The 8086 family including the 8088 8-bit bus version were available to buy in commercial quantities at a time when the MC68000 was still a hangar queen with dev boards running at half the speed of the planned production machines (we tried overclocking our dev board from 4MHz to the production speed of 8MHz, didn't work). The Z8000 was even more of a pipe dream.
In addition the 8086/8088 worked with all the 8080-family bus chips like the serial port, parallel port, interrupt controller, 8087 maths chip etc. The MC68k had to fake all that functionality with separate and expensive silicon (no affordable FPGA chips back then). Software -- the 8086 was deliberately designed with an 8080-family structure of registers and memory access internally which made it easy to port existing CP/M code over to the new platform and Intel wrote compilers and provided other tools to make that job easy. The MC68k was a dream to write new code for but it took a lot more effort to get something, anything working on it.
That sort of operation means a single coax or fiber cable pull, a modem unit at either end and an ongoing contract with the school or other commercial customers that could run for decades rolling over each billing period on automatic payments. $300/month is a recipe to print money for the supplier even with the SLA support costs included.
Britain is half-way through a mild winter, the fourth-mildest on record. We had a series of wet and windy storms blow in from the Atlantic in December, lots of rain and flooding but temperatures have remained above freezing even in central Scotland which is at about the same latitude as Baffin Bay for comparison. No frosts here which is very unusual, we normally get periods of below-freezing temperatures starting in early November. Where are these places in Europe getting unseasonal frosts?
Nope, it's Win8.1 64-bit, 8GB of RAM etc. I'm running one of the DOOM clones (zdoom I think), probably written around the W95 era so maybe 20 years old. I'm thinking of installing DOSbox to run GWBasic later just for the laughs. Are there emulators like DOSbox for Mavericks to run 68k MacOS programs? I assume so...
Compatibility mode in Win8.1 goes as far back as Win95. It's not guaranteed but I've got 15-year old Windows programs written under NT4 to work under Win8.1.
Currency is a measure of wealth and the tokens we call "currency" are effectively IOUs, usually issued by a government and circulated between people and companies to facilitate trade.
The dollar bill IOU issued by the US Federal Reserve has a couple of hundred years of "full faith and credit" behind it so people regard it as real money, tokens representing real wealth. The dollar bill issued by the US Confederacy lasted only a few years as a valid IOU and nobody in the modern world uses it in trade; the individual notes have curio value only today.
Bitcoin does not have a history of trustworthiness yet and may never have such. The creation of Bitcoin has made its creators and early adopters quite rich and that's always a bad sign in a currency token system which should be effectively neutral in its effects on individuals.
Jobs like home video editing now that everyone, just about, has a HD video camera in their tablet or the phone in their pocket and an insatiable desire to put their cat's funny antics up on Youtube.
The fact that 90% of the time a machine is idling, even when doing spreadsheets or word processing doesn't detract from the 10% of the time when it's under the hammer doing something intensive and/or memory hungry, like the spreadsheet I was working on recently importing a CSV file of meteorological data that was close to a gigabyte of raw text. Even with a 99%/1% split having the processing power on tap to get the job done in less than geological epochs is kinda useful. It's a bit like having a 200hp engine in your car even though it spends 22 hours a day parked up somewhere and rarely goes over 70 even on the interstate.
Microsoft, Apple (and Linus too) don't want to support a noddy OS for noddy hardware as well as a separate full-blown OS that can make use of all the power a modern system can supply so eventually the older versions are no longer supported. Saying that folks have tried putting Windows 8 on older hardware that falls below MS' official minimum spec and in some cases it runs OK, even beating out a native XP installation in benchmark tests.
I have the opposite problem -- my HP4850 scanner works perfectly well under Windows 8 (and XP and even Win2000 IIRC) but it's unsupported under Linux and always has been.
Win 8 and Win 7 before it have compatibility modes that allow them to run badly-behaving XP code; it's possible you could use your scanner that way. I've had some problems installing drivers for older hardware on Windows 8 but using the compatibility mode options usually got them up and running. The TWAIN interface for my HP4850 works under Win 8.1 with a 16-year-old version of Corel PhotoPaint originally meant to run under W98 as well as with Infanview, GIMP etc.
"You could turn that around by saying that XP just didn't need more than 4GB of RAM and 2TB hard disk space"
And nobody needs more than 640k of memory, right? That old quip always brought the house down as I recall...
More and more computing jobs do need more than 4GB of RAM or at least work a lot better if more than 4GB is available via a 64-bit OS. The killer upgrade is SSDs though, they are the biggest no-brainer boost-for-the-buck to productivity on the desktop/laptop and XP's inability to handle TRIM sucks.
