Weirdly enough a Dell U2711 is what I'm looking at right now. I find the 16:9 ratio is no handicap to me doing portrait format graphics for publication, spreadsheets for numerical work, photoediting etc. It's a big investment, financially speaking but I really don't think I could go back to anything smaller or lower-quality -- the U2711 uses an S-IPS panel with a very good colour gamut. I don't game on it though.
AFAIK the biggest 4:3 ratio LCDs on the market are 1600 x 1200, 20" diagonal such as the Dell 2007FP, costing about 350 bucks or so. You can get 22" CRT monitors that will do 1920 x 1440 but, well, they're CRTs. They're free though if you dig around in Freecycle, Gumtree or Craigslist.
Cinemas had curtains at the side of the screen that would move in and out when the projection ratio changed -- adverts used to be shown on 4:3 16mm film or 35mm slides but the main feature would be 2.35:1 or similar.
Perhaps someone could come up with a similar curtain-type device for 16:9 screens, USB-driven perhaps, for those folks who absolutely insist on looking at a 4:3 ratio screen. It lets them view HD Youtube content in full 16:9 proportions but when they're focussed on their golden-ratio spreadsheet and don't want distractions the curtains will slide over to block the extra pixels from their sight.
Intel doesn't own ARM and so it couldn't create an ARM64 design. It has in the past built non-x86 architecture chips such as the 88000 series aimed at general-purpose computing, supercomputing and server apps. Never heard of it? Not surprising as it was not a success.
As for speed increases to 8GHz and beyond, can you point to any simplified CPU designs running at that sort of speed now? Microcontroller architectures, embedded systems, even ARM silicon? Nope? Thought so.
IBM has some fast Power series CPUs in its lineup but they are aggressively cooled in structured assemblies, not applicable for the desktop or especially laptop markets which is where most of the effort of both Intel and AMD is focussed, creating high-capability CPUs that drink small amounts of power using aggressive silicon designs and sophisticated software power management techniques.
India is not a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As such it is barred from receiving uranium imports from other countries. It doesn't have any significant native sources of uranium ore but it does have a lot of thorium, hence its interest in developing light-water reactors fuelled by thorium with the addition of a "sparkplug" of Medium Enriched Uranium (MEU) and plutonium since thorium by itself is not spontaneously fissile enough to sustain a chain reaction.
They'd like to export this technology but there are not many possible buyers since nearly every other country in the market for a fleet of power reactors has signed the NPT and they can buy proven uranium-fuelled LWRs and HWRs off-the-shelf and also source fuel for them.
Ummm, hydrazine is not a monopropellant, it is "burned" with an oxidiser such as nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) or an acid like Red Fuming Nitric Acid (RFNA) which, as you can guess from the name has the same sort of ground handling properties as hydrazine (i.e. if it leaks it can dissolve the operators working the fuelling system).
The Space Shuttle's Orbital Manoeuvering System (OMS) engines burned monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and N2O4. This meant that when the Shuttle returned to Earth it had to be effectively treated as toxic waste before handlers could safely remove the surplus fuel in the OMS tanks. If you ever watch videos of a Shuttle landing and its aftermath you'll see folks in full-coverage bunnysuits at the back of the Shuttle making sure no propellants are leaking and preparing to decant the reserve fuel and oxidiser from the tanks before the Shuttle is moved off the runway.
A major benefit of fuel/oxidiser combos like MMH/N2O4 is that they are very stable and stay liquid at very low temps, something that long-duration space flights require. The Cassini mission probe carried over three tonnes of MMH/N2O4 and it spent seven years in flight before its final 90-minute engine burn to successfully put the probe into orbit around Saturn.
The TSR2 was a strike bomber, not a fighter. It was cancelled mostly because its extended role to carry tactical nukes kept on getting reworked by the politicians who were leery about accidentally starting WWIII if a war broke out in West Germany.
Britain already had three strategic nuclear bombers -- the Valiant, the Victor and the Vulcan were all flying at the time the TSR2 was being developed. Their role was restricted to low-level attacks after it became clear high-altitude bombers were at the mercy of AA missile systems and that meant the existing aircraft could fill the strike bombing role.
