Okay, maybe, MAYBE, if you were talking about a solid fuel reactor.
If you want to say "Thorium is dumb in a solid fuel reactor", I'd say "Yeah! You're right! It is!"
But take a look at a Liquid Thorium reactor
Basically you put the fuel in and pretty much let it burn through it's fuel supply.
You also have NONE of the problems involved in a solid-fuel reactor. Most of the failsafes become passive, rather than engineered.
Not only that, several of the byproducts are actually medically or scientifically useful (U238, which gets used in deep space device batteries), etc. The rest of the byproducts are things that are, yes, DREADFULLY radioactive...for a few days/weeks. Then they break down into stuff that's about as harmful as eating a banana.
What's more, Thorium is orders of magnitude more plentiful than most of the other stuff we're currently burning in reactors. Just the tailings that come up from current mining concerns can produce more power than the US uses in a year.
ON TOP OF THAT, actual use of Thorium would allow rare-earth mining to pick back up in many places around the world.
We need to do this because, otherwise, in 20 years' time, we're going to be buying Chinese-built Thorium reactors.
I, as an end user on the network for *INSERT ISP HERE* am paying for an unlimited connection to the internet.
By that I don't mean "X-speed no matter what", though that can be thought of as a component of the service I'm paying for.
What I'm paying for is for my provider to fulfill my internet requests in the most timely manner possible (best effort).
If they're PURPOSEFULLY sabotaging traffic to try to hold a given content provider hostage for "protection money", that's the very OPPOSITE of unlimited. Additionally, it's technically a breach of contract with the end user.
Coming to an agreement with a content provider for a dedicated peering arrangement is one thing. But sabotaging peering points (and not upgrading permanently congested peering points IS a form of sabotage) and QOS'ing traffic to degrade such services is something else entirely. And it should not be countenanced.
Though it still completely ignores the fact that certain providers can fall out of favor, fall to the wayside and die if something significantly better comes along.
It also ignores the fact that 60% is NOT 100%. As such, there's still room in the ecosystem for multiple providers with a significant percentage of the market and significant revenues (Amazon, Google, Hulu, etc).
The thing is, it IS fact. Netflix doesn't control the end-user's computer. It doesn't bring up a browser and click it's own links. Netflix doesn't generate the traffic requests for their content.
The end-user does. And the end user is ALREADY paying Comcast to fullfill their requests for internet traffic. No ifs, ands or buts.
How the hell was Netflix "trying to get bandwidth for free"?
They were PAYING their provider for their bandwidth utilization.
All they were doing was fulfilling requests THAT ORIGINATED WITHIN COMCAST'S NETWORK for content.
Comcast advertises unlimited internet.
Comcast is getting by with DELIBERATELY under-provisioned peering points. That's a limit.
Comcast used the peering points that Netflix data comes through to squeeze them for a bribe.
Comcast was deliberately degrading the performance of a given content provider (who is a threat to their cable TV business model). Which means their internet is not "unlimited". It means they're dictating to their customers what they can and cannot watch. Even if it's only at the level of "mild discouragement".
Basically Comcast is operating in bad faith with their customers, their peering partners and content providers, in an effort to chill innovation in the streaming, on-demand video market and sway customers away to their own lock-in solutions.
This is one of the main reasons why the TWC deal should be taken out back and shot with a bazooka.
Honestly, the current version is badly cluttered, and this implementation is just a bunch of porcine lipstick.
I want a nice, clean, fast-loading interface. The closer I can get to a raw text-list interface on it the better. I don't WANT shit popping out at me from any given direction.
But clearly the Republicans would be worse, as they are the anti-business (or at least anti-entrepreneur), anti-education, anti-ACA (a very pro entrepreneurism law) and pro-big business, pro-rentier party
*Spittake*
Republicans are anti-business?
Sorry, even with your qualifications, you don't have a frickin clue what you're talking about.
There's a difference between being a leader and playacting.
Jumping out front going "Look how CLEAN we are!" while everyone else is going "Oh. That's nice!" and ramping UP greenhouse gas production is most definitely NOT the former.
False, because demand for energy isn't perfectly inelastic.
Okay. Now impose those taxes and tariffs across a border.
