Intelligent folks often do crazy things outside their own specialist fields. Newton, the author of the Principia among other great works was an alchemist in his spare time, "studying" strange Kabbalistic nonsense. Linus Pauling went all weird in his later days too, the list goes on and on.
Just because Bussard was a smart guy in one field doesn't mean Polywell or focus fusion will work; the "and then a miracle occurs" stage is a big hurdle to pass. I class it in the "carburettor that runs on water" family of ideas that a few overenthusiastic folks think will work with just another little tweak here or an adjustment there along with some out-and-out con men riding the coattails. I will be condescending here and assume you're a True Believer rather than the other alternative.
When you say no tokamak has "sustained ignition" I assume you think JET's 1.5 seconds at 16 megawatts thermal output is not sustained or not ignition, I don't know which. JET and other tokamaks were never designed for sustained running or even to reach a Q>1 (more energy out than in) return, they are fusion testbeds to develop methods of creating, focussing, heating and maintaining plasmas. JET was rebuilt yet again recently to support the ITER project, concentrating on construction and materials. ITER is meant to run to Q>10 for tens of seconds and more but it's a materials and operations testbed too, more engineering than physics though and intended to narrow the design parameters of the first prototype power reactors.
I'm surprised you're so down on tokamak research which has actually produced large quantities of energy in tests (22MJ thermal in 1.5 seconds from the JET run in 1997, for example) while describing the con-artists like Polywell and Focus (zero joules in several years of funding and self-promotion) as "promising". At least you're not carrying a (fusion) torch for Fleischman and Pons.
For US readers, it should be pointed out that the British National Health Service is implemented on the ground as a number of regional organisations rather than a single nationwide behemoth. This leads to a lot of variation across the country in quality of care in certain specialities or medical outcomes which the tabloid press gleefully reports on every now and then. It also means record-keeping systems are different so building a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't break existing ways of doing things was a non-starter to begin with, even before the mission creep began.
One solution (I presume put forward facetiously) was to hire the Mafia to kill every patient with a paper record folder more than an inch thick, and start from the beginning again.
Arianespace launched their first Vega rocket this year. Its first three stages are solid-fuel with only the final orbital insertion stage being liquid fuelled. It can put about 3 tonnes into LEO giving Arianespace a lower-mass launch vehicle compared to their Ariane 5 (20 tonnes LEO) and Soyuz (10 tonnes LEO) launchers at a published price of 32 million Euros, less than the cost of a SpaceX Falcon 9.
"You must mean RAM chips and even those are often on-chip on these SoC systems."
Nope. A DRAM of any significant capacity (256MB or better) has a similar die size to a SoC chip. An SoC will usually have some RAM on-board for buffers, cache, maybe low-end graphics support but the main memory in tablets, phones etc. resides on separate DRAM chips. A typical 2Gb DDR3 die is about 30 sq. mm whereas the Tegra 3 with 5 cores and over a MB of cache is 80 sq. mm.
Devices like the Raspberry Pi uses package-on-package construction where the DRAM device is mounted on top of the SoC controller to save space but they don't share the same die.
The British fleet of fourteen AGRs (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors) have been running successfully for thirty years now and some of the fleet will probably operate for another ten to fifteen years with licence extensions. Based on the earlier Magnox design, they use carbon dioxide as coolant. They're a little bit more efficient than boiling-water or pressurised-water reactors since their cores run a bit hotter. The increased efficiency doesn't make up for the extra cost of construction though since the fuel costs are so low, and no-one else outside the UK licenced the design. The next generation of nuclear reactors built in the UK will be BWR or PWR designs.
The spent fuel pools at Fukushima were not compromised at all during the earthquake and the tsunami or indeed after the hydrogen explosions although it was suspected they had sustained some damage at the time of the accident. After engineers gained access to the top of the reactors a month or two after the accident cameras were lowered into the pools and the fuel rod bundles appeared to be totally undamaged. Two rod bundles were recently removed from reactor 4's pool for much closer examination (they were unused with no fission products and so could be handled without the shielding precautions exposed rods would need). Those rod bundles showed no noticeable damage or deformation and only a little surface corrosion from the use of seawater to top up the pool water levels just after the accident.
