The longer a half-life it is, the longer it hangs around in the environment, posing a threat to the local ecology.
Ideally, we could burn stuff down and reuse it long enough that the byproducts are inert, radiologically speaking.
Realistically though, we can burn things down so that fuel that's been reprocessed enough goes from something that breaks down (goes inert) over tens or hundreds of thousands of years to something that breaks down in a few hundred.
As people say, at the end of the fission power process, you wind up with a very compact amount of waste that's highly radioactive (and not always suitable as fuel for the reactor it came from, though second, or third generation reactors might be able to burn it).
Over time, you're dealing with an ever more compact and more radioactive mass. Sooner or later it's really no longer suitable for reactor fuel, and, if we're lucky, has been converted to something that will quickly break down into something harmless.
What produces a larger, longer-lived waste stream in the end? Burning the fuel once and then putting it into storage for the next half million years while you grab more pristine fuel and put it through the same single cycle?
Or reprocessing several times and putting the waste into storage for the next couple centuries?
Reprocess. Instead of polluting the environment with stuff that has a half-life measured in thousands of years, keep reprocessing it, and burn the stuff down into something that could be used in next-gen reactors and keep going until you've extracted as much energy from it as possible and the remaining waste has a half-life measured in decades or a few short centuries.
Done right it can be reprocessed on-site and almost in-situ. This way there's no need for large containment vessels to sit out in what's essentially a parking lot in the back.
At the end of it all, you wind up with a relatively tiny amount of waste, compared to what we output today. Easier to store, easier to manage, easier to transport when a site finally completely decommissions and is returned to nature.
Dumping it into space is the equivalent of shitting on your elderly neighbor's lawn. You may not have to deal with it right away, but it's eventually going to come back and haunt you.
Why the hell would anyone pay more simply because they have a larger screen?
The fact is, a screen's physical dimensions and the screen's resolution have almost nothing to do with one another.
I can see paying more for a higher resolution version based on bandwidth consumption.
But screen size?
That has to be the dumbest, most inconsistent metric available.
I'm wondering if Katzenberg has been smoking the whacky weed.
The fact is, NOTHING is going to "revolutionize" the distribution of movie/TV content. That's ALREADY happened with digital delivery. But the market continues to evolve. And it's the content delivery systems, like Google Play, Amazon Instant Video and Netflix that are evolving it.
If Jeffy thinks that his one little studio is going to somehow drag the rest of the industry away from the people doing the ACTUAL pioneering of the format, he's delusional at best.
'Comcast also said it would divest another 2.5 million subscribers into a new publicly traded company, dubbed SpinCo for now, to be one-third owned by Charter and two-thirds owned by Comcast shareholders.
In other words, Comcast STILL owns them. They're just revenue sharing with Charter at that point and we now have an even NASTIER Trust issue as Comcast and Charter would now be FINANCIALLY tied together by this erstwhile "third company".
This would probably be even WORSE for consumers than if Comcast just kept the clients and told Charter to go suck a dick.
The problem here is not competition between Charter and Comcast.
As has already been pointed out, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COMPETITION in ANY of these markets. There's simply a bunch of individual monopoly positions. Basically this situation is not going to be remedied whether there's 1 company or 101 companies handling all cable subscribers in the US.
The problem right now is the monopoly business model of the cable industry.
With the destruction of analog broadcast television, consumers who wish to watch television are basically forced onto expensive cable plans. On top of this, the fact that Comcast is in bed with the content producers of the television industry, and that they're so damn huge, gives them ZERO incentive to keep from raking new media content provisioners (Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc) over the coals or blocking/degrading traffic through their network unless they pay "protection money".
And keep in mind, this is for content BEING REQUESTED BY THEIR SUBSCRIBERS!
This is NOT "unlimited internet".
This is VERY limited internet. Whenever they decide they want to extort money out of someone, they simply start dropping requests for their traffic. Regardless of what the consumer, who's PAYING THEM TO MAKE THE CONNECTION HAPPEN PROPERLY, wants. So the consumer is stuck paying for service that Comcast is deliberately sabotaging.
And this kind of abuse of power and position is going to get better by them simply divesting a few milllion subscribers to a shell company they still control and paying the next biggest fish in the pond a bribe? BULLSHIT!
This deal needs to be nixed. I dislike Big Government. But this is one instance where the government needs to step in and make some serious changes to the industry and how it operates.