OOPS!
Additionally, this only ENCOURAGES people to act in manners that may benefit the environment. It doesn't stop people, and entities, from gaming the system.
How accurate do they need to be in order to be useful? How many nines? 4? 5? 6?
Considering that this is the one and only survivable biosphere we have here, the more accurate the better. Right now we're not even at 99.whatever% accuracy, let alone five nines.
Geoengineering with even MODERATELY sketchy data can cause PHENOMENAL amounts of environmental damage and kill lots of people, either directly or indirectly.
Why can't we be leaders?
Because the problem is orders of magnitude larger than us. Because there are areas of the world that don't enjoy our current standards of energy consumption, for whom cheap, dirty energy is The Answer. Because, to be quite frank, the US climate science community is a schizoid mess that couldn't get anyone to follow them, even if they jumped into a gravity well and then forcibly had the rest dumped in after them.
Unless we are involving a majority of the population on the planet in a more or less unified plan, we're just setting ourselves up for ultimate failure.
The really big problem is, "Okay. It's happening. Now what do we actually DO about it?"
Right there the knives start coming out. Because everyone has a different idea of what should happen.
And there are very few concrete plans, based on actual, proven science.
Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem.
Then you have all the people proposing stuff like carbon sequestration through iron doping of algae and all sorts of unproven schemes based on pseudoscience.
Not to mention the fact that we STILL don't have a computer simulation that ACCURATELY models the phenomenon. In short, we can't even properly quantify THE PROBLEM. How the hell are we supposed to come up with a "solution"?
On top of that, everyone in the US could stop producing greenhouse gasses RIGHT NOW, and it wouldn't do a damn thing. Because everyone else is still putting the stuff out. SPECIFICALLY China. Unless we have government buy-in representing the majority of the world's population all that's happening is that we're trading one set of bad actors for another.
And everyone's so precondition to fight over the smallest detail on this that I honestly feel that nothing will ever TRULY be done about it.
Not through lack of care for the long term. But over-abundance of inflexible actors working at cross purposes.
The main problem with testing this is "how does one generate infinite or near-infinite energy" to power something like this?
Of course, if we've answered that, we're ALREADY in a place where we've either wiped ourselves out (accidentally or otherwise), or we've basically solved the greatest real-world problem in the history of humanity.
I'd also accuse you of not reading the question either.
Why do we want to deal with waste that has a potential lifespan measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of years?
We can use it and eventually cook it down to byproducts that remain dangerous for far FAR less time.
Nobody said the reprocessing is easy. Or cheap. But nobody said filtering exhaust from coal and oil plants was easy or cheap either.
And there ARE nuclear nations that DO reprocess. France being one of them.
The reason it's considered expensive is because it's still easier to dig it out of the ground right now and process it from raw ore or buy and then down-blend material from soviet warheads..
The problem with this approach is that we're putting out "spent" fuel that has the potential to fire reactors for an extended period of time, but instead of reprocessing them, they're going into containment casks and expected to just sit there for the next few million years?
When I say "burn", it's not becasue we're actually, y'know, burning it.
It's because it's a simple concept that jumps over all the physics and allows luddites a grasp of the process of fuel consumption in a familiar package.
And if you think criminals are going to buy these guys, instead of getting a regular gun through illicit channels, you're smoking some SERIOUS ganja there.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, maybe, MAYBE, if you were talking about a solid fuel reactor.
If you want to say "Thorium is dumb in a solid fuel reactor", I'd say "Yeah! You're right! It is!"
But take a look at a Liquid Thorium reactor
Basically you put the fuel in and pretty much let it burn through it's fuel supply.
You also have NONE of the problems involved in a solid-fuel reactor. Most of the failsafes become passive, rather than engineered.
Not only that, several of the byproducts are actually medically or scientifically useful (U238, which gets used in deep space device batteries), etc. The rest of the byproducts are things that are, yes, DREADFULLY radioactive...for a few days/weeks. Then they break down into stuff that's about as harmful as eating a banana.
What's more, Thorium is orders of magnitude more plentiful than most of the other stuff we're currently burning in reactors. Just the tailings that come up from current mining concerns can produce more power than the US uses in a year.
