I've noticed that many of these fine suggestions are male. One of the biggest problems in my field of physics is that there is a very large gender imbalance. Perhaps we're sending a message early on that only men are good at science -- an absolutely false one. So, for instance, consider Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.
Preferably, look for a treatment which doesn't portray the scientists as demigods; the dirty little secret that you find out after joining their ranks is that they're just as normal as everyone else.
What I liked about these (which I read in elementary school) at the time was the promise of Tips and Tricks for the game the novel was based on. Some of them (like being able to pause Blaster Master when a grenade explosion was on the boss and effectively instantly kill them) were quite helpful!
The only other big difference I recall was that in the Metal Gear rendition, the cigarettes were never acquired or used by Solid Snake -- even though they gave you a significant boost in the amount of time you had to escape the facility at the end of the game!
I distinctly remember the first thing in the box. No, it wasn't packaging, or anything like that -- it was the *warning manual.* This manual was about 25 pages or so with wonderful things like "Do not allow a child under the age of seven to use the Virtual Boy Gaming System or else permanent eye damage could occur."
Who wouldn't want to try out the system after that?
I certainly look forward to seeing just how much the phone companies have been aiding the NSA. With the abuses leaked regarding the "terrorist surveillence program" related to international phone calls, the warrantless surveilance of American citizens certainly needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light of day.
You can certainly make fusion reactions with a collider -- but the problem is that the goal of a fusion reactor is net energy gain. The tremendous energy losses associated with running particle accelerators rules out their use as a fusion device.
So, the alternative currently employed is our only other option: heating the D-T fuel to thermonuclear temperatures (~10 keV / 100,000,000 C) and let the intrinsic thermal motion of the particles overcome their mutual Coulomb repulsion.
Part of the long-term nature of construction is because ITER is an international cooperative effort. The EU, Russia, US, Japan, India, South Korea, and China are all making different components of the device.
Also, ITER is huge. (Picture -- see the little man on the left side?) Furthermore, the extensive use of superconducting materials impedes construction, as they are difficult to construct.
There's a lot of subtlety hiding in that 9 years. As a researcher in the field, I certainly hope that it goes well!
The reactor mentioned in the article is the DIII-D tokamak, located at General Atomics in San Diego. It is the largest tokamak in the US, and third largest in the world. (I am a researcher in the field, and have worked at GA.)
These devices are not fusion reactors, in the power-generation sense. They are research machines used to understand the fundamental physics of plasma confinement and stability. They do not use D-T fuel, as tritium is radioactive and therefore must be strictly controlled. (Besides, the device isn't built for the neutron load of active fusion.) The fuel used is deuterium; the fusion cross-sections are sufficiently low for D-D fusion that at the temperatures achievable in the device D-D fusion events are negligible.
The idea is to discern the physics behind the ELMs and then supress them if it turns out to be beneficial. (This is an open question.) The real prototype fusion reactor will be ITER (at least before the prototype commercial electric plant DEMO comes online following ITER), soon to be under construction in France.
We'll see how fast I'm beaten to the punch, but...
Why not use an ODF-compatible version of Word? That way, all the existing Word-compatible accessibility features will still be there. Especially with MS support for the standard, this doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.
This particular Zelda cartoon was part of the Super Mario Bros show. SMB was on weekdays, with Fridays being a Zelda cartoon and the rest being SMB cartoons.
This is not to be confused with a few appearances on Captain N following the release of Zelda II, after the SMB cartoon was past its prime. The Captain N version featured the same voice for Link, IIRC.
Disclaimer: I am a plasma physicist working in the magnetic fusion arena.
A magnetically confined fusion plasma is a very tenuous beast. If all operating conditions are not satisfied, the background plasma requisite for fusion will not be created -- and if you go from 'good' to 'bad' operating conditions, the plasma snuffs itself out on the order of a confinement time (several milliseconds depending on device parameters).
has any scientist working on such a reactor deliberately simulated a total containment field failure?