It seems that when Facebook buys a company, they gain more users instead of less... This is going against what almost everyone here predicted would happen with both services: That no one wanted Facebook in their lives...
There's a sucker born every minute - Often Misattributed to P.T. Barnum
And whoever DID actually codify that was a pessimist. Suckers are WAY more prolific than that...
Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling natural gas or some sort of petroleum product.
Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
And the only reason nuclear has any sort of price comparison to solar or wind to begin with is the fact that, under the guidance of enviro-nuts, they've basically tarriffed the entire process, from proposition through decomission into the stratosphere. Require the kinds of multi-billion dollar investments (see bribes) for wind or solar plants that are now required for nuclear and watch the price of those options skyrocket too.
Right, it hasn't been done because a bunch of environmentalist morons have forestalled any reasonable measures of fuel reprocessing by invoking the "proliferation" boogeyman.
Yeah. Disposal is a non-starter. And should never have been pursued the way it was. Why? Because NOBODY wants that stuff in their back yard. They don't care HOW safe it is.
But, again, the dueling environmental agendas have basically left the fuel with no place to go. So it basically sits in containment casks out in back parking lots and the like.
As for "a plutonium economy". Why would it have to be solely plutonium? IFRs will burn plutonium, Uranium, Thorium and other fuels equally well. So you're burning stuff down until it's only going to be "hot" for a couple hundred years, rather than tens of thousands. And more, fully "spent" wastes burned in earlier generations of reactor can actually be used as fuel in later generations.
So we get rid of weapons-grade materials, and burn it down into something far far safer. And we get a buttload of power out of it at the same time.
How the hell isn't that a Win-Win-Win scenario?
Oh yeah, because no matter what, some idiot bridgae is going to equate nuclear power with "it's a bomb".
I know why for me. Because I didn't want to get in trouble for beating the crap out of someone. Because I didn't want to fight. Because it was never a one-to-one fight. Because whenever I fought back, I was immediately outnumbered and had the shit kicked out of me. Sorry, but IRL, martial arts training does NOT prepare you for fighting 15 people. Because every time I complained, the stupid, piece of shit principal would reprimand ME. Because every time I fought back, the stupid, piece of shit principal would reprimand ME. Because the one time I fought back against someone who was attacking me IN A CLASSROOM WITH A TEACHER PRESENT, I had the teacher try to jump on ME and restrain ME.
Fuck that noise.
By the time I hit High School, the only thing that kept me from going Columbine was lack of access to a gun, and the fact that other large weapon would have been caught by my parents when they drove me to school.
People like this are the reason I DON'T allow myself to own a gun. The urge to shoot people like this is just overwhelming. All school REALLY taught me was that you can't trust people in authority. Ever. And, as much as your parents want to help you, they can't do anything for you. Not that my parents didn't bust their humps trying. My grade school principal HATED my family, because my parents gave him and his lazy ass, do-nothing self absolute hell. But I still got the crap kicked out of me on a weekly basis from Grade 3-4 to Grade 8 and still had to deal with assholes throughout high school.
Is that it's time to start killing our way through politicians until we find some who are properly terrified of the general populace enough to actually simulate honesty and do their job with minimal graft and corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm. No.
The longer a half-life it is, the longer it hangs around in the environment, posing a threat to the local ecology.
Ideally, we could burn stuff down and reuse it long enough that the byproducts are inert, radiologically speaking.
Realistically though, we can burn things down so that fuel that's been reprocessed enough goes from something that breaks down (goes inert) over tens or hundreds of thousands of years to something that breaks down in a few hundred.
As people say, at the end of the fission power process, you wind up with a very compact amount of waste that's highly radioactive (and not always suitable as fuel for the reactor it came from, though second, or third generation reactors might be able to burn it).
Over time, you're dealing with an ever more compact and more radioactive mass.
Sooner or later it's really no longer suitable for reactor fuel, and, if we're lucky, has been converted to something that will quickly break down into something harmless.
What produces a larger, longer-lived waste stream in the end?
Burning the fuel once and then putting it into storage for the next half million years while you grab more pristine fuel and put it through the same single cycle?
Or reprocessing several times and putting the waste into storage for the next couple centuries?
Why "dump" anything?
Reprocess. Instead of polluting the environment with stuff that has a half-life measured in thousands of years, keep reprocessing it, and burn the stuff down into something that could be used in next-gen reactors and keep going until you've extracted as much energy from it as possible and the remaining waste has a half-life measured in decades or a few short centuries.