The Space Shuttle's avionics were upgraded regularly during their time in service -- for example they got a "glass cockpit" quite early on in the program using CRTs and that was later replaced with flatscreens and more configurability to match mission requirements.
The decontamination problem for agricultural areas hit by fallout in Fukushima province means removing a small amount of soil, usually the top few centimetres from the fields as that's where most of the fallout resides. Toshiba recently unveiled an experimental soil processing plant mounted on the back of a truck that is designed to extract cesium isotopes from soil. It's still in the development stage and needs to be tested and improved and it may not be cost-effective -- the truck unit currently can only process about 2 tonnes of soil a day which may not be enough.
On the other hand the decontamination of the thousands of hectares of land flooded by the tsunami in areas like Sendai starts with removing large pieces of debris such as houses, ships, cars, trucks, bridges, telephone poles etc. which ended up being dumped in the fields from the force of the water. After that gross part of the cleanup has been achieved attempts can be made to reconstruct the irrigation canals and other field structures which also got smashed. After that the restoration work bogs down somewhat as they have to remove the fuel oil, salt and other contaminants that were churned deep into the soil metres deep in places. After that they can maybe think about growing crops there again, five or ten years down the line. Removing most of the radioactive fallout from a field well inland in Fukushima province is a piece of piss in comparison.
As for seawater contamination, the Japanese government has been monitoring the situation around the Fukushima plant continuously since the accident, sampling seawater close-in and also further out to sea, at different depths. As of 18th Jan 2012 the only places registering any measurable amount of cesium isotopes are a kilometre or two offshore from the reactors themselves. The measured levels in seawater sampled in those places are about 1.8 Bq/litre for each of Cs-134 and Cs-137. All other areas sampled are under the lower limit of measurement, about 1 Bq/litre. In comparison, as I mentioned previously, the K-40 activity level of regular seawater is 10Bq/litre and that's everywhere on the planet, not just within a km or two of Fukushima. As for your point about food-chain concentration of cesium that also applies to potassium which is why human body tissue runs to about 60Bq/kg from K-40 radioactivity. Potassium is actively retained by body tissues, of course whereas cesium is not -- the biological half-life of cesium in human beings is about 70 days i.e. if you ingest an amount of cesium you will excrete about half of it in a seventy day period and half of the residual amount in the next 70 days and so on.
If you want to look up the historical measurement data recorded by the Japanese government you can find it at http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/en/ where most of the numbers are published, including prefectural city centre monitoring, drinking water levels, land fallout measurements etc. as well as the sea monitoring program. There are other sources of data on contamination levels from TEPCO, universities etc. also available on the Web if you're interested in the subject.
I don't know where you get the bit about a third of Japan's rice being grown in Fukushima province. A lot of the rice eaten in Japan is imported, for one thing. For another thing the major part of the contamination from the Fukushima reactors was deposited in mountainous terrain to the north-west of the plant. Nearly all rice-growing in Japan is done on coastal flatlands such as the Kansai region, a looong way from Fukushima.
The tsunami smashed a lot of agricultural areas along the Tohoku coast, polluting them with salt, building debris, fuel oil etc. and they will need several years remediation before crops can be grown there again. This is basically the same situation for the agricultural areas contaminated with fallout although decontamination there might be easier as less soil needs removing and treating.
As for radioactivity levels, I do hope you are aware that seafood swims in radioactivity? Seawater has about 10Bq/litre of radioactivity due to the presence of potassium-40 (K-40). A rough BOTE calculation says there are 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope in the world's oceans continuously emitting beta particles and gamma rays. The few kilogrammes of cesium-134 and -137 deposited in the sea by the Fukushima explosions are a spit in the bucket by comparison. The short half-lives (2 years and 30 years) of the cesium isotopes means their radioactivity will diminish in a short timescale -- the amount of cesium and strontium fallout deposited in the Pacific during the H-bomb tests in the 1950s has already decayed significantly, for example. Conversely K-40 has a half-life of over a billion years meaning it will be a threat to life until the Sun goes into its red giant phase.
