10CFR173, DOT specifications for shipping radioactive material, already has container and routing specifications for shipment of high level radioactive material. It has not been used for shipments of commercial fuel but has been used for shipments of special weapons material in the past. (very much a classified activity for the DoD)
As to where to ship, the answer is recycling. It is criminal that the U.S. does not recycle spent commercial nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of useful material in a spent fuel bundle but a buildup of fission products makes it unusable. Better to remove the useful material and seriously reduce the volume of material that has to be given long term disposal.
And, guess what, the technology is proven. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Fuel-Recycling/Processing-of-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/
Testing specs for a fissile material shipping container contain: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part071/part071-0073.html
A couple of youtube links showing the type of catastrophic accident testing that spent fuel casks must pass before being design accepted for shipment of high level nuclear material. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0-hjHDizA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JhruRobRI
Just trying to add some perspective on what would be required in shipping spent commercial nuclear fuel for either reprocessing or long term storage.
No kidding. The 233S test lab where McCluskey's accident happened was torn down about a decade ago. I was part of the crew doing the remediation and rip-out of the building.
What happened with McCluskey was an improper layup of equipment prior to a holliday break. When he went to start up the process equipment after a break, the chemical reactor overpressuized blowing out the viewing window into the pressure vessel. McCluskey received a large number of lacerations from the flying glass and injuries from being knocked off the catwalk he was on.
What got him the "Atomic Man" moniker was the fact that his exposure was an impingement uptake of Plutonium-239. The chemicals carried by the burst pressure tank put the chemicals through his skin under high pressure and into the lacerations. Pu-239 is a bone seeker and replaces calcium in the bones so it is hard to get out of the body.
McCluskey lived in a section of the hospital for over a year while they used chelation therapy to remove most of the Plutonium that was in his body. At first, if he walked barefoot, you could find his footprints with a radiation detector from the material coming out with his sweat.
His lounge chair was still kept in a radioactive material storage area as late as 2003. (Last time I saw it)
I have a sneaking suspicion that this article actually should be that they finally settled on who would fund the cleanup of the area where McCluskey stayed at the hospital. The lab where he was exposed is long gone. BTW, that was the only job I've worked where we had, and actually needed, alpha dose rate meters.
And so often, you can do things with "it's only a spreadsheet" that the IT departments will foam at the mouth and scream bloody murder if you actually write some code over.
I've seen a person fired for writing a simple BAT file to automate data transference and storage.
Ask WHY commercial nuclear power reactors are having to spend your, as in rate payers, money to store used nuclear fuel on their own sites?
The Atomic Energy Act of 1972 did more than split the AEC into the DOE and NRC. The Atomic Energy Act of 1972 made the Department of Energy the sole entity that can recycle or dispose of fissile radioactive material. It also mandated the DOE to take custody of all spent commercial fuel by fiscal year 1998 for recycling and processing. The DOE has yet to take custody of any spent commercial fuel from U.S. commercial power reactors. Commercial power producers are required to pay into a fund for disposal of used fuel but the DOE just sits on the money. Actually, there is legal action to force the DOE to fund the cost of above ground temporary storage facilities at commercial nuclear power reactors as those reactors have already been forced to pay for disposal once already.
The original plan called for five year storage in a spent fuel pool to allow the hottest and most short lived fission fragments to decay off. Then, the fuel was to be shipped out for reprocessing. There is still a lot of usable fuel in a used fuel bundle but the buildup of fission products such as Xenon prevent efficient burning off of the rest of the fuel. Europe has been using reprocessed MOX fuel for decades but the DOE actually shut down and allowed to go derelict the plant built for such reprocessing in the late 1980s.
I see this as more an example of rote verbatim compliance with a procedure that said to use "kitty litter" as an over-pack when putting the hazardous material into a disposal drum.
Sintered diatomacious earth or "fuller's earth" are synonymous with the old fashioned sintered clay "kitty litter". Sintered clay is a wonderful, inert, absorbtion agent of small amounts of leakage and stabilizes hazardous material wonderfully. Go get some cheap kitty litter and keep it in your garage for soaking up small oil spills on the concrete. It works great.
But, woe betide the fool that mistakes "organic kitty litter" or "odor neutralizing kitty litter" for the classic sintered clay. The odor neutralizers and the chemically treated paper products of the "organic" variety will react with petrochemicals and can outgas and swell a container and even catch fire.
Some idiot read the procedure to get "kitty litter" and was totally clueless as to why and what they really wanted. I've run into this so often with clueless middle managers that change a requisition to something totally unsuitable in order to save money.
I wonder what they ever did with all the corn cobs contaminated with radioactive material they used for over pack back in the early 60s?
And if it is not only butt ugly but hides the speedometer and controls for the lights among so much eye candy you need a diagram with legend to find anything.....
I remember the old Radio Shack well. I was an assistant manager of a Radio Shack computer center until I got so sick of dealing with the clueless that I joined the Navy for the nuclear program. One customer, for the third time, stored their master DOS disk on the back of a filing cabinet with a refrigerator magnet.
