Uranium generally isn't a problem in radioactive spills or contamination. It's not particularly biotoxic as a metal or oxide and with very long half-lives for the two most common isotopes (U-235's half-life is 700 million years and for U-238 it's 4.5 billion years) it's not even very radioactive by itself. Most uranium ore bodies contain a lot of decay products like radium, thorium, polonium etc. which have built up over millions or billions of years and these are exposed to the wider environment when the uranium ore is mined and refined. A method of concentrating and sequestering such short-halflife isotopes from mine tailings would be more useful than this biological method which only, it seems, concentrates uranium. Right now the Japanese would really like a variant that, say, concentrated cesium in a similar manner as Cs-134 and Cs-137 are 99.9% of the contamination problem in the area around Fukushima.
It might be this particular form of the bacteria could be better used to extract uranium from lesser ore bodies or even seawater where it is present in quantities of about 3 tonnes per cubic kilometre but right now and for the next fifty years or more uranium ore is plentiful enough that the costs of such marginal operations would outweigh the value of uranium metal (currently trading on world markets for 60 dollars a kilo) extracted by them.
Of course uranium has a scary reputation -- see this news report for an example. Further comments suggest the uranium in question was 500 milligrammes of yellowcake in a sealed vial, a gift from a friend studying chem eng who had prepared it from ore found in New Mexico (just lying about out in the open! Horrors!).
A lot of modern lower-end mobos will work with ECC memory but I don't know if they actually use the ECC functionality or just run it like it was non-ECC. The manual for the Asus M4A87TD/USB3 mobo, to choose one at random, says it accepts ECC and non-ECC memory but there's no further details on functionality.
Using that "disposable robot" approach eventually the operators would need to send in a specialised robot tow-truck to remove all the dead/crashed/jammed robots blocking access to the bits of the buildings that they need to get into. And if the tow-truck robot got stuck...
Disaster engineering is more tricky than shoulder-surfers often comprehend; the matrix of decisions on how to solve big problems like last year's Gulf spill or the current Fukushima situation starts with "Will doing this kill a lot of people?" and steps down through "Can doing this make things worse and how can we avoid that happening?" and only near the end is consideration made about how a given approach might help solve the fucking problem.
Soft-landing on Mars takes retro-rockets as well as parachutes. There's no sea to splash-down in. The atmosphere is too thin to fly a Shuttle-style spaceplane hull to a runway touchdown and there isn't a runway to land on anyway. Small very rugged spacecraft can use balutes and cushions for surface contact but scaling them up as the lander size and mass increases is problematic; see the incredibly complex system of heatshield, parachutes and retrorockets the Curiosity rover is going to be using to put down on the Mars surface compared to the (failed) Beagle 2 lander.
All this sort of stuff can be tested on the Lunar surface, a convenient low-G laboratory near LEO. The final tests would be done on Mars using supply capsules and ascent stages before the Marsnauts ever reach LEO to start their journey.
I think that a Big Booster system is optimised for a "boots and banners" mission to, say, Mars. Fly four or five astronauts in a crowded capsule plus a lander/ascent vehicle to the Red Planet where they go down, plant a flag, take some pictures, grab some rocks and then come home after a couple of months max and then we (meaning the human race) never go back. See Apollo and the much-lauded Saturn V as an example of a just such a dead-end mission profile.
Everything in a single mission vehicle to Mars has to work perfectly for a year or more in space plus the landing and ascent. Testing all the hardware in a complete unmanned mission or two (or three) before we send the meatbags is going to take a long time and be very expensive.
Alternatively, doing it incrementally using modular launches on existing vehicles it is possible to get the bugs out part by part. Use the Moon as a testbed for landers and ascent vehicles; Mars gravity is double that of Lunar gravity but otherwise conditions aren't that much different. Send one or two manned missions to the Earth-Trojans etc. to test the vehicles and their extended life support using lessons learned from operating the space stations. Put several lander/ascent vehicles on the Martian surface and see if they degrade or take damage from the conditions before dispatching the fleet of well-tested manned capsules; four at a minimum, built by two different contractors to different designs just in case of a boo-boo that is only discovered later. The extra capsules can act as lifeboats for the twelve or fifteen Marsnauts in the fleet if something goes wrong in one or more of the vehicles.
