The French TGV steel-wheel record holder was a heavily-modified racecar version of their regular 300km/h trainsets, running higher voltages and damaging track and overhead as it reached its peak speed (pictures of the TGV trainset setting the record show a cloud of track ballast being sucked up behind it). The maglev record was taken by a regular test carset with some modifications and did not damage the track which is regularly operated at 500km/h plus anyway. The maglev holds another speed record TGV and other trains can't even get close to, the passing speed record of 1026km/h when they ran two maglevs past each other on adjacent tracks at over 500km/h.
Safety -- like the shinkansen the proposed Tokyo-Nagoya maglev will run on separated track, no crossings or other traffic allowed on the same route. There are barrier walls and fencing along all of the track to keep cows, people and Gojira from getting in the way.
The recent Spanish high-speed train "accident" was a disaster waiting to happen when you study it, there is no way a high-speed railway line should have had an 80kph-limit curve like that anywhere along its length. The Japanese maglev will be basically as straight as they can make it with a lot of tunneling and raised viaducts like the existing shinkansen routes but even more so as the maglev will start operation with a 50% speed increase over the steel-wheel-on-steel-rail shinkansen (there are somewhat sketchy plans to eventually run maglev trains at 700km/h and more once the technology improves).
TFA is a cut-n-paste from a badly-written and poorly-researched Wired article some staffer wrote to fill in a blank space on the website last week.
The Japanese maglev trains (there are two parallel tracks) have been running consistently at 500km/h (310 mph in old money) for over a decade and more in testing. Its actual record speed is 580km/h (about 360mph). In addition the test track is 40km long, not 26km as stated in the article; it was extended a few years back. Etc., etc.
They don't have enough waste for it to be worth constructing a deep geological repository as yet. It's one of the benefits of reprocessing spent fuel, reducing the volume and mass of actual waste needing to be stored which helps offset the cost of doing it.
Finland of all places is building one of the first deep repositories for unreprocessed spent fuel from power stations. Total cost for constructing and operating a facility expected to store about 100 years of spent fuel from several reactors is about $1 billion. It's already paid for from a levy on electricity generated by the existing operational reactors which has raised about $1.3 billion up till now.
BTW the US is already storing high-level nuclear waste in a salt-mine geological repository in New Mexico, the WIPP. It's for defence-related waste not for commercial power stations though.
"Yep, there is no insurance company in the world that will cover anyone for a nuclear accident."
Wrong. The US reactor operators carry commercial insurance up to about $10 billion per reactor site (most sites run two or more reactors). It's a sinecure for the insurers, lots of money in premiums and a very low risk they'll ever have to pay out anything. The government carries the load after $10 billion in the same way they're paying $50 billion after Superstorm Sandy trashed the New England coast and overwhelmed the local insurance market's ability to pay out, even when they try to weasel with "Act of God" clauses. Other nations operating nuclear reactors have the same sort of insurance deals in place.
Commercial insurers are covering the cost of the Three Mile Island incident, for example, having paid out a few hundred million bucks up to now. A lot of the payouts have gone to deal with nuisance lawsuits, nothing to do with coping with the damage to the reactor.
"This is a concern with a US manufacturer of a device that is often on, has a camera, has a microphone, and comes from a company that has cooperated with the stazi."
That technical specification covers every smartphone going pretty much with the additional features of location data, movement tracking outside the home, contacts lists etc. Not gonna give up your iPhone though are you?
There's about fifty million tonnes of radioactive potassium (K-40) in the world's oceans, all natural as you can get with a half-life of ONE BILLION years!!! so it will be a persistent hazard to health until the Sun enters its red giant phase. It's the reason seawater is highly radioactive and why seafood sets off scintillometers and radiation meters (counts of about 100-150 Bq/kg typically). It also makes detecting fission isotope contamination from Fukushima and the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific kinda tricky when the samples taken close to Fukushima read 0.05 Bq/litre from cesium-134 and cesium-137 and the meters are pegging out from the 10Bq/l emissions due to the presence of K-40. The only way to accurately measure it is to record the spectrum of the particles and gamma radiation emitted from a smaple over a period of a few weeks since the energies of the radiation due to the fission products is different to the natural K-40 background of the seawater samples.
50 million tonnes of K-40 versus a kilogramme or two of the cesium isotopes from the Fukushima reactors, which one concerns you more? Let me guess...
I presume you are referring to the spent fuel pool in the reactor 4 building as that's the one that's been reported by fantasists and alarmists like Arne Gunderson as exploding, imminently collapsing, bulging, disintegrating, sinking into the ground and catching fire ever since the accidents happened. Unfortunately for their delusions reactor 4 is still there as is its spent fuel pool which today has a water temperature of 38 deg C., not what I'd describe as "inadequately cooled".
Right now the engineers at Fukushima Daiichi are finishing building a crane and supporting structure on reactor 4 in preparation to start removing the spent fuel rods from the pool. They've been working on this project for more than a year, clearing away the rubble on top of the building and constructing a heavy foundation before erecting the crane structure alongside and on top of the building and enclosing the top of the building in a weather shield since, in the words of George RR Martin, "winter is coming".