The FDA already recommends limits on eating seafood. This is due to the high levels of mercury found in fish like tuna. Unlike radiation this cumulative toxin never decays and more is being added every year to the seas, due in part to coal-burning power stations. Attempts are being made by the EPA to reduce the US contribution to this ongoing natural disaster from the current level of 50 tonnes a year at the smokestack but the coal industry is pushing back on this, not surprisingly. In comparison guess how much mercury the nuclear power industry adds to the seas each year? Yep, you you're right. A big fat zero.
A small irrigation dam in the hills above Fukushima city in Japan failed after the 2011 earthquake. Four people inspecting the dam at the time were drowned and a few houses below it were swept away, their occupants missing presumed drowned too. Google "Fujinuma dam collapse" for details.
It was an irrigation dam, not for power per se but it used the same technology other power dams use. That one incident directly killed more people and destroyed more homes than the Fukushima radiation releases have done to date.
Elsewhere a dam collapsed during flooding in Nigeria in September 2011, killing over a hundred people and destroying homes and property in its wake. It barely made the world news unlike the events at Fukushima.
The cost of the fastest (Nozomi) shinkansen trip in Japan between Tokyo and Nagoya (about 200 miles of track distance) is about 14,500 yen or 115 quid one-way for a journey time of about 1 hour 40 minutes. The slower Hikari service which stops more often costs 10,500 yen or about 90 quid for a journey time of just over 2 hours.
The regular pricing of long-distance rail travel in the UK is not abnormally high compared to other countries, but discount fares distort the perception of the true costs. In contrast there are no super-apex cheap ticket deals available in Japan although slight discounts of a few percent can be had if you search for them; they're not offered by Japan Rail directly.
Fissioning thorium produces a wide range of radioactive daughter elements just as fissioning uranium and plutonium does. Radioactive decay is a different process -- it produces little energy in comparison and is only used in RTGs for spacecraft and other low-power applications.
As for non-proliferation the proposed liquid-fluorine thorium reactors (LFTRs) have to continuously process the fuel stream to prevent it creating U-233 which works fine as a nuclear weapon core. The other thorium reactor designs as proposed by India and other countries are basically the same concept as existing uranium and MOX-fuelled reactors except that they NEED highly-enriched uranium and/or plutonium to produce enough neutron flux to fission the thorium fuel which is not self-sustaining or at least not self-initiating.
Back in the summer some pictures came out of the camp being built near Fukushima Daiichi to house the people working there. I knew things weren't as bad as some of the doomsayers were claiming when I saw an Asahi vending machine installed beside one of the dormitory buildings.
The SMART-1 probe launched by ESA took about 13 months to reach Lunar orbit, propelled by a small ion engine and solar panels. Even then it started from a geostationary transfer orbit as a Getaway Special piggybacked on the commercial launch of two communications satellites via an Ariane 5.
If you're putting a system into a dirty environment such as a basement then either buy or build an environmental enclosure
to put the server in. It's basically a sealed box with large filters for cleaning the airflow through the hardware inside it. Enclosure fans are optional, an overtemp alarm/shutdown system isn't. Replace the filters every six months or so and it should be good.
The oyaji (old guy) on a 5000 yen note would work on the cigarette machine face-recognition systems as well. They've switched to an ID card for cigarette vending machines; theory says only folks over 20 years old can get a card but that's as subject to abuse as you might expect.
One neat thing is that the cigarette vending machines switch themselves off at about 11:00 at night, same for the beer and spirits vending machines.
These remote-piloted helicopters and "flying jeeps" are being deployed in testing because they are thought to be safer methods of resupply than an 11-B driving a truck. This indicates that in Afghanistan, after almost ten years of occupation (longer than the Soviets stayed) most of the country is considered too dangerous for the occupiers to move freely in.
The second point is that these neat toys don't provide mass logistics supply to the forces in Afghanistan from friendly countries, the convoys of fuel tankers, food and ammunition, the thousands of tonnes of supplies needed each day to keep a modern military force operational. The US yahoos who blew up a bunch of Pakistani troops has cost the NATO forces that safe border convoy route and no technological tricks will restore that conduit. Abject apologies and reparations might help but this is the US who don't apologize for slaughtering other people's troops even by accident.