The explosions were caused by overheating of the fuel elements within the reactors themselves after cooling stopped resulting in a catalytic reaction that produced hydrogen and oxygen gas via disassociation of steam. Pressure relief valves released this gas mix plus significant amounts of volatile radioactive fission products such as I-131 and Cs-134 and Cs-137 into the upper parts of the reactor buildings where the explosions occurred. Continued heating from the uncovered fuel rods in the reactors compromised the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels and some melted fuel may have made its way down into the primary containments, mixed with water and contributed to the releases.
The spent fuel rods in the pools on the reactors and in the site central pool did not contribute at all to the contamination that resulted as far as anyone can tell. The site plan posted by TEPCO states they expect to empty reactor 4's spent fuel pool by the end of 2013 after building a weather shield and a crane system on top of the damaged reactor building, and then move on to deal with the spent fuel in the pools in the other reactor buildings in turn.
Japan is currently planning to build a 500km/h maglev train line from Tokyo to Nagoya. At those speeds the track needs to be as straight as possible with few curves. This line will involve a lot of tunnelling as the proposed route runs down the mountainous spine of Honshu, Japan's main island.
Building the tunnel for a linear accelerator alongside a major part of the maglev line would be a nice twofer; all the tunneling gear and an experienced construction crew is to hand.
So why does Germany still produce about 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita per annum while France's carbon load is about 5 tonnes (and has been for the past 30 years or so after their dash for nuclear generation in the 1980s)? The answer is in the amount of coal and lignite Germany continues to burn to generate electricity along with its greenwashing wind and solar plants.
Germany's consumer electricity prices are double that and more of France since nuclear power is cheap, cheaper even than coal in terms of fuel costs per MWhr generated -- the killer cost for nuclear is the upfront price of construction of a reactor and its ancillary structures. In Germany's case the consumers are paying for the solar panels and wind turbines and are going to have to pay more as their first generation renewable generators will soon be coming to end-of-life after 20 years or so and need replacing.
They're burning coal, natural gas, oil and garbage to generate electricity. They've recommissioned a bunch of older mothballed thermal power stations, the ones with inadequate pollution controls in the main.
The town of Okuma has just been reopened to access by residents who can visit but not stay permanently yet. It is adjacent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant but due to the vagaries of wind and weather is was not actually the most heavily contaminated area outside the reactor site itself.
Quite a few other areas within the original 20km exclusion zone have been reopened permanently to their residents and active decontamination of roads, schools, shops and houses has been taking place along with constant monitoring and testing.
The Rokkasho plant was just getting commissioned when 3/11 happened. It didn't take any damage from the earthquake or tsunami but legislative moves and the Big Rethink in Japan has stretched out its timetable until full operation is established.
As far as I know the Tokaimura reprocessing plant was a prototype plant, not really designed for large-scale reprocessing. Fuel from Japan's older Magnox reactors was sent to the UK to be reprocessed and the waste and recycled fuel was returned to Japan but the last operating Japanese Magnox reactor (Tokai 1) was shut down about fifteen years ago and has now been decommissioned to brownfield status.
My second monitor is 2048 pixels high, a 16:9 Samsung monitor rotated 90 degrees into portrait mode for proofing graphical prepress and print images. If you're desperate for vertical pixels a pivoting monitor is the way to go. Oddly enough despite Apple supposedly being the goto folks for graphics work none of the current Apple monitor and all-in-one offerings will do screen rotation out of the box; they even lack standard VESA mounts so third-party pivot mount solutions are more complicated (Apple sell a VESA adaptor plate for some of their Cinema monitors at extra cost).
My primary monitor is a Dell U2711, an IPS 2560x1440 display that is the smartest tech purchase I've made it a long while given I spend several hours a day in front of it. It doesn't pivot like the Samsung display but it does have a VESA mounting layout on the back so I could easily remount it on a pivot if I felt the need.
The local councils don't "profit" from parking charges, the money from charges and permits goes into the funding pool to help pay for everything the council does like street sweeping etc. If councils reduced the parking charges or zeroed them out they'd have to raise rates and other fees to cover the shortfall.