As older hardware dies off due to component failure I don't see a lot of folks buying new kit only to reinstall XP even for the comfort of a familiar interface. Some may do so, there are niche markets out there for XP-only devices but not many.
A couple of years back I was contracted to help carry out a hardware upgrade cycle in a hospital, desktops with XP on them in the main with a few laptops here and there. Only a few machines were being heavily used to do imaging work and the like and we looked at upgrading those particular machines to XP 64-bit and giving them lots more memory (8GB or 16GB, a lot at that time) plus fitting them with SSDs but in the end the bosses just bought new hardware with Win7 preinstalled. Saved us a lot of grief...
The "limited usage" niche that makes XP hard to kill in the real world is why Chromebooks are getting marketshare, granny browsing the Web and Skype, thin clients basically. I do OCR and image processing on this desktop and I appreciate the extra RAM space, the SSD support and the other things that XP can't offer me. I could have gone with Win7 or even Vista but they go out of support in a few years time as XP is in April this year and I still expect to be using this Win8 setup then or at least something like it.
XP has a number of limitations that Win7 and Win8 supercede -- nearly all XP installs still running are the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit on RAM and a 2TB limit for disk volumes, and as far as I know XP doesn't support TRIM for SSDs. It also limits out at DX9, important for gamers and there are probably other limitations due to its age and end-of-support status.
I'm OK with Win8, I run it exclusively in desktop mode where it presents a look and feel similar to Win7. I pinned my most used programs on the taskbar so I don't need to invoke the start menu very often. I have Vistart installed as a shell replacement but I could work without it if I had to. The upgrade to 8.1 on my main machine went OK apart from the very large download (3 GB plus) needed to make it happen but I was satisfied with the original OS release (I still have it on another desktop which is waiting for a replacement motherboard).
Older electronics like the Cube tended to be made from discrete components, through-hole mounted and soldered using wave machines or even by hand and they could be easily chopped around, extra bits soldered into them or signals tapped out with the chip specs and pinouts available from a number of sources. Newer devices like tablets and modern compact laptops consist of one or two dedicated ball-grid-mounted ASICs, not easily hackable or repairable by ordinary folks without expensive reflow soldering gear, jigs etc. and of course the specs for those ASICs are commercial secrets. Even scrapping modern devices is less fun than it used to be -- I junked a Belkin wireless router recently and the only reuseable components I got off it were things like the DC power connector and a few electrolytic capacitors. On the other hand I replaced a switch on my favourite ten-year-old mouse just the other day, a like-for-like swap from another old defective mouse I had lying around.
Yep, that's why Qatar's per-capita GNP is twice that of the US. Moving money around also inflates the GNP figures hence the appearance of Monaco, Leichtenstein and the Bermudas at the top of the world tables. Japan has virtually no raw materials it can export and it's not a financial black hole for rich people to hide funds from their national governments but it still holds up well in terms of GNP per-capita due mainly to its industrial base.
Actually the EU has a higher GDP than the US, the usual marker for the strength of an economy. Mostly that's due to the greater population (505 million EU citizens compared to 310 million or so Americans) as per-capita GNP in the EU is a bit less since we don't have quite as much raw materials production (oil, gas, coal) which inflates the figures.
The US tried withholding its funding contributions for ITER during the run-up to the off-the-books trillion-dollar war in Iraq after most of the other participants in the project decided it should be built in Cadarache in France, home of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, instead of Japan. It didn't work, America decided to rejoin the project and they're pouring concrete this month in southern France for the reactor vessel's base.
WiFi in the 2.4GHz band is very close to the frequencies used in microwave ovens to cook food. Water molecules are "tuned" to that frequency and will absorb that energy most efficiently. It's part of the reason Wifi has that less-regulated spectrum assigned to it as it doesn't propagate over long distances very well especially if the air is damp or humid.
At the signal levels used in a classroom it's very unlikely to impossible a Wifi system will cause any kind of noticeable heating effect in body tissues. Having a couple of hundred watts of 2.4GHz RF bouncing around inside a commercial aircraft fuselage is starting to get into microwave oven territory though...
I have hardware in a cupboard that failed after a year or two or in some cases even earlier but I never bothered to jump through the hoops to get it fixed or replaced under warranty. I also have working computing gear that dates back to the 70s. That fact that some hardware has survived a decade doesn't mean that all (or even most) hardware will do so.