The business machines of the early 80s had 8" 1.2 meg floppies. The home hobbyist models had 180k 5-1/4 floppies. The business machines were about four grand and the home machines a bit over a grand.
In 1983, Radio Shack had an 80% market share in desktop business computing.
In 1984, after IBM decided to leverage the desktop computing market, Radio Shack made what was to prove a very bad corporate decision. The TRS-280 project was dumped in favor of discontinuing their own design in desktop computing and jumping on the IBM clone bandwagon. The TRS-280 project was a CGA graphics 16 bit machine. The prototype blew away anything IBM tried to do for another five years. They never did get a decent IBM clone in their line and ended up selling their computer division to Acer.
The next big mistake was in the early 90s. The first clue was a complete remake of their website. No longer could you look up a part and order it for delivery to the local store. All you could find was name brand electronics at prices that K-mart beat every day.
I lament the old Radio Shack and the source for hobby supplies I had as a kid. But, they have been dead for decades and the stores a slowly moldering corpse.
BTW, I didn't go MS-DOS until 1992. Sometimes I miss that old TRS-80 Model 4 I had modified for hi-res graphics, installed 2 meg of memory, and put an internal 35 meg hard drive into. It booted to three different operating systems and even after being retired from a main work machine ran a BBS quite well. (That was before the internet was anything but a high tech experiment for the military and universities... arpanet) Gad that BBS stayed going like crazy after I started hosting the starter edition of Castle Wolfenstein. You got the first three levels free to try but it was a 1 meg download that took hours to get with a state of the art 2400 bps modem and all night with the more common 1200bps modems.
A commercial nuclear reactor does follow the steam load in power output.
But, the efficiency loss is at the turbine end. With only one massive turbine for generation you have to keep it rolling at top load to get the best output efficiency.
And, it costs the same maintenance cost and personnel staffing cost to run at 100% power or 30% power.
You could make a nuclear plant power scaling with a major re-design... i.e. multiple smaller turbine generators that would be brought online as the power output requirement increased.
But, you would still have the same need for the number of people for maintenance and operation at reduced power or full power.
Hydroelectric is in the same situation. It costs the same to operate whether you are running one or all turbines at a given time. More cost effective to maximize output for the cost of operation.
I have taken to ignoring local papers except for advertisements. For news I go to less agenda driven sources. Why pay for the local paper to interpret, edit, and tell you what to think? Go for the news services that still feed the newspapers like Reuters http://www.reuters.com/
Better world news coverage than most is at BBC News
You can get better news if you read the text and ignore the talking heads at Fox News MSNBC NPR News
And the international pages from other countries often have a more complete take on even U.S. issues than the major American networks. Der Spiegel Pravda
Electric cars actually cause more pollution but relocates the pollution to the power plants instead of the highways for a net increase in carbon footprint and release of toxins into the air.
Look up the power factor on electric motors and electric generators.
Look up the median failure rate of solar panels. (Last I looked, the mean failure time was below the break even point of generating as much energy as it takes to manufacture them. Good for relocating a small source of power but overall increases the system load.)
Look at the whole system instead of focusing on a tiny portion and claiming it is a universal solution.
And a "no" answer means you don't believe in evolution.
I've become so jaded and skeptical as it is so easy to design questions to get the response you want. I know when I was teaching it was expected to design them so to increase the pass/fail ratio for my classes.
As to republican vs democrat, that is a very regional perception. Where I grew up it was the democrat sheeple that were not too sure the world was really round.
I was really interested in solar back at the turn of the century. At the time, I was living in an area where it was feasible to use solar. You have to realize that solar has a very geographically limited output; desert and tropical areas. In tropical areas the frequent cleaning is a bit labor intensive. Unless there has been a huge change in manufacturing technique; my findings from 2005 should still be good.
1> Without battery buffering solar is variable with light sourcing.
2> To generate the amount.current it takes to make a solar panel it would take 15 years. The mean lifetime of a panel in service before output degrades is around 5 years.
After running numbers I concluded that from a system standpoint the supposed "green" power of solar was a bunch of hooey. Now, using a solar hot water heater actually works well just requiring a bit of plumbing, a home made box full of black gravel, and a thermal sensor to turn the heating pump on when the sun put the temperature of the box above 150 degrees F.
What so many never consider is the maintenance of an alternative energy source. A co-worker put in a wind generation facility along with a battery system to buffer the power generation. Works well. But, there is weekly maintenance on the moving parts of the generator and on the batteries. The initial cost was a bit high but manageable using Navy surplus submarine batteries. But, where to put a bank of five foot tall lead acid batteries? From the numbers I saw, the installation cost should be amortized by the power savings in less than a decade.
I do ask how many of those clamoring for "green power" are willing to do the upkeep on household systems?
Taxpayers pay for a bail out and the jobs went to China...
Sigh, I could be convinced bailouts might have been a good thing if it hadn't come out that 7 out of every 10 Chevrolet automobiles built are manufactured in China.
This video says it all... the 70% of GM cars being built outside the U.S. is a direct quote from CEO of GM.
Don't forget much higher cost. Need to do a 480vac mod to your house to get rapid charging Lack of charging points for trips...yeah, part of infrastructure.