Pictures of my city, Edinburgh from the 1960s show a few cars parked in busy city centre streets with no traffic meters or wardens because back then not many people had cars so there was no problem finding space to park them. Today is a different matter with more people around and a higher percentage of them owning cars.
Back in the 1970s President Carter decided, in the interests of promoting nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaties, to stop processing spent nuclear fuel produced in the US although the generation of BWR and PWR power reactors don't breed usable bomb-grade Pu-239 plutonium as it is contaminated with Pu-240. The result of the reprocessing moratorium is there are a large number of moderately radioactive spent fuel rods in storage in various places from the hundred or so power reactors in the US (the US military reactor fleet and its accumulated waste problem in Hanford and elsewhere is another matter).
Reprocessing is quite expensive; it's cheaper by far to use mined uranium ore to make fresh fuel. The big advantage of reprocessing is that it concentrates the waste isotopes and, although kilo for kilo they are much more radioactive than unprocessed spent fuel they take up much less space and hence are easier to dispose of in deep geological burial sites. A 1GW reactor produces a few hundred kilos of long-lived dangerous waste each year whereas a set of spent fuel rods will mass over 100 tonnes for the same generating capacity.
Yucca Mountain was going to be physically a very large depository to accomodate all the spent fuel rods currently in store and for the next few decades of reactor operations. Other countries which reprocess fuel rods are planning much smaller depositories although there is no pressing need for them yet since the current quantities of waste in aboveground storage are so small.
Modbook rebuilds Mac Pro hardware into a pen tablet format complete with a Wacom CintiQ display, a bit like the Surface Pro. It costs about 3000 bucks although the pen resolution is not as good and the pressure sensitivity is half that of the 900-buck Surface Pro.
I wonder if the Surface Pro hardware could run OS/X?
The heat collector system used in the SEGS plant isn't high-pressure. The oil used in the collector pipes never boils so it is only at a few atmospheres pressure, just enough to keep it circulating. The 400 deg C oil passes through a heat exchanger in central locations at each collector "farm" to produce steam that drives a turbine and generates electricity. This vastly simplifies the piping structure and keeps costs down while maintaining decent efficiency in terms of heat capture versus the amount of electricity generated. The weird hybrid the ICE guys have come up with looks to be a lot more complicated for lower resulting efficiency and that's not going to make it cheap to build or run.
The SEGS system isn't very cost-effective (it costs about 14 cents/kWh according to the Wikipedia article on it) either but that's simply because there's a lot of hardware and it doesn't produce much saleable electricity to pay back the construction loans and fund the maintenance budget, replace broken mirrors etc.
The Solar Energy Generating Systems power plants in the Mojave Desert have been using parabolic mirrors to generate electricity via solar heat for nearly 30 years now, using oil as the heat transfer fluid.
"The sunlight bounces off the mirrors and is directed to a central tube filled with synthetic oil, which heats to over 400 ÂC (750 ÂF). The reflected light focused at the central tube is 71 to 80 times more intense than the ordinary sunlight. The synthetic oil transfers its heat to water, which boils and drives the Rankine cycle steam turbine, thereby generating electricity. Synthetic oil is used to carry the heat (instead of water) to keep the pressure within manageable parameters." From the Wikipedia article on the SEGS operation.
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.
MS recently announced the availability of Windows 8 Embedded in early 2013, basically a modular version of the complete Win8 system which can be pared down for devices like set-top boxes, terminals etc. to run on limited CPU, graphics and memory as required. The description of this set-top box sounds like it's going to run Win8 Embedded but as a Xbox Live content delivery system rather than being aimed at console gaming i.e. it's going to be MS TV.
Is there really a pressing need/demand for an upgraded Xbox? Are console gamers crying out for more CPU and more graphics or are folks like MMO players satisfied with what they can see on their HD teevees right now with the current generation of consoles?
The Saturn V stack burned through 10% of its total fuel and oxidiser load (about 200 tonnes) just clearing the tower. Despite the giant F1 motors in the first stage it was actually underpowered for its takeoff mass; at T-0 when the clamps came off its acceleration upwards was only 1.5G gross (or 0.5G net). It relied as all rockets do on burning fuel to reduce its mass fast enough that its acceleration would increase. When the first stage was just about empty it was pulling 4Gs gross since it had lost over half its takeoff mass.
