I'm tired of all the hype about "Hyperloop". The science behind it is iffy, at best right now. They haven't even had a successful run of the full test track yet. Even with their proprietary pod. But he's prancing around as if it were a fully realized product, getting handshake deals for building hyperloops all over the place. It's looking a lot like ship-and-patch to me.
Which means, with something like this, people are going to have to DIE before someone takes a serious look at it and sees what a boondoggle is could be. And the way things are progressing, that's EXACTLY what's going to happen.
How many people died because of Three Mile Island?
None.
As for contamination. You DO realize exactly how much Thorium and Uranium are present in the ground beneath your feet right? Where do you think radon gas comes from?
Done SAFELY, nuclear is essentially carbon-free.
And the problems with current nuclear can be solved by moving to a different reactor model. One that's inherently safe and runs no risk of steam explosions. Unlike the solid fuel reactors, it burns ALL of it's fuel, so you're not pulling fuel that's only 10-15% spent. And while the byproducts which aren't medically or scientifically useful are VERY radioactive, they're only this way for short periods of time.
And even if it was megaton quantities (like the waste from solid fuel reactors from the past 60 years), it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what's gone up the flues of coal-fired plants.
A base load power plant is a power station that usually provides a continuous supply of electricity throughout the year with some minimum power generation requirement. Base load power plants will only be turned off during periodic maintenance, upgrading, overhaul or service. Base load power plant has the character of slow demand respond, a mechanism to match generation with the load it supplies.
Examples of base load power plants are coal-fired power plant, geothermal power plant, tidal power plant, nuclear power plant, etc.
Wind and solar, BY THEIR NATURE, are NOT continuous supplies.
The problem right now is that the nuclear regulation environment is a byzantine money pit.
Note: I'm not saying nuclear doesn't need regulation. It does. It needs oversight to make sure that bad decisions aren't being made simply because they save money.
But the entire process to even just TALK to NREC has become this ridiculously expensive game of cat and mouse. And that's even before the pointless NIMBY lawsuits and protests and the like.
No. Reactors are not bombs. And they lack the capability of detonating.
What happened with all three reactor failures in history were first failures of the pressurized water cooling safety systems. This is kind why it'd be a good idea to move away from water cooled reactors.
Funny, there's still a bustling metropolitan area around Three Mile Island, just south of Harrisburg, PA. And there are occupied homes, today, less than quarter mile away from Reactor 2.
There have been a grand whopping THREE meltdowns in the history of commercial nuclear power (1956-present)..
TMI: Which killed nobody was a combination of bad design and human error.
Chernobyl: Combination of bad design and human stupidity.
Fukushima: The problem at Fukushima was cost-cutting by those jackasses at TEPCO. Had they raised the height of the sea wall, or placed the backup generators someplace OTHER than the basement, Fukushima would never have happened.
You want to play with transuranics? Go ahead. Just put rubber gloves on. Not so much to protect you. But to protect the stuff you're playing with from contamination.
The stuff that's super long-term radioactive isn't terribly radioactive in terms of intensity.
Sure, you don't want to drink it or eat it. But handling it won't kill you. Or even give you a significant exposure above background.
As for "these issues outliving us". Well, in the proper sort of reactor, we can actually burn off most of the truly long-lived stuff. And while most of what's left over from that is HIGHLY radioactive, most of it's gone in hours/days/weeks. With only a small amount (absolutely miniscule compared to the megatons of nuclear waste we have today) lasting longer than a human lifetime.
Right now the big issue with burying spend fuel (stuff that's only used a tiny fraction of it's total power ) is that it will be that way for millennia. And can we trust our engineering for that long?
As opposed to the alternative. Building a facility that can hold stuff that'll be gone in 100 years? We KNOW we can do something like that...
You forgot 4: The anti-nuke crowd has poisoned public and legislative opinion of nuclear to the point where building the reactor is the cheap part. All the permitting and protests and lawsuits and the like are where billions are lost.
No. A variable power source (wind/solar/etc) CANNOT be baseload. Because baseload is the minimum required 24x7x365.
Wind is not 24x7x365. Solar is not 24x7x365.
Maybe tacking in battery. But then you have to factor in replacing batteries every 7-10 years.
Or you're talking about a plant that's solar-PLUS-something else (natural gas, oil, etc) or wind-PLUS-something else. And that's a completely different animal.
Coal is a baseload power source (hence the term "brown power"). Oil is a baseload power source. Natural gas can be a baseload power source. Nuclear is a baseload power source. Hydro is a baseload power source. Geothermal is a baseload power source.
