South Korea has just taken a number of its reactors offline after discovering a lot of parts weren't properly qualified for use in nuclear installations, sold and fitted with dodgy paperwork in regard to QA and such. They're not safety-related parts but under the terms of their operating licences the reactors can't generate power until the parts are swapped out for properly documented replacements.
The Chinese are bringing their new-build reactors online approximately to schedule (about 4 to 5 years from first concrete to grid connection) but we don't know what sort of corners they're cutting, if any.
The Fukushima Daiichi reactors were in fact fitted with venting apparatus -- if you look at pictures of the site you'll see large white vertical pipes standing beside the reactor buildings, braced with girders to cope with earthquakes. The problem is that if the vents are used they can (and probably will) release radioactivity as well as hydrogen gas since at that point in time the fuel elements in the reactors will have suffered heat damage.
I've heard claims that the decision to not vent the gas buildup was taken by politicians in the Japanese government since they didn't want to be responsible for deliberately releasing radioactive contamination across parts of Japan. Whether that is true or not venting would have released much less radioactivity than the explosions did.
The Monju fast-breeder has been a white elephant for a long time. Sodium leaks/fires (a perennial problem with fast reactors around the world) and general poor operational practices have meant it has spent most of its life sitting idle getting reworked or repaired.
AutoCAD is the basis of an entire ecology of add-ons and workflow tools, many of which can cost ten times the basic cost of the package itself and then some. Oil refinery piping layouts, dynamic flow analysis, bill of materials, finite element analysis tools, import and export to other engineering packages, 3DMax visualisation etc. etc. Unless and until the FOSS alternatives to AutoCAD can plug in as a one-for-one replacement to that ecology then they're not going to make big inroads in the multiseat engineering/architectural world.
The Russians have mostly shifted to nuke subs like the US and UK. Their replacement for the obsolete Kilo class is the Lada which has been delayed with problems meeting the design specification after the lead boat was built and tested. Its operational profile is very much as a coastal boat, defending harbours and such.
A more interesting modern non-nuclear sub design is the German/Italian Type 212A with a nuclear-like underwater endurance of up to three weeks without surfacing or snorkelling using fuel cells. It has a decent range and carries a modern suite of offensive and defensive weapons and sensors allowing it a more active role than the Lada.
These modern diesel/AIP subs are a lot smaller than the newer nuke boats -- the British Astute boats are 7400 tonnes submerged displacement compared to the Lada and 212A (and the S-80) at under 2000 tonnes. Even the older LA 688s are 6900 tonnes submerged. That means the diesels have an advantage in brown water close to shore as they can operate in shallower seas than the cruiser-sized nukes. In open water the nukes would have them for breakfast, of course.
Our economy may be shit but one thing we can do is build a sub
As far as I know the US doesn't build or use non-nuclear subs and it certainly doesn't export the nuclear boats it does build. The same is true for the UK.
Cesium doesn't linger in mammals. Depending on the tissues it lodges in after inhalation or ingestion (bone, fat, muscle etc.) its biological halflife is between 70 and 120 days i.e. half the cesium taken in will be pissed away or excreted in that time, then half the residue over the next period and so on. It's the same with strontium and a number of other problem specimens in the radiochemical zoo although the half-life varies from element to element.
Iodine-131 is the major contamination problem from fission releases, it's preferentially concentrated in the thyroid and is very radioactive but because of that it goes away quite quickly, with a halflife of only 8 days or so and superdosing with iodine tablets will prevent uptake of I-131 to a large extent. Hospitals and therapeutic facilities that use I-131 to "burn out" thyroid cancers flush residues into the sewer systems leading to the occasional panic when I-131 is detected in miniscule amounts in rivers, lakes etc. downstream.
Actually Japan didn't ban bananas. The Forbes writer got it wrong.
The new tighter limits on food, water etc. set by Japan were for contamination due to cesium-134 and -137, byproducts of fission usually only found in the wild after a reactor goes wrong or from nuclear explosions. The "natural" levels of radiation from potassium, rubidium etc. are already factored in to the safety regs.
I'm in Japan at the moment, I bought bananas a couple of days ago -- they're a cheap source of energy (and potassium too) since I'm doing a lot of walking around and sightseeing while I'm here.
