The way to find out about this sort of problem is to field-test the late beta design, run it through a lot of focus groups, power users and grannies and teenagers, folks with visual handicaps etc. and then analyse the data and revise the design if necessary before releasing v1.0 to the public. Of course if you want to keep the look and feel of your GUI a close secret it's difficult to do that but it gives some important folks a chance to stand up on stage and say "and just one last thing..."
It costs very little to produce Sky at Night. I worked on the show doing computer graphics over a decade ago; there's an old joke about the official BBC tartan being "small checks" and I can attest to that. The schedule was one 15-minute show a month involving a two-man talking-heads format in a tiny cubbyhole studio plus an annual "spectacular" with Sir Patrick making a visit to, say, Meteor Crater or a famous observatory like Siding Springs. Each studio program took a day to record, maybe three days production, scripting etc. There wasn't much else the BBC produced that cost as little per show.
That phantom road might have been a copyright deal. Folks selling mapbooks and A-Z guides would often put a few phantom streets into their maps. That way if someone simply copied the books without surveying the streets themselves then they could be more easily sued for copyright theft. It's a bit like GI Joe's thumbnail.
I didn't NEED to use Windows 8, I had a couple of XP boxes that worked (and still work) fine and ran the scanner but they limited out as 32-bit machines, AGP, only 4GB RAM, didn't understand HDD volumes bigger than 2TB etc. etc. When I decided a hardware upgrade was needed I built a machine from parts and downloaded the RC version of Windows 8. It suited my purposes very well, unlike Ubuntu and a couple of other distros I experimented with. Win8 ran an essential but odd piece of software I use regularly which has no Linux equivalent and it supported pretty much every bit of hardware I threw at it including my HP4850 scanner (and my Opticbook Pro too -- I'm not sure if that ever got support from Linux). When it came the time I bought a copy of Windows 8 without a qualm. Instead of spending a few hundred hours searching the web for help (RTFM, n00b!) on getting a box-of-LEGOS Linux distro to work at all, never mind well I use software that Just Works instead.
Scanners? I have an HP 4850 scanner sitting at my elbow. I bought it about eight years ago, ran it on W2K and it's now running happily on Win8. Linux drivers for this scanner? I *think* there's someone selling a closed-source driver solution that *might* work with this scanner. There's a few dead Linux driver projects on the web which mention this scanner, nothing that actually works "out of the box" the way the free Windows drivers do.
There's so much wrong with this that it's difficult where to start. It's a Gish Gallop of half-remembered anecdotes and self-reinforcing delusions...
No-one has built and operated a thorium-based molten-salt reactor. The US had an molten-salt reactor fuelled purely with U-233 in intermittent operation for a few years back in the 60s, it produced no electricity and ran at operating levels up to about 7MW thermal output which was dumped to air. It proved that fissioning U-233 in molten salt will work but back then everything was being tried, pebble beds, helium coolant, liquid metals coolant, odd geometry cores etc. all under a very lax regulatory regime which doesn't exist any more.
The Indian plans to use thorium in fuel are real although the actual implementation is a bit fuzzy with no actual operations in train as it's still experimental and very theoretical. The proposed fuel mix is very nasty though with up to 20% of the fuel being 20%-plus medium-enriched uranium and also some plutonium in order to transmute the thorium into U-233 since the neutron economy of breeding thorium into U-233 and then fissioning it in an otherwise-conventional PWR is somewhat lacking hence the extra neutron sources in the fuel mix. Other folks are working on the idea of using fuel able to breed thorium up to U-233 in-situ in regular reactors too but it's long-term -- the first experiments recently announced to see what happens physically and chemically to a few test fuel pellets will take four or five years of low-energy exposure in a test reactor in Norway.
The thorium-breeding MSR is perfect for making bomb-grade material. It produces lots of U-233, it has to because thorium by itself in not fissile. The whole idea of the thorium MSR is to breed thorium-232 up into U-233 and then fission that, hopefully getting enough neutrons to keep the chain reaction going and also breed up more U-233 (not something lower-economy PWRS have to achieve) while generating lots of electricity. Since U-233 is the only isotope of uranium in the fuel mix if it's chemically extracted during the operating cycle then the operator ends up with pure weapons-grade uranium. There are complications but it can theoretically be done, and thorium MSRs require continuous chemical extraction of neutron-absorbing waste isotopes anyway to keep the neutron economy healthy enough for the breed-burn cycle to continue.