Then, to meet demand, you have peaking plants. Which can also be coal, oil, NG or even hydro. They aren't meant to be up and running 24x7. So they come up for a few hours during the day and shut down in the evening.
The problem with nuclear right now is that the US "picked a winner" in nuclear by going with solid fuel fast reactors. While the reactors themselves aren't terribly huge, the bulk of a plant are the water cooling towers and all the plumbing for the safety systems. And, contrary to popular belief, REACTORS do NOT "blow up". What you're seeing in these cases are STEAM explosions from the cooling systems.
In an MSR style reactor, most of that crap is done away with. Because you don't need it and aren't using water to cool the reactor. If you need to shut the reactor down, you simply pop the plug to the reactor's dump tank and the reactor shuts down.
As for pricing of power. Not going to speak to that. I'll simply point to power density.
Actually no. Most of it is stored in open air casks. And most of it is only very mildly radioactive. Hell, you could hold it in a rubber-gloved hand. The issue is that it's like this for millions of years.
The main problem is the way the US government "picked a winner" with solid fuel reactors and solid fuels that are "done" after only giving up a tiny percentage of energy in "fast" reactors. It makes far more sense to go with MSR reactors where the fuel is kept in until it and most of the byproducts cook down. And while we're still producing waste at the end, it's only a tiny fraction of what's produced today (and we can cook off the stuff we have today too). And while most of it is MUCH more radioactive, the majority of it breaks down in months and years, with a tiny remainder that'll require something in the neighborhood of a human lifetime to break down.
Even so, nuclear produces less waste. It produces more CONCENTRATED waste. Rather than blowing it up a stack and into the atmosphere where it becomes somebody else's problem.
They're smaller, denser and far less complicated to set up than solid fuel reactors. Therefore, cheaper in the long run. They don't require vast quantities of water because they don't use water to cool the reactor or run the turbine. They can burn existing nuclear waste and they can burn existing mine tailings that had to be stored because they're high in thorium. They can even be built in such a way that an entire reactor, dump tank and turbine header can be built as a single unit the size of a tractor trailer. Then plugged into a concrete pit like a battery.
Let's be real here. NO form of energy generation is truly "clean".
And if we could get some modern MSR facilities built, we could get rid of a bunch of the byproducts of solid fuel reactors.
Then, instead of stuff that's mildly radioactive for millions of years, we'd cook off most of the fuel and be left with stuff that's far more radioactive, but decays out within the span of a human lifetime (with the bulk going inert in a couple years).
And we can do it with NO new mining at all years. Why? Because of all the preserved mine tailings that are thorium rich.
On top of that, because an MSR removes the need for water cooling or a steam turbine, facilities can safer, smaller, denser and cheaper. Pretty much to the point where an entire reactor and turbine assembly can be unitized and plugged into a facility like batteries.
You were on the right track with "privacy" and "security".
Then you lost it at "reasonable controls on behavior".
Why? Because "reasonable" is an entirely arbitrary value that's different for everyone. See "reasonable gun control laws". So what YOU might find "reasonable", others might find oppressive. And who's to say that abuse of the "reasonable behavior" systems couldn't be used to deprive someone of innocent of equal access/footing?
And I'm sorry, but trying to rely on something "built by hackers" on top of "open wifi access points" is idiotic. This is TOR, and it's already a shitty alternative that's totally compromised.
The type of network being talked about pretty much needs to be a ground-up implementation.
Okay Google (and their lickspittles at Mozilla) decide to wall off stock http sites behind "danger" messages. So anyone providing more than a cursory "I love me" page website has to run out and get a cert.
Let's Encrypt steps up and makes the process easy and mostly seamless.
Now people are bitching because they didn't draw out the process and make it more painful. And they're worried about how a security mechanism can be used to make people LESS secure.
Maybe someone should have thought their way through this BEFORE making https and certs essentially MANDATORY.
Nobody uses 1600 tabs. Sorry, at best, you use maybe, MAYBE 1-3% of those with any regularity. The rest is just masturbation.
What's REALLY upsetting with the latest versions are the nasty memory leaks and slowdowns in FF since the multi-threading was enabled.
With just three tabs open (for this example Slashdot, Facebook and YouTube, but I can reproduce the behavior with any number of sites), the browser begins exhibiting multiple tens of seconds of input lag after as little as 5 minutes of browsing. So you click on something and wait, and wait, and wait. And it "eventually" does it.
It's getting so bad that I'm going to HAVE to stop using Firefox if it continues.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm tired of all the hype about "Hyperloop".
The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
They haven't even had a successful run of the full test track yet. Even with their proprietary pod.
But he's prancing around as if it were a fully realized product, getting handshake deals for building hyperloops all over the place.
