As fusion inherently creates less High-Z byproducts; yes, a fusion reactor would generate less radioactive waste from the fuel cycle. But, activation products would be similar to a fission reactor.
What the article completely ignores is that the Wendelstein project is a proof of concept prototype and not intended to be an operational power generation plant. The concept to be proven is that a laboratory grade design of a fusion reactor that creates a few percent more power than it takes to operate can be scaled up to an industrial size facility that could actually generate usable levels of power. Think like EBR-1 or Vermont Yankee back int eh 50s as proof of concept for industrial size fission plants. The facility is the better part of a decade into construction and has several more years to go before the first low power testing can be accomplished.
If the concept proofs well; there will still be several more engineering iterations before you can expect a turn key design that will function efficiently. Heck, it took 30 years of shaking things out before we go the BWR-6 BWR design or the AP-1000 PWR design turn key nuclear power plants.
Someone toss a clue bat. Desalinization is extremely inefficient. Natural evaporation condensing on a mountain range works a hell of a lot better... i.e. Oahu if you want a microclime small enough to tour in a day.
What time frame are they talking.
If you go back to the 1850s when, according to Sam Clemens, a squirrel could go from Angel's Camp to the San Francisco Bay without ever having to touch the ground; it is much more than 75% of the trees in California that are dead.
If you are talking Southern California; when you overbuild in a desert removing the majority of the natural ground cover why are you surprised there are droughts?
And for sheer functionality you can replace the average macbook with a ten year old EEE as both share the fact you can't run anything the manufacturer didn't pre install without having to hack the system.
Meh, social media is not a news outlet. And Facebook is going the way of Twitter and labeling challenges to articles after fact checking as "hate speech".
With mainstream journalism demonstrably unable to accurately report any story that is not Hollywood or Sports and get things right for more than one paragraph; how to you tell a fake story from clueless reporting with only a passing nod to facts?
"Free Radio Sites" are not free. Streaming has given ISPs a case for further jacking the price of internet access with metered connections and throttling when you use too much of an "unlimited" plan.
Hmmm, Starship Troopers.... it sounds like many have only seen the movie and not bothered to read the book.
A good kickass description of mobile infantry tactics using personal powered armor and how to handle an airborne HALO drop with heavy powered armor done from orbit.
Interesting concept of psychological ordinance that sparked several papers done in the War College. "I'm a thirty second bomb! I'm a thirty second bomb! 29, 28..."
Alternative political organization of a society. To qualify as a full citizen with the right to vote and hold public office one must do a term of Federal Service which may or may not be military. (the movie just mentioned military) If you aren't willing to give a chunk of your life to society; why should you have a say in how society is run?
A lot of RAH's work has a rare blend of a fun story with exploration of several other topics woven into the fun part.
I can't see Connery as Jubal Harshaw. I always saw Jubal as more of a Wilford Brimley type of characterization. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000979/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
A fine line to get the "curmudgeon with a heart" type of vibe.
Young adult fiction? Yep, RAH wrote a ton of it. Stories like "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" were serialized in Boy's Life magazine in the 60s. That was the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America back in the 60s when I was working on merit badges. The stories about the Stone Family are certainly young adult fiction as is Starship Troopers. Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger, Fear no Evil are written for adults. If you go back to the 60s and 70s; the prime market for scifi was the 13-24 age block. Today, it covers all generations.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was more of a yarn to appease the publisher with more stories in the milieu the editor liked. It makes more sense if you had read a lot of other novels in the same milieu.
I can hear it now, like the line from WOSAT, "We are going to use REAL Hollywood and none of that scifi shit".
That kind of thinking is what crippled the DC Universe in movies when they took the two perennial boy scout characters with over 50 years of back story and made them sociopath ass-hats. Yep, talking about Batman and Superman. Not even going into turning the "Clown Prince of Crime" into a Juggalo.
Robert Heinlein was one of the first authors to ever discus alternative lifestyles without them having to ship in a plain brown wrapper. If you read his larger body of work he addresses polyamory, line marriage, group marriage, and some other variants of how to arrange a household. The bottom line I got out of the variants was that as long as the arrangement creates a safe place for progeny to grow and thrive; it would be a positive system.