The crane system has to be heavily built since it will be craning fuel canisters weighing over a hundred tonnes out of the pool after spent fuel bundles are loaded into them. It's not something that can be done safely in an ad-hoc manner despite the Chicken Littles running around in a panic screaming "the world is ending!". Once the crane's up and running in the next few weeks it should only take a month or two to empty the pool of fuel bundles at which time I'm sure the folks worrying about it will turn their attention to the other reactor spent fuel pools which are also in train to be emptied too.
I think the technical problems of building a waste-burning reactor can be overcome but they are substantial much as designing the first jet engines was much more difficult than building piston steam engines. The financial aspects are more problematical -- a waste-burner has to produce electricity to be viable in the marketplace, it's what will make money to pay off its design, construction and operation. It, like any other commercial electricity-generating system has to compete with coal and gas as bottom-line cheap generating fuels (cheap gas will probably run out in the next decade or two, coal is abundant and cheap into the next century and more), Right now conventional nuclear LWR and (debatably) heavy-water power reactors can compete even with coal generation in terms of cost per kWh even with all the regulatory, decommissioning and waste handling costs lumped in (not something the coal generating industry has to pay for of course). A new design of reactor, whether metal-cooled fast-spectrum or molten-salt which is aimed at burning waste and providing electricity as an afterthought will either be a subsidy bitch or will not be built in the first place.
There have been a number of breeder reactor programmes around the world, almost all of them have been shut down in part because of their lack of financial viability and the rest closed due to major design screwups and mechanical failures before their financial problems came to light. Breeders are similar to waste-burners in many ways and the knowledge gained from the assorted failures would go into the detailed design stage of such reactors. Indeed a waste-burner would also be a breeder, it would take deliberate design decisions and careful operational control of such a reactor to prevent it from producing excess plutonium at the end of its operating cycle by breeding up from the U-238 in the waste fuel being "burned".
You mentioned U-238 and a neutron capture to make Pu-239 which is fissile, yes. When it fissions it produces "extra" neutrons, great. The fission also produces two or more atoms of fission products like Cs-137 and Sr-90, the sort of actinides the waste burners are meant to be destroying by splitting them with fast spectrum neutrons, and two neutrons (one for the breeding capture and one for the fission of the Pu-239) have already been debited from the total neutron economy of the cycle. It's only the fact that fission of the uranium and plutonium fuel produces a lot of short-lived actinides as well while the waste fuel being "burned" only contains problematic waste actinides with half-lives longer than a few days makes this work at all. The usual way to make it work is to use MEU and HEU, a proliferation risk and of course lots of Pu as a kickstarter. Breeding up from U-238 uses up too many precious neutrons if waste-burning is meant to be accomplished economically or at all.
As far as construction a waste-burner reactor arrays the fuel and waste very closely together, not something that is simple to design and engineer as there is a lot of heat to get rid of hence the use of liquid metals like sodium or lead alloys and generally the last fifty years of experiments with sodium coolant and other liquid-metal systems have not been happy ones (although the Soviets only had a few problems with lead-bismuth in their submarine reactors). A waste-burning reactor needs two types of neutrons, slow moderated ones for the fission reaction in the uranium/plutonium fuel that creates a neutron surplus and fast-spectrum ones to accomplish the waste destruction and that means an incredibly high neutron flux in a small contained space at very high temperatures (usually 600 or 700 deg C). The designers hope the materials they choose today with no extensive experimental track record to go on will survive this onslaught for decades of continuous operation. Decommissioning at end-of-life is going to be problematic with a lot of irradiated and activated structure to deal with; most of the Powerpoint Cowboy handwaving on this subject tends to be that the solution will be developed while the first generation of reactors are running. Right.
As for molten-salt, the reactor built in the US that is brought out like Lenin's corpse any time the thorium boosters need to make a point produced 7MW thermal for the few thousand hours it ran, it never generated any electricity and it burned U-233. It never used thorium at all or bred anything, it was a "simple" fission reactor with a normal neutron flux built at a time when a lot of experimental designs were being tried and tested and under a much laxer regulatory regime than exists today for power reactor construction. It would never be built in today's world, especially not after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
There are fast-spectrum reactors being built today, experimental ones like the CIFR and first-gen production designs like the Russian BN-800/1000 (they think they've got the bugs out and they promise fewer sodium fires in the future) but they're not optimised for waste burning but aimed at using up more fuel per operating cycle and theoretically producing less long-lived waste. They are, thank Ghu, not trying anything involving molten-salt and thorium.
Where do you plan to get those neutrons from? Fissile uranium-233/235 and some plutonium isotopes are about the only good source of energetic neutrons we have and guess what? fissioning them to create the neutron flux needed to destroy the various problematic actinides produces more of those pesky actinides. The high neutron flux needed to burn actinides damages reactor structures, piping, containments etc. and activates them with neutron capture producing isotopes like Co-60 which makes decommissioning at end-of-life a big headache, assuming nothing breaks bad due to neutron embrittlement meantime. And for Ghu's sake don't mention thorium.
I don't really get what you think might happen with regard to reactor 4's spent fuel pool. It's a large deep tank of water with a lot of spent fuel bundles in it, cooling down the residual heat from radioactive decay of fission products. There are similar pools with spent fuel bundles on the top of the other three damaged reactors. The pool on reactor four contains more fuel bundles than the other three but that's about the only real difference.