Third point, following on from the second is keeping these remotely-piloted aircraft flying is expensive in fuel terms. A truck will burn ten or fifteen gallons of gas or fuel oil to get ten tonnes of supplies a hundred miles. A helicopter burns a lot more fuel to cover the same distance with a much smaller load, and the fuel convoys across the Pakistani border have been shut down after the "accident". The only way to get that fuel into Afghanistan now is to fly it into airbases and that's both a logistical nightmare and also dollar-expensive.
Japan reprocesses fuel rods. It has just completed building a large facility at Rokkaisho to deal with about 800 tonnes of fuel rods a year. Previously it sent fuel rods to Britain to be reprocessed as well as processing rods at a smaller prototype plant at Tokai. It does have a backlog of rods in store to deal with though.
Several reactors in Japan were built from the 1980s onwards -- the newest Japanese reactor, Tomari-3, a type-3 PWR in Hokkaido only started up for the first time in December 2009.
Seawater is already radioactive, reading about 10-11 Bequerels/litre in a scintillometer. The isotope responsible is potassium-40, the same stuff that makes sea salt trigger a Geiger counter. A BOTE calculation suggests the oceans contain about 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope, half-life about a billion years.
There's also three tonnes of uranium dissolved in each cubic kilometre of seawater. At a ratio of 0.6% U-235 (the fissile stuff) that's about 20kg or enough for a simple nuke of the Hiroshima type in each cubic kilometre and there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of seawater.
The Indian design of thorium reactor is a pressurised-water fission reactor like most uranium reactors around the world except it is fuelled with a small amount of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and possibly some plutonium to provide enough neutron flux to "burn" the thorium fuel. The HEU at 20% is a lot closer to bomb-grade than regular pressurised-water fuel enrichment (about 3-4%). India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) hence not covered by the IAEA so these reactors would be ideal for any country wishing to divert uranium and plutonium into weapons programmes.
The US doesn't have the capability to shoot down its own NAVSTAR GPS satellites never mind the GLONASS, COMPASS and planned Galileo constellations. They're not in low-earth orbit but high up in long-period orbits which keep them above the horizon for several hours at a time, altitudes which would be difficult for manoeuverable hunter-killer spacecraft to achieve.
The large number of satellites planned or already in orbit would also require lots of H-K launches to intercept enough units before the positional data received on the ground would be noticeably degraded.
Same here. There have been quite a few newsworthy instances of private/commercial data being found on second-hand disk drives from Ebay, USB keys and CD-ROMs left in trains etc. that it's better in the long run for a data centre to shred the disks once they are taken out of service rather than have that happen to them. The auditing and inventory check is to make sure they all get shredded and none of them walk out the door in an engineer's toolbox destined for his home NAS upgrade (Johnny Cash wrote a song about that...). Data security is more important than saving a couple of hundred bucks recycling or repurposing a surplus disk.
These are enterprise disks though (10k and 15k SAS drives) and the thought of putting a second-hand drive with ten thousand plus spindle hours on it into a very-high-uptime server with an SLA would make most data centre managers cringe.
Uranium orebodies being exploited at the moment usually run about 1%-2% metal, that is a tonne of ore will yield between ten and twenty kilos of metal after processing. For nuclear power reactor use the U235 concentration in the metal needs to be enriched from 0.6% to about 3%, a fivefold increase so a tonne of ore will produce between two and four kilos of "fuel" and the residue metal is depleted uranium, nearly all U238.
Most uranium mining is done at open-cast operations as they are the cheapest method of extracting the ore. In contrast there are few high-quality open-cast coal operations left anywhere as they were usually mined out decades or even centuries ago. A lot of coal today is dug from underground workings, more labour-intensive and more dangerous than open-cast diggings. Some countries such as Germany carry out large-scale brown coal or lignite open-cast mining to feed their thermal power stations but this results in low thermal output per tonne of fuel and requires more expensive pollution controls on the smokestacks.
The Battle of Britain was in the summer of 1940. The first V-1s were launched shortly after D-Day in June 1944. The first V-2s were fired operationally several months later.
The oldest reactor at Fukushima Daiichi is the no. 1 BWR, first started up in the mid-70s so it's been in operation for about 35 years. I think it was due to be decommissioned in the next year or two. The other reactors at Daiichi date from the late 70s onwards. Reactors at other sites around Japan were built and started up as much as a decade after the Tchernobyl disaster happened in 1986.
