The idea that renewables cannot supply power 24/7 and that the grid could not handle a fully renewables is trivially easy to find. I assume you simply couldn't be bothered to google it because many examples come up in the first page of hits:
Which starts with "Americans have been repeatedly told a series of lies about accommodating renewables onto the power grid: That it can't handle large amounts of intermittent power generation. That standby fossil-fueled capacity must be maintained at 100 percent of demand for those times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That brownouts and blackouts will inevitably result from depending on renewables. That nuclear is the only power source that can meet our needs in the future. And so on."
This has, of course, been widely debunked by, literally, hundreds of studies.
> Germany is sunnier than the USA.
This was a widely spread meme from a while back, the argument being made that it is not possible for the US to replicate Germany's policies because Germany is sunnier, which is, of course, very much opposite of the truth:
> I believe (but I may be wrong) that the common commercial panels these days use three-layer cells.
You are wrong. The VAST majority of cells are single-layer silicon. There are a few exceptions, but they are used solely in niche applications - Unisolar's three-layer aSi was flexible (was, they are now bankrupt), while Boeing and Emcore make three-layer GaAs cells for aerospace use. Practically everything else is a single layer, whether it be Si or CdTe.
> So using a fission reactor to respond to day or week long variations in demand is horribly inefficient and expensive
That depends on the plant design. The US midwest does just this because they're using the Westinghouse reactors that throttle daily. France does it because they have all of their plants on a national grid and can do some really fancy load following that wouldn't be possible elsewhere.
> It still isn't, but for the huge subsidies on both production and demand side
Ugh. Another claim utterly devoid of numbers presented as if it's true. This is in spite of the numbers being in the linked article and trivially easy to compute. DO THE FUGGING MATH. Here are the production-adjusted CAPEXs:
That means wind is about double the expensive of a CC plant to build, yet has zero fuel costs. In comparison, nuclear costs twice as much as wind, and also has fuel costs on top of that (and the highest O&M of all of these).
If you want to consider all-in numbers from CAPEX to power price, that's a little more complex. However, NREL has done all the work for you:
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
If you go to the page it is pre-set for the natural gas case, but it has an outdated price for the fuel from 2013. Reducing fuel cost to the current EIA average of 2.5 $//MMbtu produces an LCOE of 5.2 cents/kWh. If you then change the inputs for wind, CF 34%, CAPEX 1500, zero variable, zero heating rate, zero fuel cost) the equivalent cost is 4.1 cents/kWh. For PV it's the same 1500 CAPEX, but the period is 25 years, CF is 25, and O&M is 12. That gives you 4.5 cents/kWh. My 12 panels have a CF of only 15, which gives 7.4 cents.
So basically these technologies are perfectly capable of competing on their own, which is precisely why they are, by far, the fastest growing power sources in the world. Only in the US is that not *overwhelmingly* the case, and that's because of the subsidized price of natgas. Natgas received about 1/2 the subsidies of solar or wind during the last 5 years, and that's only because of the accelerating rate of production tax breaks on the later two:
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
But that's the US centric view. For a real idea of what's going on you'd want to look at the world as a whole, add everything up, and then come up with the averages. Which is precisely what Lazard has been doing once a year for the last nine. Here is everything you need to know, up to date as of last October:
Rocket launch delayed. Covered in major news sources around the world.
Airliner fails to fly, a few whiny posts on Twitter.
Car fails to start. News doesn't make it out of your driveway.
All of these are exactly the same event, but only one of them results in a news shitstorm, and only one of those results in management pressure on the guys on the line. If your car failing to start resulted in the same shitstorm of news, trust me, there would be constant car crashes because of it.
Imagine the problem space for a moment: take a random distribution of 1 to N people where nominal person 1 is the target. So basically make the set of physical arrangements of 1 person in a space (which is singular), all the arrangements of 2 people in a space (given a selected positional accuracy), 3 people, etc. Now shoot bullets toward the target in each of those arrangements, with a certain accuracy, to get some statistics on the spreads.
Ok, in many of those does a self-destructing bullet help? Well, it doesn't help in any case where there's anyone in front of the range of the target. We also have to assume there is a deliberate delay to deal with measurement and timing accuracy, so it also doesn't help anyone located within X of the range of the target. So basically, it only helps in the case when the shooter misses the target, is beyond a certain range behind the target, and in-line with the target. In all other cases the bullet still kills the person.