The Shuttle's acceleration profile on takeoff wasn't actually much different to the Saturn V, pulling 0.5G net on liftoff but it took a lot less time to get into orbit, 510 seconds compared to the Saturn V's 680 seconds or so. It topped out at about 3Gs gross rather than the more brutal Saturn V's max of 4G gross but the longer time taken is due to the lower acceleration of the Saturn V's second and third stages. In comparison the Shuttle achieved peak Gs about a minute before the ET was empty.
Development of a capsule system that could keep people alive for 18 months to two years for the round trip to and from Mars. Part of that development time would be taken up by a full-dress unmanned rehearsal flight under remote control before risking human beings -- that would take about two years total after maybe ten years development work. Nine months there, nine months back and six months in Mars orbit waiting for Earth and Mars to align properly again. If something goes wrong and the scratch monkeys on board die in some interesting manner then it's back to the drawing board again of course.
Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.
A worked example is the ISS -- 400 tonnes of modules, none of which massed more than 20 tonnes on the pad before launch. From proposal to completion took well over a decade, funding was trimmed and restored, corners were cut and major revisions made as it was built. For 150 billion dollars we ended up with a large spacecraft that can only go round in circles and if a really serious problem ever occurred then the crew could be rescued in theory since a compatible biosphere is only 400 km away. A manned Mars mission is going to cost a lot more than that, and the launch costs are a minor part of the time and money budgets.
The fuel and oxidiser from the ET was fed directly into the Shuttle's motor pump intakes; once the valves shut and the ET disconnected that was it. That valve gear and disconnect system was a pain in the arse as it was complicated, a major failure point if it ever let rip in flight and also heavy, cutting into the Shuttle's payload capacity. The SpaceX design for the Heavy requires topping up the core booster's LOX and RP1 tanks from the two outboard booster segments. Instead of using gravity and acceleration to provide most of the force to make the liquids flow downwards as the Shuttle used, it will need transfer pumps as they're going to be refilling the tanks sideways, not straight down. They will have to be decent-sized pumps too, each capable of transferring 30-40 tonnes of liquid in a minute or so further eating into the final payload.
If SpaceX could throttle their motors like modern launchers can then they could avoid this fuel transfer problem but more sophisticated engines would mean costlier launches.
LOX/RP-1 motors aren't hypergolic just like fully-cryogenic motors so shutting them off in flight is something you do only once. Relighting them would require extra hardware and may not work anyway -- relightable motors tend to use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide since they're hypergolic and store nicely. Using a bulky array of redundant motors as Soyuz and SpaceX do it is possible to throttle-down by shutting one or more motors in a cluster off but it can't throttle back up again after booster separation or in-atmosphere peak dynamic load points are passed.
Modern cryogenic engine designs like the Vulcain-1, the RS-68A and even the venerable RS-25 Block 2 have throttle-down capability so they don't need to use the venerable clustered-motor system SpaceX has adopted from Soyuz. It's certainly possible to design LOX/RP-1 motors to be throttleable but it costs in complexity and weight penalties and they're a bugger to design to keep the Isp numbers high throughout the throttle range.
As for the base cost of a boots-and-banners Mars mission, assuming 2000 tonnes into LEO to get four or six crew to Mars and back the launch costs using a hundred Ariane launches of 20-tonne lumps would be around 25 billion dollars. Doing it with two hundred Falcon 9 launches of 10-tonne lumps would cost about 12 billion dollars. That's excluding crew flights to the Mars transfer vehicles in orbit which would add another few hundred million dollars to the cost. Quantity discounts apply, of course but the actual launch cost of such a mission would still be well under 30 billion using existing pre-tested launchers whichever vehicle family you choose to throw the lumps up there. Building and testing the fleet of fuel tanker/motor modules, landers, ascent stages, Mars orbiter transfer vehicles, supply landers etc. is where the rest of the trillion bucks goes. It's also the giant suck of time, the years that would stretch into decades since all of it would have to be built and working before the first crew gets into their Soyuz or Dragon capsule on their ride to orbit.