At the same time supply landers are being launched from LEO, one every few months or so to keep the semi-permanent crew of explorers on the surface and in Mars orbit fed with air, food etc. Every 19 months or so when the transit time is minimal a new crew goes out and some of the older Mars hands come back. That sort of continuous exploration model doesn't work as well with a big single-stack launcher which has to do everything because it's the only thing that can get funded. Worst case the funding for its development gets pulled when it's half-finished and nothing ever flies operationally (see Ares 1). As I said before the Ariane, Delta, Soyuz etc. are already flying, there's no decades-long multi-billion dollar development programme required before the first metal flies. The costs of developing and building the assorted bits the launchers will carry is of course eye-wateringly high but they're on top of the cost of the Big Booster, not in place of it.
"Boots and banners" is of course a lot cheaper than supporting a semi-permanent manned presence on Mars but if that's the only reason you can think of to go to Mars then I'd say it isn't really worth going in the first place.
With smaller rockets and a modular approach it would be possible, for example, to put an unmanned lander/ascent stage or two on the Moon or Mars well before any manned crew capsule gets there, giving the crews redundancy as well as removing the need for them to fly their own ascent stage down to the surface. Similarly unamnned supply capsule flights could be pipelined with lots of smaller launch vehicles, and if one is lost then another can be rotated into the launch program to replace it.
With an Apollo-style "everything in one package" giant launcher you risk both a catastrophic failure to deliver a complete bundle of equipment to orbit killing the program for years (Ares V will be unmanned, a pure cargo carrier so no lives will be at risk) and also the possibility that a single equipment failure in flight as with Apollo 13 can also be a mission-kill.
The really good thing is that there is an existing range of small and medium-lift vehicles already in the catalogue off-the-shelf -- Delta, Ariane, Soyuz, H-2 and others all of which can do the job today without the eye-watering development costs and inevitable construction delays of building and qualifying a new heavy-lifter.
I think someone is already selling a USB-powered BBQ. It takes six 5-port powered USB hubs to run it if I remember the advertising blurb correctly and it probably can't cook half a hog in thirty-five seconds from cold like a Real Man's turbo-LOX BBQ can.
What I'd like is a USB-to-mains charger, an small electronic brick that plugs into a USB port and can provide 100V (DC will do fine but 50/60Hz AC should be achievable) for things like camera battery chargers and other low-current electronics where the manufacturer for some reason or other doesn't offer a direct-USB charging or operating mode. Saying that many devices (cellphones etc.) are converging on a USB charging port as a common feature.
The Leonardo module (not the Rafaello) was destined to become a permanent module on the ISS on Atlantis' last flight so it was not loaded fully with cargo. It normally carried about 9 tonnes, or three times the load of an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule. The modified Leonardo module did have some parts from the unused Donatello module on board though to adapt it for permanent attachment to the ISS.
As for the crewing levels, the Dragon capsule doesn't support spacewalks for external operations at the ISS as it has no airlock or space for spacewalk-capable spacesuits inside its tiny cabin. The Shuttle's extra crewmembers (absent the pilot and co-pilot) were mission specialists, usually running experiments in the giant payload bay or even in the crew compartment or spacewalking to assemble, repair and replace parts on the ISS. Dragon's spam-in-a-can design means any spacewalk operations will have to be carried out by the crewmembers of the ISS station requiring cargo launches to provide supplies and such for the spacewalks themselves rather than the self-contained Shuttle capability which lofted everything in one go.
The Shuttle was designed in the days of Apollo when the operational systems on the ground required everything to go up on one stack rather than having multiple units rendezvous in orbit within tight time slots. To replace that one-shot capability is going to require more than the same throw-weight in boosters to get all the bits needed in the right places at the right time.
France is reprocessing over a thousand tonnes of spent fuel every year and has been for some time now. Britain has been processing spent fuel for its indigenous power reactor fleet for a couple of decades as well as dealing with fuel rods from Japan and elsewhere. Japan recently completed its own reprocessing plant at Rokkasho which should be capable of handling about 800 tonnes of fuel rods a year when it is up to speed. The accident-beset Tokaimaru processing plant (about 200 tonnes a year) may be decommissioned once Rokkasho is fully on-line. The Russians are expanding their fuel reprocessing capabilities at the moment with a new plant that should be able to deal with about 1500 tonnes of fuel elements each year when it is complete.
Right now reprocessing isn't particularly cost-effective as raw uranium is so cheap (last figure I saw was 56 dollars US per kilo of unenriched metal), but if the price rises and the cost and logistics of storage of spent fuel rods becomes enough of a problem then I expect the US will overturn the Carter-era moratorium and build their own reprocessing facilities to start using up the Strategic Uranium Reserve they have accumulated over the past thirty years or so.