Businesses usually replace a desktop box every four or five years, laptops maybe every two or three. Any five-year-old desktop running XP or similar will have ageing components, hard drives wearing out mechanically, fans dying etc. which makes them ripe for replacement. They also probably don't support affordable amounts of RAM (typically 8 or 16GB) which can make a serious difference to performance in 64-bit operating systems -- nearly all XP installs were for the 32-bit version which limits out hard at 3.5GB. XP also has the 2TB drive volume limit and no TRIM for SSDs. Older boxes have no hardware support for SATA-3 and usually poor support for SATA generally. They may still be AGP rather than supporting any version of PCI-e, no USB 3.0 ports, the onboard video is crude and slow etc. etc.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the next big NASA space project although the funding has been on-off for the past decade, raising the final price and stretching the delivery time to 2018 and counting. It could still be cancelled by Congress to save money and help reduce the national debt. Europe is providing a number of instruments and an Ariane V launch for the project in return for access to the science.
The JWST is the last Big Space Science project on NASA's books though, all the other big observatories were cancelled or never got past the proposal stage. There are no plans to replace the Hubble with a similar visible-light observatory even in low Earth orbit, unless someone can rework those spare NRO Keyholes that were donated to NASA recently and find money to launch them.
Work out how much delta-v it takes to get a missile from the Moon's surface to somewhere, anywhere on Earth then compare that with the effort needed to fire a cruise missile from somewhere on the Earth to its target on Earth and then get back to me. After that we can discuss the pricetag and annual operating costs.
Lasers over a distance of 400,000km followed by 50km of atmospheric defocussing, right...
Absolute guess here but are you American by any chance? Any time I read militaristic stupidity and a belief that anything in space must have a military application then the odds are they're kill-crazy Americans.
Japan still has several thousand tonnes of spent fuel in store and reprocessing it would reduce the storage requirements if nothing else. I figure they will restart most of their nuclear fleet over the next few years, the cost of importing more LNG to make up for the cheap nuclear electricity they're not generating is starting to impact the country's financial bottom line.
Britain's current nuclear fleet of 12 reactors generates about 8GW or roughly 20% of our electricity needs running flat out between refuelling stoppages. One small reactor at Wylfa, the last operating Magnox unit anywhere I believe, currently producing about 420MW to the grid may be shut down next year after 40-odd years of operation when the last fresh fuel elements are expended. Plans have been announced to build two EPR1400s with a total grid capacity of 3.2GW at Hinkley Point, an old Magnox reactor site and more recently a two-reactor generating plant with a similar capacity but based on boiling-water reactors has been announced for Wylfa, both to come on-line in about ten years or so when the other reactors currently operating, nearly all AGRs, start to reach end-of-life after 40-50 years of operation. The four Hinkley Point and Wylfa new-builds by themselves will replace about 80% of the capacity currently provided by the ten AGRs, and the new designs could operate until the end of the century. There's also an 1100MW PWR at Sizewell with a projected operating life out beyond 2050.
Reactors have been getting bigger over the past few decades -- some future designs are in the 1800MWe class -- but the extra size makes them more expensive to build. Fewer units are needed however for the same capacity in a grid and operating costs are generally lower per MW of capacity (reduced staffing, longer operation periods between refuelling, smaller footprints etc.) It's a problem (to get back to the original subject) that the NuScale and mPower small modular reactors face, loss of economy of scale. Yes, they can be built in a factory but most large components for an EPR1400 are factory-built anyway; moving one large reactor vessel or ten small ones to a site is a wash in terms of cost and disruption and any nuclear build will involve a lot of ground works, concrete and rebar which can't be done on a production line indoors.
The British, French, Russians and now the Japanese are currently recycling spent fuel. The Americans aren't so that means hardly anyone is doing it. Right?
Total world capacity for commercial reprocessing is about 5000 tonnes of spent fuel a year once the new Japanese plant at Rokkasho (800 tonnes/yr) is up to speed. These plants are based on chemical treatments of the spent fuel to produce nearly-pure forms of uranium and plutonium for reuse in reactors plus a waste stream to be vitrified or used as feedstock for separation out of other particular isotopes for research, industrial or medicinal purposes. There are R&D projects going on into other lower-cost means of processing spent fuel, by electrolysis for example but they're not actually processing mass quantities of spent fuel as the in-operation plants around the world are.
I understand the site off Tiree for the planned 1.8GW dataplate wind farm involved hard-rock mounts for the turbines and apparently the engineering costs for the mounts were going to raise the price -- this wind farm was to be situated in the north Atlantic which is a much harsher environment than the sheltered southern reaches of the North Sea. Some other wind farms in the south of Britain closer to major population centres in shallower more sheltered areas such as the Irish Sea have gone ahead at that strike price of 0.21 USD/kWh (£145/MWh).