The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.
Oceanside nuclear and other thermal power stations do not evaporate any water, they return seawater warmed by a few degrees from the condensers to the ocean.
The SEGS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems in California near Edwards Air Force Base uses pressure washer systems to wash sand and dust off the heat-concentrating mirrors. They use water from the local desert aquifer which is running out. They also use water from that aquifer to cool the condensers on the output side of their steam turbine setup since there's no convenient river or ocean to dump the heat into.
Long-term storage of nuclear waste is paid for by a levy on the electricity generated by the reactors and not by the "taxpayers". In the US that's 0.1c per kWh. The total US fund for that is over 28 billion dollars and rising. In contrast the coal power station operators pay bupkis for long-term treatment of their unconstrained waste output -- any attempt to get them to cough up (so to speak) is a War On Coal.
"Saying that the Ballmer is no worse than Fiorini is no reason to keep Ballmer - there are far better alternatives around."
Such as? Who's available, with the sort of deep knowledge of where MS came from, where it is today and where it is going tomorrow and who can step in and make MS even better than it is today with minimal disruption to the financial bottom line? Hmmm, tricky...
Some day MS is going to have to cope without Steve B., hopefully not in the same way that Apple is handling the loss of Steve Jobs but that day isn't here yet. I find the idea that Ballmer is some kind of liability to MS quite amusing considering what would/will happen to the business if/when he does leave.
Steve Ballmer has been in a senior position at MicroSoft for about thirty years now, unlike the typical bungee boss CEOs and board members of various other high-tech corporations such as HP (remember Carly?). During the time he's been working there MS total turnover has been about half a trillion bucks. I'd say US high-tech businesses could use some more chair-throwers like Ballmer and fewer wily super-geniuses like Fiorina.
Yep, my mistake, a simple brain fart on my part but the RD-180, the RD-171 and its predecessor the RD-170 are all LOX/kerosene like the F-1. They produce 20% more thrust for the amount of fuel and oxidiser they burn and they are available off the shelf. The RD-171 produces more 300,000lb thrust than the last version of the F-1 and it can be tilted and swivelled unlike the old fixed F-1 motor design. I'm not sure if the RD-17x family and derivatives can be throttled; the Saturn V tended to beat up its crew as the first stage emptied at a maximum acceleration of 4G just before separation and a throttleable engine such as the Shuttle had could smooth out the ascent somewhat.
You're right about the mass fraction. The tankerage required for a staging LOX/LH2 rocket would be quite bulky and expensive in terms of launchpad mass. Vehicles like Ariane and the Shuttle ran their main engines nearly all the way to orbit assisted by strapons for the early part of the ascent. I think the Delta 4 with RS-68 engines is the only rocket that takes off and discards a LOX/LH2 stage in flight, trading the very good Isp figure for the mass of the extra tank volume.
The investigation being pressed is to see if the bidders colluded before and during the auction to keep the price down. This is illegal under British law but that's not stopped folks before.
The RD-180 engine, a LOX/LH2 engine like the F1, is available off-the-shelf today and has a significantly higher Isp figure (311s sea-level) than the F1 ever had had (263s sea-level). I'd rate that as more than a few fractions more efficient. Its parent engine, the RD-170 and the current RD-171 are both more powerful than the F1 at about 1.8 million lb as compared to the F1's 1.52 million lb. and the RD-171 can similarly be bought off-the-shelf today. Of course they're Russian ex-Soviet designs which gives them cooties in the eyes of some Americans.
The drag-and-snap windows default behaviour can be switched off. "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Ease of Access Center\Make the mouse easier to use" and then enable "Prevent Windows...". Click Apply and windows will no longer snap to screen borders of full-size automatically. Works on both Win7 and Win8.
Quite a few Europeans use vegetable oil in their diesel-engined cars. There's a thriving market for small back-of-the-garage "refineries" processing waste cooking oil from fast-food shops etc. to remove some of the more harmful byproducts like glycerine and water as well as filtering out particulates. You can usually tell if someone's doing this as their car exhaust tends to smell of french fries.
