Huh? I see only minor changes in the pipe. The most annoying one seems to be the removal of the 'properties' context menu item, though I'm sure an extension can add it back in.
Yes, or more precisely, the cost of giving up cell phones is so high that the evidence against them needs to be very certain, and I'm not going to panic until I see more rigorous analysis.
This opposition to cell phones is part of a much larger Luddite movement today. From cell phones, to nuclear power, to vaccination, to practically any other field of science, we're seeing large numbers of people, honestly or not, yearn to return to a supposedly simpler, less mechanized time. The desire has been around as long as technology has, but the recent greatly-accelerated pace of progress has exacerbated the problem.
Unfortunately, we'll be stuck with these people until they die. It's "common sense" for them to opposite scary new devices with atoms and wavelengths and things, and "common sense" is something acquired early in childhood and immutable thereafter. The new generation of people growing up with these things will be much less susceptible to anti-technological fear mongering.
Can someone email me a copy of the actual paper? I can't find it on the researcher's site.
The study's subjects were asked to detail their cell phone use patterns in terms of how frequently they used one, and the average length of calls. They were compared to a sample of about 1,300 healthy control subjects.
The study also found an increased risk of cancer for heavy users who lived in rural areas. Due to fewer antennas, cell phones in rural areas need to emit more radiation to communicate effectively.
Sadetzki predicts that, over time, the greatest effects will be found in heavy users and children.
While anecdotal evidence has been substantial, the consistency of the results of this study support an association between cell phone use and these tumors. The risks have been hard to prove, mainly due to the long latency period involved in cancer development, explains Sadetzki.
Controlled according to what criteria? Did he account for possible exposure to agricultural carcinogens among rural users? Inferior access to health care there? Also, self-reported studies are inherently inaccurate: it'd be far better to go by reliable numbers involving actual cell phone usage records.
The researcher also mentioned that Israelis are particular heavy users of cell phones, implying that might be one reason he was able to produce results where others have failed. What about other reasons Israelis might be different, such as exposure to constant warfare, or dust from the Negev?
We shouldn't jump the gun on this study:
Many researchers have tried to find correlations between cell phone use and cancer. He's the only one who's had any success. Even the best-designed studies have a chance of producing Type I and Type II errors (false positives and false negatives). With enough studies, you'll eventually find a spurious result. See publication bias.
Studies that purport to show results when many other have failed are suspect for other reasons too.
Going by the article, the study does not seem very well-controlled
In short, given that cell phones are utterly important to our lives today, I'm going to have to see a lot more independent evidence before I even begin to suspect that they're actually dangerous.
Some reactors can work with natural, unenriched uranium. Others (light water reactors primarily) need the fuel to be enriched, but only up to the 3% level.
Making a crude bomb, on the other hand, requires a minimum enrichment of around 20%-30%. For a good bomb, up to 100%. The critical mass necessary for a chain reaction goes up as the enrichment percentage drops, approaching infinity around 20% (IIRC).
Luckily for us you need a large dose (many litres) to see any effects in humans.
In order for heavy water to be toxic to mammals, approximately 50% of our body weight would need to be replaced by the substance. You could put work in an office where heavy water is in the water cooler and drink it for years without ill effects.
Have a source for that plutonium figure? Even if you're right, that is a tiny amount. You have no sense of scale, especially when you compare the waste to other industrial products. You're using special pleading to treat nuclear waste specially.
As for the greenhouse gasses --- you know perfectly well that the old CFC-based enrichment processes are obsolete and that they're being phased out. The CFC process is being used at one facility in the US, and newer designs are coming online. What you're doing is equivalent to attacking refrigeration in general because chlorofluorocarbons used to be used. It's disingenuous.
Speaking of being disingenuous --- your 0.3% quote is a lie: first of all, you must be referring to the percent of U235 in natural uranium (even if our number is a bit off). That's where the energy is. It's just dishonest to claim that we're extracting 0.3% of the available energy when only that much of the substance is fissile and has energy to extract. Second, we can do better with fast breeder reactors, which make the rest of that uranium useful by transmuting it.
And of course you need a quite a bit of seawater to extract uranium. However, 1) we're nowhere near needing to do that just yet, and 2) there's more seawater than you imagine.
And as for your containment facility in granite --- what would be geologically stable enough for you? Yucca mountain is perfectly stable by any sane person's standards. It's only hysterical opposition like yours that leads to it being dubbed seismically unfit. Would one tremor disqualify a site? One fault line, no matter how ancient? You might as well dictate the Archangel Michael stand guard at the door. It's ridiculous.
We can treat nuclear waste like any other form of toxic industrial output. It's not that terrible.