As for the supposed decision to go for uranium-fuelled PWRs for their bomb-making ability, by the mid-60s the major nuclear powers had already made as much Pu-239 as they'd ever need using dedicated breeder reactors for their stockpiles of tens of thousands of warheads. The decision to not implement thorium MSR as a power-generating technology was nothing to do with weapon-making capability. PWRs are steam-engine simple in design and operation, no breeding required, no super-high temperatures, no molten fuel circulating in and out of a carbon moderating core, no continuous processing of the fuel to extract contaminants etc. That's why basically, it's a bit like whining about the Wright Brothers decision to use an internal-combustion engine in their Flyer rather than a jet engine.
You claim solid-fuel motors have a nasty habit of exploding. Can you point to a case in, say, the last twenty years or thirty years of a big solid motor exploding on launch or in flight? I can certainly point to a lot of "oops" from liquid-fuel launches over the same period. Even in the Challenger disaster, the SRB that leaked flame out of a joint didn't explode or even lose much thrust, it was the liquid-fuel External Tank that exploded. If the flame leak from the SRB's joint had been directed away from the ET then the flight would probably have reached orbit safely.
Solids are so reliable they don't NEED to be test-fired. Manufacturing them is basically large-scale cakemaking using a giant Magimix with extra safety precautions. Lots of experience in making these big motors for the defence industry means manufacturing flaws are rare and easily detected during inspection.
As for solids being a "dead end" I point you to the strap-on boosters that are used on many medium and large-scale launchers today as well as the new small and medium-throw-weight solid-based low-cost launchers rolling out -- Ares, Epsilon, Vega and the forthcoming Ariane 6. The lower launch operation costs are another advantage with no requirements for complex liquid fuel handling at the pad.
Sure solid fuels have a lower Isp than liquid fuels but there's not that much difference -- The Merlin 1D motors have an Isp of about 275 sea-level whereas solids run about 240-250. Solids don't have the dead weight of the pumps, metering and injection systems, tankerage, pressurisation gas bottles, valves, fuelling ports, defuelling systems etc. liquid-fuel motors require and they tend to be more ballistically efficient since they're slimmer and denser than liquid-fuelled rockets so the effects of air resistance in the first thirty seconds of a launch are less of a drag, so to speak. Nozzle control systems for solids have recently moved from heavier hydraulic actuators to simpler and lighter electric motors, further reducing launch weight.
OK, a couple of tons (I keep on reflexively writing "tonnes" and have to backtrack since this is an Inperialist-based site) of U-233 stockpiled seems more reasonable.
One problem with U-233 is that it can be used to make quite functional nuclear weapons hence using up this stockpile in some manner is a boost for anti-proliferation efforts in the same way the "Megatons to Megawatts" project I mentioned earlier. The other side of the coin seems to be that it's not got any real purpose and it costs money to store and monitor. It's been sitting unused for fifty years and there's no real prospect of much or any of it being needed any time soon.
As for the thorium jihadists, well... If they can come up with a complete realistic design and operating plan for a thorium breeder molten-salt reactor, financial cover for waste-handling and end-of-life decommissioning, insurance etc. and jump through the NRC regulatory and licencing hoops for a decade or so then maybe they can get a thorium-based MSR built. They don't absolutely need kickstarter U-233 to fuel it though and it's questionable whether the US government would release bomb-grade material into private hands for this purpose.
"I just read that the US is planning to spend 1/2 $billion to 'destroy' a few thousand tons of U-233"
Can you give me any sort of link to this? It sounds weird (and unbelievable) for a whole number of reasons. For one thing that amount of U-233 is enough to supply the US' entire demand for nuclear power for decades. For another making U-233 is not easy, it's not refinable from ore the way U-235 is so having "thousands of tons" lying around seems odd. MSRs and other reactor designs meant to breed U-233 from Th-232 can use anything as a source of fission neutrons including U-235 and Pu-239/240, indeed that's what the Indians are planning to use for their three-stage thorium burners. Other folks are also looking at conventional PWR fuel combos using Th-232 in a pelletised form along with copious neutron sources but not in unproven molten-salt systems. There was a Slashdot article about this a couple of weeks ago regarding initial experiments with eight such pellets in a Norwegian test reactor.