Testing of the coolant water and visual inspection of the fuel bundles says none of them are damaged or leaking contra wild speculation and earlier press reports. The engineers have actually craned out a couple of fuel bundles from the pool which had never been exposed in a reactor and so were only slightly radioactive (no fission products, just ceramic enriched uranium oxide pellets with very long half-lifes in metal tubes) and those bundles didn't show any noticeable damage, only a slight amount of corrosion from the use of seawater as emergency top-up coolant for the pool from shortly after the accident.
A phrase I heard a while back, "overabundance of caution" sums up most of the thinking and legal processes involved. The measured radiation level in Fukushima City is about 6mSv/year, reducing as the Cs-134 (half-life two years) goes away but the Cs-137 (half-life 30 years) will hang around for a while so it won't go down very quickly -- it was at about 9 or 10 mSv/year when I visited Fukushima City briefly a couple of years ago. The problem is that this radioactive cesium is direct contamination on surfaces and in the upper soil levels, not stored in rocks and concrete so it's more likely than regular radioactive materials to get picked up on skin, breathed in, ingested in local food and water etc. thus it gets taken more seriously than simple background measurements would indicate. FYI before the accidents and contamination the background in Fukushima City was about 0.3 milliSv/year or 5% of the current value.
As for "dangerous", living for years or decades in the more severely affected areas along the main plume would increase the lifetime chances of suffering from cancer by several percent, up from (say) 30% to maybe 35 or 40%. This is regarded as unacceptable, YMMV, but it would affect children and infants more than adults.
The evacuation was carried out because things had gone badly wrong with releases of radioactive materials over a wide area and for a time the folks working at the site weren't sure it wouldn't get worse, with much greater releases as the cores and containments melted through after a total loss of cooling, the spent fuel pools drying out completely etc. Thanks to the efforts of those "blundering incompetent TEPCO" engineers they actually stopped worse happening but even a few months after the accidents happened there was still a chance of losing a reactor big time. While this was in progress Japanese law requires evacuation. Overabundance of caution means areas which are properly habitable again according to the measured amounts of contamination are still marked as off-limits or only accessible for short periods. The official Japanese upper limit for habitability is 20 milliSv/year but that's not being used as a yes/no decision point in regard to permanent return for most locations.
The area of Japan that's noticeably contaminated (i.e. significantly above background and maybe dangerous to live in for decades) by the Fukushima radiation releases is maybe a thousand square km in extent, or a quarter the size of Rhode Island to put it in terms of the US. A chunk of that is hills and mountains, quite lightly populated to start with. The larger towns in the area tend to be down near the coast for fishing and agriculture and most of those population centres missed the plumes of radioactive material from the explosions. They were evacuated anyway as a precaution -- some areas have now been reopened for the citizens to move back as testing and decontamination efforts have cleared them as being safe.
The one place that remained occupied which did in fact get hit somewhat by the fallout plume is Fukushima City about 60km NW of the plant. Background radiation there is still way higher than before the accident (about 0.75 microSv/h today, or about 6 milliSv per annum cumulative).
The reactors were shut down, that is the fission "chain reaction" had been stopped. The problem is that reactors build up fission products in the fuel pellets, assorted isotopes like I-131 and Cs-137 that are radioactive and as they decay they give off energy = heat. Operating reactors like the ones at Fukushima Daiichi produce about 3000 MW of heat when running at 100% power. A few seconds after they were shut down the residual radioactivity was producing only 50 MW of heat. By the time the cooling systems failed a few hours later that was down to one or two MW of heat as the very short-lived isotopes with half-lifes of seconds or minutes decayed away. That heat energy was still enough to react steam with the fuel rod cladding jackets and evolve hydrogen which caused the explosions.
Reactors five and six at Daiichi, both with full fuel loads in place are being actively cooled to this day; they didn't suffer the hydrogen explosions the other four did but they weren't operating directly before the earthquake hit. There were some problems sustaining their cooling operations after the tsunami but they never failed totally.
The Japanese government has been supervising the work TEPCO have been carrying out since the tsunami. Basically they can't spit without permission and anything and everything about the site is reported to the government on a daily basis via the newly-setup Nuclear Regulatory Authority. Exactly what the government could do that TEPCO isn't doing right now I don't know.
As for the earthquake the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi (and Daini ten km south) survived the ground shocks quite well, going into shutdown and maintaining their cooling operations on battery power even after the tsunami hit and knocked out the emergency generators. It was only after the batteries gave out that they overheated and gas explosions wrecked the reactor vessels and breached the containments.
The reactor complex at Onagawa about 100km further up the coast from Fukushima Daiichi was even closer to the site of the earthquake and it survived without incident -- being sited higher up from sea level it wasn't materially affected by the tsunami.
Consoles are changing from being simple standalone games platforms like the N64 to being an entertainment system like the 360 and PS3 supporting media streaming and cooperative play with fee-earning sidebars like Steam, Xbox Live etc. The extra revenue they bring in during their lifetime more than covers the loss (if any) on the retail sticker price of the actual hardware. It's something Gillette worked out a long time back, sell the razor at a loss and make a fortune on the blades.
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL).