Hydro-electric dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Indeed, a small (non-power-generating) dam in Fukushima prefecture broke during the recent big earthquake in Japan, killing at least four people at the dam itself and washing away a couple of villages downstream with some inhabitants reported as missing presumed drowned. That's a lot more people than were killed by the tsunami and earthquake at the two Fukushima plants and (obviously) a lot more than have died from radioactivity releases caused by the reactor failures.
Hydro power is a proven killer with a long history of mass deaths due to structural failures and operating problems. It's not in the same class as coal and oil due to the amount of pollution and CO2 it produces for the amount of energy it outputs but in terms of ill-effects it's way ahead of nuclear in any scale you care to compare it with.
The eggs have codes
printed directly on the shell using inkjet technology. The codes indicate the production facility and the date the egg was collected. This allows an outbreak of, say, salmonella to be traced back to a particular location and even a particular group of birds that laid the infected eggs.
A blogger named Spike has been to the 20km zone boundary. The Japanese authorities are now enforcing the exclusion zone to prevent looting of deserted properties as well as stopping folks who want to return to their homes.
TEPCO are doing "feed and bleed" -- they are pumping between 6 and 9 tonnes of water an hour into the reactors and then extracting it again to remove decay heat from the cores. Step 2 is to build a self-contained cooling loop in each reactor building starting with reactor 1 that will circulate cooling water rather than doing feed and bleed. Step 3, if it is possible, will be to restore the original cooling loop systems through the seawater condensers under the turbine buildings beside the reactors. That can only be done when the loops are fully functional again and that will take a lot more time to achieve.
They are also planning to flood the secondary containments to immerse the reactor vessels in a large heatsink of water to further cool the reactor vessel itself. This will only be done when and if they are sure the containments are watertight.
Japan is in the process of commissioning a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at the moment. When up to full capacity it will be able to handle about 800 tonnes of spent fuel rods each year, recycling the uranium and plutonium into new fuel rods and preparing the remaining high-level waste for vitrification and long-term storage.
The most gruelling racing track in the world is probably the Mountain Course in the Isle of Man, sixty miles of road up and down the side of a mountain and then passing through a series of villages and over hump-back bridges. It's a rare year that doesn't end in at least one fatality during the motorbike Time Trial (TT) races in June or the Manx GP in the autumn -- in 2010 four riders died.
There's now a race for electric motorbikes included in the TT series, and a $10,000 prize for the first bike to achieve a 100mph lap. Last year the winning bike managed 96mph and might have broken the 100mph barrier if the rider hadn't been over-conservative regarding the bike's batteries and their capacity.
The releases from the Fukushima reactors were nearly all highly-mobile radioactive elements such as iodine, a vapour at normal temperature and cesium, a low-melting-point metal dispersed during the venting of steam and hydrogen from the reactor vessels. The Tchernobyl releases included large amounts of everything in the burning core after the entire reactor vessel slagged down and exposed it to the world including strontium-90, a bone-seeker which usually has too high a melting point to be easily released from a reactor.
The good news (if there is any) is that iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days and a stable non-radioactive daughter, xenon. In three months time only 0.1% of it will be left and in a year it will be down to one-billionth of the original release. The bad news is that the major cesium isotope released, Cs-137 has a half-life of thirty years and it's not going away any time soon except through environmental means or a massive hands-on cleanup operation.
A
dam used for irrigation and drinking water (much like any hydroelectric dam anywhere in the world) in the hills above Fukushima town failed during the earthquake. The resulting flood killed at least four people and a bunch of others in houses downstream are missing, presumed drowned.
Several dams in the area are known to have sustained damage but many others have not yet been properly inspected.
There were drums of yellowcake (actually not yellow in colour) refined uranium ore in storage at Tuwaitha in Iraq, under IAEA seal. During the 2003 invasion the Iraqi security on the site ran away and the US-led forces did not secure the area for several months after the regime folded, despite it being a site of extreme importance in terms of WMDs and nuclear proliferation.
The local Iraqi population took this opportunity to loot the site, stealing everything that was worth stealing. They broke into the storage bunkers, found these large plastic drums full of dirt, tipped them out and took the drums to store drinking water in. The "dirt" was yellowcake ore.
Yellowcake is only mildly hazardous, both chemically and radioactively. Mining and initial processing of the ore body releases daughter isotopes trapped within the rocks which are the result of billions of years of radioactive decay and which produce most of the alpha and beta particles and all of the gamma radiation but after the processing at the mine is complete the most active of those daughter isotopes such as radon-222 have been removed.
According to the Anandtech article the transistor in question is in the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) circuitry for the four SATA2 3Gbps controllers. When it dies due to overvoltage and heat it takes all four SATA channels with it since it cripples the PLL which provides the clocks for the SATA controller. The SATA3 6Gbps controller has its own PLL and so its clocking system is not affected.
