Precisely, if the risks of an activity cannot be rigorously evaluated, then it should not be declared safe. Any professional certification of an activity requires evaluations. If serious evaluations are impossible then the activity cannot be certified, therefore responsible deciders should discard it.
It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
The result of sufficient lobbying is that everybody is believing paying cheap nuclear electricity, while in reality everybody (or the descendants) take a chance paying huge future costs. Just like Japanese now do for the next decades.
Humans do errors all the time, and by errors I mean in the broad sense (wars, corruption, mere stupidity,...). Several percents of the population has over years mental problems which can not be detected in advance. This is incompatible with an energy production method which requires perfect people, especially for time spans exceedings a generation. Fukushima, Tchernobyle, TMI all illustrate this simple fact. And for sure, such accidents will repeat as humans do not improve.
I trust insurance companies that they have done the math: no one is willing to insure nuclear plants to an acceptable cost; this is rather unique in the industry and shows that when the proper insurance costs are factored in, nuclear energy is not economically justifiable.
Fukushima and Tchernobyl come to mind of course. Do you realize that making an area like (40 miles)^2 unusable amounts to not a small cost on the economic point of view, or ruining the lives of 10'000's of displaced people is not a small nuisance?
Presently nuclear energy is the energy method having the largest impact in the far future (~100'000 years), as the nuclear wastes will require to be watched for a long time. Do you realize that such a timespan is comparable to the total time homo sapiens existed on Earth? (The salary of a single engineer over 100'000 yr corresponds already to the total building cost of a nuclear plant).
Can you imagine what will happen when the next global war occurs? And it will occur well before a century for sure. Each nuclear power plant will be an easy target, at the least a serious menace for those countries foolish enough to have forgot how stupid and nasty human beings may be.
I miss the instant boot of Apple ][ and the immediate access/modification to any memory location as well as the possibility to write interactively assembly programs with the built-in "monitor". It was a great machine to learn in detail how a computer works .
There is competition from Jacket: http://www.accelereyes.com/products/jacket This product is more expensive but more effective than Matlab. I tried the free trial and found it much more effective than Matlab. Alas the cost is too high to justify Jacket in my case, I would rather buy more hardware instead.
-179 C is the surface temperature. As on Earth temperature rises with depth because heat is generated inside, by radioactivity in Earth, and mainly by Saturn tidal friction in Titan. If the core tempeature is much higher than 100 C then there is necessarily a depth range at which the temperature is between the fusion and boiling temperature of water, which means liquid water can exist. In the quoted news article it is not explained why only water and not other molecules would provides the liquid conditions. I presume water is a learned guess from what is known in other bodies of the solar system.
Note that the solar system co-rotates with the Milky Way matter around it, so the 225-250 Myr period with respect to an inertial frame is not relevant for dramatic effects. The sometimes discussed effect linked with massive extinction is the periodic crossing of the Milky Way plane, which occurs about every 35 Myr. The last great extinction ocurred 65 Myr ago, so one should have seen at least one or two of these plane crossing.
Another possibility is the solar system crossing spiral arms, with period of order of 150 Myr, but this is debated.
"Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity."
Not necessarily. By now there are several ways to store energy produced by intermittent solar or wind energy. One interesting possibility is hydrogen. For example McPhy (mcphy.com) makes such storage tanks with efficient conversion of energy to hydrogen and vice versa. Seeing how fast such solutions arrive these recent years in the area of sustainable energy production and storage, it looks as if within a decade solar energy might become cheaper than coal or nuclear energy.
These nuclear accidents illustrate clearly why nuclear energy is a plain wrong option. The companies running them, even when big, are unable to be insured to the level allowing full potential damage compensation. Like large banks they are too big to fail, but do fail eventually. Nuclear power has just a too high risk (probability of accident times damage cost) (even if rare) that any insurance consortium is willing to accept covering the full cost.
At the time these plants were built it was common to evaluate the risks with classical statistics, assuming normal (Gaussian) distribution of accidents. A normal distribution has well defined first and second moments, which allows to evaluate the accident cost expectation, and typical fluctuations to the norm. But later thinking (for example by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals) made more realistic statistics more popular. It turns out that many natural phenomena like earthquakes have often long tails, which means their distribution is NOT normal. This changes completely the evaluation of the distribution moments. Typically these moments diverge (are formally infinite!), which means that no sane insurance should accept such risks. Thus no responsible politician should accept that the country becomes the gratis insurance of a private company.
RedHat exercises the GNU freedom by selling for money a distribution consisting mostly of free programs made by others. CentOS provides a distribution gratis (and doing this is certainly costing them something in term of work and servers) based on this huge work mostly made by others than RedHat. What is the problem exactly?
Theoretically there are still other ways to double data flow while keeping the same frequency. Using circular polarization one sender can emit clockwise rotating waves, the other sender the opposite. Linear polarization can be destroyed by wave reflections on obstacles, but afaik circular polarization is rather immune.