Second, even the reactors that require enriched uranium only need to enrich it up to 3% or so, not all the way up to 100%. You only need to enrich the uranium that high to make a bomb.
My figures were for real uranium you'd actually use. 100% enriched uranium has an energy density closer to 88 million megajoules per kilogram.
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of power we can extract from nuclear. Coal has a far lower energy density and it's still very EROEI positive.
Natural uranium can be used to fuel both low- and high-power reactors. Historically, graphite moderated reactors and heavy water moderated reactors have been fueled with natural uranium in the pure metal (U) or uranium dioxide (UO2) ceramic forms, however experimental fuelings with uranium trioxide (UO3) and triuranium octaoxide, (U3O8) have shown promise.
Stop making unfounded assertions. As for my link being an "advertisement" --- you're implying that it's dishonest. Where, exactly, is it wrong? What specific portions are incorrect? Where is its reasoning faulty?
How big are uranium mines, the roads used to transport the uranium, the refining plants, the reprocessing plants, and the mountain that is needed to store the waste for several millenia?
Well, let's see. Coal has an energy density of about 24 megajoules per kilogram, and uranium has a density of 560 megajoules per kilogram. Uranium comes from its ore uraninite, which is UO2 (78% uranium by weight). So let's adjust uranium's energy density to 441 megajoules per kilogram to make up for it.
The density of coal is about 1.05 g/cm^3, while the density of uraninite is 8.725 g/cm^3, that is, uraninite is 8.3 times denser than coal on a weight basis. It also has 18.375 times as much energy.
So, taking into account both the higher density and higher energy density of nuclear fuel, we need 1/(8.3 * 18.375), or 1/152 the infrastructure we need to mine the equivalent amount of coal.
Let me repeat that: for the same amount of energy, we need 153 times as much infrastructure to get it from coal instead of uranium.
(lots of little modern submarine style reactors instead of one big dangerous dinosaur from Westinghouse)
Your mind is still in the "small is beautiful" rut. Nuclear power plants are big because big plants are more efficient and easier to regulate, which makes them cheaper and safer. Hyperion is a crock.
The heat our civilization directly produces is utterly insignificant in terms of climate change. The issue is that our carbon emissions act as greenhouse gasses and alter the entire earth's energy balance, greatly amplifying the heat-trapping effects of the atmosphere.
It's solar radiation that's warming the planet, not the heat we directly produce.
This plant doesn't cause any carbon emissions. Even if it does warm the atmosphere, the effect is insignificant next to the greenhouse gas emissions that don't need to happen to generate the same amount of power.
? I agree that humanity needs to try to level off population growth, and maybe even try to gradually decline it, over the course of a few generations, down to 4-6 Billion.
Where do you get that figure? Why work to limit the population to that arbitrary figure? What about the happiness of the billions of people who'll never be born?
Your ass is not a very good normative policy machine.
So tell me then, why did the price of Uranium go up?
Because that's how it works. You start with some initial reserves. You mine them cheaply. When you start to run out of reserves, prices go up. The high prices cause exploration. New mines open up, and prices go down. Repeat ad infinitum.
Also, we've actually been using decommisioned nuclear weapons as fuel, which is cheaper than anything else because the uranium there is already mined and enriched.
Regardless, the actual cost of fuel is such a small part of a nuclear power plant's budget that the price could rise twentyfold before you'd notice it at the meter.
the good stuff is scarce
It's called enrichment. Besides, if you're willing to use heavy water (which is non-toxic), you can even use natural uranium in a reactor.
The "good stuff" isn't scarce, and the article I linked to provided plenty of numbers that support my position. Why don't you come up with some of your own?
The total volume is waste is tiny, and it's not that dangerous. It's not more dangerous than the output of other industrial sites like oil refineries and solvent plants. Considering that the carbon footprint of the nuclear power cycle is staggeringly low (even taking into account plant construction and uranium mining), nuclear power is the best and most obvious solution to climate change. We don't even need thorium reactors. There's enough conventional nuclear fuel to last millennia even without reprocessing. We can extract the stuff from seawater.
The issue here is political: the general populace is frightened of political power due to a 40 year standoff involving nuclear weapons and one terrible Russian nuclear accident. The waste "problem" is fear-mongering.
How can you tell? Ask a nuclear opponent what his criteria for "solving" the waste problem are. What containment technology would win him over, even in principle? You'll find he won't accept anything short of the magical transformation of nuclear waste into hemp.
Education and sanity are slowly winning, but it will be a long time until nuclear power is accepted again here. Until then, we're going to be stuck with coal power slowly strangling our planet.
Though science, we can provide a first-world lifestyle for all those people. We can build enough nuclear plants to provide enough energy to supply them all with power, and desalinate seawater, and still have plenty left over.