It's looking a lot like ship-and-patch to me.
Which means, with something like this, people are going to have to DIE before someone takes a serious look at it and sees what a boondoggle is could be.
And the way things are progressing, that's EXACTLY what's going to happen.
No way man! Nuclear = EVIL! So anything he says will be okay!
How many people died because of Three Mile Island?
None.
As for contamination. You DO realize exactly how much Thorium and Uranium are present in the ground beneath your feet right? Where do you think radon gas comes from?
Done SAFELY, nuclear is essentially carbon-free.
And the problems with current nuclear can be solved by moving to a different reactor model. One that's inherently safe and runs no risk of steam explosions.
Unlike the solid fuel reactors, it burns ALL of it's fuel, so you're not pulling fuel that's only 10-15% spent.
And while the byproducts which aren't medically or scientifically useful are VERY radioactive, they're only this way for short periods of time.
And even if it was megaton quantities (like the waste from solid fuel reactors from the past 60 years), it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what's gone up the flues of coal-fired plants.
No. Sorry, but YOU are the one who doesn't understand what base load is.
Wind and solar, BY THEIR NATURE, are NOT continuous supplies.
Thanks for playing.
The problem right now is that the nuclear regulation environment is a byzantine money pit.
Note: I'm not saying nuclear doesn't need regulation. It does. It needs oversight to make sure that bad decisions aren't being made simply because they save money.
But the entire process to even just TALK to NREC has become this ridiculously expensive game of cat and mouse.
And that's even before the pointless NIMBY lawsuits and protests and the like.
No. Reactors are not bombs. And they lack the capability of detonating.
What happened with all three reactor failures in history were first failures of the pressurized water cooling safety systems.
This is kind why it'd be a good idea to move away from water cooled reactors.
Funny, there's still a bustling metropolitan area around Three Mile Island, just south of Harrisburg, PA. And there are occupied homes, today, less than quarter mile away from Reactor 2.
There have been a grand whopping THREE meltdowns in the history of commercial nuclear power (1956-present)..
TMI: Which killed nobody was a combination of bad design and human error.
Chernobyl: Combination of bad design and human stupidity.
Fukushima: The problem at Fukushima was cost-cutting by those jackasses at TEPCO. Had they raised the height of the sea wall, or placed the backup generators someplace OTHER than the basement, Fukushima would never have happened.
You want to play with transuranics? Go ahead. Just put rubber gloves on. Not so much to protect you. But to protect the stuff you're playing with from contamination.
The stuff that's super long-term radioactive isn't terribly radioactive in terms of intensity.
Sure, you don't want to drink it or eat it. But handling it won't kill you. Or even give you a significant exposure above background.
As for "these issues outliving us". Well, in the proper sort of reactor, we can actually burn off most of the truly long-lived stuff.
And while most of what's left over from that is HIGHLY radioactive, most of it's gone in hours/days/weeks. With only a small amount (absolutely miniscule compared to the megatons of nuclear waste we have today) lasting longer than a human lifetime.
Right now the big issue with burying spend fuel (stuff that's only used a tiny fraction of it's total power ) is that it will be that way for millennia.
And can we trust our engineering for that long?
As opposed to the alternative. Building a facility that can hold stuff that'll be gone in 100 years? We KNOW we can do something like that...
You forgot 4: The anti-nuke crowd has poisoned public and legislative opinion of nuclear to the point where building the reactor is the cheap part. All the permitting and protests and lawsuits and the like are where billions are lost.
No. A variable power source (wind/solar/etc) CANNOT be baseload.
Because baseload is the minimum required 24x7x365.
Wind is not 24x7x365.
Solar is not 24x7x365.
Maybe tacking in battery. But then you have to factor in replacing batteries every 7-10 years.
Or you're talking about a plant that's solar-PLUS-something else (natural gas, oil, etc) or wind-PLUS-something else.
And that's a completely different animal.
Coal is a baseload power source (hence the term "brown power").
Oil is a baseload power source.
Natural gas can be a baseload power source.
Nuclear is a baseload power source.
Hydro is a baseload power source.
Geothermal is a baseload power source.
Then, to meet demand, you have peaking plants. Which can also be coal, oil, NG or even hydro. They aren't meant to be up and running 24x7. So they come up for a few hours during the day and shut down in the evening.
The problem with nuclear right now is that the US "picked a winner" in nuclear by going with solid fuel fast reactors.
While the reactors themselves aren't terribly huge, the bulk of a plant are the water cooling towers and all the plumbing for the safety systems.
And, contrary to popular belief, REACTORS do NOT "blow up". What you're seeing in these cases are STEAM explosions from the cooling systems.