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Intelligent folks often do crazy things outside their own specialist fields. Newton, the author of the Principia among other great works was an alchemist in his spare time, "studying" strange Kabbalistic nonsense. Linus Pauling went all weird in his later days too, the list goes on and on.
Just because Bussard was a smart guy in one field doesn't mean Polywell or focus fusion will work; the "and then a miracle occurs" stage is a big hurdle to pass. I class it in the "carburettor that runs on water" family of ideas that a few overenthusiastic folks think will work with just another little tweak here or an adjustment there along with some out-and-out con men riding the coattails. I will be condescending here and assume you're a True Believer rather than the other alternative.
When you say no tokamak has "sustained ignition" I assume you think JET's 1.5 seconds at 16 megawatts thermal output is not sustained or not ignition, I don't know which. JET and other tokamaks were never designed for sustained running or even to reach a Q>1 (more energy out than in) return, they are fusion testbeds to develop methods of creating, focussing, heating and maintaining plasmas. JET was rebuilt yet again recently to support the ITER project, concentrating on construction and materials. ITER is meant to run to Q>10 for tens of seconds and more but it's a materials and operations testbed too, more engineering than physics though and intended to narrow the design parameters of the first prototype power reactors.
I'm surprised you're so down on tokamak research which has actually produced large quantities of energy in tests (22MJ thermal in 1.5 seconds from the JET run in 1997, for example) while describing the con-artists like Polywell and Focus (zero joules in several years of funding and self-promotion) as "promising". At least you're not carrying a (fusion) torch for Fleischman and Pons.
For US readers, it should be pointed out that the British National Health Service is implemented on the ground as a number of regional organisations rather than a single nationwide behemoth. This leads to a lot of variation across the country in quality of care in certain specialities or medical outcomes which the tabloid press gleefully reports on every now and then. It also means record-keeping systems are different so building a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't break existing ways of doing things was a non-starter to begin with, even before the mission creep began.
One solution (I presume put forward facetiously) was to hire the Mafia to kill every patient with a paper record folder more than an inch thick, and start from the beginning again.
"It reminds me of a centuries old piece of equipment called a "Pencil"."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Pencil
Arianespace launched their first Vega rocket this year. Its first three stages are solid-fuel with only the final orbital insertion stage being liquid fuelled. It can put about 3 tonnes into LEO giving Arianespace a lower-mass launch vehicle compared to their Ariane 5 (20 tonnes LEO) and Soyuz (10 tonnes LEO) launchers at a published price of 32 million Euros, less than the cost of a SpaceX Falcon 9.
"You must mean RAM chips and even those are often on-chip on these SoC systems."
Nope. A DRAM of any significant capacity (256MB or better) has a similar die size to a SoC chip. An SoC will usually have some RAM on-board for buffers, cache, maybe low-end graphics support but the main memory in tablets, phones etc. resides on separate DRAM chips. A typical 2Gb DDR3 die is about 30 sq. mm whereas the Tegra 3 with 5 cores and over a MB of cache is 80 sq. mm.
Devices like the Raspberry Pi uses package-on-package construction where the DRAM device is mounted on top of the SoC controller to save space but they don't share the same die.
The British fleet of fourteen AGRs (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors) have been running successfully for thirty years now and some of the fleet will probably operate for another ten to fifteen years with licence extensions. Based on the earlier Magnox design, they use carbon dioxide as coolant. They're a little bit more efficient than boiling-water or pressurised-water reactors since their cores run a bit hotter. The increased efficiency doesn't make up for the extra cost of construction though since the fuel costs are so low, and no-one else outside the UK licenced the design. The next generation of nuclear reactors built in the UK will be BWR or PWR designs.
Wrong in all aspects.
The spent fuel pools at Fukushima were not compromised at all during the earthquake and the tsunami or indeed after the hydrogen explosions although it was suspected they had sustained some damage at the time of the accident. After engineers gained access to the top of the reactors a month or two after the accident cameras were lowered into the pools and the fuel rod bundles appeared to be totally undamaged. Two rod bundles were recently removed from reactor 4's pool for much closer examination (they were unused with no fission products and so could be handled without the shielding precautions exposed rods would need). Those rod bundles showed no noticeable damage or deformation and only a little surface corrosion from the use of seawater to top up the pool water levels just after the accident.