Done right it can be reprocessed on-site and almost in-situ.
This way there's no need for large containment vessels to sit out in what's essentially a parking lot in the back.
At the end of it all, you wind up with a relatively tiny amount of waste, compared to what we output today. Easier to store, easier to manage, easier to transport when a site finally completely decommissions and is returned to nature.
Dumping it into space is the equivalent of shitting on your elderly neighbor's lawn. You may not have to deal with it right away, but it's eventually going to come back and haunt you.
Why the hell would anyone pay more simply because they have a larger screen?
The fact is, a screen's physical dimensions and the screen's resolution have almost nothing to do with one another.
I can see paying more for a higher resolution version based on bandwidth consumption.
But screen size?
That has to be the dumbest, most inconsistent metric available.
I'm wondering if Katzenberg has been smoking the whacky weed.
The fact is, NOTHING is going to "revolutionize" the distribution of movie/TV content.
That's ALREADY happened with digital delivery.
But the market continues to evolve. And it's the content delivery systems, like Google Play, Amazon Instant Video and Netflix that are evolving it.
If Jeffy thinks that his one little studio is going to somehow drag the rest of the industry away from the people doing the ACTUAL pioneering of the format, he's delusional at best.
'Comcast also said it would divest another 2.5 million subscribers into a new publicly traded company, dubbed SpinCo for now, to be one-third owned by Charter and two-thirds owned by Comcast shareholders.
In other words, Comcast STILL owns them. They're just revenue sharing with Charter at that point and we now have an even NASTIER Trust issue as Comcast and Charter would now be FINANCIALLY tied together by this erstwhile "third company".
This would probably be even WORSE for consumers than if Comcast just kept the clients and told Charter to go suck a dick.
The problem here is not competition between Charter and Comcast.
As has already been pointed out, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COMPETITION in ANY of these markets. There's simply a bunch of individual monopoly positions.
Basically this situation is not going to be remedied whether there's 1 company or 101 companies handling all cable subscribers in the US.
The problem right now is the monopoly business model of the cable industry.
With the destruction of analog broadcast television, consumers who wish to watch television are basically forced onto expensive cable plans.
On top of this, the fact that Comcast is in bed with the content producers of the television industry, and that they're so damn huge, gives them ZERO incentive to keep from raking new media content provisioners (Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc) over the coals or blocking/degrading traffic through their network unless they pay "protection money".
And keep in mind, this is for content BEING REQUESTED BY THEIR SUBSCRIBERS!
This is NOT "unlimited internet".
This is VERY limited internet. Whenever they decide they want to extort money out of someone, they simply start dropping requests for their traffic. Regardless of what the consumer, who's PAYING THEM TO MAKE THE CONNECTION HAPPEN PROPERLY, wants. So the consumer is stuck paying for service that Comcast is deliberately sabotaging.
And this kind of abuse of power and position is going to get better by them simply divesting a few milllion subscribers to a shell company they still control and paying the next biggest fish in the pond a bribe? BULLSHIT!
This deal needs to be nixed. I dislike Big Government. But this is one instance where the government needs to step in and make some serious changes to the industry and how it operates.
Sorry, but just about every one of these I've seen have been coming back from the office of Mr. "YES! YOU CAN!" has been "NO! YOU CAN'T!"
Online petitions are worth exactly the amount of energy it takes to ignore them completely.
It seems that when Facebook buys a company, they gain more users instead of less... This is going against what almost everyone here predicted would happen with both services: That no one wanted Facebook in their lives...
There's a sucker born every minute
- Often Misattributed to P.T. Barnum
And whoever DID actually codify that was a pessimist. Suckers are WAY more prolific than that...
And I feel cramped!
(He feels cramped.)
(He's a schmuck.)
(Kick his ass.)
HEY!
Sorry. My chorus gets a bit...independent at times.
I'm going to have to break them of that...again...
Okay, Intel chips tend to outperform AMD on a clock-for-clock and core-for-core basis. So Intel has the high end pretty firmly locked in.
And Intel's going after the low end as well.
So where does that leave AMD?
Pretty much with whatever leavings Intel chucks their way?
No. Polygamy is outlawed for religious and tax reasons.
The Federal Government study of this issue indicates that up to 80% of baseload power can come from renewables without any issue.
Yeah. Okay.
Who SPECIFICALLY commissioned that particular study? Who actually carried out the study?