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Weirdly enough a Dell U2711 is what I'm looking at right now. I find the 16:9 ratio is no handicap to me doing portrait format graphics for publication, spreadsheets for numerical work, photoediting etc. It's a big investment, financially speaking but I really don't think I could go back to anything smaller or lower-quality -- the U2711 uses an S-IPS panel with a very good colour gamut. I don't game on it though.
AFAIK the biggest 4:3 ratio LCDs on the market are 1600 x 1200, 20" diagonal such as the Dell 2007FP, costing about 350 bucks or so. You can get 22" CRT monitors that will do 1920 x 1440 but, well, they're CRTs. They're free though if you dig around in Freecycle, Gumtree or Craigslist.
Cinemas had curtains at the side of the screen that would move in and out when the projection ratio changed -- adverts used to be shown on 4:3 16mm film or 35mm slides but the main feature would be 2.35:1 or similar.
Perhaps someone could come up with a similar curtain-type device for 16:9 screens, USB-driven perhaps, for those folks who absolutely insist on looking at a 4:3 ratio screen. It lets them view HD Youtube content in full 16:9 proportions but when they're focussed on their golden-ratio spreadsheet and don't want distractions the curtains will slide over to block the extra pixels from their sight.
Intel doesn't own ARM and so it couldn't create an ARM64 design. It has in the past built non-x86 architecture chips such as the 88000 series aimed at general-purpose computing, supercomputing and server apps. Never heard of it? Not surprising as it was not a success.
As for speed increases to 8GHz and beyond, can you point to any simplified CPU designs running at that sort of speed now? Microcontroller architectures, embedded systems, even ARM silicon? Nope? Thought so.
IBM has some fast Power series CPUs in its lineup but they are aggressively cooled in structured assemblies, not applicable for the desktop or especially laptop markets which is where most of the effort of both Intel and AMD is focussed, creating high-capability CPUs that drink small amounts of power using aggressive silicon designs and sophisticated software power management techniques.
India is not a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As such it is barred from receiving uranium imports from other countries. It doesn't have any significant native sources of uranium ore but it does have a lot of thorium, hence its interest in developing light-water reactors fuelled by thorium with the addition of a "sparkplug" of Medium Enriched Uranium (MEU) and plutonium since thorium by itself is not spontaneously fissile enough to sustain a chain reaction.
They'd like to export this technology but there are not many possible buyers since nearly every other country in the market for a fleet of power reactors has signed the NPT and they can buy proven uranium-fuelled LWRs and HWRs off-the-shelf and also source fuel for them.
Ummm, hydrazine is not a monopropellant, it is "burned" with an oxidiser such as nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) or an acid like Red Fuming Nitric Acid (RFNA) which, as you can guess from the name has the same sort of ground handling properties as hydrazine (i.e. if it leaks it can dissolve the operators working the fuelling system).
The Space Shuttle's Orbital Manoeuvering System (OMS) engines burned monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and N2O4. This meant that when the Shuttle returned to Earth it had to be effectively treated as toxic waste before handlers could safely remove the surplus fuel in the OMS tanks. If you ever watch videos of a Shuttle landing and its aftermath you'll see folks in full-coverage bunnysuits at the back of the Shuttle making sure no propellants are leaking and preparing to decant the reserve fuel and oxidiser from the tanks before the Shuttle is moved off the runway.
A major benefit of fuel/oxidiser combos like MMH/N2O4 is that they are very stable and stay liquid at very low temps, something that long-duration space flights require. The Cassini mission probe carried over three tonnes of MMH/N2O4 and it spent seven years in flight before its final 90-minute engine burn to successfully put the probe into orbit around Saturn.
The TSR2 was a strike bomber, not a fighter. It was cancelled mostly because its extended role to carry tactical nukes kept on getting reworked by the politicians who were leery about accidentally starting WWIII if a war broke out in West Germany.
Britain already had three strategic nuclear bombers -- the Valiant, the Victor and the Vulcan were all flying at the time the TSR2 was being developed. Their role was restricted to low-level attacks after it became clear high-altitude bombers were at the mercy of AA missile systems and that meant the existing aircraft could fill the strike bombing role.