Heinlein even managed to do a take on transgender life without actually calling it that with "I Will Fear No Evil". Robert Heinlein managed to discuss topics in the 50s and 60s that were never ever not at all discussed in general society until at least the 1980s.
Ahem..... google "beat generation" to get information on the counter culture before "hippy" was a word. Jack Kerouac was the patron saint of the beat generation and a huge influence on 60s counterculture. The counterculture was well in place before 1961 but it didn't get prime time airplay until it became part of the resistance to the Vietnam War.
If you actually look at a lot of science fiction; you find a story that includes a problem and a potential solution. I'm talking about what is today "hard" science fiction as opposed to fantasy and simple space opera (sorry fans, Star Wars and Star Trek are space opera - the stories could be wild west or foreign country stories just as well).
Being an old fart, 50+, I've seen enough science fiction become accepted reality not to blow raspberries and wild hair dreams. If you have a cellphone in your pocket; you have a 1960s pipe dream science fiction item that would never actually become reality.
Is this any more of a hard thing to understand when there are still vocal idiots that think the writings of nutter Karl Marx have any workable solutions in reality?
By shuttering the right wing radicals while letting the left wing radical totalitarians have free reign; the bias of Twitter is shown. Since the 1st amendment really doesn't apply to a private company; it is the right of Twitter to become a closed echo chamber. Now if the FCC made a ruling that social media sites are equivalent to a broadcast network; the 1st amendment would apply and Twitter would be fined out the wazoo for stifling speech.
I still find it ironic that the Democratic Party has become such a bastion of socialist totalitarianism as the Democratic Party, back in the 1920s and 1930s, completely embraced National Socialism... Nazis for short.
Seriously, a centrifugal clutch with a bell ringer on a take off from the drive train would work well for about $50 a unit. You hear ding ding ding raising in rapidity as the vehicle moves until the speed gets high enough the clutch locks out the bell ringer. Problem solved.
Or, take off the speedometer that would beep the horn until a certain rpm. Could be a cheap bolt on to the speedo (would work with electrical speedo sensor or a mechanical speedo).
The one thing that reaching old fart status is to realize the promise of technology never pays off the way it claims to. The "Internet of Things" is already providing a downside not mentioned in the promise of hackable vehicles and hackable door locks on homes. Tech shortcuts are more efficient but one still needs a backup plan. i.e. Keeping a supply of old school receipt books in a retail establishment so you can stay open when the power, or network, goes down.
Young Hahn did not attempt to make a nuclear reactor in his garden shed. Total misconception based on ignorance of high school level physics.
What the radioactive boy scout did do was portray himself as a research institution in order to get samples of beryllium foil and Americium foil used in smoke detectors. Hahn also purchased a supply of natural uranium ore. He also had tungsten for use as a neutron reflector.
As anyone who has googled "radiation sources for calibration" or "industrial neutron sources" you will see the reaction of an alpha particle striking a beryllium target and giving off a neutron. And, when an atom absorbs a neutron it can decay and become a totally different element. (i.e. U238 absorbs a neutron and decays off to Pu239. O16 absorbs a neutron and becomes N17 which decays emitting a hefty gamma.) As a sealed source where the neutron stream can readily be turned on and off; it is wonderful source of neutrons for calibration checks on neutron detectors and for doing Nitrogen 17 activation in well logging equipment and soil moisture detectors. (Soil moisture gages are found wherever road construction is being done. Well logging is done in both water well and oil well drilling.)
Where his science fair level experimentation screwed up is with dealing with unsealed sources outside of a containment mechanism. Furthermore, beryllium has a hefty hazard class as beryllium dust in the lungs and beryllium splinters in the skin cause some seriously bad health effects. The shed where he was working ended up contaminated with sufficient levels of americium, beryllium, uranium, and some plutonium he had created by bombarding the uranium with a neutron flux. None of this would have been a bad thing if done inside a HEPA filtered fume hood with appropriate protective clothing in a controlled area. But, Hahn managed to contaminate the whole shed and had nuclides leaching into the soil beneath. Except when he had his neutron source engaged; there was never enough radiation to cause any hazard to people. The level of contaminants left were enough that when ingested could cause the ALI (Allowable Level for Intake) to be exceeded.
