Half-life is a stupid measurement for the level of danger for wastes. The longer the half-life, the safer it is, because it's not as radioactive as something with a shorter half life. Everyone gets way too worked up about multi-thousand year half-life measurements, when those are the ones we want.
Which would you rather have sitting next to you, a lump of Cobalt-60 that will fire off 44TBq of radiation per gram, mostly gamma rays - but hey, it only has a half-life of 5.27 years - or a equal sized lump of Plutonium-242 with a big scary sounding half-life of 373,000 years, which decays by ejecting a helium atom and turns into Uranium-238 (>98% of natural Uranium) with a whopping 4.46 billion year half-life.
I think I know which I'd go for.
The half-life measurements to worry about are the medium-life isotopes like Strontium-90 (28.8 years) and Cesium-137 (30.17 years, and decays into something that is a gamma ray producer with a half-life measured in less than a couple hundred seconds, very nasty) - they are short enough to have concerning rates of decay, but long lived enough that you can't just wait them out like a lot of the stuff that's immediately present after a reactor shuts down and goes away fairly rapidly.
50 years? I guess pulling numbers out of your ass is fun, but I prefer reality: the Trojan Nuclear Generating Station had it's first criticality in December 1975. Other notable dates:
1992: reactor was taken offline 1993: chief operator announced it would not be restarted 2003: final fuel rods from cooling pools transferred to dry cask storage 2005: reactor vessel removed from containment dome, barged up the Columbia River to Hanford, and buried. 2006: cooling tower imploded
Now, I was never an advanced student at math, but that seems like 31 years from the beginning of operation, to not having a reactor vessel or cooling apparatus on site anymore. And that includes 17 years of operation, generating 1130MWe.
Yes, it takes a while to decommission the plant once it's done. But just like the uber-proponents of nuclear power around here, the uber-detractors don't need to lie and make shit up in order to sound smarter than they are. Decommissioning has been done. It didn't take 50 years. It was absolutely no risk to "the water table" or "populations both near and distant" in any sort of way - they barged the damn reactor core through the middle of a major metro area and nobody noticed. And major cooling efforts are only a concern for the first week or so after shutdown, as the extremely lively stuff decays rapidly, as it's extremely lively. At the moment of reactor shutdown, decay heat will be about 7% of the previous core power if the reactor has had a long and steady power history. About 1 hour after shutdown, the decay heat will be about 1.5% of the previous core power. After a day, the decay heat falls to 0.4%, and after a week it will be 0.2%
A week. Not 50 years. Not one year. A week.
So stop with the FUD. Call nuclear power expensive - it is. Call nuclear power a massive disaster when companies cut corners, or operators cock it up - it is. But don't make shit up because you just look like a fool.
There have been decommissioned plants. See: Trojan Nuclear Generating Station.
A pissing match between Westinghouse and the construction contractor over cracked steam pipes caused PGE to flip them both the bird and just decommission the thing early to take the public relations win. The only thing remaining on the site today is a helipad, a guard shack, and a couple warehouses. They took the reactor vessel out of the containment structure, wrapped it in plastic, and barged it up the Columbia to Hanford, where it was buried. They imploded the cooling tower a decade ago.
This might be one of the dumbest things posted yet.
You know that the Thorium cycle works because it transmutes Thorium-232 into Uranium-233, right? It's all Uranium fuel.
Second, Uranium is not "first of all bomb material". It's a fucking rock, which has energetic properties depending on isotope purity, mass, and configuration. If you don't ever have chunks at high enough purity which you then assemble it into a big enough mass, it never turns into a "bomb". See: Reactor-grade purity versus Weapons-grade purity. Your head would probably explode if you realized that many of these reactors also produce and use Plutonium as fuel too, because Plutonium is a "bomb material" too. Scary stuff if you are ignorant!
Third, I don't even know what the hell you're talking about with waste heat being dumped into the environment and that somehow contributes to global warming, but somehow a Thorium reactor wouldn't do the exact same thing. You do know that basically all nuclear energy generation depends on boiling water into steam, right? Regardless of fuel? I guess over a matter of billions of years you are correct - the heat being created by nuclear reactions are contributing to the eventual heat-death of the universe, but so is your own metabolism.
I would like them to continue on the trend of reducing the size of the internal bits, but rather than also reducing the size of the case, just fill it with more battery.
My iPhone 6 lasts for two days as it is, but I'd rather it last even longer. Let's get back to weekly charging cycles like we were with the Nokias back in the day.