The Space Shuttle's avionics were upgraded regularly during their time in service -- for example they got a "glass cockpit" quite early on in the program using CRTs and that was later replaced with flatscreens and more configurability to match mission requirements.
The decontamination problem for agricultural areas hit by fallout in Fukushima province means removing a small amount of soil, usually the top few centimetres from the fields as that's where most of the fallout resides. Toshiba recently unveiled an experimental soil processing plant mounted on the back of a truck that is designed to extract cesium isotopes from soil. It's still in the development stage and needs to be tested and improved and it may not be cost-effective -- the truck unit currently can only process about 2 tonnes of soil a day which may not be enough.
On the other hand the decontamination of the thousands of hectares of land flooded by the tsunami in areas like Sendai starts with removing large pieces of debris such as houses, ships, cars, trucks, bridges, telephone poles etc. which ended up being dumped in the fields from the force of the water. After that gross part of the cleanup has been achieved attempts can be made to reconstruct the irrigation canals and other field structures which also got smashed. After that the restoration work bogs down somewhat as they have to remove the fuel oil, salt and other contaminants that were churned deep into the soil metres deep in places. After that they can maybe think about growing crops there again, five or ten years down the line. Removing most of the radioactive fallout from a field well inland in Fukushima province is a piece of piss in comparison.
As for seawater contamination, the Japanese government has been monitoring the situation around the Fukushima plant continuously since the accident, sampling seawater close-in and also further out to sea, at different depths. As of 18th Jan 2012 the only places registering any measurable amount of cesium isotopes are a kilometre or two offshore from the reactors themselves. The measured levels in seawater sampled in those places are about 1.8 Bq/litre for each of Cs-134 and Cs-137. All other areas sampled are under the lower limit of measurement, about 1 Bq/litre. In comparison, as I mentioned previously, the K-40 activity level of regular seawater is 10Bq/litre and that's everywhere on the planet, not just within a km or two of Fukushima. As for your point about food-chain concentration of cesium that also applies to potassium which is why human body tissue runs to about 60Bq/kg from K-40 radioactivity. Potassium is actively retained by body tissues, of course whereas cesium is not -- the biological half-life of cesium in human beings is about 70 days i.e. if you ingest an amount of cesium you will excrete about half of it in a seventy day period and half of the residual amount in the next 70 days and so on.
If you want to look up the historical measurement data recorded by the Japanese government you can find it at http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/en/ where most of the numbers are published, including prefectural city centre monitoring, drinking water levels, land fallout measurements etc. as well as the sea monitoring program. There are other sources of data on contamination levels from TEPCO, universities etc. also available on the Web if you're interested in the subject.
Hyperbole much?
I don't know where you get the bit about a third of Japan's rice being grown in Fukushima province. A lot of the rice eaten in Japan is imported, for one thing. For another thing the major part of the contamination from the Fukushima reactors was deposited in mountainous terrain to the north-west of the plant. Nearly all rice-growing in Japan is done on coastal flatlands such as the Kansai region, a looong way from Fukushima.
The tsunami smashed a lot of agricultural areas along the Tohoku coast, polluting them with salt, building debris, fuel oil etc. and they will need several years remediation before crops can be grown there again. This is basically the same situation for the agricultural areas contaminated with fallout although decontamination there might be easier as less soil needs removing and treating.
As for radioactivity levels, I do hope you are aware that seafood swims in radioactivity? Seawater has about 10Bq/litre of radioactivity due to the presence of potassium-40 (K-40). A rough BOTE calculation says there are 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope in the world's oceans continuously emitting beta particles and gamma rays. The few kilogrammes of cesium-134 and -137 deposited in the sea by the Fukushima explosions are a spit in the bucket by comparison. The short half-lives (2 years and 30 years) of the cesium isotopes means their radioactivity will diminish in a short timescale -- the amount of cesium and strontium fallout deposited in the Pacific during the H-bomb tests in the 1950s has already decayed significantly, for example. Conversely K-40 has a half-life of over a billion years meaning it will be a threat to life until the Sun goes into its red giant phase.