The planned Hinkley nuclear plant's strike price of 0.15 USD/kWh is less than your wind farm's 0.19 USD/kWh and it will generate electricity for 60 years, at least -- the EPR1400 design could well operate for a century with mid-life upgrades. That price includes the cost of decommissioning the plant at end-of-life back to greenfield status. I don't know if that is factored into the price of wind turbines in Denmark, after all you can't simply leave the mounts littering the seabed after the turbines have been scrapped -- or is it a case of out of sight, out of mind and they'll be just left to rot? There's an older wind farm here in Britain where the ownership of the non-functional turbines built in the 1990s is in doubt (the farm was bought and sold a few times) and no-one's sure who's going to pay to have the scrap turbines removed and the site restored. There's no ring-fenced decommissioning fund as required for all nuclear plants these days.
Offshore wind runs about $5/MW of dataplate energy according to a report today on the BBC about a major project that's just been cancelled -- £5.4 billion ($8.6 billion) for an 1800MW capacity wind turbine array (Three hundred 6MW units). Offshore gets a little bit better capacity factor than land-based units, maybe 30% so that's 540MW average over a year or so. Expected lifespan of offshore wind turbines is about 15-20 years but the industry has been quite coy over failure rates and actual operating costs of offshore wind turbines. Decommissioning costs don't seem to be mentioned but for an array of that size it could be hundreds of millions. The strike price, the cost the grid would be obligated by law to buy this wind energy in at was set at £145 per MWh; apparently this wasn't enough of a return for the folks proposing the wind farm and the project has been abandoned.
The two EPR1400 nuclear reactors planned for Hinkley in England will produce about 3200MW baseload at a capacity factor of about 90% or so, averaging about 2700MW per annum, expected construction costs about £10 billion ($16 billion) and a working lifespan of 60 years minimum, probably more. The grid will buy this reliable and very predictable baseload at an agreed strike price of £90 per MWh assuming the project actually goes ahead, that price to include paying into a decommissioning fund on each kWh sold as well as covering the cost of fuel, operation, mid-life refurbishments etc.
Those are the grid-supply pricing targets an array of small reactors will have to meet; it would take more than 35 NuScale 45MW reactors to deliver the same generating capacity as an EPR1400 which costs (according to the Chinese who are closest to completing their EPR builds on time and on budget) about £5 billion a pop so each NuScale reactor needs to cost less than £150 million for them to be even marginally an economic prospect.
The $226 million grant from the DoE isn't to build a reactor, it's to fund further development and help NuScale to get a licence to build and operate a prototype in maybe ten years time -- that process could cost a billion dollars in itself.
"Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"
NGK make large storage batteries and they use their own products to power an office complex in Japan, doing just what the article suggests by storing overnight lower-cost electricity in a large battery pack.
Apparently it two weeks for the resulting fire to be extinguished.
NGK have sold a bunch of these batteries around the world, including to support wind power in the Shetland Isles in Scotland.
Positioning such a battery a couple of metres from a 3,800 tonne fuel-oil tank was probably not a good idea...
That's a bit like AsbestosNacht -- the idea that the wonder material of the twentieth century, asbestos, was a toxic hazard to health would have been laughed at by the enlightened rationalists of the 1930s and 1940s. Fortunately everyone knows tobacco is harmless and indeed positively beneficial hence the presence of public smokatoriums burning the weed in city centres so everyone can enjoy its healthgiving effects and pleasant odours. And let's not forget those other boons to mankind, lead and mercury, so prevalent in the atmosphere and drinking water...
Reprocessing commercial PWR and BWR spent fuel produces a mixture of two isotopes of plutonium, Pu-239 which can be used to make weapons and Pu-240, the presence of which spoils an implosion weapon's functioning by producing lots of heat and radiation since Pu-240's half-life is a lot shorter than Pu-239. Weapons-grade plutonium is produced in specialised non-commercial military breeder reactors which produce a purer for of plutonium with only a tiny amount of Pu-240.
Proliferation isn't really a problem for reprocessing, the real hurdle to overcome is that it is expensive and complicated to do safely. The upside is that it reuses spent fuel, but at the moment freshly-mined uranium is very cheap so the cost factor predicates against more countries operating a reprocessing facility. One major benefit is that reprocessing concentrates the unwanted isotopes in the fuel (aka "waste") into a much smaller volume which, although much more radioactive per kilogram than unreprocessed spent fuel makes it easier to dispose of in a deep geological burial site or storing it temporarily aboveground.