No they are not. Also, the quoted "analyst" [Ming-Chi Kuo] is wrong far more often than not, so I have no idea why people continue to post and repost their articles.
Why would you think that the area would be permanently warded off, rather than simply having the topsoil and rubble removed until a geiger counter shows an acceptable level of background radiation?
Oh no, someone covered a few blocks of a city with a material that is barely dangerous when it's spread out over a few blocks of a city. We'd better abandon that forever, or we could clean it up and laugh at how stupid a 'dirty bomb' really is.
There's a reason nobody has ever bothered with a 'dirty bomb' and it's not because of the unavailability of radioactive material.
You truly think like an American, congratulations on your naturalization. But every Muslim isn't the problem.
You win the irony-through-hypocrisy award for the day. You blast him for painting every muslim with the same brush, while simultaneously painting 330 million Americans with the same brush.
Can't imagine why you posted this as an anonymous coward. Oh, I know exactly why - because you're a fucking asshole, but don't want your true views of being an ignorant fuck to reflect on your actual pseudonymity.
"doing the reading" of the Book of Leviticus would have Christianity and Judaism calling homosexuality an abomination (Leviticus 18:22), the Book of Exodus would have people selling their daughters into slavery (Exodus 21:7) and putting people to death for working on the sabbath (Exodus 35:2). And let's not forget about touching the skin of a dead pig making one unclean (Leviticus 11:7), which means hundreds of millions of people are fucked for just having that slice of bacon.
If a farmer plants different crops side by side, do we really have to gather up the whole town to stone him?
Ancient religious texts are ancient, and many religions move past the arcane content contained within, in favor of celebrating the spirituality of the overarching messages. If Christians and Jews can evolve their teachings to get rid of these ridiculous passages, why can't muslims do the same? Are you saying that they are particularly resistant, or unwilling?
Islam is to Islamic terrorism as Christianity is to the KKK and abortion clinic bombers. Any sufficiently large group of people sharing a belief will have extremes, and people should not paint that entire group with the color of the extremes.
If Apple sold >50% of the smart watches that shifted in 2015, how is Pebble outselling that combined with all the Android Wear 2:1? Are you counting total sales since the absolute first unit left the factory? Even that doesn't pass the sniff test.
I used to hate metal bracelets on wrist watches until I got a good watch. There's something about how it's made where I don't have this problem now, where it was a constant irritant on every previous metal-bracelet watch I had.
Let me get this right: 1. Company A makes gadget that is an answer to a question nobody asked. 2. Company A gets press for selling said gadget to early adopters who buy it just to have it, but it still doesn't solve a problem that anyone has. 3. Massive consumer electronics companies (Samsung, Apple, LG, Motorola) get in on the action, creating massive competition for a small market, growing it marginally and creating new features that make the product marginally more useful. 4. Company A now has a product that is less featured, and is not as quick to replace with a more full featured product due to resource constraints, and sales plummet. 5. Company A is forced to lay people off due to the inevitable economics of their situation. 6. "The smartwatch bubble set to burst" doom and gloom story.
As opposed to the incumbent 18th century technology (coal / oil) which obliterates all coastal zones on the planet as a matter of normal operation.
No, nuclear power isn't perfect, but we don't have a generation technology that is. So pick a mix that does the least damage as a matter of normal operation, and keep working towards things that are better.
Well, the first containment was built immediately after the accident, by Communists that were only there because they'd be shot in the face if they didn't. Doesn't exactly endear them to the work, and motivate for doing it right.
The new containment structure that is (was?) built was being done by contractors from a different country, being paid quite nicely to get the job done. It's possible that they could do this properly because they aren't under the specter of worldwide attention, and I'm pretty sure that Ukraine someday would like to be known for something other than being a radioactive dump and warzone.
No, all we need is the senior Senator from the Great State of Nevada to go write his book and get out of the Senate. And a good dash of physics and common sense. We have a $90B facility already constructed and ready to go - it may not be suitable for millions of years of storage, but it's quite suitable for several hundred years of the really high-level stuff if we separate it through fuel reprocessing and vitrify it.
Funny how Harry Reid didn't have any problem with Yucca Mountain while it was in planning and construction, and then threw himself on the tracks when it came to actually using the place.
The problem is that people listen to the app, rather than the local radio station. The local radio station then sees a decline in donations, and goes off the air. NPR then sees a decline in revenue from local stations purchasing the content they provide, and the service as a whole dies.
That's probably not what would actually happen, but it's the argument being presented.