The naive ex-president wanted to participate to a gala evening in Geneva, Switzerland, on Feb. 12th. Under the risk of being arrested for violation of international treaties about torture, his visit has been canceled today.
The US media like to give as motive threats of protesters...
Viewing the video, I had the impression that the first stage was unable to keep the rocket straight, which caused a high lateral pressure on the rocket, especially at the top. The top was then taken off by this lateral wind. For a long time the rocket kept the same inclination angle but was progressively destroyed. So the destruction appears to have been caused by a power drop in the first stage, not by a direct explosion.
Chemical reactions are easier on Earth than nuclear reactions because the required threshold energy to start reactions is lower by about 1 million. The residual radioactive elements on Earth can transmute atoms, but their amount is tiny. But you are right, the sub-atomic particles that can be easily exchanged are the outer electrons, so we can expect most atoms on Earth had some promiscuitous exchange with others.
The water we drink must have been reprocessed many times for eons by living beings. Remember that the amount of sedimentary rocks made of dead stuff is much larger than the total of oceans. This implies that striclty speaking each molecule has been dissociated and recombined with different oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Many O and H atoms now in water have been in other compounds (CO, H2SO4,...) for a while and vice versa.
Well, university of Arizona did contributes to this work, but from the 9 author institute list it arrives in the 8th position boooh:
1 Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland 2 Sterrewacht Leiden, P.O. Box 9513, Niels Bohrweg 2, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands 3 European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova 3107, Vitacura, Cassilla 19001, Santiago, Chile 4 European Southern Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild Strasse, 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany 5 Laboratoire dAstrophysique, Observatoire de Grenoble, Université Joseph Fourier, CNRS, BP 53, F-38041 Grenoble, France 6 Space Telesope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA 7 LESIA, UMR 8109 CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, UPMC, Université Paris-Diderot, 5 place J. Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France 8 Steward Observatory, The University of Arizona, 933 N. Cherry Ave., Tucson, AZ 85721, USA 9 Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
The orbit was *around* L2, not at L2. The orbit around L2 appears as loops with an apreciable extension wrt to the Earth-L2 distance. The paradox is that L2 is actually unstable, but orbits can be found around L2 which are stable over a sufficiently long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely, if the risks of an activity cannot be rigorously evaluated, then it should not be declared safe. Any professional certification of an activity requires evaluations. If serious evaluations are impossible then the activity cannot be certified, therefore responsible deciders should discard it.
It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
The result of sufficient lobbying is that everybody is believing paying cheap nuclear electricity, while in reality everybody (or the descendants) take a chance paying huge future costs. Just like Japanese now do for the next decades.
Humans do errors all the time, and by errors I mean in the broad sense (wars, corruption, mere stupidity, ...). Several percents of the population has over years mental problems which can not be detected in advance. This is incompatible with an energy production method which requires perfect people, especially for time spans exceedings a generation. Fukushima, Tchernobyle, TMI all illustrate this simple fact. And for sure, such accidents will repeat as humans do not improve.
I trust insurance companies that they have done the math: no one is willing to insure nuclear plants to an acceptable cost; this is rather unique in the industry and shows that when the proper insurance costs are factored in, nuclear energy is not economically justifiable.
"It has the smallest impact" ???
Fukushima and Tchernobyl come to mind of course. Do you realize that making an area like (40 miles)^2 unusable amounts to not a small cost on the economic point of view, or ruining the lives of 10'000's of displaced people is not a small nuisance?
Presently nuclear energy is the energy method having the largest impact in the far future (~100'000 years), as the nuclear wastes will require to be watched for a long time. Do you realize that such a timespan is comparable to the total time homo sapiens existed on Earth? (The salary of a single engineer over 100'000 yr corresponds already to the total building cost of a nuclear plant).
Can you imagine what will happen when the next global war occurs? And it will occur well before a century for sure. Each nuclear power plant will be an easy target, at the least a serious menace for those countries foolish enough to have forgot how stupid and nasty human beings may be.
Big bang, supernovae, dynamites, I feel a compulsive obsession in the Nobel club.
I miss the instant boot of Apple ][ and the immediate access/modification to
any memory location as well as the possibility to write interactively assembly
programs with the built-in "monitor". It was a great machine to learn in detail
how a computer works .
There is competition from Jacket:
http://www.accelereyes.com/products/jacket
This product is more expensive but more effective than Matlab.
I tried the free trial and found it much more effective than Matlab.
Alas the cost is too high to justify Jacket in my case, I would rather
buy more hardware instead.
-179 C is the surface temperature. As on Earth temperature rises with depth because heat is generated inside, by radioactivity in Earth, and mainly by Saturn tidal friction in Titan. If the core tempeature is much higher than 100 C then there is necessarily a depth range at which the temperature is between the fusion and boiling temperature of water, which means liquid water can exist. In the quoted news article it is not explained why only water and not other molecules would provides the liquid conditions. I presume water is a learned guess from what is known in other bodies of the solar system.