Sorry 'bout that. I thought when you said "a couple of years ago" you meant two or maybe three years ago rather than a decade ago (MSFT's first dividend was in 2003 after the first dotcom crash, not 2000). What you were saying seemed to fit AAPL's financials history better.
MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, about ten years ago. You might be mistaking them for Apple who only started paying dividends in 2012. The AAPL price is down $200 bucks since last year, not "largely flat". As for the future, who knows?
Apple seems to be at the point that MS was at in 1999/2000 or so, running out of space to grow (unless they can persuade people to buy two iPhones at a time) and transitioning to living off their investments in tech and their customer base (aka iTunes). They've started handing out money from their cash mountain to investors, doing share buybacks and, a big tipoff that they've stopped growing, spending billions on big flashy offices.
CUPERTINO, California - July 23, 2013 - Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended June 29, 2013. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $35.3 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $35 billion and net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.9 percent compared to 42.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 57 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Revenues flat, margins down, profits down from a year ago whereas MSFT's numbers are up over the same period. Anyone screaming for MBA Sooper-Genius Tim Cook's head yet?
Which software platform is that? Windows 7? Selling like hot cakes. Windows 8? Selling steadily but not being rolled out at the moment by the corporate VLKs because it's too new; any current rollouts being carried now out were planned years ago around Win7. Server 2012, doing quite nicely with sales up 9% and Hyper-V chewing lumps out of the VMWare marketshare from what I've heard. Office? The money just keeps rolling in.
The mobile market is not one of MS' strengths; RT/WinPhone 8 is tuned for corporate use with the ability to connect to domains, authenticate via AD and support group policies etc. which is not where the Angry Birds and Facebook button brigade excel (or should that be Excel?) Expecting stodgy profit-making MS to suddenly become hip and with it in that market is a bit like watching your rich old Granny trying to breakdance.
"If you look at the numbers, they are clearly fucking it up."
Revenues for FY 2013 for MSFT were $77.8B, up 5.6% over FY2012. If that's evidence of "fucking it up" then I know of a lot of businesses who'd really like to be fucked up like MSFT -- Canonical, for example is in Mark Knopfler territory financially speaking, Sony's been losing money year on year for a while but is still regarded as successful, same with a bunch of other tech companies large and small.
MS' innovation and expansion days are over, they moved (like IBM did in the 90s) to being a services company several years back instead of pushing for growth because in part they had nowhere left to grow into since they owned 90% of the market for business desktop software and a large chunk of the server OS market too. They don't do hardware like Apple and Samsung because they've got customers who do hardware for them (Dell, HP, the various mobo manufacturers). Even the Surface machines are a tiny part of the MS oeuvre, more technology demonstrators than real products. The only mass-market hardware product line is the Xbox and that's not core to what MS does.
Because Microsoft has been creating illegal and unethical barriers to fair trade by abusing its monopoly position.
1996 called, it wants its "Year of the Linux Desktop" T-shirt back.
The Nozomi shinkansen averages about 200km/h on the run from Tokyo to Nagoya, a track distance of about 330km, so a 100mph (160km/h) average for German ICEs isn't that shabby. The top speeds of the various HSR systems are just that, a peak that isn't sustained for much of the journey.
I was reading some Kipling a little while back and in his day a crack express train could reach speeds of up to 70mph. Commuter and freight trains were a lot slower than that. A train that "struggled" to average 100mph would be a wonder to the folks of a hundred years ago.
The fastest ever car (Thrust SSC) handily beat the top speed of the current fleet of passenger aircraft (since Concorde and the Tu-144 retired). So what? The Japanese maglev test vehicles regularly run at 500km/h plus and its record runs were at 580km/h while carrying passengers in unmodified cars. The TGV's stripped-down racecar no-passenger one-off record was 574km/h, damaging the track and overhead as it went, and the best high-speed rail like the TGV runs at 320-350 km/h. 50% better speed is not "slightly faster".
Running through tunnels is not done at maximum speed for many reasons and the Channel Tunnel was never designed for TGV-speed operations. The big problem with mixing fast and slow rail on the same track is the congestion and delays caused by other traffic on the shared rail as well as the wear and tear from operating heavy (and often illegally overloaded) freight on high-speed track. Japanese shinkansen has totally separate tracks and station operations for this reason -- of course they also use a smaller track gauge for their regular train operations which made the choice simpler.
The Japanese maglev testbed runs at 500km/h regularly, with record speeds of over 550km/h in open running, not in a vacuum tube. Most TGV/HSR/shinkansen fast rail tops out at about 320km/h -- I think there's some Chinese HSR that goes a bit faster on scheduled runs. The planned Tokyo-Nagoya maglev will start operating at 500km/h but they're laying out the track to go faster in the future as the engineering improves. That's not "slightly faster" than TGV.
Freight doesn't run on LGV, or if it does then the operators are crazy. Heavy freight cars would destroy the track which is optimised for high-speed passenger transport and slower freights would collapse the passenger scheduling to the point where delays and cancellations would be frequent, not a good selling point for HSR. I've made a lot of shinkansen trips over the past few years, only once did I end up on a delayed train. The rest arrived and departed on schedule to the second (and I mean that, the second-hand on the platform clock reaches "12" and the train starts moving.)