And of course, this isn't a problem that needs to be solved. People don't get killed because they're standing behind the target, they get killed because *the shooter thinks they are the target*. This is like working on a system to stop people driving into the ocean - this happens, but there's other problems that need to be solved first.
> That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself
Beyond that, the system itself was entirely accessible. Books like Mapping the Atari and C64 let you have complete, direct, access to the hardware with a single POKE. I remember reading through the former when something caught my eye... one POKE later all the glyphs were upside down. I have no idea why someone put this into the hardware, but there it was.
The closest we've come since then is HyperCard. As a single integrated environment you could poke about, although not in memory. It was, however, *accessible* in the same way that the 8-bit machines were. I have tried any number of similar solutions since then, and simply put nothing is really the same. Even Apple couldn't do it, and they tried over and over. VB6 was close, and a hell of a lot more powerful, but again just didn't have the accessibility.
Today I'm finding hints of improvements. I just did my first 3D app in SceneKit in Swift. It was a couple hundred lines in total. I was astonished. But I can't fool myself into thinking that Xcode + Swift + source code editing + SceneKit + IB + compile/link/run cycle is even remotely accessible. I wish I could say Swift playgrounds were, but they're not.
"following the Milgram experiment"... The results indicate that humans are able to hurt each other when given orders."
That's not what the Milgram experiment says either. From what I've seen on the original tapes, the exact opposite is true: when people were *ordered* to do something they told the experimenters to screw off and left. It was only when they were told *they would fail* the experiment that they continued.
> Nobody actually ever thought that gravity waves wouldn't exist
Which is precisely why this is such a non-important result. You don't learn much about the universe by demonstrating something everyone already knew is true. It would be much, MUCH more interesting if it didn't work. That's why the MMX is cool, and this isn't.
> But it's amazing that we can actually detect it.
From a technology point of view, yes. From a theoretical perspective, not so much.
> TL:DR stop spreading irrational fear about nuclear fission power plants
Why bother even saying that? Do you think this person will be convinced? Do you think people like this are the reason that fission plants aren't being built in any number, and the "fission renaissance" is as dead as The King? It isn't.
Fission, fusion, coal, anything using a Rankine cycle for energy extraction, is no longer economically competitive. They haven't been since around 2008, when wind turbines hit ~$2.50 a watt. Now they're $1.50 a watt. Darlington B was whispered at a *minimum* of $8.25 a watt. Vogtle is around $7.25. Crystal River was $11. That's it, that's all, that's the entire reason fission is dead.
Fusion is done like dinner, but keeps itself alive though massive funding efforts and a dearth of other big science to spend on. There's no way it will ever be economical, and everyone knows that. There's plenty of papers written by the industry itself saying just that, and they go back to the 1970s.
1) it was with hydrogen, not D or D-T, which makes it easier to do 2) JET is limited by its flywheel storage to 30 seconds, but routinely hits 100 million degrees for 30 seconds 3) ITER is designed to hit 200 million with actual fuel, and do that for something like 10 minutes
This is a classic example of the sort of overblown press releases the sciences put out these days. It is precisely as interesting as those "new solar power record!" papers we constantly see here, which when you read the fine print are records compared only to other craptastic tech that mainstream systems have been beating for decades.
In order to enjoy protection, derivative works have to show significant derivation. It is not clear that a translation is such a thing, although I'm sure there's case law on this somewhere.
Apple has, what, $200 billion in the bank? Their quarterly income is what, $50 billion? I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.
Here's the absolute "worst" case scenario for the company: they pay the fine from change they find on the cafeteria floor, and then send out a press release with a mild complaint about it but saying they're happy as long as the money is put to good use. Ireland cuts them a side deal for the inconvenience, and Apple agrees to remain in Cork for the foreseeable future.
"Based on its est reserves & a (conservative) valuation of $10 p barrel":rolleyes:
They're comparing one company's total future raw material value to another's present stock value? And you think that's interesting?
The measure in question is the total *possible future value* of the company. Eventually they will run out of oil and be worth nothing. They are estimating total sales between now and then.
In comparison, Apple has nothing to run out of and can continue selling updates to their existing products forever. So by the same measure and definition, Apple's value is infinite.