Unused cooking oil (usually sunflower or rapeseed) can be poured into the tank without requiring treatment, especially in older diesel cars and vans with mechanical fuel pumps. In the UK the price of cooking oil is now kept artificially high to match the price of garage forecourt diesel (about UKP 1.40 a litre at the moment) since most of that is tax and too many folks were going to Costco and the like and buying vegetable oil in 5-litre containers for a lot less. Theory says that folks using alternative fuels like biodiesel should pay the same duty as petroleum-derived fuels garner but this doesn't happen much as you might expect.
The purpose of Earth Hour is to make us realize how absolutely reliant on technology we are. No electric lights, no computers or phones and no television is a jarring shift for most urbanites.
And when the dreadful Hour has passed and you click the lightswitch to return to the 21st century you fervently swear you will burn every ounce of fossil carbon on the planet, and Titan too if necessary if it means you'll never ever have to go through that horrible experience for real.
The Seto is not much more than a hundred metres across in places. The Onomichi ferry is 100 yen one way if you ever want to cross the Pacific on the cheap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAR69cmBEr4
Someone did a Youtube video putting Win 8 on a 2006-era IBM laptop and carried out a head-to-head comparison with XP. Win 8 installed quicker and programs and utilities mostly ran faster under Win 8 than under XP, and that's with 1GB of RAM and a regular HDD rather than an SSD. It still ran sluggishly compared to more modern multicore CPUs with up-to-date GPUs and fast SSDs, of course but then again so did the original XP install.
How does the Mk. 1 Eyeball perform in the infrared spectrum? UV and higher? Radio frequencies? Simultaneously?
How well does it work at night (the preferred time to launch attacks)? What's its unaided range, fifty km and more like modern aircraft instruments can zoom to or a few hundred metres at best? How does its performance degrade in an 8-gee turn when it gets squishy and all out of shape and the pilot can't see the instrument panel clearly never mind resolving what's outside the cockpit?
How would the pilot deal with a laser blinding attack? Switch to a new set of Mk. 1 Eyeballs he carries as spares? Laser-blinding the optical sensors on an unmanned fighter doesn't mean the plane or even the mission is lost if it is planned for at the design stage.
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South Korea has just taken a number of its reactors offline after discovering a lot of parts weren't properly qualified for use in nuclear installations, sold and fitted with dodgy paperwork in regard to QA and such. They're not safety-related parts but under the terms of their operating licences the reactors can't generate power until the parts are swapped out for properly documented replacements.
The Chinese are bringing their new-build reactors online approximately to schedule (about 4 to 5 years from first concrete to grid connection) but we don't know what sort of corners they're cutting, if any.
The Fukushima Daiichi reactors were in fact fitted with venting apparatus -- if you look at pictures of the site you'll see large white vertical pipes standing beside the reactor buildings, braced with girders to cope with earthquakes. The problem is that if the vents are used they can (and probably will) release radioactivity as well as hydrogen gas since at that point in time the fuel elements in the reactors will have suffered heat damage.
I've heard claims that the decision to not vent the gas buildup was taken by politicians in the Japanese government since they didn't want to be responsible for deliberately releasing radioactive contamination across parts of Japan. Whether that is true or not venting would have released much less radioactivity than the explosions did.
The Monju fast-breeder has been a white elephant for a long time. Sodium leaks/fires (a perennial problem with fast reactors around the world) and general poor operational practices have meant it has spent most of its life sitting idle getting reworked or repaired.
AutoCAD is the basis of an entire ecology of add-ons and workflow tools, many of which can cost ten times the basic cost of the package itself and then some. Oil refinery piping layouts, dynamic flow analysis, bill of materials, finite element analysis tools, import and export to other engineering packages, 3DMax visualisation etc. etc. Unless and until the FOSS alternatives to AutoCAD can plug in as a one-for-one replacement to that ecology then they're not going to make big inroads in the multiseat engineering/architectural world.
The Russians have mostly shifted to nuke subs like the US and UK. Their replacement for the obsolete Kilo class is the Lada which has been delayed with problems meeting the design specification after the lead boat was built and tested. Its operational profile is very much as a coastal boat, defending harbours and such.
A more interesting modern non-nuclear sub design is the German/Italian Type 212A with a nuclear-like underwater endurance of up to three weeks without surfacing or snorkelling using fuel cells. It has a decent range and carries a modern suite of offensive and defensive weapons and sensors allowing it a more active role than the Lada.