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The French TGV steel-wheel record holder was a heavily-modified racecar version of their regular 300km/h trainsets, running higher voltages and damaging track and overhead as it reached its peak speed (pictures of the TGV trainset setting the record show a cloud of track ballast being sucked up behind it). The maglev record was taken by a regular test carset with some modifications and did not damage the track which is regularly operated at 500km/h plus anyway. The maglev holds another speed record TGV and other trains can't even get close to, the passing speed record of 1026km/h when they ran two maglevs past each other on adjacent tracks at over 500km/h.
Safety -- like the shinkansen the proposed Tokyo-Nagoya maglev will run on separated track, no crossings or other traffic allowed on the same route. There are barrier walls and fencing along all of the track to keep cows, people and Gojira from getting in the way.
The recent Spanish high-speed train "accident" was a disaster waiting to happen when you study it, there is no way a high-speed railway line should have had an 80kph-limit curve like that anywhere along its length. The Japanese maglev will be basically as straight as they can make it with a lot of tunneling and raised viaducts like the existing shinkansen routes but even more so as the maglev will start operation with a 50% speed increase over the steel-wheel-on-steel-rail shinkansen (there are somewhat sketchy plans to eventually run maglev trains at 700km/h and more once the technology improves).
TFA is a cut-n-paste from a badly-written and poorly-researched Wired article some staffer wrote to fill in a blank space on the website last week.
The Japanese maglev trains (there are two parallel tracks) have been running consistently at 500km/h (310 mph in old money) for over a decade and more in testing. Its actual record speed is 580km/h (about 360mph). In addition the test track is 40km long, not 26km as stated in the article; it was extended a few years back. Etc., etc.
They don't have enough waste for it to be worth constructing a deep geological repository as yet. It's one of the benefits of reprocessing spent fuel, reducing the volume and mass of actual waste needing to be stored which helps offset the cost of doing it.
Finland of all places is building one of the first deep repositories for unreprocessed spent fuel from power stations. Total cost for constructing and operating a facility expected to store about 100 years of spent fuel from several reactors is about $1 billion. It's already paid for from a levy on electricity generated by the existing operational reactors which has raised about $1.3 billion up till now.
BTW the US is already storing high-level nuclear waste in a salt-mine geological repository in New Mexico, the WIPP. It's for defence-related waste not for commercial power stations though.
"Yep, there is no insurance company in the world that will cover anyone for a nuclear accident."
Wrong. The US reactor operators carry commercial insurance up to about $10 billion per reactor site (most sites run two or more reactors). It's a sinecure for the insurers, lots of money in premiums and a very low risk they'll ever have to pay out anything. The government carries the load after $10 billion in the same way they're paying $50 billion after Superstorm Sandy trashed the New England coast and overwhelmed the local insurance market's ability to pay out, even when they try to weasel with "Act of God" clauses. Other nations operating nuclear reactors have the same sort of insurance deals in place.
Commercial insurers are covering the cost of the Three Mile Island incident, for example, having paid out a few hundred million bucks up to now. A lot of the payouts have gone to deal with nuisance lawsuits, nothing to do with coping with the damage to the reactor.
"This is a concern with a US manufacturer of a device that is often on, has a camera, has a microphone, and comes from a company that has cooperated with the stazi."
That technical specification covers every smartphone going pretty much with the additional features of location data, movement tracking outside the home, contacts lists etc. Not gonna give up your iPhone though are you?
There's about fifty million tonnes of radioactive potassium (K-40) in the world's oceans, all natural as you can get with a half-life of ONE BILLION years!!! so it will be a persistent hazard to health until the Sun enters its red giant phase. It's the reason seawater is highly radioactive and why seafood sets off scintillometers and radiation meters (counts of about 100-150 Bq/kg typically). It also makes detecting fission isotope contamination from Fukushima and the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific kinda tricky when the samples taken close to Fukushima read 0.05 Bq/litre from cesium-134 and cesium-137 and the meters are pegging out from the 10Bq/l emissions due to the presence of K-40. The only way to accurately measure it is to record the spectrum of the particles and gamma radiation emitted from a smaple over a period of a few weeks since the energies of the radiation due to the fission products is different to the natural K-40 background of the seawater samples.
50 million tonnes of K-40 versus a kilogramme or two of the cesium isotopes from the Fukushima reactors, which one concerns you more? Let me guess...
I presume you are referring to the spent fuel pool in the reactor 4 building as that's the one that's been reported by fantasists and alarmists like Arne Gunderson as exploding, imminently collapsing, bulging, disintegrating, sinking into the ground and catching fire ever since the accidents happened. Unfortunately for their delusions reactor 4 is still there as is its spent fuel pool which today has a water temperature of 38 deg C., not what I'd describe as "inadequately cooled".
Right now the engineers at Fukushima Daiichi are finishing building a crane and supporting structure on reactor 4 in preparation to start removing the spent fuel rods from the pool. They've been working on this project for more than a year, clearing away the rubble on top of the building and constructing a heavy foundation before erecting the crane structure alongside and on top of the building and enclosing the top of the building in a weather shield since, in the words of George RR Martin, "winter is coming".