Nuclear fuel is that abundant. You can even extract it from seawater. Growth problems go away with the application of enough electricity.
Besides: population growth is self-limiting. Affluent people have fewer children. As we see more people enjoy a first world lifestyle, with its education and contraceptives, we'll see worldwide population sizes level off just as it they have in first world nations.
Slashdot Mirror
No language is object-oriented.
Some programs are.
You can write an object-oriented program in practically any language.
Some kind of runtime code dispatching tool (like defgeneric, function pointers, or first-class function objects) is helpful.
Huh? I see only minor changes in the pipe. The most annoying one seems to be the removal of the 'properties' context menu item, though I'm sure an extension can add it back in.
Pure U235, yes. I'm talking about natural uranium.
Yes, or more precisely, the cost of giving up cell phones is so high that the evidence against them needs to be very certain, and I'm not going to panic until I see more rigorous analysis.
My email is far from useless. Email address obfuscation is security theater.
This opposition to cell phones is part of a much larger Luddite movement today. From cell phones, to nuclear power, to vaccination, to practically any other field of science, we're seeing large numbers of people, honestly or not, yearn to return to a supposedly simpler, less mechanized time. The desire has been around as long as technology has, but the recent greatly-accelerated pace of progress has exacerbated the problem.
Unfortunately, we'll be stuck with these people until they die. It's "common sense" for them to opposite scary new devices with atoms and wavelengths and things, and "common sense" is something acquired early in childhood and immutable thereafter. The new generation of people growing up with these things will be much less susceptible to anti-technological fear mongering.
Can someone email me a copy of the actual paper? I can't find it on the researcher's site.
Controlled according to what criteria? Did he account for possible exposure to agricultural carcinogens among rural users? Inferior access to health care there? Also, self-reported studies are inherently inaccurate: it'd be far better to go by reliable numbers involving actual cell phone usage records.
The researcher also mentioned that Israelis are particular heavy users of cell phones, implying that might be one reason he was able to produce results where others have failed. What about other reasons Israelis might be different, such as exposure to constant warfare, or dust from the Negev?
We shouldn't jump the gun on this study:
In short, given that cell phones are utterly important to our lives today, I'm going to have to see a lot more independent evidence before I even begin to suspect that they're actually dangerous.
Some reactors can work with natural, unenriched uranium. Others (light water reactors primarily) need the fuel to be enriched, but only up to the 3% level.
Making a crude bomb, on the other hand, requires a minimum enrichment of around 20%-30%. For a good bomb, up to 100%. The critical mass necessary for a chain reaction goes up as the enrichment percentage drops, approaching infinity around 20% (IIRC).
In order for heavy water to be toxic to mammals, approximately 50% of our body weight would need to be replaced by the substance. You could put work in an office where heavy water is in the water cooler and drink it for years without ill effects.
It's about as toxic as table salt.
Have a source for that plutonium figure? Even if you're right, that is a tiny amount. You have no sense of scale, especially when you compare the waste to other industrial products. You're using special pleading to treat nuclear waste specially.
As for the greenhouse gasses --- you know perfectly well that the old CFC-based enrichment processes are obsolete and that they're being phased out. The CFC process is being used at one facility in the US, and newer designs are coming online. What you're doing is equivalent to attacking refrigeration in general because chlorofluorocarbons used to be used. It's disingenuous.
Speaking of being disingenuous --- your 0.3% quote is a lie: first of all, you must be referring to the percent of U235 in natural uranium (even if our number is a bit off). That's where the energy is. It's just dishonest to claim that we're extracting 0.3% of the available energy when only that much of the substance is fissile and has energy to extract. Second, we can do better with fast breeder reactors, which make the rest of that uranium useful by transmuting it.
And of course you need a quite a bit of seawater to extract uranium. However, 1) we're nowhere near needing to do that just yet, and 2) there's more seawater than you imagine.
And as for your containment facility in granite --- what would be geologically stable enough for you? Yucca mountain is perfectly stable by any sane person's standards. It's only hysterical opposition like yours that leads to it being dubbed seismically unfit. Would one tremor disqualify a site? One fault line, no matter how ancient? You might as well dictate the Archangel Michael stand guard at the door. It's ridiculous.
We can treat nuclear waste like any other form of toxic industrial output. It's not that terrible.
You're twisting the facts and you know it.
First of all, some reactors can run on unenriched uranium.
Second, even the reactors that require enriched uranium only need to enrich it up to 3% or so, not all the way up to 100%. You only need to enrich the uranium that high to make a bomb.