"This kind of refurbishing is why the Space Shuttle ended up being way more expensive than expected"
It was fully expected to be that expensive, the upper management simply ignored it.
At one point when they were still considering fully reusable designs, the Phase II' candidates, management put the cost of the system at something like $100 per pound to orbit. However, they had already estimated the staffing at the Cape to be on the order of 25,000 people, which meant the payroll alone was about $500 a pound. Most estimates put the absolute lowest cost at $1000/pound. After Challenger it was over $2500, making it the most expensive launch system in US history.
So why was management saying $100 until the end? Because the entire justification for the Shuttle was that it would be lower cost than any other system. And because of that, everyone would move their cargos to it. And since everyone moved their cargos to it, it would be launching all the time. And because it was launching all the time, the embedded payroll per launch was lower. Even then it didn't look like it could match Scout, so they came up with the Getaway Specials to try to take those, and then cancelled Scout.
Now it was clear to everyone, including the very detailed CBO report, that if they didn't get every single payload out there, then there was no way to get the launch rates they needed to make the payroll costs go down. And as the CBO report noted, if any of those assumptions failed, it would end up being more expensive than systems like Titan. And they went on to point out that many of the payloads NASA assumed would move to the Shuttle never even existed in the first place (modular telcomsats for instance, which they just made up).
So management lied, fully aware there was no way they could meet the numbers. And it was this precise attitude that caused the Challenger Disaster, where bad news numbers were simply ignored and replaced with ones that met political or economic criterion.
> The proper thing to to with the waste is use it to power a breeder reactor and get more of the energy out of the stuff. > However, that was outlawed for no good reason so power plants are forced to define high energy > radioactive material as 'waste' instead of 'fuel.'
*sigh*
The extremely good reason is that breeders are fueled by highly enriched uranium which is fantastically expensive, and their primary output is plutonium, which is fantastically dangerous. And if you don't recall, the US "lost" several bombs worth of plutonium during the 1960s and 70s (and continues to do so at a fantastic rate), and the idea that there would be 100 times more of the stuff to be skimmed from gave people the willies, and rightfully so.
But that's far from the main reason. The main reason is that the only thing breeders have successfully done is go bankrupt. The economics of breeders is *terrible*. You can only mix so much of the new fuel in with stuff you mine, it's not like the stuff that comes out of the breeder is fuel in of itself. So in order to use up what you get, you need a fleet of something like 50 reactors per breeder. So that means the US needs two of them, which means they will *never* pay for their R&D - nuclear fuel simply isn't that expensive in the first place.
Now the French were worried they'd run out of fuel, so they pressed ahead with breeders in the 1970s. The French pressed on anyway, and it was a disaster. After dumping billions into the breeder hole, they simply threw up their hands and walked away. Given the rapid fall in fuel costs during the 1980s, the idea of having to burn up all that expensive HEU to make a *little* more fuel that was orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying on the open market put a nail in the coffin of the concept.
All of this was very well known and reported on at the time, maybe you should read one of the many find accounts in Scientific American that spelled out the problems in detail.
Gah, I wish/. had "edit". I forgot to mention that the #1 output from the reprocessing is plutonium. You can mix that into your fuel mix in some reactors, and this is common in France and the UK for instance, but it is a proliferation issue. This is why the US and fSovs offered to reprocess fuel for other countries, even after the US decided not to reprocess its own.
> So how much of the "waste" is just spent fuel that can be reprocessed vs irradiated materials and other construction trash and whatnot
It depends on the type of reactor. The MAGNOX and CANDUs have better neutron economy, so you can burn all sorts of mixes that won't burn in a typical US or French reactor. That said, France is the #1 reprocessed, and the UK and Canada are both involved too (along with Russia and Japan).
In the best-case scenarios, you can get the equivalent of 30% recovery - that is, you can get enough fuel from the waste to cover 30% of what you burned to get that waste. It's not insignificant, but it certainly doesn't eliminate the waste problem, in spite of what you might have heard. The real advantage is that it tends to isolate the nastier bits, which means that part can be stored more easily while you can put the larger-in-volume-but-less-nasty stuff somewhere less intensive.
As always the only real problem is cost. Reprocessed fuel costs much more than just digging up new stuff from the ground. As reactors can't really compete on the market right now even with the current fuel glut forcing prices down, they can't even think about used reprocessed fuel. Again, that depends on the cycle, at least some of the fuel being used here in Canada is reprocessed.