Sure -- in modern research devices these failures happen for a myriad of reasons. Disruptions have happened a lot in the course of this research. On current devices, a disruption can be a 'no big deal' operation or force repairs; on a fusion reactor they really need to be avoided. Fortunately, the cause of showstopper disruption events are well known and techniques exist to stay away from the region of parameter space that causes them! There are also techniques to mitigate disruptions from unexpected failures (PDF warning).
think a popcorn kernel what happens when it reaches the right temperature? *pop*
There's a difference between temperature and energy density. For instance, if you blow out a candle you can snuff out the glowing wick with your fingers without burning them -- despite the wick being around 1000 K. The reason is that the candle wick doesn't have much energy stored inside. The same goes for a magnetically confined plasma. While the plasma has a very small tail in its energy distribution which allows thermonuclear fusion, the stored energy in the plasma itself is insufficient to, say, melt a building and set off an incindeary firestorm.
Disclaimer: I'm a plasma physicist, work in the lab next door, and know several of the people working on this project.
I think a distinction needs to be made between the use of fusion to produce net energy versus fusion for other purposes, such as a low-volume neutron generator. It is the latter which IEC devices currently find their use. For instance, a friend of mine is working on using the IEC device to produce medically useful isotopes; another works on detecting explosives/land mines via the emitted neutrons.
When it comes to making power, IEC grids suffer from the same neutronics issues. A real fusion reactor will be undoubtedly the harshest material environment on Earth. These neutronics material issues are of fundamental importance, so much so that a separate neutron irradiation facility will be constructed as a part of the ITER negotiations to study the topic.
It turns out that the D-T fusion reaction yields a high-energy neutron. (In fact, these neutrons rattling around a shield/heating blanket around our reactor are what generates the heat we'll use to make electricity.)
However, there also exists a couple of favorible nuclear reactions which convert Lithium to tritium:
1) 6Li + n -> 4He + T + n + 4.5 MeV 2) 7Li + n + 2.5 MeV -> 4He + T + n
Effectively, the presence of Lithium, a very abundant element in the ground (more 7Li than 6Li), around the fusion reactor will generate _more_ T from fusion than is burned. We can therefore breed as much T as is needed from our existing supplies, which are = 20 kg for civilian use! A better way to think of fusion fuel is that they burn deuterium and lithium.:)
Without a fusion reactor, tritium can be created in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere through cosmic ray bombardment (perhaps ~50 kg distributed around the entire atmosphere), and in practical amounts by using heavy-water moderated fission reactors (deuterium bombardment, as you suggest).
I may not be the GP, but I'll throw in my $.02 as a fusion science researcher. (I work on a magnetic confinement device myself.)
1) The running joke of fusion is that it's always 30-50 years away. This is more due to meager funding levels than anything else. At a talk by a PPPL scientist a few years back, it was mentioned that if one plots the price of oil and the amount allocated for fusion research versus year, they track rather nicely. (The 70's were a great time to be in the field!)
Why the meager funding? Fusion researchers kind of shot themselves in the foot in the late 50's and 60's, before much of the underlying plasma physics was well understood. TFTR (the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, built in the late 70's, ran through the 90's) turned up physics phenomena that were unexpected and needed to be understood. (That can still be said for many devices today, which are built to specifically analyze these phenomena.) When Nature deals you a bum hand, you have to go back to the drawing board -- and push things off for another decade. Politicians don't like that -- especially when they've been coerced into thinking past their next election!
ITER will be a very large-scale test device. Some of the phenomena that we see disrupting our current experiments are related to physical device size. Additionally, fusion power production is volumetric, while losses from the plasma come from the surface area of the confined plasma. Therefore, scaling up the size will boost fusion output, making it easier to "breakeven" (power out == power in) and, in ITER's case, very likely "ignite" (after reaching a critical temperature, you can turn off external heating and the plasma burning supplies the rest).
Of course, such scaling takes Lots of Money. Superconducting magnet coils are pricey; so is requisite neutron shielding. Current designs incorporate a Lithium "blanket" which will both absorb the 14 MeV neutrons (shielding) and produce tritium (amazingly, more T than you seed the plasma with initially!). One of the biggest question marks is in the field of materials. Nothing has been built that is going to take the neutron punishment that ITER will dish out to plasma-facing surfaces. It is such an important task to design materials that can sustain bombardment that a separate facility will be constructed simultaneously with ITER in Japan to study neutron bombardment exclusively. This has implications in the divertor material (high-Z tungsten or something lighter?) as well as blanket design.