You may be suffering from conspiracy theory or conflating other stories in the news about 'destroying' nuclear material -- the US has funded an operation to secure weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from the former Soviet Union and downgrade it to be used in nuclear power plant fuel pellets, the "Megatons to Megawatts" project. Is this what you're thinking of?
At least five tonnes of plutonium has been vapourised and dispersed around the world, often at altitude by a long series of atmospheric nuclear and thermonuclear weapons tests by the Big Five (and possibly a couple of other nations) during the middle part of the last century. I doubt the addition of a few more kilos of Pu to the atmosphere would have any significant effect other than making some very sensitive radiation detectors read a bit higher for a time.
Maximum single-lift launch capability today is about 24 tonnes, a Delta-4 Heavy with all the go-faster bits usually reserved for NRO spy satellite launches. It might be possible to build a reactor in orbit from smaller modules and lift the fuel in a separate launch.
As for using a molten-salt reactor it would be simpler to just use U-233 in the fuel stream rather than have to breed up from non-fissile Th-232. I don't know if U-235 or Pu-239/240 could be used in a molten-salt reactor; the one that was built back in the 60s in the US used U-233.
Actually it IS radioactive decay. Fission is when a nucleus fractures into two or more pieces and emits neutrons, usually when it's hit by another neutron. There are only a few available isotopes that are fissionable, U-233 and -235 and Pu-239 and such. Pu-238 isn't fissionable.
Monitoring submarines, mostly. It would be kinda nice to know where the Other Guy's boomers and attack subs are at any given time. There are also stealth satellites which don't use big solar arrays highly visible from the Earth's surface.
There's a new generation of low-cost small launchers using solid-fuel lower stages entering the market, like the Vega from ESA and the Epsilon just launched by the Japanese a few days ago. The next ESA launcher, the Ariane 6 will be a solid-fuelled rocket with a cryogenic upper stage. The Constellation SLS also uses/used a solid first stage and the Russians have been offering launches using repurposed obsolescent ICBMs.
The heyday of the liquid-fuelled rocket may be coming to a close, at least for commercial unmanned launches. Solids are a lot less work to get off the ground, no pumps and valves, no complex pad facilities delivering liquid oxygen and/or hypergolics to the vehicle before launch etc. Epsilon famously launched using a team of only eight people and two laptops. On the other hand SpaceX is struggling to launch the first of their already-delayed liquid-fuelled stretch Falcon 9s at Vandenberg at the moment. Their hotfire test for the Cassiope mission last week threw up some unpublicised problems and they're having to reschedule another hotfire and eventual launch around a series of ICBM tests the USAF is carrying out at the site soon.
My point is the Prius is a plug-in hybrid with limited range in part because it uses Ni-MH batteries. If it was reconfigured with Li-technology batteries it would have a better range like its competitors such as the Volt but it would cost more and there would be other knock-on design changes required in the charging system, motor control, regenerative braking etc. Toyota will probably move to Li-tech batteries in a future plug-in hybrid design. At the time the EV-1 was being tested in the mid-90s electric-car experimenters had only recently moved from using lead-acid traction batteries to Ni-Cd. High-current Li-ion and Li-poly were still lab queens -- a friend who worked on them described how when things went wrong they'd go flying across the room like July 4th fireworks.
The Prius is a hybrid and the early versions had an electric-only range of 11 miles, not surprisingly since the battery pack is small by all-electric vehicle standards and Ni-MH to boot. There were, as I recall, hackers who tried to give their Prius a useful electric-drive range or even convert it to all-electric by filling the boot and some of the passenger spaces with extra batteries. I don't know how well that worked given the extra mass they added really required structural upgrades to take the weight as well as suspension and brake upgrades. I suspect the handling post-conversion was not all that could be desired.
The EV-1 was an experiment, not a production car. They cost GM about $250,000 each to hand-build and they were leased only to people who already owned one or more petrol/gasoline cars as the EV-1's reliability couldn't be guaranteed and it might be recalled for upgrading or examination at any time during the lease.
At the end of the experiment they were recalled and scrapped. If they had been sold on then GM would have been liable to provide a very expensive maintenance and parts supply operation for them for ten years minimum by law.