The crane system has to be heavily built since it will be craning fuel canisters weighing over a hundred tonnes out of the pool after spent fuel bundles are loaded into them. It's not something that can be done safely in an ad-hoc manner despite the Chicken Littles running around in a panic screaming "the world is ending!". Once the crane's up and running in the next few weeks it should only take a month or two to empty the pool of fuel bundles at which time I'm sure the folks worrying about it will turn their attention to the other reactor spent fuel pools which are also in train to be emptied too.
I think the technical problems of building a waste-burning reactor can be overcome but they are substantial much as designing the first jet engines was much more difficult than building piston steam engines. The financial aspects are more problematical -- a waste-burner has to produce electricity to be viable in the marketplace, it's what will make money to pay off its design, construction and operation. It, like any other commercial electricity-generating system has to compete with coal and gas as bottom-line cheap generating fuels (cheap gas will probably run out in the next decade or two, coal is abundant and cheap into the next century and more), Right now conventional nuclear LWR and (debatably) heavy-water power reactors can compete even with coal generation in terms of cost per kWh even with all the regulatory, decommissioning and waste handling costs lumped in (not something the coal generating industry has to pay for of course). A new design of reactor, whether metal-cooled fast-spectrum or molten-salt which is aimed at burning waste and providing electricity as an afterthought will either be a subsidy bitch or will not be built in the first place.
There have been a number of breeder reactor programmes around the world, almost all of them have been shut down in part because of their lack of financial viability and the rest closed due to major design screwups and mechanical failures before their financial problems came to light. Breeders are similar to waste-burners in many ways and the knowledge gained from the assorted failures would go into the detailed design stage of such reactors. Indeed a waste-burner would also be a breeder, it would take deliberate design decisions and careful operational control of such a reactor to prevent it from producing excess plutonium at the end of its operating cycle by breeding up from the U-238 in the waste fuel being "burned".
You mentioned U-238 and a neutron capture to make Pu-239 which is fissile, yes. When it fissions it produces "extra" neutrons, great. The fission also produces two or more atoms of fission products like Cs-137 and Sr-90, the sort of actinides the waste burners are meant to be destroying by splitting them with fast spectrum neutrons, and two neutrons (one for the breeding capture and one for the fission of the Pu-239) have already been debited from the total neutron economy of the cycle. It's only the fact that fission of the uranium and plutonium fuel produces a lot of short-lived actinides as well while the waste fuel being "burned" only contains problematic waste actinides with half-lives longer than a few days makes this work at all. The usual way to make it work is to use MEU and HEU, a proliferation risk and of course lots of Pu as a kickstarter. Breeding up from U-238 uses up too many precious neutrons if waste-burning is meant to be accomplished economically or at all.
As far as construction a waste-burner reactor arrays the fuel and waste very closely together, not something that is simple to design and engineer as there is a lot of heat to get rid of hence the use of liquid metals like sodium or lead alloys and generally the last fifty years of experiments with sodium coolant and other liquid-metal systems have not been happy ones (although the Soviets only had a few problems with lead-bismuth in their submarine reactors). A waste-burning reactor needs two types of neutrons, slow moderated ones for the fission reaction in the uranium/plutonium fuel that creates a neutron surplus and fast-spectrum ones to accomplish the waste destruction and that means an incredibly high neutron flux in a small contained space at very high temperatures (usually 600 or 700 deg C). The designers hope the materials they choose today with no extensive experimental track record to go on will survive this onslaught for decades of continuous operation. Decommissioning at end-of-life is going to be problematic with a lot of irradiated and activated structure to deal with; most of the Powerpoint Cowboy handwaving on this subject tends to be that the solution will be developed while the first generation of reactors are running. Right.
As for molten-salt, the reactor built in the US that is brought out like Lenin's corpse any time the thorium boosters need to make a point produced 7MW thermal for the few thousand hours it ran, it never generated any electricity and it burned U-233. It never used thorium at all or bred anything, it was a "simple" fission reactor with a normal neutron flux built at a time when a lot of experimental designs were being tried and tested and under a much laxer regulatory regime than exists today for power reactor construction. It would never be built in today's world, especially not after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
There are fast-spectrum reactors being built today, experimental ones like the CIFR and first-gen production designs like the Russian BN-800/1000 (they think they've got the bugs out and they promise fewer sodium fires in the future) but they're not optimised for waste burning but aimed at using up more fuel per operating cycle and theoretically producing less long-lived waste. They are, thank Ghu, not trying anything involving molten-salt and thorium.
Where do you plan to get those neutrons from? Fissile uranium-233/235 and some plutonium isotopes are about the only good source of energetic neutrons we have and guess what? fissioning them to create the neutron flux needed to destroy the various problematic actinides produces more of those pesky actinides. The high neutron flux needed to burn actinides damages reactor structures, piping, containments etc. and activates them with neutron capture producing isotopes like Co-60 which makes decommissioning at end-of-life a big headache, assuming nothing breaks bad due to neutron embrittlement meantime. And for Ghu's sake don't mention thorium.
I don't really get what you think might happen with regard to reactor 4's spent fuel pool. It's a large deep tank of water with a lot of spent fuel bundles in it, cooling down the residual heat from radioactive decay of fission products. There are similar pools with spent fuel bundles on the top of the other three damaged reactors. The pool on reactor four contains more fuel bundles than the other three but that's about the only real difference.