The good news is that the good parts don't burn off quickly, so if there is a need for reprocessed fuel, you can always go and get it from storage. Of course, it will be a very cold day in hell before the economics are in your favor, given the CAPEX on wind and solar for fiscal '16.
"Secondly, the CPU itself contained 10 parallel functional units (parallel processors, or PPs), so it could operate on ten different instructions simultaneously. This was unique for the time."
Oh god, this isn't even remotely correct.
For one, a similar design was used by Cray's earlier machine, the CC 6600, which also had 10 PPAs. And by the 7600, and the 8600. For another, there were dozens of machines with similar designs that predate this, including PEPE and the ILLIAC IV, both of which had hundreds of units.
"But just why is the US not ahead on this type of zeppelin? Is it political or do we lack the ability?" "But just why is the US not ahead on this type of horse buggy? Is it political or do we lack the ability?" "But just why is the US not ahead on this type of PRT? Is it political or do we lack the ability?"
Slashdot Mirror
> First it was this is physically impossible.
The idea that renewables cannot supply power 24/7 and that the grid could not handle a fully renewables is trivially easy to find. I assume you simply couldn't be bothered to google it because many examples come up in the first page of hits:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323699704578328581251122150
http://www.businessinsider.com/green-energy-isnt-compatible-with-us-power-grid-2013-12
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/02/nation/la-na-grid-renewables-20131203
And my favourite:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/designing-the-grid-for-renewables/
Which starts with "Americans have been repeatedly told a series of lies about accommodating renewables onto the power grid: That it can't handle large amounts of intermittent power generation. That standby fossil-fueled capacity must be maintained at 100 percent of demand for those times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That brownouts and blackouts will inevitably result from depending on renewables. That nuclear is the only power source that can meet our needs in the future. And so on."
This has, of course, been widely debunked by, literally, hundreds of studies.
> Germany is sunnier than the USA.
This was a widely spread meme from a while back, the argument being made that it is not possible for the US to replicate Germany's policies because Germany is sunnier, which is, of course, very much opposite of the truth:
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/08/fox-news-can-you-get-any-more-insane-germany-is-sunnier-than-the-us-video/
If you're not even aware of *this* story, you're clearly not interested in the power industry, which leads me to ask why are you here?
> I believe (but I may be wrong) that the common commercial panels these days use three-layer cells.
You are wrong. The VAST majority of cells are single-layer silicon. There are a few exceptions, but they are used solely in niche applications - Unisolar's three-layer aSi was flexible (was, they are now bankrupt), while Boeing and Emcore make three-layer GaAs cells for aerospace use. Practically everything else is a single layer, whether it be Si or CdTe.
> So using a fission reactor to respond to day or week long variations in demand is horribly inefficient and expensive
That depends on the plant design. The US midwest does just this because they're using the Westinghouse reactors that throttle daily. France does it because they have all of their plants on a national grid and can do some really fancy load following that wouldn't be possible elsewhere.
> It still isn't, but for the huge subsidies on both production and demand side
Ugh. Another claim utterly devoid of numbers presented as if it's true. This is in spite of the numbers being in the linked article and trivially easy to compute. DO THE FUGGING MATH. Here are the production-adjusted CAPEXs:
Natgas: $1.00 / .45 CF = $2.22 effective .35 CF = $4.30 effective .20 CF = $7.50 effective .95 = $8.40 effective
Wind: $1.50 /
Solar: $1.50 /
Nuclear: $8.00 /
That means wind is about double the expensive of a CC plant to build, yet has zero fuel costs. In comparison, nuclear costs twice as much as wind, and also has fuel costs on top of that (and the highest O&M of all of these).
If you want to consider all-in numbers from CAPEX to power price, that's a little more complex. However, NREL has done all the work for you:
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
If you go to the page it is pre-set for the natural gas case, but it has an outdated price for the fuel from 2013. Reducing fuel cost to the current EIA average of 2.5 $//MMbtu produces an LCOE of 5.2 cents/kWh. If you then change the inputs for wind, CF 34%, CAPEX 1500, zero variable, zero heating rate, zero fuel cost) the equivalent cost is 4.1 cents/kWh. For PV it's the same 1500 CAPEX, but the period is 25 years, CF is 25, and O&M is 12. That gives you 4.5 cents/kWh. My 12 panels have a CF of only 15, which gives 7.4 cents.