The results were useful but proved that electric cars at that time were not quite ready for prime-time, not when gas cost less than a buck a gallon and the EV-1 had a range at full charge of about 80 miles or so. The original Ni-Cd and later Ni-MH batteries weren't up to the job but lithium tech batteries with their greater capacity, fast-charge capability and high current drain made the later development of hybrids and full-electric cars feasible.
"Big, flat batteries could be placed in the roof or on the floor,"
That's a car roof that can get hot enough to fry eggs on in a parking lot in much of the US during summer, right? And he's worried about heat dissipation?
A chunk of the space and weight of the Tesla battery pack (and other manufacturers batteries too) is taken up by armour to prevent puncture-shorting of the cells in an accident and to stop one chain of cells catching fire and setting off the neighbouring cells. Arraying cells around the passenger compartment in the roof lining, doors, floor etc. would be like encasing the driver and pax in an electric furnace and waiting for a collision to switch it to "fricassee".
They are already using zeolite cartridges to filter radioactive cesium out of contaminated water at Fukushima. One system is called "SARRY", there are others from various manufacturers including Areva. Handling the used cartridges is done by a remote crane system, not very complex engineering. The zeolite is jacketed in a steel container which blocks nearly all of the radiation from the cesium they collect, a few grammes at most per cylinder.
Japan has a better solution to dealing with nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain or indeed the defence-waste WIPP in New Mexico. It has built and is operating a spent fuel recycling plant at Rokkaisho capable of dealing with about 800 tonnes of spent fuel a year and reducing the amount of waste to 1% or so of the original material.
Fuel rods are only kept in pools (not moon pools, they are something different) for a few years until the heat produced by radioactive decay of fission isotopes has fallen to the point where the fuel rods can be either recycled as France, Japan, Russia and the UK do, stored in dry casks (the current US solution to cope with the lack of a burial store option) or prepared for deep geological disposal as in other countries like Finland.
How do you plan to pump this coagulated sludge? The most contaminated water on the Fukushima site is being recirculated through the reactor cores to cool them; some of this coolant did escape a leaky pipe in April last year, dumping significant quantities of radioactive material into the sea. The water in most of the tanks on the site is only slightly radioactive by comparison and the recent headline-grabbing leak from such a tank (the water had already been through one filtering system and was in store waiting to get further filtration treatment) hasn't caused much of a rise in radioactivity in the seawater measurements taken regularly close to the site. You can find current and historical seawater contamination measurements via the NRA website here. Short version; the contamination from radioactive cesium isotopes just offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi plant today is well below the natural level of radioactivity of regular uncontaminated seawater which contains large mounts of potassium-40.
You mean something like zeolite, the material the engineers at Fukushima have been using for about two years or so to extract radioactive cesium and some other problematic isotopes from contaminated water before it is recycled throguh the reactor cores to cool them? The first small-capacity cesium-absorption units were supplied by Areva in France (part of the international effort to contain radioactive pollution on the site that according to pundits here and elsewhere hasn't been happening up till now because the Japanese are too stubborn to accept outside help that they're actually accepting). The larger-capacity "SARRY" units were built in Japan and first went into operation at Fukushima Daiichi in mid-August 2011.
But that's TEPCO for you, keeping things like cesium absorbtion equipment a big secret. Apart from all the press releases, the videos and such about this sort of effort that get ignored because it indicates some competency in the engineering going on at Fukushima which doesn't fit the "We're doomed!" storyline that sells newspapers and web clicks.
" None of these concepts requires the high tech solution-looking-for-a-problem that is maglev."
The problem maglev is intended to address is safe comfortable "rail" travel at speeds of 500km/h and above. Steel-wheel-on-steel-rail transport appears to be limiting out at about 320-350km/h, pushing it much higher will probably cause an large increase in track maintenance and trainset engineering costs. Maglev is proven to be comfortable and safe at 500km/h plus and maintenance costs seem to be under control since the train is not in direct rubbing contact with the track except at low speeds before it levitates.
Whether 500km/h-plus rail travel is desirable or cost-effective given the current availability of affordable safe air travel is another matter but rail can be driven by a nationally-connected electric power grid, air travel is dependent on cheap liquid fuels which might not be so abundant in the future. This first maglev line is not expected to be in operation even partially until 2020, any widespread rollout of the technology to replace a lot of existing TGV routes is maybe half a century in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The way to find out about this sort of problem is to field-test the late beta design, run it through a lot of focus groups, power users and grannies and teenagers, folks with visual handicaps etc. and then analyse the data and revise the design if necessary before releasing v1.0 to the public. Of course if you want to keep the look and feel of your GUI a close secret it's difficult to do that but it gives some important folks a chance to stand up on stage and say "and just one last thing..."