I always find it comical the way the media can't seem to get a story straight that a high school B student in physics would no better than repeat. The details on the Hahn "Radioactive Boy Scout" incident and following cleanup were used back when I took Navy radiological safety training. It is a good small scale table top exercise for a dirty bomb scenario as well. Not hazardous to the people around so much as a psychological blow with a large fiscal expense to clean up.
And it bears out the empirical data from the Greenpeace study of the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest. For some reason they thought the rain forest would be damaged by global warming. The study actually voiced surprise that increased CO2 levels in 2009 accounted for a 17% increase in the rate of growth in the tropical rain forest.
My personal opinion: 1> Global warming due to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is a proven. The theory was well enough known that the calculations appeared on a sophomore physics exam in 1976. The numbers were within 3% of the projected increase in mean ocean temperatures in 2000. 2> Many people make careers out of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The consequences of global warming are not going to be as fast and catastrophic as those that want your tax money for draconian non solutions want you to believe. 3> Any system in equilibrium will cycle until a new equilibrium stabilizes. The atmosphere is an equilibrium system. Yep, there will by oscillations creating much colder temperatures in limited parts of the globe. The key thing is that the oscillations in the equilibrium are going to be chaotic. Worry when kudzu is starting to infest Chicago; oh, about my great great grandchildren's day.
And some people want to sow fear and talk as if the presence of "how to" manuals on sites that sells books is some kind of new and insidious thing. The books have been for sale for decades. Such books have been in public libraries for decades.
Frankly, if you have a high school level understanding of chemistry (not just taken the course) you have all you need to make explosives.
Slashdot Mirror
As fusion inherently creates less High-Z byproducts; yes, a fusion reactor would generate less radioactive waste from the fuel cycle. But, activation products would be similar to a fission reactor.
What the article completely ignores is that the Wendelstein project is a proof of concept prototype and not intended to be an operational power generation plant. The concept to be proven is that a laboratory grade design of a fusion reactor that creates a few percent more power than it takes to operate can be scaled up to an industrial size facility that could actually generate usable levels of power. Think like EBR-1 or Vermont Yankee back int eh 50s as proof of concept for industrial size fission plants. The facility is the better part of a decade into construction and has several more years to go before the first low power testing can be accomplished.
If the concept proofs well; there will still be several more engineering iterations before you can expect a turn key design that will function efficiently. Heck, it took 30 years of shaking things out before we go the BWR-6 BWR design or the AP-1000 PWR design turn key nuclear power plants.
Someone toss a clue bat. Desalinization is extremely inefficient. Natural evaporation condensing on a mountain range works a hell of a lot better... i.e. Oahu if you want a microclime small enough to tour in a day.
What time frame are they talking.
If you go back to the 1850s when, according to Sam Clemens, a squirrel could go from Angel's Camp to the San Francisco Bay without ever having to touch the ground; it is much more than 75% of the trees in California that are dead.
If you are talking Southern California; when you overbuild in a desert removing the majority of the natural ground cover why are you surprised there are droughts?
And for sheer functionality you can replace the average macbook with a ten year old EEE as both share the fact you can't run anything the manufacturer didn't pre install without having to hack the system.
I tried Edge. It does not display HTML consistently with other browsers. HTML5 menu objects and control buttons to not behave consistently.
I've relegated Edge to a display platform for Youtube running in the corner while I use either Chrome or Firefox for meaningful work.
Why not anti trust under trump since most of the oligarchical trusts and cartels are owned by democratic party supporters.
Meh, social media is not a news outlet. And Facebook is going the way of Twitter and labeling challenges to articles after fact checking as "hate speech".
With mainstream journalism demonstrably unable to accurately report any story that is not Hollywood or Sports and get things right for more than one paragraph; how to you tell a fake story from clueless reporting with only a passing nod to facts?