The explosions were caused by overheating of the fuel elements within the reactors themselves after cooling stopped resulting in a catalytic reaction that produced hydrogen and oxygen gas via disassociation of steam. Pressure relief valves released this gas mix plus significant amounts of volatile radioactive fission products such as I-131 and Cs-134 and Cs-137 into the upper parts of the reactor buildings where the explosions occurred. Continued heating from the uncovered fuel rods in the reactors compromised the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels and some melted fuel may have made its way down into the primary containments, mixed with water and contributed to the releases.
The spent fuel rods in the pools on the reactors and in the site central pool did not contribute at all to the contamination that resulted as far as anyone can tell. The site plan posted by TEPCO states they expect to empty reactor 4's spent fuel pool by the end of 2013 after building a weather shield and a crane system on top of the damaged reactor building, and then move on to deal with the spent fuel in the pools in the other reactor buildings in turn.
Japan is currently planning to build a 500km/h maglev train line from Tokyo to Nagoya. At those speeds the track needs to be as straight as possible with few curves. This line will involve a lot of tunnelling as the proposed route runs down the mountainous spine of Honshu, Japan's main island.
Building the tunnel for a linear accelerator alongside a major part of the maglev line would be a nice twofer; all the tunneling gear and an experienced construction crew is to hand.
So why does Germany still produce about 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita per annum while France's carbon load is about 5 tonnes (and has been for the past 30 years or so after their dash for nuclear generation in the 1980s)? The answer is in the amount of coal and lignite Germany continues to burn to generate electricity along with its greenwashing wind and solar plants.
Germany's consumer electricity prices are double that and more of France since nuclear power is cheap, cheaper even than coal in terms of fuel costs per MWhr generated -- the killer cost for nuclear is the upfront price of construction of a reactor and its ancillary structures. In Germany's case the consumers are paying for the solar panels and wind turbines and are going to have to pay more as their first generation renewable generators will soon be coming to end-of-life after 20 years or so and need replacing.
They're burning coal, natural gas, oil and garbage to generate electricity. They've recommissioned a bunch of older mothballed thermal power stations, the ones with inadequate pollution controls in the main.
The town of Okuma has just been reopened to access by residents who can visit but not stay permanently yet. It is adjacent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant but due to the vagaries of wind and weather is was not actually the most heavily contaminated area outside the reactor site itself.
Quite a few other areas within the original 20km exclusion zone have been reopened permanently to their residents and active decontamination of roads, schools, shops and houses has been taking place along with constant monitoring and testing.
The Rokkasho plant was just getting commissioned when 3/11 happened. It didn't take any damage from the earthquake or tsunami but legislative moves and the Big Rethink in Japan has stretched out its timetable until full operation is established.
As far as I know the Tokaimura reprocessing plant was a prototype plant, not really designed for large-scale reprocessing. Fuel from Japan's older Magnox reactors was sent to the UK to be reprocessed and the waste and recycled fuel was returned to Japan but the last operating Japanese Magnox reactor (Tokai 1) was shut down about fifteen years ago and has now been decommissioned to brownfield status.
My second monitor is 2048 pixels high, a 16:9 Samsung monitor rotated 90 degrees into portrait mode for proofing graphical prepress and print images. If you're desperate for vertical pixels a pivoting monitor is the way to go. Oddly enough despite Apple supposedly being the goto folks for graphics work none of the current Apple monitor and all-in-one offerings will do screen rotation out of the box; they even lack standard VESA mounts so third-party pivot mount solutions are more complicated (Apple sell a VESA adaptor plate for some of their Cinema monitors at extra cost).
My primary monitor is a Dell U2711, an IPS 2560x1440 display that is the smartest tech purchase I've made it a long while given I spend several hours a day in front of it. It doesn't pivot like the Samsung display but it does have a VESA mounting layout on the back so I could easily remount it on a pivot if I felt the need.
The local councils don't "profit" from parking charges, the money from charges and permits goes into the funding pool to help pay for everything the council does like street sweeping etc. If councils reduced the parking charges or zeroed them out they'd have to raise rates and other fees to cover the shortfall.