Which part of "from law enforcement agencies around the world" did you fail to notice? American, are you?
It costs very little to produce Sky at Night. I worked on the show doing computer graphics over a decade ago; there's an old joke about the official BBC tartan being "small checks" and I can attest to that. The schedule was one 15-minute show a month involving a two-man talking-heads format in a tiny cubbyhole studio plus an annual "spectacular" with Sir Patrick making a visit to, say, Meteor Crater or a famous observatory like Siding Springs. Each studio program took a day to record, maybe three days production, scripting etc. There wasn't much else the BBC produced that cost as little per show.
That phantom road might have been a copyright deal. Folks selling mapbooks and A-Z guides would often put a few phantom streets into their maps. That way if someone simply copied the books without surveying the streets themselves then they could be more easily sued for copyright theft. It's a bit like GI Joe's thumbnail.
So you wanted me to pay the Linux Tax, do you?
I didn't NEED to use Windows 8, I had a couple of XP boxes that worked (and still work) fine and ran the scanner but they limited out as 32-bit machines, AGP, only 4GB RAM, didn't understand HDD volumes bigger than 2TB etc. etc. When I decided a hardware upgrade was needed I built a machine from parts and downloaded the RC version of Windows 8. It suited my purposes very well, unlike Ubuntu and a couple of other distros I experimented with. Win8 ran an essential but odd piece of software I use regularly which has no Linux equivalent and it supported pretty much every bit of hardware I threw at it including my HP4850 scanner (and my Opticbook Pro too -- I'm not sure if that ever got support from Linux). When it came the time I bought a copy of Windows 8 without a qualm. Instead of spending a few hundred hours searching the web for help (RTFM, n00b!) on getting a box-of-LEGOS Linux distro to work at all, never mind well I use software that Just Works instead.
Scanners? I have an HP 4850 scanner sitting at my elbow. I bought it about eight years ago, ran it on W2K and it's now running happily on Win8. Linux drivers for this scanner? I *think* there's someone selling a closed-source driver solution that *might* work with this scanner. There's a few dead Linux driver projects on the web which mention this scanner, nothing that actually works "out of the box" the way the free Windows drivers do.
There's so much wrong with this that it's difficult where to start. It's a Gish Gallop of half-remembered anecdotes and self-reinforcing delusions...
No-one has built and operated a thorium-based molten-salt reactor. The US had an molten-salt reactor fuelled purely with U-233 in intermittent operation for a few years back in the 60s, it produced no electricity and ran at operating levels up to about 7MW thermal output which was dumped to air. It proved that fissioning U-233 in molten salt will work but back then everything was being tried, pebble beds, helium coolant, liquid metals coolant, odd geometry cores etc. all under a very lax regulatory regime which doesn't exist any more.
The Indian plans to use thorium in fuel are real although the actual implementation is a bit fuzzy with no actual operations in train as it's still experimental and very theoretical. The proposed fuel mix is very nasty though with up to 20% of the fuel being 20%-plus medium-enriched uranium and also some plutonium in order to transmute the thorium into U-233 since the neutron economy of breeding thorium into U-233 and then fissioning it in an otherwise-conventional PWR is somewhat lacking hence the extra neutron sources in the fuel mix. Other folks are working on the idea of using fuel able to breed thorium up to U-233 in-situ in regular reactors too but it's long-term -- the first experiments recently announced to see what happens physically and chemically to a few test fuel pellets will take four or five years of low-energy exposure in a test reactor in Norway.
The thorium-breeding MSR is perfect for making bomb-grade material. It produces lots of U-233, it has to because thorium by itself in not fissile. The whole idea of the thorium MSR is to breed thorium-232 up into U-233 and then fission that, hopefully getting enough neutrons to keep the chain reaction going and also breed up more U-233 (not something lower-economy PWRS have to achieve) while generating lots of electricity. Since U-233 is the only isotope of uranium in the fuel mix if it's chemically extracted during the operating cycle then the operator ends up with pure weapons-grade uranium. There are complications but it can theoretically be done, and thorium MSRs require continuous chemical extraction of neutron-absorbing waste isotopes anyway to keep the neutron economy healthy enough for the breed-burn cycle to continue.