In an MSR style reactor, most of that crap is done away with. Because you don't need it and aren't using water to cool the reactor.
If you need to shut the reactor down, you simply pop the plug to the reactor's dump tank and the reactor shuts down.
As for pricing of power. Not going to speak to that.
I'll simply point to power density.
Sure! Let's simply consume the world's yearly supply of new batteries every 7 years for the rest of forever!
Actually no. Most of it is stored in open air casks.
And most of it is only very mildly radioactive. Hell, you could hold it in a rubber-gloved hand. The issue is that it's like this for millions of years.
The main problem is the way the US government "picked a winner" with solid fuel reactors and solid fuels that are "done" after only giving up a tiny percentage of energy in "fast" reactors.
It makes far more sense to go with MSR reactors where the fuel is kept in until it and most of the byproducts cook down.
And while we're still producing waste at the end, it's only a tiny fraction of what's produced today (and we can cook off the stuff we have today too). And while most of it is MUCH more radioactive, the majority of it breaks down in months and years, with a tiny remainder that'll require something in the neighborhood of a human lifetime to break down.
Even so, nuclear produces less waste. It produces more CONCENTRATED waste. Rather than blowing it up a stack and into the atmosphere where it becomes somebody else's problem.
Then why not invest in MSR setups?
They're smaller, denser and far less complicated to set up than solid fuel reactors. Therefore, cheaper in the long run.
They don't require vast quantities of water because they don't use water to cool the reactor or run the turbine.
They can burn existing nuclear waste and they can burn existing mine tailings that had to be stored because they're high in thorium.
They can even be built in such a way that an entire reactor, dump tank and turbine header can be built as a single unit the size of a tractor trailer. Then plugged into a concrete pit like a battery.
Let's be real here. NO form of energy generation is truly "clean".
And if we could get some modern MSR facilities built, we could get rid of a bunch of the byproducts of solid fuel reactors.
Then, instead of stuff that's mildly radioactive for millions of years, we'd cook off most of the fuel and be left with stuff that's far more radioactive, but decays out within the span of a human lifetime (with the bulk going inert in a couple years).
And we can do it with NO new mining at all years. Why? Because of all the preserved mine tailings that are thorium rich.
On top of that, because an MSR removes the need for water cooling or a steam turbine, facilities can safer, smaller, denser and cheaper. Pretty much to the point where an entire reactor and turbine assembly can be unitized and plugged into a facility like batteries.
You were on the right track with "privacy" and "security".
Then you lost it at "reasonable controls on behavior".
Why? Because "reasonable" is an entirely arbitrary value that's different for everyone. See "reasonable gun control laws".
So what YOU might find "reasonable", others might find oppressive.
And who's to say that abuse of the "reasonable behavior" systems couldn't be used to deprive someone of innocent of equal access/footing?
And I'm sorry, but trying to rely on something "built by hackers" on top of "open wifi access points" is idiotic.
This is TOR, and it's already a shitty alternative that's totally compromised.
The type of network being talked about pretty much needs to be a ground-up implementation.
No, actually it would eventually become a self-correcting issue.
As market share increases, it's desirability as a target platform goes UP.
Biggest factor in the Mac malware gambit is still market penetration.
No. What the Mac is, is more resistant to WINDOWS-based viruses and WINDOWS-based malware.
By it's nature, it's vulnerability to viruses and malware differs from that of Windows. It is NOT, as some dummies would claim, "immune".
Question: If you're not employed, and not looking for employment, how are you "part of the workforce"?
#ItWasAJoke
The Democratic Party: Because We Want To Appear To Care More...
Okay Google (and their lickspittles at Mozilla) decide to wall off stock http sites behind "danger" messages.
So anyone providing more than a cursory "I love me" page website has to run out and get a cert.
Let's Encrypt steps up and makes the process easy and mostly seamless.
Now people are bitching because they didn't draw out the process and make it more painful.
And they're worried about how a security mechanism can be used to make people LESS secure.
Maybe someone should have thought their way through this BEFORE making https and certs essentially MANDATORY.
Nobody uses 1600 tabs. Sorry, at best, you use maybe, MAYBE 1-3% of those with any regularity. The rest is just masturbation.
What's REALLY upsetting with the latest versions are the nasty memory leaks and slowdowns in FF since the multi-threading was enabled.
With just three tabs open (for this example Slashdot, Facebook and YouTube, but I can reproduce the behavior with any number of sites), the browser begins exhibiting multiple tens of seconds of input lag after as little as 5 minutes of browsing. So you click on something and wait, and wait, and wait. And it "eventually" does it.
It's getting so bad that I'm going to HAVE to stop using Firefox if it continues.