"Free Radio Sites" are not free. Streaming has given ISPs a case for further jacking the price of internet access with metered connections and throttling when you use too much of an "unlimited" plan.
Hmmm, Starship Troopers .... it sounds like many have only seen the movie and not bothered to read the book.
A good kickass description of mobile infantry tactics using personal powered armor and how to handle an airborne HALO drop with heavy powered armor done from orbit.
Interesting concept of psychological ordinance that sparked several papers done in the War College. "I'm a thirty second bomb! I'm a thirty second bomb! 29, 28..."
Alternative political organization of a society. To qualify as a full citizen with the right to vote and hold public office one must do a term of Federal Service which may or may not be military. (the movie just mentioned military) If you aren't willing to give a chunk of your life to society; why should you have a say in how society is run?
A lot of RAH's work has a rare blend of a fun story with exploration of several other topics woven into the fun part.
I can't see Connery as Jubal Harshaw. I always saw Jubal as more of a Wilford Brimley type of characterization.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000979/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
A fine line to get the "curmudgeon with a heart" type of vibe.
Young adult fiction? Yep, RAH wrote a ton of it. Stories like "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" were serialized in Boy's Life magazine in the 60s. That was the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America back in the 60s when I was working on merit badges. The stories about the Stone Family are certainly young adult fiction as is Starship Troopers. Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger, Fear no Evil are written for adults. If you go back to the 60s and 70s; the prime market for scifi was the 13-24 age block. Today, it covers all generations.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was more of a yarn to appease the publisher with more stories in the milieu the editor liked. It makes more sense if you had read a lot of other novels in the same milieu.
I can hear it now, like the line from WOSAT, "We are going to use REAL Hollywood and none of that scifi shit".
That kind of thinking is what crippled the DC Universe in movies when they took the two perennial boy scout characters with over 50 years of back story and made them sociopath ass-hats. Yep, talking about Batman and Superman. Not even going into turning the "Clown Prince of Crime" into a Juggalo.
Robert Heinlein was one of the first authors to ever discus alternative lifestyles without them having to ship in a plain brown wrapper. If you read his larger body of work he addresses polyamory, line marriage, group marriage, and some other variants of how to arrange a household. The bottom line I got out of the variants was that as long as the arrangement creates a safe place for progeny to grow and thrive; it would be a positive system.
Heinlein even managed to do a take on transgender life without actually calling it that with "I Will Fear No Evil". Robert Heinlein managed to discuss topics in the 50s and 60s that were never ever not at all discussed in general society until at least the 1980s.
Ahem..... google "beat generation" to get information on the counter culture before "hippy" was a word.
Jack Kerouac was the patron saint of the beat generation and a huge influence on 60s counterculture. The counterculture was well in place before 1961 but it didn't get prime time airplay until it became part of the resistance to the Vietnam War.
If you actually look at a lot of science fiction; you find a story that includes a problem and a potential solution. I'm talking about what is today "hard" science fiction as opposed to fantasy and simple space opera (sorry fans, Star Wars and Star Trek are space opera - the stories could be wild west or foreign country stories just as well).
Being an old fart, 50+, I've seen enough science fiction become accepted reality not to blow raspberries and wild hair dreams. If you have a cellphone in your pocket; you have a 1960s pipe dream science fiction item that would never actually become reality.
Is this any more of a hard thing to understand when there are still vocal idiots that think the writings of nutter Karl Marx have any workable solutions in reality?
By shuttering the right wing radicals while letting the left wing radical totalitarians have free reign; the bias of Twitter is shown.
Since the 1st amendment really doesn't apply to a private company; it is the right of Twitter to become a closed echo chamber. Now if the FCC made a ruling that social media sites are equivalent to a broadcast network; the 1st amendment would apply and Twitter would be fined out the wazoo for stifling speech.
I still find it ironic that the Democratic Party has become such a bastion of socialist totalitarianism as the Democratic Party, back in the 1920s and 1930s, completely embraced National Socialism... Nazis for short.
For twitter and politics; if it isn't left wing radical speech, it is hate speech. Easy training for their moderators.