Slashdot Mirror
The 8086 family including the 8088 8-bit bus version were available to buy in commercial quantities at a time when the MC68000 was still a hangar queen with dev boards running at half the speed of the planned production machines (we tried overclocking our dev board from 4MHz to the production speed of 8MHz, didn't work). The Z8000 was even more of a pipe dream.
In addition the 8086/8088 worked with all the 8080-family bus chips like the serial port, parallel port, interrupt controller, 8087 maths chip etc. The MC68k had to fake all that functionality with separate and expensive silicon (no affordable FPGA chips back then). Software -- the 8086 was deliberately designed with an 8080-family structure of registers and memory access internally which made it easy to port existing CP/M code over to the new platform and Intel wrote compilers and provided other tools to make that job easy. The MC68k was a dream to write new code for but it took a lot more effort to get something, anything working on it.
That sort of operation means a single coax or fiber cable pull, a modem unit at either end and an ongoing contract with the school or other commercial customers that could run for decades rolling over each billing period on automatic payments. $300/month is a recipe to print money for the supplier even with the SLA support costs included.
Britain is half-way through a mild winter, the fourth-mildest on record. We had a series of wet and windy storms blow in from the Atlantic in December, lots of rain and flooding but temperatures have remained above freezing even in central Scotland which is at about the same latitude as Baffin Bay for comparison. No frosts here which is very unusual, we normally get periods of below-freezing temperatures starting in early November. Where are these places in Europe getting unseasonal frosts?
Nope, it's Win8.1 64-bit, 8GB of RAM etc. I'm running one of the DOOM clones (zdoom I think), probably written around the W95 era so maybe 20 years old. I'm thinking of installing DOSbox to run GWBasic later just for the laughs. Are there emulators like DOSbox for Mavericks to run 68k MacOS programs? I assume so...
I'm running Doom in Win8, does that count?
Compatibility mode in Win8.1 goes as far back as Win95. It's not guaranteed but I've got 15-year old Windows programs written under NT4 to work under Win8.1.
"Full faith and credit"
Currency is a measure of wealth and the tokens we call "currency" are effectively IOUs, usually issued by a government and circulated between people and companies to facilitate trade.
The dollar bill IOU issued by the US Federal Reserve has a couple of hundred years of "full faith and credit" behind it so people regard it as real money, tokens representing real wealth. The dollar bill issued by the US Confederacy lasted only a few years as a valid IOU and nobody in the modern world uses it in trade; the individual notes have curio value only today.
Bitcoin does not have a history of trustworthiness yet and may never have such. The creation of Bitcoin has made its creators and early adopters quite rich and that's always a bad sign in a currency token system which should be effectively neutral in its effects on individuals.
Jobs like home video editing now that everyone, just about, has a HD video camera in their tablet or the phone in their pocket and an insatiable desire to put their cat's funny antics up on Youtube.
The fact that 90% of the time a machine is idling, even when doing spreadsheets or word processing doesn't detract from the 10% of the time when it's under the hammer doing something intensive and/or memory hungry, like the spreadsheet I was working on recently importing a CSV file of meteorological data that was close to a gigabyte of raw text. Even with a 99%/1% split having the processing power on tap to get the job done in less than geological epochs is kinda useful. It's a bit like having a 200hp engine in your car even though it spends 22 hours a day parked up somewhere and rarely goes over 70 even on the interstate.
Microsoft, Apple (and Linus too) don't want to support a noddy OS for noddy hardware as well as a separate full-blown OS that can make use of all the power a modern system can supply so eventually the older versions are no longer supported. Saying that folks have tried putting Windows 8 on older hardware that falls below MS' official minimum spec and in some cases it runs OK, even beating out a native XP installation in benchmark tests.
I have the opposite problem -- my HP4850 scanner works perfectly well under Windows 8 (and XP and even Win2000 IIRC) but it's unsupported under Linux and always has been.
Win 8 and Win 7 before it have compatibility modes that allow them to run badly-behaving XP code; it's possible you could use your scanner that way. I've had some problems installing drivers for older hardware on Windows 8 but using the compatibility mode options usually got them up and running. The TWAIN interface for my HP4850 works under Win 8.1 with a 16-year-old version of Corel PhotoPaint originally meant to run under W98 as well as with Infanview, GIMP etc.
"You could turn that around by saying that XP just didn't need more than 4GB of RAM and 2TB hard disk space"
And nobody needs more than 640k of memory, right? That old quip always brought the house down as I recall...
More and more computing jobs do need more than 4GB of RAM or at least work a lot better if more than 4GB is available via a 64-bit OS. The killer upgrade is SSDs though, they are the biggest no-brainer boost-for-the-buck to productivity on the desktop/laptop and XP's inability to handle TRIM sucks.
