are tentacles.
Fishy tentacles.
Do not be deceived. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Cthulhu.
You can go about your business.
Move along.
"Supplied Saddam with weaponry to wage war with Iran" Uh... What weaponry, exactly? Iraqi weapons systems: Aircraft -- MiGs. Soviet Union. Tanks -- TU72. Soviet Union. Ballistic missiles -- SCUD. Soviet Union. Anti-ship missiles -- Exocet. France. Infantry weapon -- AK47. Soviet Untion. Again... Just what, exactly, Iraqi arms were supplied by the U.S.? The only aid I recall the U.S. giving Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war was some satellite imagery, and some of that was disinformation.
But no.
There were just so many horrible things in the prequel trilogy that it's hard to keep track of them all. Most of all, Anakin walking into the Jedi school and slicing up all the little kids makes him, to my feeling, an irredeemable character, making me retroactively hate the ending of RotJ, which I used to love.
Beyond that, back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process that could extract uranium from seawater at a cost of about $200/pound (1970 dollars). That can be considered a very-long-term ceiling on the price of uranium.