And which particular special interests are they beholden to?
This isn't the stupidest comment I've ever seen on slashdot but its fuckin close.
It's a Beavis & Butthead reference.
Stupidity's the entire POINT!
=)
Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling natural gas or some sort of petroleum product.
Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
And the only reason nuclear has any sort of price comparison to solar or wind to begin with is the fact that, under the guidance of enviro-nuts, they've basically tarriffed the entire process, from proposition through decomission into the stratosphere. Require the kinds of multi-billion dollar investments (see bribes) for wind or solar plants that are now required for nuclear and watch the price of those options skyrocket too.
That's just it. Yucca Mountain was never finished and will never be opened.
It was a pork project and a boondoggle from the word go.
Right, it hasn't been done because a bunch of environmentalist morons have forestalled any reasonable measures of fuel reprocessing by invoking the "proliferation" boogeyman.
Yeah. Disposal is a non-starter. And should never have been pursued the way it was. Why? Because NOBODY wants that stuff in their back yard. They don't care HOW safe it is.
But, again, the dueling environmental agendas have basically left the fuel with no place to go. So it basically sits in containment casks out in back parking lots and the like.
As for "a plutonium economy". Why would it have to be solely plutonium? IFRs will burn plutonium, Uranium, Thorium and other fuels equally well. So you're burning stuff down until it's only going to be "hot" for a couple hundred years, rather than tens of thousands. And more, fully "spent" wastes burned in earlier generations of reactor can actually be used as fuel in later generations.
So we get rid of weapons-grade materials, and burn it down into something far far safer. And we get a buttload of power out of it at the same time.
How the hell isn't that a Win-Win-Win scenario?
Oh yeah, because no matter what, some idiot bridgae is going to equate nuclear power with "it's a bomb".
Howso?
Unlike DH, a floating reactor has no hard-line connection to the sea floor that can be snapped the way the well head was.
It's basically soft anchored and just using subsurface water as a monster heatsink.
So, did the stem cells all flip out, pull their shirts over their....uhh...whatevers...and start asking "Arrrre you thrrreatening me?"
didn't we just spend half a year trying to deal with with a broken oil platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
DH was a failure of a blowout prevention device. This essentially BLASTED the rig off the well, which continued to spew oil.
You're not going to have that sort of problem with a reactor.
How about we build nuclear reactors underground? The thing may get buried, but even that should help to contain rather than spread the contamination.
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
It's not that crazy. A lot of the new small reactor designs call for burying them.
It's called "reprocessing".
"Spent" nuclear fuel can be reused many, many MANY times if it is reprocessed properly.
At that point, spent fuel "waste" becomes a non-issue.
due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power
How the hell is power an issue? SSD's consume something around 1/100th of the power that a hard drive does.
Yeah, because the threat of death is a big motivator for honest people to get involved in something.
Why the hell would an honest person want to get involved in politics?
Sorry, but people aren't going to stand for this sort of revisionism.
4. Figure out why you're a target and change it.
I know why for me. Because I didn't want to get in trouble for beating the crap out of someone.
Because I didn't want to fight.
Because it was never a one-to-one fight.
Because whenever I fought back, I was immediately outnumbered and had the shit kicked out of me. Sorry, but IRL, martial arts training does NOT prepare you for fighting 15 people.
Because every time I complained, the stupid, piece of shit principal would reprimand ME.
Because every time I fought back, the stupid, piece of shit principal would reprimand ME.
Because the one time I fought back against someone who was attacking me IN A CLASSROOM WITH A TEACHER PRESENT, I had the teacher try to jump on ME and restrain ME.
Fuck that noise.
By the time I hit High School, the only thing that kept me from going Columbine was lack of access to a gun, and the fact that other large weapon would have been caught by my parents when they drove me to school.
People like this are the reason I DON'T allow myself to own a gun. The urge to shoot people like this is just overwhelming.
All school REALLY taught me was that you can't trust people in authority. Ever. And, as much as your parents want to help you, they can't do anything for you. Not that my parents didn't bust their humps trying. My grade school principal HATED my family, because my parents gave him and his lazy ass, do-nothing self absolute hell. But I still got the crap kicked out of me on a weekly basis from Grade 3-4 to Grade 8 and still had to deal with assholes throughout high school.
Is that it's time to start killing our way through politicians until we find some who are properly terrified of the general populace enough to actually simulate honesty and do their job with minimal graft and corruption.