To add to the confusion that particular section of PLL is apparently redundant, part of an older mask revision that didn't get cleaned up when they moved from rev A to rev B. This happens a lot in chip-making and leaving redundant circuitry in place doesn't normally cause problems. The thing that must be annoying the Intel engineers the most is that when this useless and unwanted transistor fails it pulls down the rest of the PLL subsystem that is totally necessary for the system to work properly.
VIA had a chipset bug on their old KT-series motherboard bridge chips that would lock up the machine if a certain sequence of bytes and a couple of signals on the ATA bus interface hit simultaneously. That condition was legal (if rare) as far as the ATA bus spec was concerned and shouldn't have caused the lockup, but it did. It was one of the conditions we had to insert escape code for when building optical (CD/DVD) drives otherwise people who bought our drives would bitch at us when the inevitable lockups happened. All the other manufacturers of IDE-bus devices did the same sort of workarounds and VIA did eventually fix the bug but it still left millions of motherboards out there with the problem chips on them.
OTOH we caught the VHDL bug that occasionally switched off the DRAM refresh controller in the testing lab before the design got sent to production, a relief for everyone concerned.
Last year I got given a QIC-150 tape written in 1995 to see if I could recover someone's old email archives. First I had to locate a QIC drive but a bit of hunting on the local Freecycle group got me an external SCSI unit weighing about 40 pounds with a tape drive and a full-height 500MB hard drive included. The tape drive didn't work, in that it talked SCSI-II all right to the BSD box's controller and the motor went round and round but no data came out.
The first inkling of bad news was realising that someone else had been into the tape drive mechanism before me when I saw the chewed-up screws holding the covers on. The really bad news was seeing the capstan roller on the drive -- or rather the motor shaft where the capstan roller used to be. It had gone missing sometime in the past and the bodger who had been in before me figured that a bunch of rubber bands would make a suitable replacement for the roller. This was some time back, judging by the condition of the rubber bands which were now a sticky mess of perished semi-liquid rubber.
I rummaged in my junkbox and pulled out an old lump of solid rubber, a platen roller from a daisywheel printed I had junked decades ago. I measured up the motor shaft, made some educated guesses and machined a replacement roller on the workshop lathe. After degunking the motor shaft with a scalpel and needle files the new capstan roller was driven into place and after that the data came pouring off the tape like it had been written yesterday as good old-fashioned CSV-delimited tarball archives. The owner of the tape got back the first emails he ever exchanged with the lady who he had since married and there was much rejoicing.
A commonly-used short-hand term in the British and Commonwealth military during the WWII period was U/S, short for "unservicable" meaning something wasn't worth repairing and it should be junked or dismantled for spare parts. It had nothing to do with the USA.
iFixit cracked the case on a new Macbook Air and did an expose.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1
The SSD is a DIMM package, not chips soldered onto the main logic board. It seems to be a custom design from Toshiba, not anything off the shelf from the regular suppliers of SSDs (Corsair, Intel etc.) but it can be swapped out and replaced, and maybe in the future when the flash chips are up to it Apple or some OEM will release a larger capacity version. The main system RAM IS soldered onto the board and is not field-upgradeable.
What liquid fuels (or gases) are cheaper in dollar costs than gasoline in energy terms? Gasoline is cheap because it's used in immense quantities around the world and doesn't have to be "manufactured" by pumping expensive energy into chemical reactions, it just needs to be extracted from the ground and refined. As for farmers or others making their own fuels that can be done right now for piston engines -- corn oil, biofuels from turkey guts, methane from manure digesters etc. Great, free fuel except for the equipment they need to buy to derive the fuel from their waste materials, the time and effort to transport the feedstocks and operate the plant etc., health and safety inspections, waste disposal etc. In the end it's usually cheaper and less time-consuming to just pull up at a pump and squeeze the handle on a tankful of Alberta crude or Venezualan black gold.