And, for me, the bottom line: Uses more fuel than a gasoline engine.
The best efficiency we can get in room temperature motors and generators is 28% (.28 power factor)
So, you generate electricity with a 28% conversion (under fantastic conditions) then turn it back to mechanical energy with a 28% conversion.
Hmmm, so putting the chemical burner in the car cuts out two inefficient conversions for the electrical and we go with only a chemical to mechanical conversion.
Ok, I will give it that it takes combustion products off the roadways... and puts more of them out in an industrial area. So, we can have cleaner highways if we burn more fuel into greenhouse gases.
Personally, I'm against government funding of an inefficient power system that uses more power to create than it generates over the mean effective lifetime of the installation and creates large amounts of hazardous waste.
Solar is a good way to relocate a source of power to an area that has no connection to a generating station or the power grid. (i.e. a remote village) But, solar units still requires a high density power source and tank car loads of hazardous chemicals for manufacture.
The subsidy system for solar is more of a pork barrel item for sun belt states than it is any long term solution for the country as a whole. If you run a system analysis I think you will find that pushing solar grids on a large scale basis actually causes more fossil fuels to be burned overall.
The whole concept of the electric car actually defeats the stated purpose of reducing pollution. The best efficiency one can find in a room temperature electric motor is 0.28. And the efficiency (power factor) applies both to the generating end and the motor end.
Big picture, once you run the numbers, comes to the fact that the amount of fuel required to get a certain torque to the wheels of a vehicle is less that 25% efficient for an electric vehicle and can be over 50% for a well tuned internal combustion engine.
I do like the concept of the Tesla car, but it isn't there yet and unless I'm building a new home I could not afford to have 480v service installed to take advantage of the fast charge capability.
I see some misconceptions in the comments and offer some clarification. Having worked in radiation protection for a while (30 years this October) I'll offer some basic information.
Radiation can't be carried. If you get out of the radiation field, you get no more exposure. Think of getting out of the sun and you won't get a sunburn. Radioactive contamination (radiation emitting material where it isn't supposed to be) can be carried with you. The type of the radioactive material, the chemical form of the radioactive material, and the solubility of the material will effect how it can be carried. The same factors will apply to bio-concentration of radioactive material.
The limits of exposure to radiation, both exposure and from radioactive material internal to the body, have limits based on studies published by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the ICRP (International Commission on Radiation Protection) as far back as 1954. Some revision was recommended in 1976 in the accounting for internal dose received from internal radiation sources. The ICRP recommendations from 1976 gained the force of law in the United States with the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) revision to 10CFR20 (Volume 10 Code of Federal Regulations Section 20) in 1994.
(Note to the non U.S. world: In the U.S. many still use the old CGS unit of REM as most radiation workers are accustomed to that unit. The SI unit of the Sievert was formulated in the 70s but didn't come into use in the U.S. until the 1994 NRC regulation revision. for reference: 100 Rem = 1 Sv).. To paraphrase a bit on how this is implemented in the U.S.: The general public is limited to 0.1 REM per year from sources, internal or external, due to the operation of any licensed facility. Radiation workers are limited to 5 REM per year. Most radiation workers work under administrative limits of 1 REM per year and rarely reach that. If a worker gets an uptake (radioactive material taken internally) the amount is measured and the exposure he would receive over the following 50 years is calculated and assigned as his dose in his records for that year. If that exceeds a limit, the licensee is liable for severe legal penalties.
For reference: You get about a Rem a year for existing on planet earth with more at places with high background levels due to granite or basalt in the area such as Denver, Colorado or Reading, Pennsylvania. I once did an empirical experiment and wore a dosimeter when getting medical diagnostics. I read 0.1 rem for a Dental X-Ray and 0.2 Rem for a chest X-Ray. (Thermoluminescent Dosimeter tucked behind my ear while I was getting X-rays for a military physical.) I hope this puts things in a bit of perspective.
Radiation exposure from an accident at an electric power producing reactor will mainly be from a release of radioactive material to anyone but the trained radiation workers directly working on the facility. What can escape? The main things that will get out are those nuclides that can be carried off in a steam plume. What can be carried off in a steam plume? Nitrogen 16: Activated Oxygen, 7 second half life, It will be gone very quickly. Iodine 131: Half life of 8 days. Since it can be concentrated in the Thyroid it is a hazard to personnel. Prevention of exposure is to take Potassium Iodide pills to flood the system with Iodine so it won't be accumulated. Iodine 131 will be a problem for about a month and a half until it decays away. Tritium (Hydrogen 3): 12 year half life. Radiation emitted is not very high energy. If taken internally treatment is to flush system by hydrating to flush it out. (I still giggle over the beer locker at a tritium producing facility I once worked at. If a worker got a Tritium uptake, they would be issued a 6 pack of beer to take home to flush their system.) These are the main things that would be carried out in the air with a steam plume.
From an operational BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) the other
I'm really surprised that Hollywood hasn't locked onto H.Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" stories. I've heard that his original stories have fallen into public domain so there would not be negotiations for rights. And think of the toy market for toys.
"Little Fuzzy" is such a cute story I revisit it again and again.