2) My personal opinion is that it is best to stick with our Gen-IV nuclear plants when it comes to fission. These are meltdown-proof, high-efficiency plants that are designed for rapid implementation, should there be a willing buyer. A tabletop-size fusion device would be a relatively inefficient method of starting a fission plant; there are plenty of natural neutron sources that can be made by mixing radioactive materials together. Essentially, it'd be cheaper to use our existing designs for a big fission plant than mixing a fusion reactor's blanket design with a subcritical fission design.
I'm a plasma physicist. The '100 million C' references, while technically accurate, are a bit misleading. The plasma particles (deuterium, tritium, helium "ash", etc.) have thermal energies that are around 10 keV (~100 million C). However, there aren't many particles to speak of; therefore, there isn't much _stored energy_ inside. If the plasma disrupts these particles hit the vacuum vessel / blanket and maybe knock off a few atoms' worth of wall. This is the same idea as snuffing out a glowing candle with your fingertips. You don't get burned because there's not much stored energy.
... after my lunch break. (I work at UW-Madison.) This is one _big_ flower. Unfortunately (fortunately?), I saw it a little over 24 hours after it began to open. By that time, you had to be about 4 inches away from the bloom to smell the carrion-like smell.
The graduate students explaining the environment the flower is found in, as well as the amazing way in which it attracts and traps flies/carrion beetles to reproduce and the 10-foot tall tree-like leaf (!) make me truly appreciate how amazing the spectrum of life we have here on Earth is. It's certainly above my head -- that's why I can stick to relatively simple things, like working on a plasma confinement device.;)
Disclaimer: I am a plasma physicist conducting active research on a magnetic confinement device.
TFA implies towards the end that crystal fusion has potential to become an energy source (i.e. exceeding "breakeaven," the condition where energy input is balanced by energy output). I sincerely doubt this will be the case. That said, the real benefit to this crystal fusion device is not producing energy, but as a cheap neutron generator.
To put things in perspective, consider the fusion rates between crystal fusion and TFTR (the most successful D-T "hot" fusion device built to date). From the FIRE place:
"Note: crystal fusion produced 800 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second compared to 50,000,000,000,000,000 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second in magnetic fusion (e.g., TFTR)."
Small, cheap neutron sources would be a great boon for many fields, such as petroleum reserve discovery and material science research. When it comes to a real energy source, though, a practical first step is to actually decide where to build the ITER.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
This seems like a rather nifty extention of the technology. However, note that the fuel source, tritium, is rather hard and expensive to come by. (The total world supply of the stuff is < 40 kg.) So I see this as a great boon for, say, space probes or other fancy applications where getting your hands on some tritium gas aren't the biggest of concerns on the budget. It'd be interesting to see how they compare to other nuclear batteries that rely on heat from alpha-decay of heavy isotopes like plutonium to generate electrical currents.
As far as all the jokes about a nuclear laptop battery using this technology causing sterility, note that tritium decays via beta emission (i.e. an electron), with a range in solid materials of a few mm, so those energetic electrons will stay in the battery. Your primary concern would be if you somehow cracked the thing open and inhaled the tritium gas -- then those few mm of exposure in your lungs etc. aren't the best things to have around energetic particles. (And, as far as having to ingest nuclear sources, tritium is probably one of the better ones, since not only does it have a relatively short half-life of ~12 years, but it gets flushed out of the body rather rapidly as it diffuses into the bloodstream/water in tissues, leading to a much shorter effective biological half-life of 11 days.)
FWIW, my 400MHz K6-III was running for about 6 years straight until its power supply decided to melt down (and puff out lots of caustic smoke), frying the motherboard and presumably the processor in the process.
I'm glad to see somebody beat me to the punch. Perhaps a bit of additional info may shed light on the subject. Disclaimer: I'm a plasma physicist.
The initial 'deal' with detonating nuclear weapons in the ionosphere was to see whether we could create our own artificial radiation belts. Due to Earth's magnetic field, the plasma created by the nuclear detonation will remain trapped (for the most part) in a bananna-shaped orbit, bouncing from north to south pole. Over time, the radiation cloud is ejected into space, again becuase of interactions with the Earth's magnetic field. (Particles can get lost and settle down over the poles, too -- watch out Antarctica!)
Sure enough, lobbing nukes up there created big, bananna shaped radiation belts, just as Nicholas Christofilos had predicted in the 50's. They decayed within a few weeks, and didn't attain the desired military effect of creating a band so intensely radioactive that it would knock out nearby missiles and sattelites. (It vindicated much of the early plasma physics, though!)