It depends on the scale of the enterprise. Cloud providers by blade chassis because they get a shit ton of density for virtualization, and they buy giant SAN / NAS hardware for storage. Large enterprise buys blade chassis because they get a shit ton of density for their VMware clusters, and buy giant SAN / NAS hardware for storage.
For sufficiently large enterprises, there is very little different about the hardware.
Really? Do a google search sometime, you might find things that are actually true.
Later units (Intel "nehalem" Xeon based 2009 Xserve) actually did have redundant power supplies. And the racking hardware wasn't too bizzare - you mount the rails, then you feed the chassis into the rails where it locks into the rails, and then there are thumbscrews on the front to secure it in the rack.
There was an optional hardware raid board you could get that would replace the SATA backplane with SATA / SAS. And they sold fiber channel controllers so you could hook it up to as much SAN as you could pack in.
The Xserve had some issues, but none of the things you posted even come close.
All they had to do to MacPro5,1 in order to make it a computer that literally every video editor out there would want to buy, is swap in modern Xeon CPUs and a PCI-E 3 bus, with associated RAM upgrades.
They could have changed nothing else - no chassis changes, etc. And it would have continued to be the Mac for graphics, 3D, audio, and video pros. Maybe a power supply upgrade so you could stack CUDA / OpenCL cores into it.
Instead they completely ruined the Mac Pro name by making a little un-upgradeable thing that sits on your desk and looks pretty, but does deceasing loads of work in comparison to the competition just as soon as the next generation of GPUs ships.
I still have an 'over 5 year old' MacPro5,1 because it's the last version of a Mac Pro that was actually made for Pros - you know, the people who actually need expansion and hardware upgradeability.
Phil Schiller is a fucking moron. He's the Senior VP of Marketing, and has no fucking clue how to actually deliver a product that their established markets want.
Slashdot Mirror
Half-life is a stupid measurement for the level of danger for wastes. The longer the half-life, the safer it is, because it's not as radioactive as something with a shorter half life. Everyone gets way too worked up about multi-thousand year half-life measurements, when those are the ones we want.
Which would you rather have sitting next to you, a lump of Cobalt-60 that will fire off 44TBq of radiation per gram, mostly gamma rays - but hey, it only has a half-life of 5.27 years - or a equal sized lump of Plutonium-242 with a big scary sounding half-life of 373,000 years, which decays by ejecting a helium atom and turns into Uranium-238 (>98% of natural Uranium) with a whopping 4.46 billion year half-life.
I think I know which I'd go for.
The half-life measurements to worry about are the medium-life isotopes like Strontium-90 (28.8 years) and Cesium-137 (30.17 years, and decays into something that is a gamma ray producer with a half-life measured in less than a couple hundred seconds, very nasty) - they are short enough to have concerning rates of decay, but long lived enough that you can't just wait them out like a lot of the stuff that's immediately present after a reactor shuts down and goes away fairly rapidly.
50 years? I guess pulling numbers out of your ass is fun, but I prefer reality: the Trojan Nuclear Generating Station had it's first criticality in December 1975. Other notable dates:
1992: reactor was taken offline
1993: chief operator announced it would not be restarted
2003: final fuel rods from cooling pools transferred to dry cask storage
2005: reactor vessel removed from containment dome, barged up the Columbia River to Hanford, and buried.
2006: cooling tower imploded
Now, I was never an advanced student at math, but that seems like 31 years from the beginning of operation, to not having a reactor vessel or cooling apparatus on site anymore. And that includes 17 years of operation, generating 1130MWe.
Yes, it takes a while to decommission the plant once it's done. But just like the uber-proponents of nuclear power around here, the uber-detractors don't need to lie and make shit up in order to sound smarter than they are. Decommissioning has been done. It didn't take 50 years. It was absolutely no risk to "the water table" or "populations both near and distant" in any sort of way - they barged the damn reactor core through the middle of a major metro area and nobody noticed. And major cooling efforts are only a concern for the first week or so after shutdown, as the extremely lively stuff decays rapidly, as it's extremely lively. At the moment of reactor shutdown, decay heat will be about 7% of the previous core power if the reactor has had a long and steady power history. About 1 hour after shutdown, the decay heat will be about 1.5% of the previous core power. After a day, the decay heat falls to 0.4%, and after a week it will be 0.2%
A week. Not 50 years. Not one year. A week.
So stop with the FUD. Call nuclear power expensive - it is. Call nuclear power a massive disaster when companies cut corners, or operators cock it up - it is. But don't make shit up because you just look like a fool.