So basically these technologies are perfectly capable of competing on their own, which is precisely why they are, by far, the fastest growing power sources in the world. Only in the US is that not *overwhelmingly* the case, and that's because of the subsidized price of natgas. Natgas received about 1/2 the subsidies of solar or wind during the last 5 years, and that's only because of the accelerating rate of production tax breaks on the later two:
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
But that's the US centric view. For a real idea of what's going on you'd want to look at the world as a whole, add everything up, and then come up with the averages. Which is precisely what Lazard has been doing once a year for the last nine. Here is everything you need to know, up to date as of last October:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
This is excellent, I can finally F9 my Excel workbooks on my Xbox!
Seems obvious to me.
Rocket launch delayed. Covered in major news sources around the world.
Airliner fails to fly, a few whiny posts on Twitter.
Car fails to start. News doesn't make it out of your driveway.
All of these are exactly the same event, but only one of them results in a news shitstorm, and only one of those results in management pressure on the guys on the line. If your car failing to start resulted in the same shitstorm of news, trust me, there would be constant car crashes because of it.
Imagine the problem space for a moment: take a random distribution of 1 to N people where nominal person 1 is the target. So basically make the set of physical arrangements of 1 person in a space (which is singular), all the arrangements of 2 people in a space (given a selected positional accuracy), 3 people, etc. Now shoot bullets toward the target in each of those arrangements, with a certain accuracy, to get some statistics on the spreads.
Ok, in many of those does a self-destructing bullet help? Well, it doesn't help in any case where there's anyone in front of the range of the target. We also have to assume there is a deliberate delay to deal with measurement and timing accuracy, so it also doesn't help anyone located within X of the range of the target. So basically, it only helps in the case when the shooter misses the target, is beyond a certain range behind the target, and in-line with the target. In all other cases the bullet still kills the person.
And of course, this isn't a problem that needs to be solved. People don't get killed because they're standing behind the target, they get killed because *the shooter thinks they are the target*. This is like working on a system to stop people driving into the ocean - this happens, but there's other problems that need to be solved first.
> That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself
Beyond that, the system itself was entirely accessible. Books like Mapping the Atari and C64 let you have complete, direct, access to the hardware with a single POKE. I remember reading through the former when something caught my eye... one POKE later all the glyphs were upside down. I have no idea why someone put this into the hardware, but there it was.
The closest we've come since then is HyperCard. As a single integrated environment you could poke about, although not in memory. It was, however, *accessible* in the same way that the 8-bit machines were. I have tried any number of similar solutions since then, and simply put nothing is really the same. Even Apple couldn't do it, and they tried over and over. VB6 was close, and a hell of a lot more powerful, but again just didn't have the accessibility.
Today I'm finding hints of improvements. I just did my first 3D app in SceneKit in Swift. It was a couple hundred lines in total. I was astonished. But I can't fool myself into thinking that Xcode + Swift + source code editing + SceneKit + IB + compile/link/run cycle is even remotely accessible. I wish I could say Swift playgrounds were, but they're not.
So raise your glass to SK8 and Bill Atkinson!
Excellent review. And then there's this part...
"following the Milgram experiment" ... The results indicate that humans are able to hurt each other when given orders."
That's not what the Milgram experiment says either. From what I've seen on the original tapes, the exact opposite is true: when people were *ordered* to do something they told the experimenters to screw off and left. It was only when they were told *they would fail* the experiment that they continued.
> We had a lot of evidence already but more is good
Oh come on. We have a lot of evidence that the sky is blue, how much money should be spend on gathering more evidence of that?
> Second, if we get more data we might be able to rule out or narrow down our search space for any eventual quantum gravity theory
That would be true if the measurement *disagreed* with the predictions, but it *agrees* with them. That is, this result helps make QG *harder*.
> Third, this gives us insight into stellar objects
Oh god, it absolutely does not. You need to look at the magnitudes and the error bars.
> Fourth, this gives us for the first time a way of getting data from very far away sources that isn't in the electromagnetic spectrum.
First time eh?
> Right now, we can detect neutrino bursts if they come from a few million light years
Oh, you mean "first time, except", like "fresh from the freezer".
Neutrino observation has the same range limits (the light cone) as gravity, but is far more useful and always will be. It's those magnitudes again.