ON TOP OF THAT, actual use of Thorium would allow rare-earth mining to pick back up in many places around the world.
We need to do this because, otherwise, in 20 years' time, we're going to be buying Chinese-built Thorium reactors.
And just sent an e-mail off to tom.wheeler@fcc.gov.
A printed letter that's essentially the same will be going out in the mail today.
c/o Tom Wheeler
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554
I, as an end user on the network for *INSERT ISP HERE* am paying for an unlimited connection to the internet.
By that I don't mean "X-speed no matter what", though that can be thought of as a component of the service I'm paying for.
What I'm paying for is for my provider to fulfill my internet requests in the most timely manner possible (best effort).
If they're PURPOSEFULLY sabotaging traffic to try to hold a given content provider hostage for "protection money", that's the very OPPOSITE of unlimited.
Additionally, it's technically a breach of contract with the end user.
Coming to an agreement with a content provider for a dedicated peering arrangement is one thing. But sabotaging peering points (and not upgrading permanently congested peering points IS a form of sabotage) and QOS'ing traffic to degrade such services is something else entirely. And it should not be countenanced.
Put in "at this time" and you're more correct.
Though it still completely ignores the fact that certain providers can fall out of favor, fall to the wayside and die if something significantly better comes along.
It also ignores the fact that 60% is NOT 100%. As such, there's still room in the ecosystem for multiple providers with a significant percentage of the market and significant revenues (Amazon, Google, Hulu, etc).
The thing is, it IS fact. Netflix doesn't control the end-user's computer.
It doesn't bring up a browser and click it's own links.
Netflix doesn't generate the traffic requests for their content.
The end-user does. And the end user is ALREADY paying Comcast to fullfill their requests for internet traffic. No ifs, ands or buts.
How the hell was Netflix "trying to get bandwidth for free"?
They were PAYING their provider for their bandwidth utilization.
All they were doing was fulfilling requests THAT ORIGINATED WITHIN COMCAST'S NETWORK for content.
Comcast advertises unlimited internet.
Comcast is getting by with DELIBERATELY under-provisioned peering points. That's a limit.
Comcast used the peering points that Netflix data comes through to squeeze them for a bribe.
Comcast was deliberately degrading the performance of a given content provider (who is a threat to their cable TV business model). Which means their internet is not "unlimited". It means they're dictating to their customers what they can and cannot watch. Even if it's only at the level of "mild discouragement".
Basically Comcast is operating in bad faith with their customers, their peering partners and content providers, in an effort to chill innovation in the streaming, on-demand video market and sway customers away to their own lock-in solutions.
This is one of the main reasons why the TWC deal should be taken out back and shot with a bazooka.
Honestly, the current version is badly cluttered, and this implementation is just a bunch of porcine lipstick.
I want a nice, clean, fast-loading interface. The closer I can get to a raw text-list interface on it the better. I don't WANT shit popping out at me from any given direction.
But clearly the Republicans would be worse, as they are the anti-business (or at least anti-entrepreneur), anti-education, anti-ACA (a very pro entrepreneurism law) and pro-big business, pro-rentier party
*Spittake*
Republicans are anti-business?
Sorry, even with your qualifications, you don't have a frickin clue what you're talking about.
As pointless as a pencil after stabbing a belt sander.
The only thing that's going to make these bastards stop is hitting them in the money, or hitting them. Period.
Outside of that, they don't give a fuck.
Take whatever the fuck they want.
They can basically operate however they want until someone snitches on them.
At that point, there's a big kerfuffle in DC as people dive out of the line of fire. Then...nothing.
Shortly afterwards, the informant is renditioned or flees and is declared an enemy of the state.
Watching ...
Paint ...
While ...
It ...
Is ...
Drying.
Capisce?
With full time dilation in effect, they're clicking once every half hour or so for their move right?
Ooh. Thrilling.
*Waggles a finger in the air*
There's a difference between being a leader and playacting.
Jumping out front going "Look how CLEAN we are!" while everyone else is going "Oh. That's nice!" and ramping UP greenhouse gas production is most definitely NOT the former.
False, because demand for energy isn't perfectly inelastic.