For a decade I preferred Windows phones for the sync compatibility. But, after Microsoft quit supporting Windows Mobile 5 while the phones were still being sold a s new in stores' I gave up and shifted to Android.
Gad, what happened to the high school science curriculum?
The fact that we did not hit the global starvation point as predicted by Malthus by 1918 was directly attributable to Bayer's method of artificial nitrogen fixing, ammonia production, that made so much of 20th century gains in agriculture yields possible.
It is a no brainer if one looks at the crop yields before manufactured fertilizer and mechanical irrigation to what was done before. We physically don't have enough arable land to feed the number of people we have today with "organic" methods of farming.
And look at the health problems we get with imported foods that are organically fertilized... e-coli outbreaks from improperly washed veggies from Mexico that show they were fertilized with manure.. from humans as well.
The huge divergence between the crop yields when using ammoniated fertilizers as opposed to manure have been documented since the first half of the 20th century. Organic may meet some esthetic ideal but it doesn't produce enough to feed the population.
Every time I read a study about changing language I'm reminded of a study done by GM in 1968. That company decided to find out what made for successful executives, the movers and shakers of the company. They started with IQ tests at every level of employment and were not satisfied with the results. They followed with testing for other skills.
The interesting thing seems to be that neither intelligence nor technical skills (math and logic) were different from the top executives to the lowest janitorial staff. What was different was the difference in ability to communicate in "standard" English.
With the acres and acres of URMAs (Underground Radioactive Materials Areas... leftover from "oops" suring cold war secrecy) radioactive flora and fauna are nothing new. Radioactive rabbits are just new in some journalist's tiny little mind.
Tubmbleweed can have a 120 foot deep taproot and can bioconcentrate radionuclides.
In the seven years I worked at Hanford, many times I pooper scooped radioactive rabbit and coyote droppings that were near the work trailers of the remediation projects I was on. Don't even get me talking about the damned high radiation areas caused by mud swallow nests.
Slowly, as long as they don't pull funding again to pay for Iraq, the problem will go away as the various contaminated sites are remediated.
Remember, the DOE had no coordinated radiation protection program with force of law until 1995 and all the messes happened under the veil of secrecy and clearance before then.
Who is responsible for health care? At one time a doctor had a "consulting room". A physician doesn't give diagnoses on stone tablets as delivered from burning bushes and many physicians have their own quirks and favorite treatments. A patient should not be averse to challenging what he is told. The old bit about getting a second opionion should always be considered.
One huge failing of the U.S. health care industry has been the systematic of legislating away a patient's ability to treat himself. In the 70's; if you had conjunctivitis (pink eye) you went to the drug counter and purchased opthalmic grade silver nitrate solution and used the eye drops. Today you pay $175 to a physician after a several hour wait to write a prescription for opthalmic ointment that you pay $80 for and is simply opthalmic grade silver nitrate ointment. A patient is, today, considered too stupid to treat common maladies.
One solution would be to disconnect the health insurance industry from the health care industry. As long as "for profit" massive corporate hostpital chains are owned by "for profit" health insurance companies it is only in their interest to keep costs spiraling upward. This certainly seems to call for a Teddy Roosevelt mentality to correct. How about legislation to consider the collusion on costs between insurance and corporate providers to be a SEC conflict of interest violation?
Another solution is to remove some of the monopolistic controls of pharmaceutical grade drugs. i.e. Amoxillin at my local pharmacy costs $125 for 20 500mg tablets. I can purchase veterinary grade Amoxillin over the counter at the Ranch and Home store at a cost of $12.95 for 100 500mg tablets. The real kicker is the tablets are identical in marking and the coding on the packaging shows they are made by the same company from the same factory.
There has been a systematic mindset propagated since the inception of organizations like the AMA that all treatments HAVE to come from a licensed physician. And we have draconian legislation to force such dependence on physicians which is often not called for and crowds emergency rooms with routine cases.
I still laugh at the Obama "Health Care" bill that does nothing to address health care but seems to be a legally mandated sinecure to heal insurance companies.
Also, try asking "Are you the person that received the problem?"
Ask who found the problem....
I have trouble counting how many times I've had an error in a program, read the error code, knew what the problem was and a few potential fixes but didn't have admin so I could fix it myself. I let the supervisor know there is a problem and have a clueless supervisor jump in and give IT a load of crap and be unable to even read the message on the screen. I guess the words there were not in his crossword puzzle dictionary.
Remember, a trained manager can manage anything even if they don't understand it just like a trained teacher can teach anything even if they don't understand it. (If you believe this I have shares in a big bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.)
As to not reading error messages... try poking one spot on your skin over and over... the spot becomes numb. MS Windows give out so many irrelevant popups that you have to click through that it becomes second nature to "close the damned window that is covering up what you are doing".
I really enjoy having the error log in Windows 7. It allows me to go back and see what irrelevant errors popped up while I was doing something else. i.e. "X application cannot connect" errors that come up when you do not have an internet connection. (peeve - programs that insist on trying to phone home when you are working in standalone)
Slashdot Mirror
10CFR173, DOT specifications for shipping radioactive material, already has container and routing specifications for shipment of high level radioactive material. It has not been used for shipments of commercial fuel but has been used for shipments of special weapons material in the past. (very much a classified activity for the DoD)
As to where to ship, the answer is recycling. It is criminal that the U.S. does not recycle spent commercial nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of useful material in a spent fuel bundle but a buildup of fission products makes it unusable. Better to remove the useful material and seriously reduce the volume of material that has to be given long term disposal.