> Nobody actually ever thought that gravity waves wouldn't exist
Which is precisely why this is such a non-important result. You don't learn much about the universe by demonstrating something everyone already knew is true. It would be much, MUCH more interesting if it didn't work. That's why the MMX is cool, and this isn't.
> But it's amazing that we can actually detect it.
From a technology point of view, yes. From a theoretical perspective, not so much.
> TL:DR stop spreading irrational fear about nuclear fission power plants
Why bother even saying that? Do you think this person will be convinced? Do you think people like this are the reason that fission plants aren't being built in any number, and the "fission renaissance" is as dead as The King? It isn't.
Fission, fusion, coal, anything using a Rankine cycle for energy extraction, is no longer economically competitive. They haven't been since around 2008, when wind turbines hit ~$2.50 a watt. Now they're $1.50 a watt. Darlington B was whispered at a *minimum* of $8.25 a watt. Vogtle is around $7.25. Crystal River was $11. That's it, that's all, that's the entire reason fission is dead.
Fusion is done like dinner, but keeps itself alive though massive funding efforts and a dearth of other big science to spend on. There's no way it will ever be economical, and everyone knows that. There's plenty of papers written by the industry itself saying just that, and they go back to the 1970s.
> So they could also just pressurize hydrogen to a trillion bars and then leave it at room temperature to ignite?
Yes, it's called NIF. It doesn't work either.
1) it was with hydrogen, not D or D-T, which makes it easier to do
2) JET is limited by its flywheel storage to 30 seconds, but routinely hits 100 million degrees for 30 seconds
3) ITER is designed to hit 200 million with actual fuel, and do that for something like 10 minutes
This is a classic example of the sort of overblown press releases the sciences put out these days. It is precisely as interesting as those "new solar power record!" papers we constantly see here, which when you read the fine print are records compared only to other craptastic tech that mainstream systems have been beating for decades.
It's a box full of monkeys with the words "peekaboo perfect space explore!" written on the side.
> Someone else has copyright on the adaptation
In order to enjoy protection, derivative works have to show significant derivation. It is not clear that a translation is such a thing, although I'm sure there's case law on this somewhere.
Apple has, what, $200 billion in the bank? Their quarterly income is what, $50 billion? I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.
Here's the absolute "worst" case scenario for the company: they pay the fine from change they find on the cafeteria floor, and then send out a press release with a mild complaint about it but saying they're happy as long as the money is put to good use. Ireland cuts them a side deal for the inconvenience, and Apple agrees to remain in Cork for the foreseeable future.
So basically zero change whatsoever.
"Based on its est reserves & a (conservative) valuation of $10 p barrel" :rolleyes:
They're comparing one company's total future raw material value to another's present stock value? And you think that's interesting?
The measure in question is the total *possible future value* of the company. Eventually they will run out of oil and be worth nothing. They are estimating total sales between now and then.
In comparison, Apple has nothing to run out of and can continue selling updates to their existing products forever. So by the same measure and definition, Apple's value is infinite.
Infinite >> 2.5 trillion
"This kind of refurbishing is why the Space Shuttle ended up being way more expensive than expected"
It was fully expected to be that expensive, the upper management simply ignored it.
At one point when they were still considering fully reusable designs, the Phase II' candidates, management put the cost of the system at something like $100 per pound to orbit. However, they had already estimated the staffing at the Cape to be on the order of 25,000 people, which meant the payroll alone was about $500 a pound. Most estimates put the absolute lowest cost at $1000/pound. After Challenger it was over $2500, making it the most expensive launch system in US history.
So why was management saying $100 until the end? Because the entire justification for the Shuttle was that it would be lower cost than any other system. And because of that, everyone would move their cargos to it. And since everyone moved their cargos to it, it would be launching all the time. And because it was launching all the time, the embedded payroll per launch was lower. Even then it didn't look like it could match Scout, so they came up with the Getaway Specials to try to take those, and then cancelled Scout.
Now it was clear to everyone, including the very detailed CBO report, that if they didn't get every single payload out there, then there was no way to get the launch rates they needed to make the payroll costs go down. And as the CBO report noted, if any of those assumptions failed, it would end up being more expensive than systems like Titan. And they went on to point out that many of the payloads NASA assumed would move to the Shuttle never even existed in the first place (modular telcomsats for instance, which they just made up).