In addition to making a radioactive blanket that encircled the Earth, it also made one helluva light show at the poles, where the magnetic mirror bounce was taking place! (Incidentally, such a belt can be more damaging to sattelites than the original EMP itself. Google HANE if you're interested.)
Would a judge allow a drunk driver to get back in a car if he caused damage to 50,000 cars? It is the same thing.
Given the laws on the books in many states where you commonly see 5+ DUI confictions with repeat offenders, the answer would appear to be "yes."
While damaging 50k computers is a true financial burden, the treatment afforded to repeat DUI offenders is by far too lenient. However, what's 50k computers or cars compared to the immense loss we have in DUI-related fatalities?
Having had personal friends killed by a drunk driver, I'd be inclined to let them rot in jail -- or better yet, provide a first conviction with such stiff penalties (plus rehabilitation) that they'd never do it again.
My first serious brush with Free software was when I took an operating systems course back in college. While many of the principles we discussed were universal (schedulers, filesystems, etc.) we turned to the Linux kernel to look at examples of how you would actually implement a scheduler, filesystem, etc.
Another interest I had was in how P2P networks work. I had no experience in network programming, but a firm grasp of C/C++; downloading the source to a Gnutella client and poking around did wonders. When I later had to contribute to a network-based application in college, I found myself ahead thankful for being able to reference functioning, stable code.
While the article makes the (valid) point that many people do not have the ability to easily modify the software they use, this ability doesn't just magically appear from nowhere; it's something that has to be learned. For me, seeing examples of how certain things are implemented is one of the most effective way to learn.
Besides, there's always the allure of knowing that if you're not satisfied with a Free software product, you can pick it up, study the source, and fix it yourself if you're so inclined!
I have very mixed feelings on this topic. Certainly, curbing global terrorism is a good thing; however, the means in which the US goes about it are suspect.
In my opinion, if we need to monitor every phone call, filter every email, or lurk in every chat room, we've already lost. What happens to free speech when you know that Big Brother is watching? It goes away.
That's why I like the new encryption tools we have at our disposal. In essence, they ensure a safe haven of free speech. Despite the fact that terrorists can use stealthy communication techniques that go under the NSA's radar, so can the average Joe.
After all, wasn't the mindset of the founding fathers that the people could overthrow the government if they found it to be tyrannical? Ensuring free speech, the right to assemble (greatly aided by unimpeded communication), and the NRA's favorite right to bear arms provide an well-needed check against the government's powers: empowering the citizens. Sadly, many of us are willing to yield these rights.
It makes me think of Ben Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I'm surprised I haven't seen mention of several publications by the American Physical Society regarding the missile defense shield. As a physicist, I looked forward to the APS' findings, as it is one of the most prominent and well-respected professional organizations of physicists.
The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.
So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.
Of course, with improving technology, higher beta (a measure of fusion plasma confinement capability), and hotter plasmas, D-T can be forsaken for other reactions.:)
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I've noticed that many of these fine suggestions are male. One of the biggest problems in my field of physics is that there is a very large gender imbalance. Perhaps we're sending a message early on that only men are good at science -- an absolutely false one. So, for instance, consider Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.
Preferably, look for a treatment which doesn't portray the scientists as demigods; the dirty little secret that you find out after joining their ranks is that they're just as normal as everyone else.
The only other big difference I recall was that in the Metal Gear rendition, the cigarettes were never acquired or used by Solid Snake -- even though they gave you a significant boost in the amount of time you had to escape the facility at the end of the game!
Who wouldn't want to try out the system after that?
I certainly look forward to seeing just how much the phone companies have been aiding the NSA. With the abuses leaked regarding the "terrorist surveillence program" related to international phone calls, the warrantless surveilance of American citizens certainly needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light of day.
You can certainly make fusion reactions with a collider -- but the problem is that the goal of a fusion reactor is net energy gain. The tremendous energy losses associated with running particle accelerators rules out their use as a fusion device.
So, the alternative currently employed is our only other option: heating the D-T fuel to thermonuclear temperatures (~10 keV / 100,000,000 C) and let the intrinsic thermal motion of the particles overcome their mutual Coulomb repulsion.
More info: General Atomics Fusion Education
Also, ITER is huge. (Picture -- see the little man on the left side?) Furthermore, the extensive use of superconducting materials impedes construction, as they are difficult to construct.