And, guess what, the technology is proven.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Fuel-Recycling/Processing-of-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/
Testing specs for a fissile material shipping container contain:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part071/part071-0073.html
A couple of youtube links showing the type of catastrophic accident testing that spent fuel casks must pass before being design accepted for shipment of high level nuclear material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0-hjHDizA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JhruRobRI
Just trying to add some perspective on what would be required in shipping spent commercial nuclear fuel for either reprocessing or long term storage.
Steven
No kidding. The 233S test lab where McCluskey's accident happened was torn down about a decade ago. I was part of the crew doing the remediation and rip-out of the building.
What happened with McCluskey was an improper layup of equipment prior to a holliday break. When he went to start up the process equipment after a break, the chemical reactor overpressuized blowing out the viewing window into the pressure vessel. McCluskey received a large number of lacerations from the flying glass and injuries from being knocked off the catwalk he was on.
What got him the "Atomic Man" moniker was the fact that his exposure was an impingement uptake of Plutonium-239. The chemicals carried by the burst pressure tank put the chemicals through his skin under high pressure and into the lacerations. Pu-239 is a bone seeker and replaces calcium in the bones so it is hard to get out of the body.
McCluskey lived in a section of the hospital for over a year while they used chelation therapy to remove most of the Plutonium that was in his body. At first, if he walked barefoot, you could find his footprints with a radiation detector from the material coming out with his sweat.
His lounge chair was still kept in a radioactive material storage area as late as 2003. (Last time I saw it)
I have a sneaking suspicion that this article actually should be that they finally settled on who would fund the cleanup of the area where McCluskey stayed at the hospital. The lab where he was exposed is long gone. BTW, that was the only job I've worked where we had, and actually needed, alpha dose rate meters.
And so often, you can do things with "it's only a spreadsheet" that the IT departments will foam at the mouth and scream bloody murder if you actually write some code over.
I've seen a person fired for writing a simple BAT file to automate data transference and storage.
Ask WHY commercial nuclear power reactors are having to spend your, as in rate payers, money to store used nuclear fuel on their own sites?
The Atomic Energy Act of 1972 did more than split the AEC into the DOE and NRC. The Atomic Energy Act of 1972 made the Department of Energy the sole entity that can recycle or dispose of fissile radioactive material. It also mandated the DOE to take custody of all spent commercial fuel by fiscal year 1998 for recycling and processing. The DOE has yet to take custody of any spent commercial fuel from U.S. commercial power reactors. Commercial power producers are required to pay into a fund for disposal of used fuel but the DOE just sits on the money. Actually, there is legal action to force the DOE to fund the cost of above ground temporary storage facilities at commercial nuclear power reactors as those reactors have already been forced to pay for disposal once already.
The original plan called for five year storage in a spent fuel pool to allow the hottest and most short lived fission fragments to decay off. Then, the fuel was to be shipped out for reprocessing. There is still a lot of usable fuel in a used fuel bundle but the buildup of fission products such as Xenon prevent efficient burning off of the rest of the fuel. Europe has been using reprocessed MOX fuel for decades but the DOE actually shut down and allowed to go derelict the plant built for such reprocessing in the late 1980s.
I see this as more an example of rote verbatim compliance with a procedure that said to use "kitty litter" as an over-pack when putting the hazardous material into a disposal drum.
Sintered diatomacious earth or "fuller's earth" are synonymous with the old fashioned sintered clay "kitty litter". Sintered clay is a wonderful, inert, absorbtion agent of small amounts of leakage and stabilizes hazardous material wonderfully. Go get some cheap kitty litter and keep it in your garage for soaking up small oil spills on the concrete. It works great.
But, woe betide the fool that mistakes "organic kitty litter" or "odor neutralizing kitty litter" for the classic sintered clay. The odor neutralizers and the chemically treated paper products of the "organic" variety will react with petrochemicals and can outgas and swell a container and even catch fire.
Some idiot read the procedure to get "kitty litter" and was totally clueless as to why and what they really wanted. I've run into this so often with clueless middle managers that change a requisition to something totally unsuitable in order to save money.
I wonder what they ever did with all the corn cobs contaminated with radioactive material they used for over pack back in the early 60s?
And if it is not only butt ugly but hides the speedometer and controls for the lights among so much eye candy you need a diagram with legend to find anything.....
I remember the old Radio Shack well. I was an assistant manager of a Radio Shack computer center until I got so sick of dealing with the clueless that I joined the Navy for the nuclear program. One customer, for the third time, stored their master DOS disk on the back of a filing cabinet with a refrigerator magnet.
The business machines of the early 80s had 8" 1.2 meg floppies. The home hobbyist models had 180k 5-1/4 floppies. The business machines were about four grand and the home machines a bit over a grand.