My figures were for real uranium you'd actually use. 100% enriched uranium has an energy density closer to 88 million megajoules per kilogram.
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of power we can extract from nuclear. Coal has a far lower energy density and it's still very EROEI positive.
So, [citation needed].
Sure:
Dimethylmercury is far more dangerous and it stays around a lot longer than plutonium. How about dioxins?
Like I said, nuclear waste is far from our worst pollutant.
How is that any worse than MTBE?
Stop making unfounded assertions. As for my link being an "advertisement" --- you're implying that it's dishonest. Where, exactly, is it wrong? What specific portions are incorrect? Where is its reasoning faulty?
Well, let's see. Coal has an energy density of about 24 megajoules per kilogram, and uranium has a density of 560 megajoules per kilogram. Uranium comes from its ore uraninite, which is UO2 (78% uranium by weight). So let's adjust uranium's energy density to 441 megajoules per kilogram to make up for it.
The density of coal is about 1.05 g/cm^3, while the density of uraninite is 8.725 g/cm^3, that is, uraninite is 8.3 times denser than coal on a weight basis. It also has 18.375 times as much energy.
So, taking into account both the higher density and higher energy density of nuclear fuel, we need 1/(8.3 * 18.375), or 1/152 the infrastructure we need to mine the equivalent amount of coal.
Let me repeat that: for the same amount of energy, we need 153 times as much infrastructure to get it from coal instead of uranium.
Where did you copy and paste that from? Did you even read the linked-to article?
The entire point is that nuclear fuel has been so cheap, and there's been so little exploration, that going by current proven reserves is a farce.
Your mind is still in the "small is beautiful" rut. Nuclear power plants are big because big plants are more efficient and easier to regulate, which makes them cheaper and safer. Hyperion is a crock.
You people have no sense of scale.
The heat our civilization directly produces is utterly insignificant in terms of climate change. The issue is that our carbon emissions act as greenhouse gasses and alter the entire earth's energy balance, greatly amplifying the heat-trapping effects of the atmosphere.
It's solar radiation that's warming the planet, not the heat we directly produce.
This plant doesn't cause any carbon emissions. Even if it does warm the atmosphere, the effect is insignificant next to the greenhouse gas emissions that don't need to happen to generate the same amount of power.
Where do you get that figure? Why work to limit the population to that arbitrary figure? What about the happiness of the billions of people who'll never be born?
Your ass is not a very good normative policy machine.
Because that's how it works. You start with some initial reserves. You mine them cheaply. When you start to run out of reserves, prices go up. The high prices cause exploration. New mines open up, and prices go down. Repeat ad infinitum.
Also, we've actually been using decommisioned nuclear weapons as fuel, which is cheaper than anything else because the uranium there is already mined and enriched.
Regardless, the actual cost of fuel is such a small part of a nuclear power plant's budget that the price could rise twentyfold before you'd notice it at the meter.
It's called enrichment. Besides, if you're willing to use heavy water (which is non-toxic), you can even use natural uranium in a reactor.
The "good stuff" isn't scarce, and the article I linked to provided plenty of numbers that support my position. Why don't you come up with some of your own?
The total volume is waste is tiny, and it's not that dangerous. It's not more dangerous than the output of other industrial sites like oil refineries and solvent plants. Considering that the carbon footprint of the nuclear power cycle is staggeringly low (even taking into account plant construction and uranium mining), nuclear power is the best and most obvious solution to climate change. We don't even need thorium reactors. There's enough conventional nuclear fuel to last millennia even without reprocessing. We can extract the stuff from seawater.
The issue here is political: the general populace is frightened of political power due to a 40 year standoff involving nuclear weapons and one terrible Russian nuclear accident. The waste "problem" is fear-mongering.
How can you tell? Ask a nuclear opponent what his criteria for "solving" the waste problem are. What containment technology would win him over, even in principle? You'll find he won't accept anything short of the magical transformation of nuclear waste into hemp.
Education and sanity are slowly winning, but it will be a long time until nuclear power is accepted again here. Until then, we're going to be stuck with coal power slowly strangling our planet.
I don't accept your premise.
(Or, I find your lack of faith disturbing.)
Though science, we can provide a first-world lifestyle for all those people. We can build enough nuclear plants to provide enough energy to supply them all with power, and desalinate seawater, and still have plenty left over.
Nuclear fuel is that abundant. You can even extract it from seawater. Growth problems go away with the application of enough electricity.
Besides: population growth is self-limiting. Affluent people have fewer children. As we see more people enjoy a first world lifestyle, with its education and contraceptives, we'll see worldwide population sizes level off just as it they have in first world nations.
There's a huge amount of nuclear fuel available. Nuclear fuel supply is not a problem.