As for the supposed decision to go for uranium-fuelled PWRs for their bomb-making ability, by the mid-60s the major nuclear powers had already made as much Pu-239 as they'd ever need using dedicated breeder reactors for their stockpiles of tens of thousands of warheads. The decision to not implement thorium MSR as a power-generating technology was nothing to do with weapon-making capability. PWRs are steam-engine simple in design and operation, no breeding required, no super-high temperatures, no molten fuel circulating in and out of a carbon moderating core, no continuous processing of the fuel to extract contaminants etc. That's why basically, it's a bit like whining about the Wright Brothers decision to use an internal-combustion engine in their Flyer rather than a jet engine.
You claim solid-fuel motors have a nasty habit of exploding. Can you point to a case in, say, the last twenty years or thirty years of a big solid motor exploding on launch or in flight? I can certainly point to a lot of "oops" from liquid-fuel launches over the same period. Even in the Challenger disaster, the SRB that leaked flame out of a joint didn't explode or even lose much thrust, it was the liquid-fuel External Tank that exploded. If the flame leak from the SRB's joint had been directed away from the ET then the flight would probably have reached orbit safely.
Solids are so reliable they don't NEED to be test-fired. Manufacturing them is basically large-scale cakemaking using a giant Magimix with extra safety precautions. Lots of experience in making these big motors for the defence industry means manufacturing flaws are rare and easily detected during inspection.
As for solids being a "dead end" I point you to the strap-on boosters that are used on many medium and large-scale launchers today as well as the new small and medium-throw-weight solid-based low-cost launchers rolling out -- Ares, Epsilon, Vega and the forthcoming Ariane 6. The lower launch operation costs are another advantage with no requirements for complex liquid fuel handling at the pad.
Sure solid fuels have a lower Isp than liquid fuels but there's not that much difference -- The Merlin 1D motors have an Isp of about 275 sea-level whereas solids run about 240-250. Solids don't have the dead weight of the pumps, metering and injection systems, tankerage, pressurisation gas bottles, valves, fuelling ports, defuelling systems etc. liquid-fuel motors require and they tend to be more ballistically efficient since they're slimmer and denser than liquid-fuelled rockets so the effects of air resistance in the first thirty seconds of a launch are less of a drag, so to speak. Nozzle control systems for solids have recently moved from heavier hydraulic actuators to simpler and lighter electric motors, further reducing launch weight.
OK, a couple of tons (I keep on reflexively writing "tonnes" and have to backtrack since this is an Inperialist-based site) of U-233 stockpiled seems more reasonable.
One problem with U-233 is that it can be used to make quite functional nuclear weapons hence using up this stockpile in some manner is a boost for anti-proliferation efforts in the same way the "Megatons to Megawatts" project I mentioned earlier. The other side of the coin seems to be that it's not got any real purpose and it costs money to store and monitor. It's been sitting unused for fifty years and there's no real prospect of much or any of it being needed any time soon.
As for the thorium jihadists, well... If they can come up with a complete realistic design and operating plan for a thorium breeder molten-salt reactor, financial cover for waste-handling and end-of-life decommissioning, insurance etc. and jump through the NRC regulatory and licencing hoops for a decade or so then maybe they can get a thorium-based MSR built. They don't absolutely need kickstarter U-233 to fuel it though and it's questionable whether the US government would release bomb-grade material into private hands for this purpose.
"I just read that the US is planning to spend 1/2 $billion to 'destroy' a few thousand tons of U-233"
Can you give me any sort of link to this? It sounds weird (and unbelievable) for a whole number of reasons. For one thing that amount of U-233 is enough to supply the US' entire demand for nuclear power for decades. For another making U-233 is not easy, it's not refinable from ore the way U-235 is so having "thousands of tons" lying around seems odd. MSRs and other reactor designs meant to breed U-233 from Th-232 can use anything as a source of fission neutrons including U-235 and Pu-239/240, indeed that's what the Indians are planning to use for their three-stage thorium burners. Other folks are also looking at conventional PWR fuel combos using Th-232 in a pelletised form along with copious neutron sources but not in unproven molten-salt systems. There was a Slashdot article about this a couple of weeks ago regarding initial experiments with eight such pellets in a Norwegian test reactor.