In 1983, Radio Shack had an 80% market share in desktop business computing.
In 1984, after IBM decided to leverage the desktop computing market, Radio Shack made what was to prove a very bad corporate decision. The TRS-280 project was dumped in favor of discontinuing their own design in desktop computing and jumping on the IBM clone bandwagon. The TRS-280 project was a CGA graphics 16 bit machine. The prototype blew away anything IBM tried to do for another five years. They never did get a decent IBM clone in their line and ended up selling their computer division to Acer.
The next big mistake was in the early 90s. The first clue was a complete remake of their website. No longer could you look up a part and order it for delivery to the local store. All you could find was name brand electronics at prices that K-mart beat every day.
I lament the old Radio Shack and the source for hobby supplies I had as a kid. But, they have been dead for decades and the stores a slowly moldering corpse.
BTW, I didn't go MS-DOS until 1992. Sometimes I miss that old TRS-80 Model 4 I had modified for hi-res graphics, installed 2 meg of memory, and put an internal 35 meg hard drive into. It booted to three different operating systems and even after being retired from a main work machine ran a BBS quite well. (That was before the internet was anything but a high tech experiment for the military and universities... arpanet) Gad that BBS stayed going like crazy after I started hosting the starter edition of Castle Wolfenstein. You got the first three levels free to try but it was a 1 meg download that took hours to get with a state of the art 2400 bps modem and all night with the more common 1200bps modems.
A commercial nuclear reactor does follow the steam load in power output.
But, the efficiency loss is at the turbine end. With only one massive turbine for generation you have to keep it rolling at top load to get the best output efficiency.
And, it costs the same maintenance cost and personnel staffing cost to run at 100% power or 30% power.
You could make a nuclear plant power scaling with a major re-design... i.e. multiple smaller turbine generators that would be brought online as the power output requirement increased.
But, you would still have the same need for the number of people for maintenance and operation at reduced power or full power.
Hydroelectric is in the same situation. It costs the same to operate whether you are running one or all turbines at a given time. More cost effective to maximize output for the cost of operation.
I have taken to ignoring local papers except for advertisements. For news I go to less agenda driven sources. Why pay for the local paper to interpret, edit, and tell you what to think? Go for the news services that still feed the newspapers like Reuters http://www.reuters.com/
Better world news coverage than most is at BBC News
You can get better news if you read the text and ignore the talking heads at
Fox News
MSNBC
NPR News
And the international pages from other countries often have a more complete take on even U.S. issues than the major American networks.
Der Spiegel
Pravda
Electric cars actually cause more pollution but relocates the pollution to the power plants instead of the highways for a net increase in carbon footprint and release of toxins into the air.
Look up the power factor on electric motors and electric generators.
Look up the median failure rate of solar panels. (Last I looked, the mean failure time was below the break even point of generating as much energy as it takes to manufacture them. Good for relocating a small source of power but overall increases the system load.)
Look at the whole system instead of focusing on a tiny portion and claiming it is a universal solution.
1> Do you believe you are related to Chimpanzees?
And a "no" answer means you don't believe in evolution.
I've become so jaded and skeptical as it is so easy to design questions to get the response you want. I know when I was teaching it was expected to design them so to increase the pass/fail ratio for my classes.
As to republican vs democrat, that is a very regional perception. Where I grew up it was the democrat sheeple that were not too sure the world was really round.
I was really interested in solar back at the turn of the century. At the time, I was living in an area where it was feasible to use solar. You have to realize that solar has a very geographically limited output; desert and tropical areas. In tropical areas the frequent cleaning is a bit labor intensive. Unless there has been a huge change in manufacturing technique; my findings from 2005 should still be good.
1> Without battery buffering solar is variable with light sourcing.
2> To generate the amount.current it takes to make a solar panel it would take 15 years. The mean lifetime of a panel in service before output degrades is around 5 years.
After running numbers I concluded that from a system standpoint the supposed "green" power of solar was a bunch of hooey. Now, using a solar hot water heater actually works well just requiring a bit of plumbing, a home made box full of black gravel, and a thermal sensor to turn the heating pump on when the sun put the temperature of the box above 150 degrees F.
What so many never consider is the maintenance of an alternative energy source. A co-worker put in a wind generation facility along with a battery system to buffer the power generation. Works well. But, there is weekly maintenance on the moving parts of the generator and on the batteries. The initial cost was a bit high but manageable using Navy surplus submarine batteries. But, where to put a bank of five foot tall lead acid batteries? From the numbers I saw, the installation cost should be amortized by the power savings in less than a decade.
I do ask how many of those clamoring for "green power" are willing to do the upkeep on household systems?
Taxpayers pay for a bail out and the jobs went to China...
Sigh, I could be convinced bailouts might have been a good thing if it hadn't come out that 7 out of every 10 Chevrolet automobiles built are manufactured in China.
This video says it all... the 70% of GM cars being built outside the U.S. is a direct quote from CEO of GM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=Lvl5Gan69Wo
Don't forget much higher cost.
Need to do a 480vac mod to your house to get rapid charging
Lack of charging points for trips...yeah, part of infrastructure.