There's a lot of subtlety hiding in that 9 years. As a researcher in the field, I certainly hope that it goes well!
These devices are not fusion reactors, in the power-generation sense. They are research machines used to understand the fundamental physics of plasma confinement and stability. They do not use D-T fuel, as tritium is radioactive and therefore must be strictly controlled. (Besides, the device isn't built for the neutron load of active fusion.) The fuel used is deuterium; the fusion cross-sections are sufficiently low for D-D fusion that at the temperatures achievable in the device D-D fusion events are negligible.
The idea is to discern the physics behind the ELMs and then supress them if it turns out to be beneficial. (This is an open question.) The real prototype fusion reactor will be ITER (at least before the prototype commercial electric plant DEMO comes online following ITER), soon to be under construction in France.
We'll see how fast I'm beaten to the punch, but...
Why not use an ODF-compatible version of Word? That way, all the existing Word-compatible accessibility features will still be there. Especially with MS support for the standard, this doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.
This particular Zelda cartoon was part of the Super Mario Bros show. SMB was on weekdays, with Fridays being a Zelda cartoon and the rest being SMB cartoons.
This is not to be confused with a few appearances on Captain N following the release of Zelda II, after the SMB cartoon was past its prime. The Captain N version featured the same voice for Link, IIRC.
A magnetically confined fusion plasma is a very tenuous beast. If all operating conditions are not satisfied, the background plasma requisite for fusion will not be created -- and if you go from 'good' to 'bad' operating conditions, the plasma snuffs itself out on the order of a confinement time (several milliseconds depending on device parameters).
has any scientist working on such a reactor deliberately simulated a total containment field failure?
Sure -- in modern research devices these failures happen for a myriad of reasons. Disruptions have happened a lot in the course of this research. On current devices, a disruption can be a 'no big deal' operation or force repairs; on a fusion reactor they really need to be avoided. Fortunately, the cause of showstopper disruption events are well known and techniques exist to stay away from the region of parameter space that causes them! There are also techniques to mitigate disruptions from unexpected failures (PDF warning).
think a popcorn kernel what happens when it reaches the right temperature? *pop*
There's a difference between temperature and energy density. For instance, if you blow out a candle you can snuff out the glowing wick with your fingers without burning them -- despite the wick being around 1000 K. The reason is that the candle wick doesn't have much energy stored inside. The same goes for a magnetically confined plasma. While the plasma has a very small tail in its energy distribution which allows thermonuclear fusion, the stored energy in the plasma itself is insufficient to, say, melt a building and set off an incindeary firestorm.
I think a distinction needs to be made between the use of fusion to produce net energy versus fusion for other purposes, such as a low-volume neutron generator. It is the latter which IEC devices currently find their use. For instance, a friend of mine is working on using the IEC device to produce medically useful isotopes; another works on detecting explosives/land mines via the emitted neutrons.
When it comes to making power, IEC grids suffer from the same neutronics issues. A real fusion reactor will be undoubtedly the harshest material environment on Earth. These neutronics material issues are of fundamental importance, so much so that a separate neutron irradiation facility will be constructed as a part of the ITER negotiations to study the topic.
Disclaimer: I'm a plasma physicist.
:)
It turns out that the D-T fusion reaction yields a high-energy neutron. (In fact, these neutrons rattling around a shield/heating blanket around our reactor are what generates the heat we'll use to make electricity.)
However, there also exists a couple of favorible nuclear reactions which convert Lithium to tritium:
1) 6Li + n -> 4He + T + n + 4.5 MeV
2) 7Li + n + 2.5 MeV -> 4He + T + n
Effectively, the presence of Lithium, a very abundant element in the ground (more 7Li than 6Li), around the fusion reactor will generate _more_ T from fusion than is burned. We can therefore breed as much T as is needed from our existing supplies, which are = 20 kg for civilian use! A better way to think of fusion fuel is that they burn deuterium and lithium.
Without a fusion reactor, tritium can be created in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere through cosmic ray bombardment (perhaps ~50 kg distributed around the entire atmosphere), and in practical amounts by using heavy-water moderated fission reactors (deuterium bombardment, as you suggest).
I may not be the GP, but I'll throw in my $.02 as a fusion science researcher. (I work on a magnetic confinement device myself.)