So management lied, fully aware there was no way they could meet the numbers. And it was this precise attitude that caused the Challenger Disaster, where bad news numbers were simply ignored and replaced with ones that met political or economic criterion.
> The proper thing to to with the waste is use it to power a breeder reactor and get more of the energy out of the stuff.
> However, that was outlawed for no good reason so power plants are forced to define high energy
> radioactive material as 'waste' instead of 'fuel.'
*sigh*
The extremely good reason is that breeders are fueled by highly enriched uranium which is fantastically expensive, and their primary output is plutonium, which is fantastically dangerous. And if you don't recall, the US "lost" several bombs worth of plutonium during the 1960s and 70s (and continues to do so at a fantastic rate), and the idea that there would be 100 times more of the stuff to be skimmed from gave people the willies, and rightfully so.
But that's far from the main reason. The main reason is that the only thing breeders have successfully done is go bankrupt. The economics of breeders is *terrible*. You can only mix so much of the new fuel in with stuff you mine, it's not like the stuff that comes out of the breeder is fuel in of itself. So in order to use up what you get, you need a fleet of something like 50 reactors per breeder. So that means the US needs two of them, which means they will *never* pay for their R&D - nuclear fuel simply isn't that expensive in the first place.
Now the French were worried they'd run out of fuel, so they pressed ahead with breeders in the 1970s. The French pressed on anyway, and it was a disaster. After dumping billions into the breeder hole, they simply threw up their hands and walked away. Given the rapid fall in fuel costs during the 1980s, the idea of having to burn up all that expensive HEU to make a *little* more fuel that was orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying on the open market put a nail in the coffin of the concept.
All of this was very well known and reported on at the time, maybe you should read one of the many find accounts in Scientific American that spelled out the problems in detail.
Gah, I wish /. had "edit". I forgot to mention that the #1 output from the reprocessing is plutonium. You can mix that into your fuel mix in some reactors, and this is common in France and the UK for instance, but it is a proliferation issue. This is why the US and fSovs offered to reprocess fuel for other countries, even after the US decided not to reprocess its own.
> So how much of the "waste" is just spent fuel that can be reprocessed vs irradiated materials and other construction trash and whatnot
It depends on the type of reactor. The MAGNOX and CANDUs have better neutron economy, so you can burn all sorts of mixes that won't burn in a typical US or French reactor. That said, France is the #1 reprocessed, and the UK and Canada are both involved too (along with Russia and Japan).
In the best-case scenarios, you can get the equivalent of 30% recovery - that is, you can get enough fuel from the waste to cover 30% of what you burned to get that waste. It's not insignificant, but it certainly doesn't eliminate the waste problem, in spite of what you might have heard. The real advantage is that it tends to isolate the nastier bits, which means that part can be stored more easily while you can put the larger-in-volume-but-less-nasty stuff somewhere less intensive.
As always the only real problem is cost. Reprocessed fuel costs much more than just digging up new stuff from the ground. As reactors can't really compete on the market right now even with the current fuel glut forcing prices down, they can't even think about used reprocessed fuel. Again, that depends on the cycle, at least some of the fuel being used here in Canada is reprocessed.
The good news is that the good parts don't burn off quickly, so if there is a need for reprocessed fuel, you can always go and get it from storage. Of course, it will be a very cold day in hell before the economics are in your favor, given the CAPEX on wind and solar for fiscal '16.
And now I see the error is in the quote above, because the original article doesn't screw it up.
"Secondly, the CPU itself contained 10 parallel functional units (parallel processors, or PPs), so it could operate on ten different instructions simultaneously. This was unique for the time."
Oh god, this isn't even remotely correct.
For one, a similar design was used by Cray's earlier machine, the CC 6600, which also had 10 PPAs. And by the 7600, and the 8600. For another, there were dozens of machines with similar designs that predate this, including PEPE and the ILLIAC IV, both of which had hundreds of units.
So bogus.
> Is it political or do we lack the ability?
"But just why is the US not ahead on this type of zeppelin? Is it political or do we lack the ability?"
"But just why is the US not ahead on this type of horse buggy? Is it political or do we lack the ability?"
"But just why is the US not ahead on this type of PRT? Is it political or do we lack the ability?"
The actual reason is: it doesn't work.