And, for me, the bottom line: Uses more fuel than a gasoline engine.
The best efficiency we can get in room temperature motors and generators is 28% (.28 power factor)
So, you generate electricity with a 28% conversion (under fantastic conditions) then turn it back to mechanical energy with a 28% conversion.
Hmmm, so putting the chemical burner in the car cuts out two inefficient conversions for the electrical and we go with only a chemical to mechanical conversion.
Ok, I will give it that it takes combustion products off the roadways... and puts more of them out in an industrial area. So, we can have cleaner highways if we burn more fuel into greenhouse gases.
Personally, I'm against government funding of an inefficient power system that uses more power to create than it generates over the mean effective lifetime of the installation and creates large amounts of hazardous waste.
Solar is a good way to relocate a source of power to an area that has no connection to a generating station or the power grid. (i.e. a remote village) But, solar units still requires a high density power source and tank car loads of hazardous chemicals for manufacture.
The subsidy system for solar is more of a pork barrel item for sun belt states than it is any long term solution for the country as a whole. If you run a system analysis I think you will find that pushing solar grids on a large scale basis actually causes more fossil fuels to be burned overall.
The whole concept of the electric car actually defeats the stated purpose of reducing pollution. The best efficiency one can find in a room temperature electric motor is 0.28. And the efficiency (power factor) applies both to the generating end and the motor end.
Big picture, once you run the numbers, comes to the fact that the amount of fuel required to get a certain torque to the wheels of a vehicle is less that 25% efficient for an electric vehicle and can be over 50% for a well tuned internal combustion engine.
I do like the concept of the Tesla car, but it isn't there yet and unless I'm building a new home I could not afford to have 480v service installed to take advantage of the fast charge capability.
I see some misconceptions in the comments and offer some clarification. Having worked in radiation protection for a while (30 years this October) I'll offer some basic information.
Radiation can't be carried. If you get out of the radiation field, you get no more exposure. Think of getting out of the sun and you won't get a sunburn.
Radioactive contamination (radiation emitting material where it isn't supposed to be) can be carried with you. The type of the radioactive material, the chemical form of the radioactive material, and the solubility of the material will effect how it can be carried. The same factors will apply to bio-concentration of radioactive material.
The limits of exposure to radiation, both exposure and from radioactive material internal to the body, have limits based on studies published by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the ICRP (International Commission on Radiation Protection) as far back as 1954. Some revision was recommended in 1976 in the accounting for internal dose received from internal radiation sources. The ICRP recommendations from 1976 gained the force of law in the United States with the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) revision to 10CFR20 (Volume 10 Code of Federal Regulations Section 20) in 1994. .. To paraphrase a bit on how this is implemented in the U.S.:
(Note to the non U.S. world: In the U.S. many still use the old CGS unit of REM as most radiation workers are accustomed to that unit. The SI unit of the Sievert was formulated in the 70s but didn't come into use in the U.S. until the 1994 NRC regulation revision. for reference: 100 Rem = 1 Sv)
The general public is limited to 0.1 REM per year from sources, internal or external, due to the operation of any licensed facility.
Radiation workers are limited to 5 REM per year. Most radiation workers work under administrative limits of 1 REM per year and rarely reach that.
If a worker gets an uptake (radioactive material taken internally) the amount is measured and the exposure he would receive over the following 50 years is calculated and assigned as his dose in his records for that year. If that exceeds a limit, the licensee is liable for severe legal penalties.
For reference: You get about a Rem a year for existing on planet earth with more at places with high background levels due to granite or basalt in the area such as Denver, Colorado or Reading, Pennsylvania. I once did an empirical experiment and wore a dosimeter when getting medical diagnostics. I read 0.1 rem for a Dental X-Ray and 0.2 Rem for a chest X-Ray. (Thermoluminescent Dosimeter tucked behind my ear while I was getting X-rays for a military physical.) I hope this puts things in a bit of perspective.
Radiation exposure from an accident at an electric power producing reactor will mainly be from a release of radioactive material to anyone but the trained radiation workers directly working on the facility.
What can escape? The main things that will get out are those nuclides that can be carried off in a steam plume.
What can be carried off in a steam plume?
Nitrogen 16: Activated Oxygen, 7 second half life, It will be gone very quickly.
Iodine 131: Half life of 8 days. Since it can be concentrated in the Thyroid it is a hazard to personnel. Prevention of exposure is to take Potassium Iodide pills to flood the system with Iodine so it won't be accumulated. Iodine 131 will be a problem for about a month and a half until it decays away.
Tritium (Hydrogen 3): 12 year half life. Radiation emitted is not very high energy. If taken internally treatment is to flush system by hydrating to flush it out. (I still giggle over the beer locker at a tritium producing facility I once worked at. If a worker got a Tritium uptake, they would be issued a 6 pack of beer to take home to flush their system.)
These are the main things that would be carried out in the air with a steam plume.
From an operational BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) the other
I'm really surprised that Hollywood hasn't locked onto H.Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" stories. I've heard that his original stories have fallen into public domain so there would not be negotiations for rights. And think of the toy market for toys.
"Little Fuzzy" is such a cute story I revisit it again and again.