1) The running joke of fusion is that it's always 30-50 years away. This is more due to meager funding levels than anything else. At a talk by a PPPL scientist a few years back, it was mentioned that if one plots the price of oil and the amount allocated for fusion research versus year, they track rather nicely. (The 70's were a great time to be in the field!)
Why the meager funding? Fusion researchers kind of shot themselves in the foot in the late 50's and 60's, before much of the underlying plasma physics was well understood. TFTR (the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, built in the late 70's, ran through the 90's) turned up physics phenomena that were unexpected and needed to be understood. (That can still be said for many devices today, which are built to specifically analyze these phenomena.) When Nature deals you a bum hand, you have to go back to the drawing board -- and push things off for another decade. Politicians don't like that -- especially when they've been coerced into thinking past their next election!
ITER will be a very large-scale test device. Some of the phenomena that we see disrupting our current experiments are related to physical device size. Additionally, fusion power production is volumetric, while losses from the plasma come from the surface area of the confined plasma. Therefore, scaling up the size will boost fusion output, making it easier to "breakeven" (power out == power in) and, in ITER's case, very likely "ignite" (after reaching a critical temperature, you can turn off external heating and the plasma burning supplies the rest).
Of course, such scaling takes Lots of Money. Superconducting magnet coils are pricey; so is requisite neutron shielding. Current designs incorporate a Lithium "blanket" which will both absorb the 14 MeV neutrons (shielding) and produce tritium (amazingly, more T than you seed the plasma with initially!). One of the biggest question marks is in the field of materials. Nothing has been built that is going to take the neutron punishment that ITER will dish out to plasma-facing surfaces. It is such an important task to design materials that can sustain bombardment that a separate facility will be constructed simultaneously with ITER in Japan to study neutron bombardment exclusively. This has implications in the divertor material (high-Z tungsten or something lighter?) as well as blanket design.
2) My personal opinion is that it is best to stick with our Gen-IV nuclear plants when it comes to fission. These are meltdown-proof, high-efficiency plants that are designed for rapid implementation, should there be a willing buyer. A tabletop-size fusion device would be a relatively inefficient method of starting a fission plant; there are plenty of natural neutron sources that can be made by mixing radioactive materials together. Essentially, it'd be cheaper to use our existing designs for a big fission plant than mixing a fusion reactor's blanket design with a subcritical fission design.
I'm a plasma physicist. The '100 million C' references, while technically accurate, are a bit misleading. The plasma particles (deuterium, tritium, helium "ash", etc.) have thermal energies that are around 10 keV (~100 million C). However, there aren't many particles to speak of; therefore, there isn't much _stored energy_ inside. If the plasma disrupts these particles hit the vacuum vessel / blanket and maybe knock off a few atoms' worth of wall. This is the same idea as snuffing out a glowing candle with your fingertips. You don't get burned because there's not much stored energy.
We do need to give the translators credit where credit's due:
has made public its (sic) plans to construct
Note that its == posessive; it's == "it is", so the plans of the Federation are accurately described with "its" versus the contraction form.
The graduate students explaining the environment the flower is found in, as well as the amazing way in which it attracts and traps flies/carrion beetles to reproduce and the 10-foot tall tree-like leaf (!) make me truly appreciate how amazing the spectrum of life we have here on Earth is. It's certainly above my head -- that's why I can stick to relatively simple things, like working on a plasma confinement device. ;)
Disclaimer: I am a plasma physicist conducting active research on a magnetic confinement device.
TFA implies towards the end that crystal fusion has potential to become an energy source (i.e. exceeding "breakeaven," the condition where energy input is balanced by energy output). I sincerely doubt this will be the case. That said, the real benefit to this crystal fusion device is not producing energy, but as a cheap neutron generator.
To put things in perspective, consider the fusion rates between crystal fusion and TFTR (the most successful D-T "hot" fusion device built to date). From the FIRE place:
"Note: crystal fusion produced 800 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second compared to 50,000,000,000,000,000 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second in magnetic fusion (e.g., TFTR)."
Small, cheap neutron sources would be a great boon for many fields, such as petroleum reserve discovery and material science research. When it comes to a real energy source, though, a practical first step is to actually decide where to build the ITER.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
This seems like a rather nifty extention of the technology. However, note that the fuel source, tritium, is rather hard and expensive to come by. (The total world supply of the stuff is < 40 kg.) So I see this as a great boon for, say, space probes or other fancy applications where getting your hands on some tritium gas aren't the biggest of concerns on the budget. It'd be interesting to see how they compare to other nuclear batteries that rely on heat from alpha-decay of heavy isotopes like plutonium to generate electrical currents.