As older hardware dies off due to component failure I don't see a lot of folks buying new kit only to reinstall XP even for the comfort of a familiar interface. Some may do so, there are niche markets out there for XP-only devices but not many.
A couple of years back I was contracted to help carry out a hardware upgrade cycle in a hospital, desktops with XP on them in the main with a few laptops here and there. Only a few machines were being heavily used to do imaging work and the like and we looked at upgrading those particular machines to XP 64-bit and giving them lots more memory (8GB or 16GB, a lot at that time) plus fitting them with SSDs but in the end the bosses just bought new hardware with Win7 preinstalled. Saved us a lot of grief...
The "limited usage" niche that makes XP hard to kill in the real world is why Chromebooks are getting marketshare, granny browsing the Web and Skype, thin clients basically. I do OCR and image processing on this desktop and I appreciate the extra RAM space, the SSD support and the other things that XP can't offer me. I could have gone with Win7 or even Vista but they go out of support in a few years time as XP is in April this year and I still expect to be using this Win8 setup then or at least something like it.
XP has a number of limitations that Win7 and Win8 supercede -- nearly all XP installs still running are the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit on RAM and a 2TB limit for disk volumes, and as far as I know XP doesn't support TRIM for SSDs. It also limits out at DX9, important for gamers and there are probably other limitations due to its age and end-of-support status.
I'm OK with Win8, I run it exclusively in desktop mode where it presents a look and feel similar to Win7. I pinned my most used programs on the taskbar so I don't need to invoke the start menu very often. I have Vistart installed as a shell replacement but I could work without it if I had to. The upgrade to 8.1 on my main machine went OK apart from the very large download (3 GB plus) needed to make it happen but I was satisfied with the original OS release (I still have it on another desktop which is waiting for a replacement motherboard).
Older electronics like the Cube tended to be made from discrete components, through-hole mounted and soldered using wave machines or even by hand and they could be easily chopped around, extra bits soldered into them or signals tapped out with the chip specs and pinouts available from a number of sources. Newer devices like tablets and modern compact laptops consist of one or two dedicated ball-grid-mounted ASICs, not easily hackable or repairable by ordinary folks without expensive reflow soldering gear, jigs etc. and of course the specs for those ASICs are commercial secrets. Even scrapping modern devices is less fun than it used to be -- I junked a Belkin wireless router recently and the only reuseable components I got off it were things like the DC power connector and a few electrolytic capacitors. On the other hand I replaced a switch on my favourite ten-year-old mouse just the other day, a like-for-like swap from another old defective mouse I had lying around.
Yep, that's why Qatar's per-capita GNP is twice that of the US. Moving money around also inflates the GNP figures hence the appearance of Monaco, Leichtenstein and the Bermudas at the top of the world tables. Japan has virtually no raw materials it can export and it's not a financial black hole for rich people to hide funds from their national governments but it still holds up well in terms of GNP per-capita due mainly to its industrial base.
Actually the EU has a higher GDP than the US, the usual marker for the strength of an economy. Mostly that's due to the greater population (505 million EU citizens compared to 310 million or so Americans) as per-capita GNP in the EU is a bit less since we don't have quite as much raw materials production (oil, gas, coal) which inflates the figures.
The US tried withholding its funding contributions for ITER during the run-up to the off-the-books trillion-dollar war in Iraq after most of the other participants in the project decided it should be built in Cadarache in France, home of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, instead of Japan. It didn't work, America decided to rejoin the project and they're pouring concrete this month in southern France for the reactor vessel's base.
WiFi in the 2.4GHz band is very close to the frequencies used in microwave ovens to cook food. Water molecules are "tuned" to that frequency and will absorb that energy most efficiently. It's part of the reason Wifi has that less-regulated spectrum assigned to it as it doesn't propagate over long distances very well especially if the air is damp or humid.
At the signal levels used in a classroom it's very unlikely to impossible a Wifi system will cause any kind of noticeable heating effect in body tissues. Having a couple of hundred watts of 2.4GHz RF bouncing around inside a commercial aircraft fuselage is starting to get into microwave oven territory though...
I have hardware in a cupboard that failed after a year or two or in some cases even earlier but I never bothered to jump through the hoops to get it fixed or replaced under warranty. I also have working computing gear that dates back to the 70s. That fact that some hardware has survived a decade doesn't mean that all (or even most) hardware will do so.