Seriously, a centrifugal clutch with a bell ringer on a take off from the drive train would work well for about $50 a unit. You hear ding ding ding raising in rapidity as the vehicle moves until the speed gets high enough the clutch locks out the bell ringer. Problem solved.
Or, take off the speedometer that would beep the horn until a certain rpm. Could be a cheap bolt on to the speedo (would work with electrical speedo sensor or a mechanical speedo).
The one thing that reaching old fart status is to realize the promise of technology never pays off the way it claims to. The "Internet of Things" is already providing a downside not mentioned in the promise of hackable vehicles and hackable door locks on homes. Tech shortcuts are more efficient but one still needs a backup plan. i.e. Keeping a supply of old school receipt books in a retail establishment so you can stay open when the power, or network, goes down.
Hanging chads anyone?
Young Hahn did not attempt to make a nuclear reactor in his garden shed. Total misconception based on ignorance of high school level physics.
What the radioactive boy scout did do was portray himself as a research institution in order to get samples of beryllium foil and Americium foil used in smoke detectors. Hahn also purchased a supply of natural uranium ore. He also had tungsten for use as a neutron reflector.
As anyone who has googled "radiation sources for calibration" or "industrial neutron sources" you will see the reaction of an alpha particle striking a beryllium target and giving off a neutron. And, when an atom absorbs a neutron it can decay and become a totally different element. (i.e. U238 absorbs a neutron and decays off to Pu239. O16 absorbs a neutron and becomes N17 which decays emitting a hefty gamma.) As a sealed source where the neutron stream can readily be turned on and off; it is wonderful source of neutrons for calibration checks on neutron detectors and for doing Nitrogen 17 activation in well logging equipment and soil moisture detectors. (Soil moisture gages are found wherever road construction is being done. Well logging is done in both water well and oil well drilling.)
Where his science fair level experimentation screwed up is with dealing with unsealed sources outside of a containment mechanism. Furthermore, beryllium has a hefty hazard class as beryllium dust in the lungs and beryllium splinters in the skin cause some seriously bad health effects. The shed where he was working ended up contaminated with sufficient levels of americium, beryllium, uranium, and some plutonium he had created by bombarding the uranium with a neutron flux. None of this would have been a bad thing if done inside a HEPA filtered fume hood with appropriate protective clothing in a controlled area. But, Hahn managed to contaminate the whole shed and had nuclides leaching into the soil beneath. Except when he had his neutron source engaged; there was never enough radiation to cause any hazard to people. The level of contaminants left were enough that when ingested could cause the ALI (Allowable Level for Intake) to be exceeded.
I always find it comical the way the media can't seem to get a story straight that a high school B student in physics would no better than repeat. The details on the Hahn "Radioactive Boy Scout" incident and following cleanup were used back when I took Navy radiological safety training. It is a good small scale table top exercise for a dirty bomb scenario as well. Not hazardous to the people around so much as a psychological blow with a large fiscal expense to clean up.
And it bears out the empirical data from the Greenpeace study of the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest. For some reason they thought the rain forest would be damaged by global warming. The study actually voiced surprise that increased CO2 levels in 2009 accounted for a 17% increase in the rate of growth in the tropical rain forest.
My personal opinion:
1> Global warming due to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is a proven. The theory was well enough known that the calculations appeared on a sophomore physics exam in 1976. The numbers were within 3% of the projected increase in mean ocean temperatures in 2000.
2> Many people make careers out of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The consequences of global warming are not going to be as fast and catastrophic as those that want your tax money for draconian non solutions want you to believe.
3> Any system in equilibrium will cycle until a new equilibrium stabilizes. The atmosphere is an equilibrium system. Yep, there will by oscillations creating much colder temperatures in limited parts of the globe. The key thing is that the oscillations in the equilibrium are going to be chaotic. Worry when kudzu is starting to infest Chicago; oh, about my great great grandchildren's day.
And some people want to sow fear and talk as if the presence of "how to" manuals on sites that sells books is some kind of new and insidious thing. The books have been for sale for decades. Such books have been in public libraries for decades.
Frankly, if you have a high school level understanding of chemistry (not just taken the course) you have all you need to make explosives.