As far as all the jokes about a nuclear laptop battery using this technology causing sterility, note that tritium decays via beta emission (i.e. an electron), with a range in solid materials of a few mm, so those energetic electrons will stay in the battery. Your primary concern would be if you somehow cracked the thing open and inhaled the tritium gas -- then those few mm of exposure in your lungs etc. aren't the best things to have around energetic particles. (And, as far as having to ingest nuclear sources, tritium is probably one of the better ones, since not only does it have a relatively short half-life of ~12 years, but it gets flushed out of the body rather rapidly as it diffuses into the bloodstream/water in tissues, leading to a much shorter effective biological half-life of 11 days.)
FWIW, my 400MHz K6-III was running for about 6 years straight until its power supply decided to melt down (and puff out lots of caustic smoke), frying the motherboard and presumably the processor in the process.
I'm glad to see somebody beat me to the punch. Perhaps a bit of additional info may shed light on the subject. Disclaimer: I'm a plasma physicist.
The initial 'deal' with detonating nuclear weapons in the ionosphere was to see whether we could create our own artificial radiation belts. Due to Earth's magnetic field, the plasma created by the nuclear detonation will remain trapped (for the most part) in a bananna-shaped orbit, bouncing from north to south pole. Over time, the radiation cloud is ejected into space, again becuase of interactions with the Earth's magnetic field. (Particles can get lost and settle down over the poles, too -- watch out Antarctica!)
Sure enough, lobbing nukes up there created big, bananna shaped radiation belts, just as Nicholas Christofilos had predicted in the 50's. They decayed within a few weeks, and didn't attain the desired military effect of creating a band so intensely radioactive that it would knock out nearby missiles and sattelites. (It vindicated much of the early plasma physics, though!)
In addition to making a radioactive blanket that encircled the Earth, it also made one helluva light show at the poles, where the magnetic mirror bounce was taking place! (Incidentally, such a belt can be more damaging to sattelites than the original EMP itself. Google HANE if you're interested.)
Given the laws on the books in many states where you commonly see 5+ DUI confictions with repeat offenders, the answer would appear to be "yes."
While damaging 50k computers is a true financial burden, the treatment afforded to repeat DUI offenders is by far too lenient. However, what's 50k computers or cars compared to the immense loss we have in DUI-related fatalities?
Having had personal friends killed by a drunk driver, I'd be inclined to let them rot in jail -- or better yet, provide a first conviction with such stiff penalties (plus rehabilitation) that they'd never do it again.
Another interest I had was in how P2P networks work. I had no experience in network programming, but a firm grasp of C/C++; downloading the source to a Gnutella client and poking around did wonders. When I later had to contribute to a network-based application in college, I found myself ahead thankful for being able to reference functioning, stable code.
While the article makes the (valid) point that many people do not have the ability to easily modify the software they use, this ability doesn't just magically appear from nowhere; it's something that has to be learned. For me, seeing examples of how certain things are implemented is one of the most effective way to learn.
Besides, there's always the allure of knowing that if you're not satisfied with a Free software product, you can pick it up, study the source, and fix it yourself if you're so inclined!
In my opinion, if we need to monitor every phone call, filter every email, or lurk in every chat room, we've already lost. What happens to free speech when you know that Big Brother is watching? It goes away.
That's why I like the new encryption tools we have at our disposal. In essence, they ensure a safe haven of free speech. Despite the fact that terrorists can use stealthy communication techniques that go under the NSA's radar, so can the average Joe.
After all, wasn't the mindset of the founding fathers that the people could overthrow the government if they found it to be tyrannical? Ensuring free speech, the right to assemble (greatly aided by unimpeded communication), and the NRA's favorite right to bear arms provide an well-needed check against the government's powers: empowering the citizens. Sadly, many of us are willing to yield these rights.
It makes me think of Ben Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.
The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.
So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.
The first wall will contain lithium, which can transmute to T when bombarded by the fast neutrons generated by the fusion reactions. For more info, see Boeing's blurb on the shield/breeding blanket designs.
Of course, with improving technology, higher beta (a measure of fusion plasma confinement capability), and hotter plasmas, D-T can be forsaken for other reactions. :)