If a new Magic Cheap Fuel came along the government would end up taxing it just like they tax gasoline and diesel -- here in the UK diesel used to be a lot cheaper than gasoline because the tax per gallon was less even though the energy per gallon is greater than regular gasoline. After diesel cars became popular the tax level went up and now diesel and gasoline cost about the same at the pump. The fuel homebrew guys are a tiny part of the fuel market. If that market increases and bites into the tax take then the regulatory structure will be tightened up. Expect, for example, some form of "fuel" tax for electric vehicles to be developed in the next decade or so, even if the car owner lives off-grid and derives all their power from solar cells and hamster wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
Uranium generally isn't a problem in radioactive spills or contamination. It's not particularly biotoxic as a metal or oxide and with very long half-lives for the two most common isotopes (U-235's half-life is 700 million years and for U-238 it's 4.5 billion years) it's not even very radioactive by itself. Most uranium ore bodies contain a lot of decay products like radium, thorium, polonium etc. which have built up over millions or billions of years and these are exposed to the wider environment when the uranium ore is mined and refined. A method of concentrating and sequestering such short-halflife isotopes from mine tailings would be more useful than this biological method which only, it seems, concentrates uranium. Right now the Japanese would really like a variant that, say, concentrated cesium in a similar manner as Cs-134 and Cs-137 are 99.9% of the contamination problem in the area around Fukushima.
It might be this particular form of the bacteria could be better used to extract uranium from lesser ore bodies or even seawater where it is present in quantities of about 3 tonnes per cubic kilometre but right now and for the next fifty years or more uranium ore is plentiful enough that the costs of such marginal operations would outweigh the value of uranium metal (currently trading on world markets for 60 dollars a kilo) extracted by them.
Of course uranium has a scary reputation -- see this news report for an example. Further comments suggest the uranium in question was 500 milligrammes of yellowcake in a sealed vial, a gift from a friend studying chem eng who had prepared it from ore found in New Mexico (just lying about out in the open! Horrors!).
A lot of modern lower-end mobos will work with ECC memory but I don't know if they actually use the ECC functionality or just run it like it was non-ECC. The manual for the Asus M4A87TD/USB3 mobo, to choose one at random, says it accepts ECC and non-ECC memory but there's no further details on functionality.
Using that "disposable robot" approach eventually the operators would need to send in a specialised robot tow-truck to remove all the dead/crashed/jammed robots blocking access to the bits of the buildings that they need to get into. And if the tow-truck robot got stuck...
Disaster engineering is more tricky than shoulder-surfers often comprehend; the matrix of decisions on how to solve big problems like last year's Gulf spill or the current Fukushima situation starts with "Will doing this kill a lot of people?" and steps down through "Can doing this make things worse and how can we avoid that happening?" and only near the end is consideration made about how a given approach might help solve the fucking problem.
Soft-landing on Mars takes retro-rockets as well as parachutes. There's no sea to splash-down in. The atmosphere is too thin to fly a Shuttle-style spaceplane hull to a runway touchdown and there isn't a runway to land on anyway. Small very rugged spacecraft can use balutes and cushions for surface contact but scaling them up as the lander size and mass increases is problematic; see the incredibly complex system of heatshield, parachutes and retrorockets the Curiosity rover is going to be using to put down on the Mars surface compared to the (failed) Beagle 2 lander.
All this sort of stuff can be tested on the Lunar surface, a convenient low-G laboratory near LEO. The final tests would be done on Mars using supply capsules and ascent stages before the Marsnauts ever reach LEO to start their journey.
I think that a Big Booster system is optimised for a "boots and banners" mission to, say, Mars. Fly four or five astronauts in a crowded capsule plus a lander/ascent vehicle to the Red Planet where they go down, plant a flag, take some pictures, grab some rocks and then come home after a couple of months max and then we (meaning the human race) never go back. See Apollo and the much-lauded Saturn V as an example of a just such a dead-end mission profile.
Everything in a single mission vehicle to Mars has to work perfectly for a year or more in space plus the landing and ascent. Testing all the hardware in a complete unmanned mission or two (or three) before we send the meatbags is going to take a long time and be very expensive.
Alternatively, doing it incrementally using modular launches on existing vehicles it is possible to get the bugs out part by part. Use the Moon as a testbed for landers and ascent vehicles; Mars gravity is double that of Lunar gravity but otherwise conditions aren't that much different. Send one or two manned missions to the Earth-Trojans etc. to test the vehicles and their extended life support using lessons learned from operating the space stations. Put several lander/ascent vehicles on the Martian surface and see if they degrade or take damage from the conditions before dispatching the fleet of well-tested manned capsules; four at a minimum, built by two different contractors to different designs just in case of a boo-boo that is only discovered later. The extra capsules can act as lifeboats for the twelve or fifteen Marsnauts in the fleet if something goes wrong in one or more of the vehicles.