Steven
For a decade I preferred Windows phones for the sync compatibility.
But, after Microsoft quit supporting Windows Mobile 5 while the phones were still being sold a s new in stores' I gave up and shifted to Android.
Naa, that is transparent aluminum, not super glass.
Gad, what happened to the high school science curriculum?
The fact that we did not hit the global starvation point as predicted by Malthus by 1918 was directly attributable to Bayer's method of artificial nitrogen fixing, ammonia production, that made so much of 20th century gains in agriculture yields possible.
It is a no brainer if one looks at the crop yields before manufactured fertilizer and mechanical irrigation to what was done before. We physically don't have enough arable land to feed the number of people we have today with "organic" methods of farming.
And look at the health problems we get with imported foods that are organically fertilized... e-coli outbreaks from improperly washed veggies from Mexico that show they were fertilized with manure.. from humans as well.
The huge divergence between the crop yields when using ammoniated fertilizers as opposed to manure have been documented since the first half of the 20th century. Organic may meet some esthetic ideal but it doesn't produce enough to feed the population.
Every time I read a study about changing language I'm reminded of a study done by GM in 1968. That company decided to find out what made for successful executives, the movers and shakers of the company. They started with IQ tests at every level of employment and were not satisfied with the results. They followed with testing for other skills.
The interesting thing seems to be that neither intelligence nor technical skills (math and logic) were different from the top executives to the lowest janitorial staff. What was different was the difference in ability to communicate in "standard" English.
Draw your own conclusions...
With the acres and acres of URMAs (Underground Radioactive Materials Areas... leftover from "oops" suring cold war secrecy) radioactive flora and fauna are nothing new. Radioactive rabbits are just new in some journalist's tiny little mind.
Tubmbleweed can have a 120 foot deep taproot and can bioconcentrate radionuclides.
In the seven years I worked at Hanford, many times I pooper scooped radioactive rabbit and coyote droppings that were near the work trailers of the remediation projects I was on. Don't even get me talking about the damned high radiation areas caused by mud swallow nests.
Slowly, as long as they don't pull funding again to pay for Iraq, the problem will go away as the various contaminated sites are remediated.
Remember, the DOE had no coordinated radiation protection program with force of law until 1995 and all the messes happened under the veil of secrecy and clearance before then.
MercTech
Who is responsible for health care? At one time a doctor had a "consulting room". A physician doesn't give diagnoses on stone tablets as delivered from burning bushes and many physicians have their own quirks and favorite treatments. A patient should not be averse to challenging what he is told. The old bit about getting a second opionion should always be considered.
One huge failing of the U.S. health care industry has been the systematic of legislating away a patient's ability to treat himself. In the 70's; if you had conjunctivitis (pink eye) you went to the drug counter and purchased opthalmic grade silver nitrate solution and used the eye drops. Today you pay $175 to a physician after a several hour wait to write a prescription for opthalmic ointment that you pay $80 for and is simply opthalmic grade silver nitrate ointment. A patient is, today, considered too stupid to treat common maladies.
One solution would be to disconnect the health insurance industry from the health care industry. As long as "for profit" massive corporate hostpital chains are owned by "for profit" health insurance companies it is only in their interest to keep costs spiraling upward. This certainly seems to call for a Teddy Roosevelt mentality to correct. How about legislation to consider the collusion on costs between insurance and corporate providers to be a SEC conflict of interest violation?
Another solution is to remove some of the monopolistic controls of pharmaceutical grade drugs. i.e. Amoxillin at my local pharmacy costs $125 for 20 500mg tablets. I can purchase veterinary grade Amoxillin over the counter at the Ranch and Home store at a cost of $12.95 for 100 500mg tablets. The real kicker is the tablets are identical in marking and the coding on the packaging shows they are made by the same company from the same factory.
There has been a systematic mindset propagated since the inception of organizations like the AMA that all treatments HAVE to come from a licensed physician. And we have draconian legislation to force such dependence on physicians which is often not called for and crowds emergency rooms with routine cases.
I still laugh at the Obama "Health Care" bill that does nothing to address health care but seems to be a legally mandated sinecure to heal insurance companies.
Also, try asking "Are you the person that received the problem?"
Ask who found the problem....
I have trouble counting how many times I've had an error in a program, read the error code, knew what the problem was and a few potential fixes but didn't have admin so I could fix it myself. I let the supervisor know there is a problem and have a clueless supervisor jump in and give IT a load of crap and be unable to even read the message on the screen. I guess the words there were not in his crossword puzzle dictionary.
Remember, a trained manager can manage anything even if they don't understand it just like a trained teacher can teach anything even if they don't understand it. (If you believe this I have shares in a big bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.)
As to not reading error messages... try poking one spot on your skin over and over... the spot becomes numb. MS Windows give out so many irrelevant popups that you have to click through that it becomes second nature to "close the damned window that is covering up what you are doing".
I really enjoy having the error log in Windows 7. It allows me to go back and see what irrelevant errors popped up while I was doing something else. i.e. "X application cannot connect" errors that come up when you do not have an internet connection. (peeve - programs that insist on trying to phone home when you are working in standalone)