Testing of the coolant water and visual inspection of the fuel bundles says none of them are damaged or leaking contra wild speculation and earlier press reports. The engineers have actually craned out a couple of fuel bundles from the pool which had never been exposed in a reactor and so were only slightly radioactive (no fission products, just ceramic enriched uranium oxide pellets with very long half-lifes in metal tubes) and those bundles didn't show any noticeable damage, only a slight amount of corrosion from the use of seawater as emergency top-up coolant for the pool from shortly after the accident.
A phrase I heard a while back, "overabundance of caution" sums up most of the thinking and legal processes involved. The measured radiation level in Fukushima City is about 6mSv/year, reducing as the Cs-134 (half-life two years) goes away but the Cs-137 (half-life 30 years) will hang around for a while so it won't go down very quickly -- it was at about 9 or 10 mSv/year when I visited Fukushima City briefly a couple of years ago. The problem is that this radioactive cesium is direct contamination on surfaces and in the upper soil levels, not stored in rocks and concrete so it's more likely than regular radioactive materials to get picked up on skin, breathed in, ingested in local food and water etc. thus it gets taken more seriously than simple background measurements would indicate. FYI before the accidents and contamination the background in Fukushima City was about 0.3 milliSv/year or 5% of the current value.
As for "dangerous", living for years or decades in the more severely affected areas along the main plume would increase the lifetime chances of suffering from cancer by several percent, up from (say) 30% to maybe 35 or 40%. This is regarded as unacceptable, YMMV, but it would affect children and infants more than adults.
The evacuation was carried out because things had gone badly wrong with releases of radioactive materials over a wide area and for a time the folks working at the site weren't sure it wouldn't get worse, with much greater releases as the cores and containments melted through after a total loss of cooling, the spent fuel pools drying out completely etc. Thanks to the efforts of those "blundering incompetent TEPCO" engineers they actually stopped worse happening but even a few months after the accidents happened there was still a chance of losing a reactor big time. While this was in progress Japanese law requires evacuation. Overabundance of caution means areas which are properly habitable again according to the measured amounts of contamination are still marked as off-limits or only accessible for short periods. The official Japanese upper limit for habitability is 20 milliSv/year but that's not being used as a yes/no decision point in regard to permanent return for most locations.
The area of Japan that's noticeably contaminated (i.e. significantly above background and maybe dangerous to live in for decades) by the Fukushima radiation releases is maybe a thousand square km in extent, or a quarter the size of Rhode Island to put it in terms of the US. A chunk of that is hills and mountains, quite lightly populated to start with. The larger towns in the area tend to be down near the coast for fishing and agriculture and most of those population centres missed the plumes of radioactive material from the explosions. They were evacuated anyway as a precaution -- some areas have now been reopened for the citizens to move back as testing and decontamination efforts have cleared them as being safe.
The one place that remained occupied which did in fact get hit somewhat by the fallout plume is Fukushima City about 60km NW of the plant. Background radiation there is still way higher than before the accident (about 0.75 microSv/h today, or about 6 milliSv per annum cumulative).
The reactors were shut down, that is the fission "chain reaction" had been stopped. The problem is that reactors build up fission products in the fuel pellets, assorted isotopes like I-131 and Cs-137 that are radioactive and as they decay they give off energy = heat. Operating reactors like the ones at Fukushima Daiichi produce about 3000 MW of heat when running at 100% power. A few seconds after they were shut down the residual radioactivity was producing only 50 MW of heat. By the time the cooling systems failed a few hours later that was down to one or two MW of heat as the very short-lived isotopes with half-lifes of seconds or minutes decayed away. That heat energy was still enough to react steam with the fuel rod cladding jackets and evolve hydrogen which caused the explosions.
Reactors five and six at Daiichi, both with full fuel loads in place are being actively cooled to this day; they didn't suffer the hydrogen explosions the other four did but they weren't operating directly before the earthquake hit. There were some problems sustaining their cooling operations after the tsunami but they never failed totally.
The Japanese government has been supervising the work TEPCO have been carrying out since the tsunami. Basically they can't spit without permission and anything and everything about the site is reported to the government on a daily basis via the newly-setup Nuclear Regulatory Authority. Exactly what the government could do that TEPCO isn't doing right now I don't know.
As for the earthquake the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi (and Daini ten km south) survived the ground shocks quite well, going into shutdown and maintaining their cooling operations on battery power even after the tsunami hit and knocked out the emergency generators. It was only after the batteries gave out that they overheated and gas explosions wrecked the reactor vessels and breached the containments.
The reactor complex at Onagawa about 100km further up the coast from Fukushima Daiichi was even closer to the site of the earthquake and it survived without incident -- being sited higher up from sea level it wasn't materially affected by the tsunami.
Consoles are changing from being simple standalone games platforms like the N64 to being an entertainment system like the 360 and PS3 supporting media streaming and cooperative play with fee-earning sidebars like Steam, Xbox Live etc. The extra revenue they bring in during their lifetime more than covers the loss (if any) on the retail sticker price of the actual hardware. It's something Gillette worked out a long time back, sell the razor at a loss and make a fortune on the blades.
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL).