At the same time supply landers are being launched from LEO, one every few months or so to keep the semi-permanent crew of explorers on the surface and in Mars orbit fed with air, food etc. Every 19 months or so when the transit time is minimal a new crew goes out and some of the older Mars hands come back. That sort of continuous exploration model doesn't work as well with a big single-stack launcher which has to do everything because it's the only thing that can get funded. Worst case the funding for its development gets pulled when it's half-finished and nothing ever flies operationally (see Ares 1). As I said before the Ariane, Delta, Soyuz etc. are already flying, there's no decades-long multi-billion dollar development programme required before the first metal flies. The costs of developing and building the assorted bits the launchers will carry is of course eye-wateringly high but they're on top of the cost of the Big Booster, not in place of it.
"Boots and banners" is of course a lot cheaper than supporting a semi-permanent manned presence on Mars but if that's the only reason you can think of to go to Mars then I'd say it isn't really worth going in the first place.
With smaller rockets and a modular approach it would be possible, for example, to put an unmanned lander/ascent stage or two on the Moon or Mars well before any manned crew capsule gets there, giving the crews redundancy as well as removing the need for them to fly their own ascent stage down to the surface. Similarly unamnned supply capsule flights could be pipelined with lots of smaller launch vehicles, and if one is lost then another can be rotated into the launch program to replace it.
With an Apollo-style "everything in one package" giant launcher you risk both a catastrophic failure to deliver a complete bundle of equipment to orbit killing the program for years (Ares V will be unmanned, a pure cargo carrier so no lives will be at risk) and also the possibility that a single equipment failure in flight as with Apollo 13 can also be a mission-kill.
The really good thing is that there is an existing range of small and medium-lift vehicles already in the catalogue off-the-shelf -- Delta, Ariane, Soyuz, H-2 and others all of which can do the job today without the eye-watering development costs and inevitable construction delays of building and qualifying a new heavy-lifter.
I think someone is already selling a USB-powered BBQ. It takes six 5-port powered USB hubs to run it if I remember the advertising blurb correctly and it probably can't cook half a hog in thirty-five seconds from cold like a Real Man's turbo-LOX BBQ can.
What I'd like is a USB-to-mains charger, an small electronic brick that plugs into a USB port and can provide 100V (DC will do fine but 50/60Hz AC should be achievable) for things like camera battery chargers and other low-current electronics where the manufacturer for some reason or other doesn't offer a direct-USB charging or operating mode. Saying that many devices (cellphones etc.) are converging on a USB charging port as a common feature.
The Leonardo module (not the Rafaello) was destined to become a permanent module on the ISS on Atlantis' last flight so it was not loaded fully with cargo. It normally carried about 9 tonnes, or three times the load of an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule. The modified Leonardo module did have some parts from the unused Donatello module on board though to adapt it for permanent attachment to the ISS.
As for the crewing levels, the Dragon capsule doesn't support spacewalks for external operations at the ISS as it has no airlock or space for spacewalk-capable spacesuits inside its tiny cabin. The Shuttle's extra crewmembers (absent the pilot and co-pilot) were mission specialists, usually running experiments in the giant payload bay or even in the crew compartment or spacewalking to assemble, repair and replace parts on the ISS. Dragon's spam-in-a-can design means any spacewalk operations will have to be carried out by the crewmembers of the ISS station requiring cargo launches to provide supplies and such for the spacewalks themselves rather than the self-contained Shuttle capability which lofted everything in one go.
The Shuttle was designed in the days of Apollo when the operational systems on the ground required everything to go up on one stack rather than having multiple units rendezvous in orbit within tight time slots. To replace that one-shot capability is going to require more than the same throw-weight in boosters to get all the bits needed in the right places at the right time.
France is reprocessing over a thousand tonnes of spent fuel every year and has been for some time now. Britain has been processing spent fuel for its indigenous power reactor fleet for a couple of decades as well as dealing with fuel rods from Japan and elsewhere. Japan recently completed its own reprocessing plant at Rokkasho which should be capable of handling about 800 tonnes of fuel rods a year when it is up to speed. The accident-beset Tokaimaru processing plant (about 200 tonnes a year) may be decommissioned once Rokkasho is fully on-line. The Russians are expanding their fuel reprocessing capabilities at the moment with a new plant that should be able to deal with about 1500 tonnes of fuel elements each year when it is complete.
Right now reprocessing isn't particularly cost-effective as raw uranium is so cheap (last figure I saw was 56 dollars US per kilo of unenriched metal), but if the price rises and the cost and logistics of storage of spent fuel rods becomes enough of a problem then I expect the US will overturn the Carter-era moratorium and build their own reprocessing facilities to start using up the Strategic Uranium Reserve they have accumulated over the past thirty years or so.
Aberfan in Wales is another interesting Google target...