Businesses usually replace a desktop box every four or five years, laptops maybe every two or three. Any five-year-old desktop running XP or similar will have ageing components, hard drives wearing out mechanically, fans dying etc. which makes them ripe for replacement. They also probably don't support affordable amounts of RAM (typically 8 or 16GB) which can make a serious difference to performance in 64-bit operating systems -- nearly all XP installs were for the 32-bit version which limits out hard at 3.5GB. XP also has the 2TB drive volume limit and no TRIM for SSDs. Older boxes have no hardware support for SATA-3 and usually poor support for SATA generally. They may still be AGP rather than supporting any version of PCI-e, no USB 3.0 ports, the onboard video is crude and slow etc. etc.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the next big NASA space project although the funding has been on-off for the past decade, raising the final price and stretching the delivery time to 2018 and counting. It could still be cancelled by Congress to save money and help reduce the national debt. Europe is providing a number of instruments and an Ariane V launch for the project in return for access to the science.
The JWST is the last Big Space Science project on NASA's books though, all the other big observatories were cancelled or never got past the proposal stage. There are no plans to replace the Hubble with a similar visible-light observatory even in low Earth orbit, unless someone can rework those spare NRO Keyholes that were donated to NASA recently and find money to launch them.
Work out how much delta-v it takes to get a missile from the Moon's surface to somewhere, anywhere on Earth then compare that with the effort needed to fire a cruise missile from somewhere on the Earth to its target on Earth and then get back to me. After that we can discuss the pricetag and annual operating costs.
Lasers over a distance of 400,000km followed by 50km of atmospheric defocussing, right...
Absolute guess here but are you American by any chance? Any time I read militaristic stupidity and a belief that anything in space must have a military application then the odds are they're kill-crazy Americans.
Japan still has several thousand tonnes of spent fuel in store and reprocessing it would reduce the storage requirements if nothing else. I figure they will restart most of their nuclear fleet over the next few years, the cost of importing more LNG to make up for the cheap nuclear electricity they're not generating is starting to impact the country's financial bottom line.
Britain's current nuclear fleet of 12 reactors generates about 8GW or roughly 20% of our electricity needs running flat out between refuelling stoppages. One small reactor at Wylfa, the last operating Magnox unit anywhere I believe, currently producing about 420MW to the grid may be shut down next year after 40-odd years of operation when the last fresh fuel elements are expended. Plans have been announced to build two EPR1400s with a total grid capacity of 3.2GW at Hinkley Point, an old Magnox reactor site and more recently a two-reactor generating plant with a similar capacity but based on boiling-water reactors has been announced for Wylfa, both to come on-line in about ten years or so when the other reactors currently operating, nearly all AGRs, start to reach end-of-life after 40-50 years of operation. The four Hinkley Point and Wylfa new-builds by themselves will replace about 80% of the capacity currently provided by the ten AGRs, and the new designs could operate until the end of the century. There's also an 1100MW PWR at Sizewell with a projected operating life out beyond 2050.
Reactors have been getting bigger over the past few decades -- some future designs are in the 1800MWe class -- but the extra size makes them more expensive to build. Fewer units are needed however for the same capacity in a grid and operating costs are generally lower per MW of capacity (reduced staffing, longer operation periods between refuelling, smaller footprints etc.) It's a problem (to get back to the original subject) that the NuScale and mPower small modular reactors face, loss of economy of scale. Yes, they can be built in a factory but most large components for an EPR1400 are factory-built anyway; moving one large reactor vessel or ten small ones to a site is a wash in terms of cost and disruption and any nuclear build will involve a lot of ground works, concrete and rebar which can't be done on a production line indoors.
The British, French, Russians and now the Japanese are currently recycling spent fuel. The Americans aren't so that means hardly anyone is doing it. Right?
Total world capacity for commercial reprocessing is about 5000 tonnes of spent fuel a year once the new Japanese plant at Rokkasho (800 tonnes/yr) is up to speed. These plants are based on chemical treatments of the spent fuel to produce nearly-pure forms of uranium and plutonium for reuse in reactors plus a waste stream to be vitrified or used as feedstock for separation out of other particular isotopes for research, industrial or medicinal purposes. There are R&D projects going on into other lower-cost means of processing spent fuel, by electrolysis for example but they're not actually processing mass quantities of spent fuel as the in-operation plants around the world are.
I understand the site off Tiree for the planned 1.8GW dataplate wind farm involved hard-rock mounts for the turbines and apparently the engineering costs for the mounts were going to raise the price -- this wind farm was to be situated in the north Atlantic which is a much harsher environment than the sheltered southern reaches of the North Sea. Some other wind farms in the south of Britain closer to major population centres in shallower more sheltered areas such as the Irish Sea have gone ahead at that strike price of 0.21 USD/kWh (£145/MWh).