There have been decommissioned plants. See: Trojan Nuclear Generating Station.
A pissing match between Westinghouse and the construction contractor over cracked steam pipes caused PGE to flip them both the bird and just decommission the thing early to take the public relations win. The only thing remaining on the site today is a helipad, a guard shack, and a couple warehouses. They took the reactor vessel out of the containment structure, wrapped it in plastic, and barged it up the Columbia to Hanford, where it was buried. They imploded the cooling tower a decade ago.
This might be one of the dumbest things posted yet.
You know that the Thorium cycle works because it transmutes Thorium-232 into Uranium-233, right? It's all Uranium fuel.
Second, Uranium is not "first of all bomb material". It's a fucking rock, which has energetic properties depending on isotope purity, mass, and configuration. If you don't ever have chunks at high enough purity which you then assemble it into a big enough mass, it never turns into a "bomb". See: Reactor-grade purity versus Weapons-grade purity. Your head would probably explode if you realized that many of these reactors also produce and use Plutonium as fuel too, because Plutonium is a "bomb material" too. Scary stuff if you are ignorant!
Third, I don't even know what the hell you're talking about with waste heat being dumped into the environment and that somehow contributes to global warming, but somehow a Thorium reactor wouldn't do the exact same thing. You do know that basically all nuclear energy generation depends on boiling water into steam, right? Regardless of fuel? I guess over a matter of billions of years you are correct - the heat being created by nuclear reactions are contributing to the eventual heat-death of the universe, but so is your own metabolism.
Yucca Mountain would be a fantastic place to stick stuff that we'd like to forget about for ~400 years. It's even already built.
That "analyst" is wrong far more often than not. Anything from Ming-Chi Kuo can be immediately discounted as "may appear someday, but probably won't."
Because there's absolutely no difference between:
you MUST use a stylus for every single operation, and it's a useless device if you lose / break the stylus (where we were in 2006, pre-iPhone)
- and -
you MAY use a stylus if you want to, for drawing, handwriting, etc. (where every device is today)
I would like them to continue on the trend of reducing the size of the internal bits, but rather than also reducing the size of the case, just fill it with more battery.
My iPhone 6 lasts for two days as it is, but I'd rather it last even longer. Let's get back to weekly charging cycles like we were with the Nokias back in the day.
No they are not. Also, the quoted "analyst" [Ming-Chi Kuo] is wrong far more often than not, so I have no idea why people continue to post and repost their articles.
Why would you think that the area would be permanently warded off, rather than simply having the topsoil and rubble removed until a geiger counter shows an acceptable level of background radiation?
Oh no, someone covered a few blocks of a city with a material that is barely dangerous when it's spread out over a few blocks of a city. We'd better abandon that forever, or we could clean it up and laugh at how stupid a 'dirty bomb' really is.
There's a reason nobody has ever bothered with a 'dirty bomb' and it's not because of the unavailability of radioactive material.
You truly think like an American, congratulations on your naturalization. But every Muslim isn't the problem.
You win the irony-through-hypocrisy award for the day. You blast him for painting every muslim with the same brush, while simultaneously painting 330 million Americans with the same brush.
Can't imagine why you posted this as an anonymous coward. Oh, I know exactly why - because you're a fucking asshole, but don't want your true views of being an ignorant fuck to reflect on your actual pseudonymity.
"doing the reading" of the Book of Leviticus would have Christianity and Judaism calling homosexuality an abomination (Leviticus 18:22), the Book of Exodus would have people selling their daughters into slavery (Exodus 21:7) and putting people to death for working on the sabbath (Exodus 35:2). And let's not forget about touching the skin of a dead pig making one unclean (Leviticus 11:7), which means hundreds of millions of people are fucked for just having that slice of bacon.
If a farmer plants different crops side by side, do we really have to gather up the whole town to stone him?
Ancient religious texts are ancient, and many religions move past the arcane content contained within, in favor of celebrating the spirituality of the overarching messages. If Christians and Jews can evolve their teachings to get rid of these ridiculous passages, why can't muslims do the same? Are you saying that they are particularly resistant, or unwilling?
You are exactly right.
Islam is to Islamic terrorism as Christianity is to the KKK and abortion clinic bombers. Any sufficiently large group of people sharing a belief will have extremes, and people should not paint that entire group with the color of the extremes.
Really? [Citation needed]
Here's my citation to the contrary: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/...