Hydro-electric dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Indeed, a small (non-power-generating) dam in Fukushima prefecture broke during the recent big earthquake in Japan, killing at least four people at the dam itself and washing away a couple of villages downstream with some inhabitants reported as missing presumed drowned. That's a lot more people than were killed by the tsunami and earthquake at the two Fukushima plants and (obviously) a lot more than have died from radioactivity releases caused by the reactor failures.
Hydro power is a proven killer with a long history of mass deaths due to structural failures and operating problems. It's not in the same class as coal and oil due to the amount of pollution and CO2 it produces for the amount of energy it outputs but in terms of ill-effects it's way ahead of nuclear in any scale you care to compare it with.
The eggs have codes printed directly on the shell using inkjet technology. The codes indicate the production facility and the date the egg was collected. This allows an outbreak of, say, salmonella to be traced back to a particular location and even a particular group of birds that laid the infected eggs.
A blogger named Spike has been to the 20km zone boundary. The Japanese authorities are now enforcing the exclusion zone to prevent looting of deserted properties as well as stopping folks who want to return to their homes.
TEPCO are doing "feed and bleed" -- they are pumping between 6 and 9 tonnes of water an hour into the reactors and then extracting it again to remove decay heat from the cores. Step 2 is to build a self-contained cooling loop in each reactor building starting with reactor 1 that will circulate cooling water rather than doing feed and bleed. Step 3, if it is possible, will be to restore the original cooling loop systems through the seawater condensers under the turbine buildings beside the reactors. That can only be done when the loops are fully functional again and that will take a lot more time to achieve.
They are also planning to flood the secondary containments to immerse the reactor vessels in a large heatsink of water to further cool the reactor vessel itself. This will only be done when and if they are sure the containments are watertight.
Japan is in the process of commissioning a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at the moment. When up to full capacity it will be able to handle about 800 tonnes of spent fuel rods each year, recycling the uranium and plutonium into new fuel rods and preparing the remaining high-level waste for vitrification and long-term storage.
The most gruelling racing track in the world is probably the Mountain Course in the Isle of Man, sixty miles of road up and down the side of a mountain and then passing through a series of villages and over hump-back bridges. It's a rare year that doesn't end in at least one fatality during the motorbike Time Trial (TT) races in June or the Manx GP in the autumn -- in 2010 four riders died.
There's now a race for electric motorbikes included in the TT series, and a $10,000 prize for the first bike to achieve a 100mph lap. Last year the winning bike managed 96mph and might have broken the 100mph barrier if the rider hadn't been over-conservative regarding the bike's batteries and their capacity.
The releases from the Fukushima reactors were nearly all highly-mobile radioactive elements such as iodine, a vapour at normal temperature and cesium, a low-melting-point metal dispersed during the venting of steam and hydrogen from the reactor vessels. The Tchernobyl releases included large amounts of everything in the burning core after the entire reactor vessel slagged down and exposed it to the world including strontium-90, a bone-seeker which usually has too high a melting point to be easily released from a reactor.
The good news (if there is any) is that iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days and a stable non-radioactive daughter, xenon. In three months time only 0.1% of it will be left and in a year it will be down to one-billionth of the original release. The bad news is that the major cesium isotope released, Cs-137 has a half-life of thirty years and it's not going away any time soon except through environmental means or a massive hands-on cleanup operation.
A dam used for irrigation and drinking water (much like any hydroelectric dam anywhere in the world) in the hills above Fukushima town failed during the earthquake. The resulting flood killed at least four people and a bunch of others in houses downstream are missing, presumed drowned.
Several dams in the area are known to have sustained damage but many others have not yet been properly inspected.
There were drums of yellowcake (actually not yellow in colour) refined uranium ore in storage at Tuwaitha in Iraq, under IAEA seal. During the 2003 invasion the Iraqi security on the site ran away and the US-led forces did not secure the area for several months after the regime folded, despite it being a site of extreme importance in terms of WMDs and nuclear proliferation.
The local Iraqi population took this opportunity to loot the site, stealing everything that was worth stealing. They broke into the storage bunkers, found these large plastic drums full of dirt, tipped them out and took the drums to store drinking water in. The "dirt" was yellowcake ore.
Yellowcake is only mildly hazardous, both chemically and radioactively. Mining and initial processing of the ore body releases daughter isotopes trapped within the rocks which are the result of billions of years of radioactive decay and which produce most of the alpha and beta particles and all of the gamma radiation but after the processing at the mine is complete the most active of those daughter isotopes such as radon-222 have been removed.
According to the Anandtech article the transistor in question is in the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) circuitry for the four SATA2 3Gbps controllers. When it dies due to overvoltage and heat it takes all four SATA channels with it since it cripples the PLL which provides the clocks for the SATA controller. The SATA3 6Gbps controller has its own PLL and so its clocking system is not affected.