These modern diesel/AIP subs are a lot smaller than the newer nuke boats -- the British Astute boats are 7400 tonnes submerged displacement compared to the Lada and 212A (and the S-80) at under 2000 tonnes. Even the older LA 688s are 6900 tonnes submerged. That means the diesels have an advantage in brown water close to shore as they can operate in shallower seas than the cruiser-sized nukes. In open water the nukes would have them for breakfast, of course.
Our economy may be shit but one thing we can do is build a sub
As far as I know the US doesn't build or use non-nuclear subs and it certainly doesn't export the nuclear boats it does build. The same is true for the UK.
Cesium doesn't linger in mammals. Depending on the tissues it lodges in after inhalation or ingestion (bone, fat, muscle etc.) its biological halflife is between 70 and 120 days i.e. half the cesium taken in will be pissed away or excreted in that time, then half the residue over the next period and so on. It's the same with strontium and a number of other problem specimens in the radiochemical zoo although the half-life varies from element to element.
Iodine-131 is the major contamination problem from fission releases, it's preferentially concentrated in the thyroid and is very radioactive but because of that it goes away quite quickly, with a halflife of only 8 days or so and superdosing with iodine tablets will prevent uptake of I-131 to a large extent. Hospitals and therapeutic facilities that use I-131 to "burn out" thyroid cancers flush residues into the sewer systems leading to the occasional panic when I-131 is detected in miniscule amounts in rivers, lakes etc. downstream.
Actually Japan didn't ban bananas. The Forbes writer got it wrong.
The new tighter limits on food, water etc. set by Japan were for contamination due to cesium-134 and -137, byproducts of fission usually only found in the wild after a reactor goes wrong or from nuclear explosions. The "natural" levels of radiation from potassium, rubidium etc. are already factored in to the safety regs.
I'm in Japan at the moment, I bought bananas a couple of days ago -- they're a cheap source of energy (and potassium too) since I'm doing a lot of walking around and sightseeing while I'm here.
The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/faqs.html
Oceanside nuclear and other thermal power stations do not evaporate any water, they return seawater warmed by a few degrees from the condensers to the ocean.
The SEGS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems in California near Edwards Air Force Base uses pressure washer systems to wash sand and dust off the heat-concentrating mirrors. They use water from the local desert aquifer which is running out. They also use water from that aquifer to cool the condensers on the output side of their steam turbine setup since there's no convenient river or ocean to dump the heat into.
Jim Baxter, the famous Rangers player and well-known alcoholic received two liver transplants before he died of pancreatic cancer several years later.
Long-term storage of nuclear waste is paid for by a levy on the electricity generated by the reactors and not by the "taxpayers". In the US that's 0.1c per kWh. The total US fund for that is over 28 billion dollars and rising. In contrast the coal power station operators pay bupkis for long-term treatment of their unconstrained waste output -- any attempt to get them to cough up (so to speak) is a War On Coal.
In 2002 MicroSoft's gross profits were $24 billion. In 2012 they were $59 billion. Someone somewhere is doing something right.
"Saying that the Ballmer is no worse than Fiorini is no reason to keep Ballmer - there are far better alternatives around."
Such as? Who's available, with the sort of deep knowledge of where MS came from, where it is today and where it is going tomorrow and who can step in and make MS even better than it is today with minimal disruption to the financial bottom line? Hmmm, tricky...
Some day MS is going to have to cope without Steve B., hopefully not in the same way that Apple is handling the loss of Steve Jobs but that day isn't here yet. I find the idea that Ballmer is some kind of liability to MS quite amusing considering what would/will happen to the business if/when he does leave.
Steve Ballmer has been in a senior position at MicroSoft for about thirty years now, unlike the typical bungee boss CEOs and board members of various other high-tech corporations such as HP (remember Carly?). During the time he's been working there MS total turnover has been about half a trillion bucks. I'd say US high-tech businesses could use some more chair-throwers like Ballmer and fewer wily super-geniuses like Fiorina.
Followed shortly thereafter by "thin clients"...