The FDA already recommends limits on eating seafood. This is due to the high levels of mercury found in fish like tuna. Unlike radiation this cumulative toxin never decays and more is being added every year to the seas, due in part to coal-burning power stations. Attempts are being made by the EPA to reduce the US contribution to this ongoing natural disaster from the current level of 50 tonnes a year at the smokestack but the coal industry is pushing back on this, not surprisingly. In comparison guess how much mercury the nuclear power industry adds to the seas each year? Yep, you you're right. A big fat zero.
A small irrigation dam in the hills above Fukushima city in Japan failed after the 2011 earthquake. Four people inspecting the dam at the time were drowned and a few houses below it were swept away, their occupants missing presumed drowned too. Google "Fujinuma dam collapse" for details.
It was an irrigation dam, not for power per se but it used the same technology other power dams use. That one incident directly killed more people and destroyed more homes than the Fukushima radiation releases have done to date.
Elsewhere a dam collapsed during flooding in Nigeria in September 2011, killing over a hundred people and destroying homes and property in its wake. It barely made the world news unlike the events at Fukushima.
The cost of the fastest (Nozomi) shinkansen trip in Japan between Tokyo and Nagoya (about 200 miles of track distance) is about 14,500 yen or 115 quid one-way for a journey time of about 1 hour 40 minutes. The slower Hikari service which stops more often costs 10,500 yen or about 90 quid for a journey time of just over 2 hours.
The regular pricing of long-distance rail travel in the UK is not abnormally high compared to other countries, but discount fares distort the perception of the true costs. In contrast there are no super-apex cheap ticket deals available in Japan although slight discounts of a few percent can be had if you search for them; they're not offered by Japan Rail directly.
So much stupid...
Fissioning thorium produces a wide range of radioactive daughter elements just as fissioning uranium and plutonium does. Radioactive decay is a different process -- it produces little energy in comparison and is only used in RTGs for spacecraft and other low-power applications.
As for non-proliferation the proposed liquid-fluorine thorium reactors (LFTRs) have to continuously process the fuel stream to prevent it creating U-233 which works fine as a nuclear weapon core. The other thorium reactor designs as proposed by India and other countries are basically the same concept as existing uranium and MOX-fuelled reactors except that they NEED highly-enriched uranium and/or plutonium to produce enough neutron flux to fission the thorium fuel which is not self-sustaining or at least not self-initiating.
Back in the summer some pictures came out of the camp being built near Fukushima Daiichi to house the people working there. I knew things weren't as bad as some of the doomsayers were claiming when I saw an Asahi vending machine installed beside one of the dormitory buildings.
The SMART-1 probe launched by ESA took about 13 months to reach Lunar orbit, propelled by a small ion engine and solar panels. Even then it started from a geostationary transfer orbit as a Getaway Special piggybacked on the commercial launch of two communications satellites via an Ariane 5.
If you're putting a system into a dirty environment such as a basement then either buy or build an environmental enclosure to put the server in. It's basically a sealed box with large filters for cleaning the airflow through the hardware inside it. Enclosure fans are optional, an overtemp alarm/shutdown system isn't. Replace the filters every six months or so and it should be good.
The oyaji (old guy) on a 5000 yen note would work on the cigarette machine face-recognition systems as well. They've switched to an ID card for cigarette vending machines; theory says only folks over 20 years old can get a card but that's as subject to abuse as you might expect.
One neat thing is that the cigarette vending machines switch themselves off at about 11:00 at night, same for the beer and spirits vending machines.
A few things to note...
These remote-piloted helicopters and "flying jeeps" are being deployed in testing because they are thought to be safer methods of resupply than an 11-B driving a truck. This indicates that in Afghanistan, after almost ten years of occupation (longer than the Soviets stayed) most of the country is considered too dangerous for the occupiers to move freely in.
The second point is that these neat toys don't provide mass logistics supply to the forces in Afghanistan from friendly countries, the convoys of fuel tankers, food and ammunition, the thousands of tonnes of supplies needed each day to keep a modern military force operational. The US yahoos who blew up a bunch of Pakistani troops has cost the NATO forces that safe border convoy route and no technological tricks will restore that conduit. Abject apologies and reparations might help but this is the US who don't apologize for slaughtering other people's troops even by accident.