Pictures of my city, Edinburgh from the 1960s show a few cars parked in busy city centre streets with no traffic meters or wardens because back then not many people had cars so there was no problem finding space to park them. Today is a different matter with more people around and a higher percentage of them owning cars.
Back in the 1970s President Carter decided, in the interests of promoting nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaties, to stop processing spent nuclear fuel produced in the US although the generation of BWR and PWR power reactors don't breed usable bomb-grade Pu-239 plutonium as it is contaminated with Pu-240. The result of the reprocessing moratorium is there are a large number of moderately radioactive spent fuel rods in storage in various places from the hundred or so power reactors in the US (the US military reactor fleet and its accumulated waste problem in Hanford and elsewhere is another matter).
Reprocessing is quite expensive; it's cheaper by far to use mined uranium ore to make fresh fuel. The big advantage of reprocessing is that it concentrates the waste isotopes and, although kilo for kilo they are much more radioactive than unprocessed spent fuel they take up much less space and hence are easier to dispose of in deep geological burial sites. A 1GW reactor produces a few hundred kilos of long-lived dangerous waste each year whereas a set of spent fuel rods will mass over 100 tonnes for the same generating capacity.
Yucca Mountain was going to be physically a very large depository to accomodate all the spent fuel rods currently in store and for the next few decades of reactor operations. Other countries which reprocess fuel rods are planning much smaller depositories although there is no pressing need for them yet since the current quantities of waste in aboveground storage are so small.
Modbook rebuilds Mac Pro hardware into a pen tablet format complete with a Wacom CintiQ display, a bit like the Surface Pro. It costs about 3000 bucks although the pen resolution is not as good and the pressure sensitivity is half that of the 900-buck Surface Pro.
I wonder if the Surface Pro hardware could run OS/X?
The heat collector system used in the SEGS plant isn't high-pressure. The oil used in the collector pipes never boils so it is only at a few atmospheres pressure, just enough to keep it circulating. The 400 deg C oil passes through a heat exchanger in central locations at each collector "farm" to produce steam that drives a turbine and generates electricity. This vastly simplifies the piping structure and keeps costs down while maintaining decent efficiency in terms of heat capture versus the amount of electricity generated. The weird hybrid the ICE guys have come up with looks to be a lot more complicated for lower resulting efficiency and that's not going to make it cheap to build or run.
The SEGS system isn't very cost-effective (it costs about 14 cents/kWh according to the Wikipedia article on it) either but that's simply because there's a lot of hardware and it doesn't produce much saleable electricity to pay back the construction loans and fund the maintenance budget, replace broken mirrors etc.
The Solar Energy Generating Systems power plants in the Mojave Desert have been using parabolic mirrors to generate electricity via solar heat for nearly 30 years now, using oil as the heat transfer fluid.
"The sunlight bounces off the mirrors and is directed to a central tube filled with synthetic oil, which heats to over 400 ÂC (750 ÂF). The reflected light focused at the central tube is 71 to 80 times more intense than the ordinary sunlight. The synthetic oil transfers its heat to water, which boils and drives the Rankine cycle steam turbine, thereby generating electricity. Synthetic oil is used to carry the heat (instead of water) to keep the pressure within manageable parameters." From the Wikipedia article on the SEGS operation.
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.
MS recently announced the availability of Windows 8 Embedded in early 2013, basically a modular version of the complete Win8 system which can be pared down for devices like set-top boxes, terminals etc. to run on limited CPU, graphics and memory as required. The description of this set-top box sounds like it's going to run Win8 Embedded but as a Xbox Live content delivery system rather than being aimed at console gaming i.e. it's going to be MS TV.
Is there really a pressing need/demand for an upgraded Xbox? Are console gamers crying out for more CPU and more graphics or are folks like MMO players satisfied with what they can see on their HD teevees right now with the current generation of consoles?
The Saturn V stack burned through 10% of its total fuel and oxidiser load (about 200 tonnes) just clearing the tower. Despite the giant F1 motors in the first stage it was actually underpowered for its takeoff mass; at T-0 when the clamps came off its acceleration upwards was only 1.5G gross (or 0.5G net). It relied as all rockets do on burning fuel to reduce its mass fast enough that its acceleration would increase. When the first stage was just about empty it was pulling 4Gs gross since it had lost over half its takeoff mass.