The planned Hinkley nuclear plant's strike price of 0.15 USD/kWh is less than your wind farm's 0.19 USD/kWh and it will generate electricity for 60 years, at least -- the EPR1400 design could well operate for a century with mid-life upgrades. That price includes the cost of decommissioning the plant at end-of-life back to greenfield status. I don't know if that is factored into the price of wind turbines in Denmark, after all you can't simply leave the mounts littering the seabed after the turbines have been scrapped -- or is it a case of out of sight, out of mind and they'll be just left to rot? There's an older wind farm here in Britain where the ownership of the non-functional turbines built in the 1990s is in doubt (the farm was bought and sold a few times) and no-one's sure who's going to pay to have the scrap turbines removed and the site restored. There's no ring-fenced decommissioning fund as required for all nuclear plants these days.
Offshore wind runs about $5/MW of dataplate energy according to a report today on the BBC about a major project that's just been cancelled -- £5.4 billion ($8.6 billion) for an 1800MW capacity wind turbine array (Three hundred 6MW units). Offshore gets a little bit better capacity factor than land-based units, maybe 30% so that's 540MW average over a year or so. Expected lifespan of offshore wind turbines is about 15-20 years but the industry has been quite coy over failure rates and actual operating costs of offshore wind turbines. Decommissioning costs don't seem to be mentioned but for an array of that size it could be hundreds of millions. The strike price, the cost the grid would be obligated by law to buy this wind energy in at was set at £145 per MWh; apparently this wasn't enough of a return for the folks proposing the wind farm and the project has been abandoned.
The two EPR1400 nuclear reactors planned for Hinkley in England will produce about 3200MW baseload at a capacity factor of about 90% or so, averaging about 2700MW per annum, expected construction costs about £10 billion ($16 billion) and a working lifespan of 60 years minimum, probably more. The grid will buy this reliable and very predictable baseload at an agreed strike price of £90 per MWh assuming the project actually goes ahead, that price to include paying into a decommissioning fund on each kWh sold as well as covering the cost of fuel, operation, mid-life refurbishments etc.
Those are the grid-supply pricing targets an array of small reactors will have to meet; it would take more than 35 NuScale 45MW reactors to deliver the same generating capacity as an EPR1400 which costs (according to the Chinese who are closest to completing their EPR builds on time and on budget) about £5 billion a pop so each NuScale reactor needs to cost less than £150 million for them to be even marginally an economic prospect.
The $226 million grant from the DoE isn't to build a reactor, it's to fund further development and help NuScale to get a licence to build and operate a prototype in maybe ten years time -- that process could cost a billion dollars in itself.
"Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"
NGK make large storage batteries and they use their own products to power an office complex in Japan, doing just what the article suggests by storing overnight lower-cost electricity in a large battery pack.
Apparently it two weeks for the resulting fire to be extinguished.
NGK have sold a bunch of these batteries around the world, including to support wind power in the Shetland Isles in Scotland.
Positioning such a battery a couple of metres from a 3,800 tonne fuel-oil tank was probably not a good idea...
That's a bit like AsbestosNacht -- the idea that the wonder material of the twentieth century, asbestos, was a toxic hazard to health would have been laughed at by the enlightened rationalists of the 1930s and 1940s. Fortunately everyone knows tobacco is harmless and indeed positively beneficial hence the presence of public smokatoriums burning the weed in city centres so everyone can enjoy its healthgiving effects and pleasant odours. And let's not forget those other boons to mankind, lead and mercury, so prevalent in the atmosphere and drinking water...
Reprocessing commercial PWR and BWR spent fuel produces a mixture of two isotopes of plutonium, Pu-239 which can be used to make weapons and Pu-240, the presence of which spoils an implosion weapon's functioning by producing lots of heat and radiation since Pu-240's half-life is a lot shorter than Pu-239. Weapons-grade plutonium is produced in specialised non-commercial military breeder reactors which produce a purer for of plutonium with only a tiny amount of Pu-240.
Proliferation isn't really a problem for reprocessing, the real hurdle to overcome is that it is expensive and complicated to do safely. The upside is that it reuses spent fuel, but at the moment freshly-mined uranium is very cheap so the cost factor predicates against more countries operating a reprocessing facility. One major benefit is that reprocessing concentrates the unwanted isotopes in the fuel (aka "waste") into a much smaller volume which, although much more radioactive per kilogram than unreprocessed spent fuel makes it easier to dispose of in a deep geological burial site or storing it temporarily aboveground.