Yep, my mistake, a simple brain fart on my part but the RD-180, the RD-171 and its predecessor the RD-170 are all LOX/kerosene like the F-1. They produce 20% more thrust for the amount of fuel and oxidiser they burn and they are available off the shelf. The RD-171 produces more 300,000lb thrust than the last version of the F-1 and it can be tilted and swivelled unlike the old fixed F-1 motor design. I'm not sure if the RD-17x family and derivatives can be throttled; the Saturn V tended to beat up its crew as the first stage emptied at a maximum acceleration of 4G just before separation and a throttleable engine such as the Shuttle had could smooth out the ascent somewhat.
You're right about the mass fraction. The tankerage required for a staging LOX/LH2 rocket would be quite bulky and expensive in terms of launchpad mass. Vehicles like Ariane and the Shuttle ran their main engines nearly all the way to orbit assisted by strapons for the early part of the ascent. I think the Delta 4 with RS-68 engines is the only rocket that takes off and discards a LOX/LH2 stage in flight, trading the very good Isp figure for the mass of the extra tank volume.
The investigation being pressed is to see if the bidders colluded before and during the auction to keep the price down. This is illegal under British law but that's not stopped folks before.
The RD-180 engine, a LOX/LH2 engine like the F1, is available off-the-shelf today and has a significantly higher Isp figure (311s sea-level) than the F1 ever had had (263s sea-level). I'd rate that as more than a few fractions more efficient. Its parent engine, the RD-170 and the current RD-171 are both more powerful than the F1 at about 1.8 million lb as compared to the F1's 1.52 million lb. and the RD-171 can similarly be bought off-the-shelf today. Of course they're Russian ex-Soviet designs which gives them cooties in the eyes of some Americans.
The drag-and-snap windows default behaviour can be switched off. "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Ease of Access Center\Make the mouse easier to use" and then enable "Prevent Windows...". Click Apply and windows will no longer snap to screen borders of full-size automatically. Works on both Win7 and Win8.
Quite a few Europeans use vegetable oil in their diesel-engined cars. There's a thriving market for small back-of-the-garage "refineries" processing waste cooking oil from fast-food shops etc. to remove some of the more harmful byproducts like glycerine and water as well as filtering out particulates. You can usually tell if someone's doing this as their car exhaust tends to smell of french fries.
Unused cooking oil (usually sunflower or rapeseed) can be poured into the tank without requiring treatment, especially in older diesel cars and vans with mechanical fuel pumps. In the UK the price of cooking oil is now kept artificially high to match the price of garage forecourt diesel (about UKP 1.40 a litre at the moment) since most of that is tax and too many folks were going to Costco and the like and buying vegetable oil in 5-litre containers for a lot less. Theory says that folks using alternative fuels like biodiesel should pay the same duty as petroleum-derived fuels garner but this doesn't happen much as you might expect.
And when the dreadful Hour has passed and you click the lightswitch to return to the 21st century you fervently swear you will burn every ounce of fossil carbon on the planet, and Titan too if necessary if it means you'll never ever have to go through that horrible experience for real.
The Seto is not much more than a hundred metres across in places. The Onomichi ferry is 100 yen one way if you ever want to cross the Pacific on the cheap. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAR69cmBEr4
Someone did a Youtube video putting Win 8 on a 2006-era IBM laptop and carried out a head-to-head comparison with XP. Win 8 installed quicker and programs and utilities mostly ran faster under Win 8 than under XP, and that's with 1GB of RAM and a regular HDD rather than an SSD. It still ran sluggishly compared to more modern multicore CPUs with up-to-date GPUs and fast SSDs, of course but then again so did the original XP install.
How does the Mk. 1 Eyeball perform in the infrared spectrum? UV and higher? Radio frequencies? Simultaneously?
How well does it work at night (the preferred time to launch attacks)? What's its unaided range, fifty km and more like modern aircraft instruments can zoom to or a few hundred metres at best? How does its performance degrade in an 8-gee turn when it gets squishy and all out of shape and the pilot can't see the instrument panel clearly never mind resolving what's outside the cockpit?
How would the pilot deal with a laser blinding attack? Switch to a new set of Mk. 1 Eyeballs he carries as spares? Laser-blinding the optical sensors on an unmanned fighter doesn't mean the plane or even the mission is lost if it is planned for at the design stage.