You may be suffering from conspiracy theory or conflating other stories in the news about 'destroying' nuclear material -- the US has funded an operation to secure weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from the former Soviet Union and downgrade it to be used in nuclear power plant fuel pellets, the "Megatons to Megawatts" project. Is this what you're thinking of?
E-lop. Phone. Hoooome.
At least five tonnes of plutonium has been vapourised and dispersed around the world, often at altitude by a long series of atmospheric nuclear and thermonuclear weapons tests by the Big Five (and possibly a couple of other nations) during the middle part of the last century. I doubt the addition of a few more kilos of Pu to the atmosphere would have any significant effect other than making some very sensitive radiation detectors read a bit higher for a time.
Maximum single-lift launch capability today is about 24 tonnes, a Delta-4 Heavy with all the go-faster bits usually reserved for NRO spy satellite launches. It might be possible to build a reactor in orbit from smaller modules and lift the fuel in a separate launch.
As for using a molten-salt reactor it would be simpler to just use U-233 in the fuel stream rather than have to breed up from non-fissile Th-232. I don't know if U-235 or Pu-239/240 could be used in a molten-salt reactor; the one that was built back in the 60s in the US used U-233.
Actually it IS radioactive decay. Fission is when a nucleus fractures into two or more pieces and emits neutrons, usually when it's hit by another neutron. There are only a few available isotopes that are fissionable, U-233 and -235 and Pu-239 and such. Pu-238 isn't fissionable.
Monitoring submarines, mostly. It would be kinda nice to know where the Other Guy's boomers and attack subs are at any given time. There are also stealth satellites which don't use big solar arrays highly visible from the Earth's surface.
There's a new generation of low-cost small launchers using solid-fuel lower stages entering the market, like the Vega from ESA and the Epsilon just launched by the Japanese a few days ago. The next ESA launcher, the Ariane 6 will be a solid-fuelled rocket with a cryogenic upper stage. The Constellation SLS also uses/used a solid first stage and the Russians have been offering launches using repurposed obsolescent ICBMs.
The heyday of the liquid-fuelled rocket may be coming to a close, at least for commercial unmanned launches. Solids are a lot less work to get off the ground, no pumps and valves, no complex pad facilities delivering liquid oxygen and/or hypergolics to the vehicle before launch etc. Epsilon famously launched using a team of only eight people and two laptops. On the other hand SpaceX is struggling to launch the first of their already-delayed liquid-fuelled stretch Falcon 9s at Vandenberg at the moment. Their hotfire test for the Cassiope mission last week threw up some unpublicised problems and they're having to reschedule another hotfire and eventual launch around a series of ICBM tests the USAF is carrying out at the site soon.
Why three question marks?
My point is the Prius is a plug-in hybrid with limited range in part because it uses Ni-MH batteries. If it was reconfigured with Li-technology batteries it would have a better range like its competitors such as the Volt but it would cost more and there would be other knock-on design changes required in the charging system, motor control, regenerative braking etc. Toyota will probably move to Li-tech batteries in a future plug-in hybrid design. At the time the EV-1 was being tested in the mid-90s electric-car experimenters had only recently moved from using lead-acid traction batteries to Ni-Cd. High-current Li-ion and Li-poly were still lab queens -- a friend who worked on them described how when things went wrong they'd go flying across the room like July 4th fireworks.
The Prius is a hybrid and the early versions had an electric-only range of 11 miles, not surprisingly since the battery pack is small by all-electric vehicle standards and Ni-MH to boot. There were, as I recall, hackers who tried to give their Prius a useful electric-drive range or even convert it to all-electric by filling the boot and some of the passenger spaces with extra batteries. I don't know how well that worked given the extra mass they added really required structural upgrades to take the weight as well as suspension and brake upgrades. I suspect the handling post-conversion was not all that could be desired.
The EV-1 was an experiment, not a production car. They cost GM about $250,000 each to hand-build and they were leased only to people who already owned one or more petrol/gasoline cars as the EV-1's reliability couldn't be guaranteed and it might be recalled for upgrading or examination at any time during the lease.
At the end of the experiment they were recalled and scrapped. If they had been sold on then GM would have been liable to provide a very expensive maintenance and parts supply operation for them for ten years minimum by law.