The Shuttle's acceleration profile on takeoff wasn't actually much different to the Saturn V, pulling 0.5G net on liftoff but it took a lot less time to get into orbit, 510 seconds compared to the Saturn V's 680 seconds or so. It topped out at about 3Gs gross rather than the more brutal Saturn V's max of 4G gross but the longer time taken is due to the lower acceleration of the Saturn V's second and third stages. In comparison the Shuttle achieved peak Gs about a minute before the ET was empty.
What would take so long...
Development of a capsule system that could keep people alive for 18 months to two years for the round trip to and from Mars. Part of that development time would be taken up by a full-dress unmanned rehearsal flight under remote control before risking human beings -- that would take about two years total after maybe ten years development work. Nine months there, nine months back and six months in Mars orbit waiting for Earth and Mars to align properly again. If something goes wrong and the scratch monkeys on board die in some interesting manner then it's back to the drawing board again of course.
Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.
A worked example is the ISS -- 400 tonnes of modules, none of which massed more than 20 tonnes on the pad before launch. From proposal to completion took well over a decade, funding was trimmed and restored, corners were cut and major revisions made as it was built. For 150 billion dollars we ended up with a large spacecraft that can only go round in circles and if a really serious problem ever occurred then the crew could be rescued in theory since a compatible biosphere is only 400 km away. A manned Mars mission is going to cost a lot more than that, and the launch costs are a minor part of the time and money budgets.
The fuel and oxidiser from the ET was fed directly into the Shuttle's motor pump intakes; once the valves shut and the ET disconnected that was it. That valve gear and disconnect system was a pain in the arse as it was complicated, a major failure point if it ever let rip in flight and also heavy, cutting into the Shuttle's payload capacity. The SpaceX design for the Heavy requires topping up the core booster's LOX and RP1 tanks from the two outboard booster segments. Instead of using gravity and acceleration to provide most of the force to make the liquids flow downwards as the Shuttle used, it will need transfer pumps as they're going to be refilling the tanks sideways, not straight down. They will have to be decent-sized pumps too, each capable of transferring 30-40 tonnes of liquid in a minute or so further eating into the final payload.
If SpaceX could throttle their motors like modern launchers can then they could avoid this fuel transfer problem but more sophisticated engines would mean costlier launches.
LOX/RP-1 motors aren't hypergolic just like fully-cryogenic motors so shutting them off in flight is something you do only once. Relighting them would require extra hardware and may not work anyway -- relightable motors tend to use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide since they're hypergolic and store nicely. Using a bulky array of redundant motors as Soyuz and SpaceX do it is possible to throttle-down by shutting one or more motors in a cluster off but it can't throttle back up again after booster separation or in-atmosphere peak dynamic load points are passed.
Modern cryogenic engine designs like the Vulcain-1, the RS-68A and even the venerable RS-25 Block 2 have throttle-down capability so they don't need to use the venerable clustered-motor system SpaceX has adopted from Soyuz. It's certainly possible to design LOX/RP-1 motors to be throttleable but it costs in complexity and weight penalties and they're a bugger to design to keep the Isp numbers high throughout the throttle range.
As for the base cost of a boots-and-banners Mars mission, assuming 2000 tonnes into LEO to get four or six crew to Mars and back the launch costs using a hundred Ariane launches of 20-tonne lumps would be around 25 billion dollars. Doing it with two hundred Falcon 9 launches of 10-tonne lumps would cost about 12 billion dollars. That's excluding crew flights to the Mars transfer vehicles in orbit which would add another few hundred million dollars to the cost. Quantity discounts apply, of course but the actual launch cost of such a mission would still be well under 30 billion using existing pre-tested launchers whichever vehicle family you choose to throw the lumps up there. Building and testing the fleet of fuel tanker/motor modules, landers, ascent stages, Mars orbiter transfer vehicles, supply landers etc. is where the rest of the trillion bucks goes. It's also the giant suck of time, the years that would stretch into decades since all of it would have to be built and working before the first crew gets into their Soyuz or Dragon capsule on their ride to orbit.