Third point, following on from the second is keeping these remotely-piloted aircraft flying is expensive in fuel terms. A truck will burn ten or fifteen gallons of gas or fuel oil to get ten tonnes of supplies a hundred miles. A helicopter burns a lot more fuel to cover the same distance with a much smaller load, and the fuel convoys across the Pakistani border have been shut down after the "accident". The only way to get that fuel into Afghanistan now is to fly it into airbases and that's both a logistical nightmare and also dollar-expensive.
Japan reprocesses fuel rods. It has just completed building a large facility at Rokkaisho to deal with about 800 tonnes of fuel rods a year. Previously it sent fuel rods to Britain to be reprocessed as well as processing rods at a smaller prototype plant at Tokai. It does have a backlog of rods in store to deal with though.
Several reactors in Japan were built from the 1980s onwards -- the newest Japanese reactor, Tomari-3, a type-3 PWR in Hokkaido only started up for the first time in December 2009.
Seawater is already radioactive, reading about 10-11 Bequerels/litre in a scintillometer. The isotope responsible is potassium-40, the same stuff that makes sea salt trigger a Geiger counter. A BOTE calculation suggests the oceans contain about 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope, half-life about a billion years.
There's also three tonnes of uranium dissolved in each cubic kilometre of seawater. At a ratio of 0.6% U-235 (the fissile stuff) that's about 20kg or enough for a simple nuke of the Hiroshima type in each cubic kilometre and there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of seawater.
The Indian design of thorium reactor is a pressurised-water fission reactor like most uranium reactors around the world except it is fuelled with a small amount of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and possibly some plutonium to provide enough neutron flux to "burn" the thorium fuel. The HEU at 20% is a lot closer to bomb-grade than regular pressurised-water fuel enrichment (about 3-4%). India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) hence not covered by the IAEA so these reactors would be ideal for any country wishing to divert uranium and plutonium into weapons programmes.
The US doesn't have the capability to shoot down its own NAVSTAR GPS satellites never mind the GLONASS, COMPASS and planned Galileo constellations. They're not in low-earth orbit but high up in long-period orbits which keep them above the horizon for several hours at a time, altitudes which would be difficult for manoeuverable hunter-killer spacecraft to achieve.
The large number of satellites planned or already in orbit would also require lots of H-K launches to intercept enough units before the positional data received on the ground would be noticeably degraded.
Same here. There have been quite a few newsworthy instances of private/commercial data being found on second-hand disk drives from Ebay, USB keys and CD-ROMs left in trains etc. that it's better in the long run for a data centre to shred the disks once they are taken out of service rather than have that happen to them. The auditing and inventory check is to make sure they all get shredded and none of them walk out the door in an engineer's toolbox destined for his home NAS upgrade (Johnny Cash wrote a song about that...). Data security is more important than saving a couple of hundred bucks recycling or repurposing a surplus disk.
These are enterprise disks though (10k and 15k SAS drives) and the thought of putting a second-hand drive with ten thousand plus spindle hours on it into a very-high-uptime server with an SLA would make most data centre managers cringe.
Uranium orebodies being exploited at the moment usually run about 1%-2% metal, that is a tonne of ore will yield between ten and twenty kilos of metal after processing. For nuclear power reactor use the U235 concentration in the metal needs to be enriched from 0.6% to about 3%, a fivefold increase so a tonne of ore will produce between two and four kilos of "fuel" and the residue metal is depleted uranium, nearly all U238.
Most uranium mining is done at open-cast operations as they are the cheapest method of extracting the ore. In contrast there are few high-quality open-cast coal operations left anywhere as they were usually mined out decades or even centuries ago. A lot of coal today is dug from underground workings, more labour-intensive and more dangerous than open-cast diggings. Some countries such as Germany carry out large-scale brown coal or lignite open-cast mining to feed their thermal power stations but this results in low thermal output per tonne of fuel and requires more expensive pollution controls on the smokestacks.
The Battle of Britain was in the summer of 1940. The first V-1s were launched shortly after D-Day in June 1944. The first V-2s were fired operationally several months later.
The oldest reactor at Fukushima Daiichi is the no. 1 BWR, first started up in the mid-70s so it's been in operation for about 35 years. I think it was due to be decommissioned in the next year or two. The other reactors at Daiichi date from the late 70s onwards. Reactors at other sites around Japan were built and started up as much as a decade after the Tchernobyl disaster happened in 1986.