Note that the solar system co-rotates with the Milky Way matter around it, so the 225-250 Myr period with respect to an inertial frame is not relevant for dramatic effects. The sometimes discussed effect linked with massive extinction is the periodic crossing of the Milky Way plane, which occurs about every 35 Myr. The last great extinction ocurred 65 Myr ago, so one should have seen at least one or two of these plane crossing.
Another possibility is the solar system crossing spiral arms, with period of order of 150 Myr, but this is debated.
What if they would for once slightly innovate and put one or two Kinects in a smartphone? Could this save Nokia of a sure oblivion?
My guess is that one of the following number is used:
- average *acceleration change* as felt by passenger,
- average energy transfert in body,
on a standard bumpy road.
"Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity."
Not necessarily. By now there are several ways to store energy produced by intermittent solar or wind energy. One interesting possibility is hydrogen. For example McPhy (mcphy.com) makes such storage tanks with efficient conversion of energy to hydrogen and vice versa. Seeing how fast such solutions arrive these recent years in the area of sustainable energy production and storage, it looks as if within a decade solar energy might become cheaper than coal or nuclear energy.
Starting a war against a powerful country is rarely not going without unexpected outcomes.
These nuclear accidents illustrate clearly why nuclear energy is a plain wrong option. The companies running them, even when big, are unable to be insured to the level allowing full potential damage compensation. Like large banks they are too big to fail, but do fail eventually. Nuclear power has just a too high risk (probability of accident times damage cost) (even if rare) that any insurance consortium is willing to accept covering the full cost.
At the time these plants were built it was common to evaluate the risks with classical statistics, assuming normal (Gaussian) distribution of accidents. A normal distribution has well defined first and second moments, which allows to evaluate the accident cost expectation, and typical fluctuations to the norm. But later thinking (for example by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals) made more realistic statistics more popular. It turns out that many natural phenomena like earthquakes have often long tails, which means their distribution is NOT normal. This changes completely the evaluation of the distribution moments. Typically these moments diverge (are formally infinite!), which means that no sane insurance should accept such risks. Thus no responsible politician should accept that the country becomes the gratis insurance of a private company.
RedHat exercises the GNU freedom by selling for money a distribution consisting mostly of free programs made by others. CentOS provides a distribution gratis (and doing this is certainly costing them something in term of work and servers) based on this huge work mostly made by others than RedHat. What is the problem exactly?
Theoretically there are still other ways to double data flow while keeping the same frequency. Using circular polarization one sender can emit clockwise rotating waves, the other sender the opposite. Linear polarization can be destroyed by wave reflections on obstacles, but afaik circular polarization is rather immune.
The naive ex-president wanted to participate to a gala evening in Geneva, Switzerland, on Feb. 12th. Under the risk of being arrested for violation of international treaties about torture, his visit has been canceled today.
The US media like to give as motive threats of protesters...
Is your worldview blocked to last century?
I remember distinctly that the Apple ][ would execute self-modifying op-codes in the first 256 byte memory page.
Viewing the video, I had the impression that the first stage was unable to keep the rocket straight, which caused a high lateral pressure on the rocket, especially at the top. The top was then taken off by this lateral wind. For a long time the rocket kept the same inclination angle but was progressively destroyed.
So the destruction appears to have been caused by a power drop in the first stage, not by a direct explosion.
Remember superconductors have zero resistance.
Chemical reactions are easier on Earth than nuclear reactions because the required threshold energy to start reactions is lower by about 1 million. The residual radioactive elements on Earth can transmute atoms, but their amount is tiny. But you are right, the sub-atomic particles that can be easily exchanged are the outer electrons, so we can expect most atoms on Earth had some promiscuitous exchange with others.
The water we drink must have been reprocessed many times for eons by living beings. ...) for a while and vice versa.
Remember that the amount of sedimentary rocks made of dead stuff is much larger than
the total of oceans. This implies that striclty speaking each molecule has been dissociated
and recombined with different oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Many O and H atoms now in
water have been in other compounds (CO, H2SO4,
Well, university of Arizona did contributes to this work, but from the 9 author institute list it arrives in the 8th position
boooh:
1 Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland
2 Sterrewacht Leiden, P.O. Box 9513, Niels Bohrweg 2, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
3 European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova 3107, Vitacura, Cassilla 19001, Santiago, Chile
4 European Southern Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild Strasse, 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
5 Laboratoire dAstrophysique, Observatoire de Grenoble, Université Joseph Fourier, CNRS, BP 53, F-38041 Grenoble, France
6 Space Telesope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
7 LESIA, UMR 8109 CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, UPMC, Université Paris-Diderot, 5 place J. Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France
8 Steward Observatory, The University of Arizona, 933 N. Cherry Ave., Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
9 Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
The orbit was *around* L2, not at L2. The orbit around L2 appears as loops with an apreciable extension wrt to the Earth-L2 distance.
The paradox is that L2 is actually unstable, but orbits can be found around L2 which are stable over a sufficiently long time.