Sorry 'bout that. I thought when you said "a couple of years ago" you meant two or maybe three years ago rather than a decade ago (MSFT's first dividend was in 2003 after the first dotcom crash, not 2000). What you were saying seemed to fit AAPL's financials history better.
MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, about ten years ago. You might be mistaking them for Apple who only started paying dividends in 2012. The AAPL price is down $200 bucks since last year, not "largely flat". As for the future, who knows?
Apple seems to be at the point that MS was at in 1999/2000 or so, running out of space to grow (unless they can persuade people to buy two iPhones at a time) and transitioning to living off their investments in tech and their customer base (aka iTunes). They've started handing out money from their cash mountain to investors, doing share buybacks and, a big tipoff that they've stopped growing, spending billions on big flashy offices.
CUPERTINO, California - July 23, 2013 - Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended June 29, 2013. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $35.3 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $35 billion and net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.9 percent compared to 42.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 57 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Revenues flat, margins down, profits down from a year ago whereas MSFT's numbers are up over the same period. Anyone screaming for MBA Sooper-Genius Tim Cook's head yet?
Which software platform is that? Windows 7? Selling like hot cakes. Windows 8? Selling steadily but not being rolled out at the moment by the corporate VLKs because it's too new; any current rollouts being carried now out were planned years ago around Win7. Server 2012, doing quite nicely with sales up 9% and Hyper-V chewing lumps out of the VMWare marketshare from what I've heard. Office? The money just keeps rolling in.
The mobile market is not one of MS' strengths; RT/WinPhone 8 is tuned for corporate use with the ability to connect to domains, authenticate via AD and support group policies etc. which is not where the Angry Birds and Facebook button brigade excel (or should that be Excel?) Expecting stodgy profit-making MS to suddenly become hip and with it in that market is a bit like watching your rich old Granny trying to breakdance.
"If you look at the numbers, they are clearly fucking it up."
Revenues for FY 2013 for MSFT were $77.8B, up 5.6% over FY2012. If that's evidence of "fucking it up" then I know of a lot of businesses who'd really like to be fucked up like MSFT -- Canonical, for example is in Mark Knopfler territory financially speaking, Sony's been losing money year on year for a while but is still regarded as successful, same with a bunch of other tech companies large and small.
MS' innovation and expansion days are over, they moved (like IBM did in the 90s) to being a services company several years back instead of pushing for growth because in part they had nowhere left to grow into since they owned 90% of the market for business desktop software and a large chunk of the server OS market too. They don't do hardware like Apple and Samsung because they've got customers who do hardware for them (Dell, HP, the various mobo manufacturers). Even the Surface machines are a tiny part of the MS oeuvre, more technology demonstrators than real products. The only mass-market hardware product line is the Xbox and that's not core to what MS does.
Because Microsoft has been creating illegal and unethical barriers to fair trade by abusing its monopoly position.
1996 called, it wants its "Year of the Linux Desktop" T-shirt back.
"Flyover" -- that's when the tornadoes sweep through and double-wides blot out the sun?
The Nozomi shinkansen averages about 200km/h on the run from Tokyo to Nagoya, a track distance of about 330km, so a 100mph (160km/h) average for German ICEs isn't that shabby. The top speeds of the various HSR systems are just that, a peak that isn't sustained for much of the journey.
I was reading some Kipling a little while back and in his day a crack express train could reach speeds of up to 70mph. Commuter and freight trains were a lot slower than that. A train that "struggled" to average 100mph would be a wonder to the folks of a hundred years ago.
The fastest ever car (Thrust SSC) handily beat the top speed of the current fleet of passenger aircraft (since Concorde and the Tu-144 retired). So what? The Japanese maglev test vehicles regularly run at 500km/h plus and its record runs were at 580km/h while carrying passengers in unmodified cars. The TGV's stripped-down racecar no-passenger one-off record was 574km/h, damaging the track and overhead as it went, and the best high-speed rail like the TGV runs at 320-350 km/h. 50% better speed is not "slightly faster".
Running through tunnels is not done at maximum speed for many reasons and the Channel Tunnel was never designed for TGV-speed operations. The big problem with mixing fast and slow rail on the same track is the congestion and delays caused by other traffic on the shared rail as well as the wear and tear from operating heavy (and often illegally overloaded) freight on high-speed track. Japanese shinkansen has totally separate tracks and station operations for this reason -- of course they also use a smaller track gauge for their regular train operations which made the choice simpler.
The Japanese maglev testbed runs at 500km/h regularly, with record speeds of over 550km/h in open running, not in a vacuum tube. Most TGV/HSR/shinkansen fast rail tops out at about 320km/h -- I think there's some Chinese HSR that goes a bit faster on scheduled runs. The planned Tokyo-Nagoya maglev will start operating at 500km/h but they're laying out the track to go faster in the future as the engineering improves. That's not "slightly faster" than TGV.
Freight doesn't run on LGV, or if it does then the operators are crazy. Heavy freight cars would destroy the track which is optimised for high-speed passenger transport and slower freights would collapse the passenger scheduling to the point where delays and cancellations would be frequent, not a good selling point for HSR. I've made a lot of shinkansen trips over the past few years, only once did I end up on a delayed train. The rest arrived and departed on schedule to the second (and I mean that, the second-hand on the platform clock reaches "12" and the train starts moving.)