The results were useful but proved that electric cars at that time were not quite ready for prime-time, not when gas cost less than a buck a gallon and the EV-1 had a range at full charge of about 80 miles or so. The original Ni-Cd and later Ni-MH batteries weren't up to the job but lithium tech batteries with their greater capacity, fast-charge capability and high current drain made the later development of hybrids and full-electric cars feasible.
"Big, flat batteries could be placed in the roof or on the floor,"
That's a car roof that can get hot enough to fry eggs on in a parking lot in much of the US during summer, right? And he's worried about heat dissipation?
A chunk of the space and weight of the Tesla battery pack (and other manufacturers batteries too) is taken up by armour to prevent puncture-shorting of the cells in an accident and to stop one chain of cells catching fire and setting off the neighbouring cells. Arraying cells around the passenger compartment in the roof lining, doors, floor etc. would be like encasing the driver and pax in an electric furnace and waiting for a collision to switch it to "fricassee".
The British military use a satellite communications system called Skynet. Nothing could possibly go worng...
They are already using zeolite cartridges to filter radioactive cesium out of contaminated water at Fukushima. One system is called "SARRY", there are others from various manufacturers including Areva. Handling the used cartridges is done by a remote crane system, not very complex engineering. The zeolite is jacketed in a steel container which blocks nearly all of the radiation from the cesium they collect, a few grammes at most per cylinder.
Japan has a better solution to dealing with nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain or indeed the defence-waste WIPP in New Mexico. It has built and is operating a spent fuel recycling plant at Rokkaisho capable of dealing with about 800 tonnes of spent fuel a year and reducing the amount of waste to 1% or so of the original material.
Fuel rods are only kept in pools (not moon pools, they are something different) for a few years until the heat produced by radioactive decay of fission isotopes has fallen to the point where the fuel rods can be either recycled as France, Japan, Russia and the UK do, stored in dry casks (the current US solution to cope with the lack of a burial store option) or prepared for deep geological disposal as in other countries like Finland.
How do you plan to pump this coagulated sludge? The most contaminated water on the Fukushima site is being recirculated through the reactor cores to cool them; some of this coolant did escape a leaky pipe in April last year, dumping significant quantities of radioactive material into the sea. The water in most of the tanks on the site is only slightly radioactive by comparison and the recent headline-grabbing leak from such a tank (the water had already been through one filtering system and was in store waiting to get further filtration treatment) hasn't caused much of a rise in radioactivity in the seawater measurements taken regularly close to the site. You can find current and historical seawater contamination measurements via the NRA website here. Short version; the contamination from radioactive cesium isotopes just offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi plant today is well below the natural level of radioactivity of regular uncontaminated seawater which contains large mounts of potassium-40.
You mean something like zeolite, the material the engineers at Fukushima have been using for about two years or so to extract radioactive cesium and some other problematic isotopes from contaminated water before it is recycled throguh the reactor cores to cool them? The first small-capacity cesium-absorption units were supplied by Areva in France (part of the international effort to contain radioactive pollution on the site that according to pundits here and elsewhere hasn't been happening up till now because the Japanese are too stubborn to accept outside help that they're actually accepting). The larger-capacity "SARRY" units were built in Japan and first went into operation at Fukushima Daiichi in mid-August 2011.
But that's TEPCO for you, keeping things like cesium absorbtion equipment a big secret. Apart from all the press releases, the videos and such about this sort of effort that get ignored because it indicates some competency in the engineering going on at Fukushima which doesn't fit the "We're doomed!" storyline that sells newspapers and web clicks.
" None of these concepts requires the high tech solution-looking-for-a-problem that is maglev."
The problem maglev is intended to address is safe comfortable "rail" travel at speeds of 500km/h and above. Steel-wheel-on-steel-rail transport appears to be limiting out at about 320-350km/h, pushing it much higher will probably cause an large increase in track maintenance and trainset engineering costs. Maglev is proven to be comfortable and safe at 500km/h plus and maintenance costs seem to be under control since the train is not in direct rubbing contact with the track except at low speeds before it levitates.
Whether 500km/h-plus rail travel is desirable or cost-effective given the current availability of affordable safe air travel is another matter but rail can be driven by a nationally-connected electric power grid, air travel is dependent on cheap liquid fuels which might not be so abundant in the future. This first maglev line is not expected to be in operation even partially until 2020, any widespread rollout of the technology to replace a lot of existing TGV routes is maybe half a century in the future.