Okay. Now impose those taxes and tariffs across a border.
OOPS!
Additionally, this only ENCOURAGES people to act in manners that may benefit the environment.
It doesn't stop people, and entities, from gaming the system.
How accurate do they need to be in order to be useful? How many nines? 4? 5? 6?
Considering that this is the one and only survivable biosphere we have here, the more accurate the better. Right now we're not even at 99.whatever% accuracy, let alone five nines.
Geoengineering with even MODERATELY sketchy data can cause PHENOMENAL amounts of environmental damage and kill lots of people, either directly or indirectly.
Why can't we be leaders?
Because the problem is orders of magnitude larger than us.
Because there are areas of the world that don't enjoy our current standards of energy consumption, for whom cheap, dirty energy is The Answer.
Because, to be quite frank, the US climate science community is a schizoid mess that couldn't get anyone to follow them, even if they jumped into a gravity well and then forcibly had the rest dumped in after them.
Unless we are involving a majority of the population on the planet in a more or less unified plan, we're just setting ourselves up for ultimate failure.
No. It's not even that.
The really big problem is, "Okay. It's happening. Now what do we actually DO about it?"
Right there the knives start coming out. Because everyone has a different idea of what should happen.
And there are very few concrete plans, based on actual, proven science.
Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem.
Then you have all the people proposing stuff like carbon sequestration through iron doping of algae and all sorts of unproven schemes based on pseudoscience.
Not to mention the fact that we STILL don't have a computer simulation that ACCURATELY models the phenomenon. In short, we can't even properly quantify THE PROBLEM. How the hell are we supposed to come up with a "solution"?
On top of that, everyone in the US could stop producing greenhouse gasses RIGHT NOW, and it wouldn't do a damn thing. Because everyone else is still putting the stuff out. SPECIFICALLY China. Unless we have government buy-in representing the majority of the world's population all that's happening is that we're trading one set of bad actors for another.
And everyone's so precondition to fight over the smallest detail on this that I honestly feel that nothing will ever TRULY be done about it.
Not through lack of care for the long term. But over-abundance of inflexible actors working at cross purposes.
Driver: Why did I suddenly get a bunch of ads for funeral services and life insurance? FFFFFUUUUUU
*ARTILLERY STRIKE*
Exactly. Has anyone ever seen a big depositor waiting in line at the bank?
Only when the bathroom is full.
You're not acquainted with what "infinite" actually means are you?
We just settle on an already-given term, then trying to come up with a new alarmist term every few months/years?
Okay. Interesting on a theoretical level.
The main problem with testing this is "how does one generate infinite or near-infinite energy" to power something like this?
Of course, if we've answered that, we're ALREADY in a place where we've either wiped ourselves out (accidentally or otherwise), or we've basically solved the greatest real-world problem in the history of humanity.
Doesn't much help if backing up to tape and recovery of said "gobs and gobs of data" takes longer than the remaining lifespan of the universe.
Basically it's called "Introducing a design flaw and then selling it as a feature".
If I were Microsoft, I'd be suing the fuck outta them right now for theft of business methods.
You'd be wrong.
I'd also accuse you of not reading the question either.
Why do we want to deal with waste that has a potential lifespan measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of years?
We can use it and eventually cook it down to byproducts that remain dangerous for far FAR less time.
Nobody said the reprocessing is easy. Or cheap.
But nobody said filtering exhaust from coal and oil plants was easy or cheap either.
And there ARE nuclear nations that DO reprocess. France being one of them.
The reason it's considered expensive is because it's still easier to dig it out of the ground right now and process it from raw ore or buy and then down-blend material from soviet warheads..
The problem with this approach is that we're putting out "spent" fuel that has the potential to fire reactors for an extended period of time, but instead of reprocessing them, they're going into containment casks and expected to just sit there for the next few million years?
Insanity.
When I say "burn", it's not becasue we're actually, y'know, burning it.
It's because it's a simple concept that jumps over all the physics and allows luddites a grasp of the process of fuel consumption in a familiar package.
And if you think criminals are going to buy these guys, instead of getting a regular gun through illicit channels, you're smoking some SERIOUS ganja there.