If Apple sold >50% of the smart watches that shifted in 2015, how is Pebble outselling that combined with all the Android Wear 2:1? Are you counting total sales since the absolute first unit left the factory? Even that doesn't pass the sniff test.
I used to hate metal bracelets on wrist watches until I got a good watch. There's something about how it's made where I don't have this problem now, where it was a constant irritant on every previous metal-bracelet watch I had.
As with all things, your mileage may vary.
Let me get this right:
1. Company A makes gadget that is an answer to a question nobody asked.
2. Company A gets press for selling said gadget to early adopters who buy it just to have it, but it still doesn't solve a problem that anyone has.
3. Massive consumer electronics companies (Samsung, Apple, LG, Motorola) get in on the action, creating massive competition for a small market, growing it marginally and creating new features that make the product marginally more useful.
4. Company A now has a product that is less featured, and is not as quick to replace with a more full featured product due to resource constraints, and sales plummet.
5. Company A is forced to lay people off due to the inevitable economics of their situation.
6. "The smartwatch bubble set to burst" doom and gloom story.
Slashdot editors are fucking amazing.
As opposed to the incumbent 18th century technology (coal / oil) which obliterates all coastal zones on the planet as a matter of normal operation.
No, nuclear power isn't perfect, but we don't have a generation technology that is. So pick a mix that does the least damage as a matter of normal operation, and keep working towards things that are better.
Well, the first containment was built immediately after the accident, by Communists that were only there because they'd be shot in the face if they didn't. Doesn't exactly endear them to the work, and motivate for doing it right.
The new containment structure that is (was?) built was being done by contractors from a different country, being paid quite nicely to get the job done. It's possible that they could do this properly because they aren't under the specter of worldwide attention, and I'm pretty sure that Ukraine someday would like to be known for something other than being a radioactive dump and warzone.
No, all we need is the senior Senator from the Great State of Nevada to go write his book and get out of the Senate. And a good dash of physics and common sense. We have a $90B facility already constructed and ready to go - it may not be suitable for millions of years of storage, but it's quite suitable for several hundred years of the really high-level stuff if we separate it through fuel reprocessing and vitrify it.
Funny how Harry Reid didn't have any problem with Yucca Mountain while it was in planning and construction, and then threw himself on the tracks when it came to actually using the place.
The problem is that people listen to the app, rather than the local radio station. The local radio station then sees a decline in donations, and goes off the air. NPR then sees a decline in revenue from local stations purchasing the content they provide, and the service as a whole dies.
That's probably not what would actually happen, but it's the argument being presented.
It depends on the scale of the enterprise. Cloud providers by blade chassis because they get a shit ton of density for virtualization, and they buy giant SAN / NAS hardware for storage. Large enterprise buys blade chassis because they get a shit ton of density for their VMware clusters, and buy giant SAN / NAS hardware for storage.
For sufficiently large enterprises, there is very little different about the hardware.
Really? Do a google search sometime, you might find things that are actually true.
Later units (Intel "nehalem" Xeon based 2009 Xserve) actually did have redundant power supplies. And the racking hardware wasn't too bizzare - you mount the rails, then you feed the chassis into the rails where it locks into the rails, and then there are thumbscrews on the front to secure it in the rack.
There was an optional hardware raid board you could get that would replace the SATA backplane with SATA / SAS. And they sold fiber channel controllers so you could hook it up to as much SAN as you could pack in.
The Xserve had some issues, but none of the things you posted even come close.
The Centris / Quadra 610 was a gimped 68LC040 if I recall. No FPU. Even back then, Apple played games with their pros.
All they had to do to MacPro5,1 in order to make it a computer that literally every video editor out there would want to buy, is swap in modern Xeon CPUs and a PCI-E 3 bus, with associated RAM upgrades.
They could have changed nothing else - no chassis changes, etc. And it would have continued to be the Mac for graphics, 3D, audio, and video pros. Maybe a power supply upgrade so you could stack CUDA / OpenCL cores into it.
Instead they completely ruined the Mac Pro name by making a little un-upgradeable thing that sits on your desk and looks pretty, but does deceasing loads of work in comparison to the competition just as soon as the next generation of GPUs ships.
What a flop, and a super expensive flop at that.
I still have an 'over 5 year old' MacPro5,1 because it's the last version of a Mac Pro that was actually made for Pros - you know, the people who actually need expansion and hardware upgradeability.
Phil Schiller is a fucking moron. He's the Senior VP of Marketing, and has no fucking clue how to actually deliver a product that their established markets want.