To add to the confusion that particular section of PLL is apparently redundant, part of an older mask revision that didn't get cleaned up when they moved from rev A to rev B. This happens a lot in chip-making and leaving redundant circuitry in place doesn't normally cause problems. The thing that must be annoying the Intel engineers the most is that when this useless and unwanted transistor fails it pulls down the rest of the PLL subsystem that is totally necessary for the system to work properly.
VIA had a chipset bug on their old KT-series motherboard bridge chips that would lock up the machine if a certain sequence of bytes and a couple of signals on the ATA bus interface hit simultaneously. That condition was legal (if rare) as far as the ATA bus spec was concerned and shouldn't have caused the lockup, but it did. It was one of the conditions we had to insert escape code for when building optical (CD/DVD) drives otherwise people who bought our drives would bitch at us when the inevitable lockups happened. All the other manufacturers of IDE-bus devices did the same sort of workarounds and VIA did eventually fix the bug but it still left millions of motherboards out there with the problem chips on them.
OTOH we caught the VHDL bug that occasionally switched off the DRAM refresh controller in the testing lab before the design got sent to production, a relief for everyone concerned.
Last year I got given a QIC-150 tape written in 1995 to see if I could recover someone's old email archives. First I had to locate a QIC drive but a bit of hunting on the local Freecycle group got me an external SCSI unit weighing about 40 pounds with a tape drive and a full-height 500MB hard drive included. The tape drive didn't work, in that it talked SCSI-II all right to the BSD box's controller and the motor went round and round but no data came out.
The first inkling of bad news was realising that someone else had been into the tape drive mechanism before me when I saw the chewed-up screws holding the covers on. The really bad news was seeing the capstan roller on the drive -- or rather the motor shaft where the capstan roller used to be. It had gone missing sometime in the past and the bodger who had been in before me figured that a bunch of rubber bands would make a suitable replacement for the roller. This was some time back, judging by the condition of the rubber bands which were now a sticky mess of perished semi-liquid rubber.
I rummaged in my junkbox and pulled out an old lump of solid rubber, a platen roller from a daisywheel printed I had junked decades ago. I measured up the motor shaft, made some educated guesses and machined a replacement roller on the workshop lathe. After degunking the motor shaft with a scalpel and needle files the new capstan roller was driven into place and after that the data came pouring off the tape like it had been written yesterday as good old-fashioned CSV-delimited tarball archives. The owner of the tape got back the first emails he ever exchanged with the lady who he had since married and there was much rejoicing.
A commonly-used short-hand term in the British and Commonwealth military during the WWII period was U/S, short for "unservicable" meaning something wasn't worth repairing and it should be junked or dismantled for spare parts. It had nothing to do with the USA.
iFixit cracked the case on a new Macbook Air and did an expose. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1 The SSD is a DIMM package, not chips soldered onto the main logic board. It seems to be a custom design from Toshiba, not anything off the shelf from the regular suppliers of SSDs (Corsair, Intel etc.) but it can be swapped out and replaced, and maybe in the future when the flash chips are up to it Apple or some OEM will release a larger capacity version. The main system RAM IS soldered onto the board and is not field-upgradeable.
What liquid fuels (or gases) are cheaper in dollar costs than gasoline in energy terms? Gasoline is cheap because it's used in immense quantities around the world and doesn't have to be "manufactured" by pumping expensive energy into chemical reactions, it just needs to be extracted from the ground and refined. As for farmers or others making their own fuels that can be done right now for piston engines -- corn oil, biofuels from turkey guts, methane from manure digesters etc. Great, free fuel except for the equipment they need to buy to derive the fuel from their waste materials, the time and effort to transport the feedstocks and operate the plant etc., health and safety inspections, waste disposal etc. In the end it's usually cheaper and less time-consuming to just pull up at a pump and squeeze the handle on a tankful of Alberta crude or Venezualan black gold.
If a new Magic Cheap Fuel came along the government would end up taxing it just like they tax gasoline and diesel -- here in the UK diesel used to be a lot cheaper than gasoline because the tax per gallon was less even though the energy per gallon is greater than regular gasoline. After diesel cars became popular the tax level went up and now diesel and gasoline cost about the same at the pump. The fuel homebrew guys are a tiny part of the fuel market. If that market increases and bites into the tax take then the regulatory structure will be tightened up. Expect, for example, some form of "fuel" tax for electric vehicles to be developed in the next decade or so, even if the car owner lives off-grid and derives all their power from solar cells and hamster wheels.