On Netflix now is "Pandora's Promise". Released last year, this documentary talks about the specific IFR type nuclear power referenced in the fine article. It is a little one-sided, but pretty interesting overall. The reactor can enrich depleted uranium, and burn it over and over until all the uranium is gone. It is not prone to meltdown, either.
How are you going to get Russia, Canada and northern Europe to agree to cooperate with a plan that prevents their climate from approaching utopia? It is not in their interest.
Admiral Rickover preferred once-through BWRs to breeders for practical reasons to get nuclear power launched in a realistic timeframe. The jury is still out on whether he erred in haste. As a legacy of that decision we have all this spent fuel and nowhere to put it. We may as well burn it all up while we figure that out. The once-through design burns up 0.65 percent of it. Breeders burn up 99.7 percent of the trash.
There are several proven designs that meet your two points. IFR burns the spent fuel that is bothering you. They deliberately shut down its cooling twice and the reactor finds thermal equilibrium without becoming dangerously hot because thermal expansion of the fuel shuts down fission. It can be done.
Danger of what? Extinctions? The natural course was to return to glaciation right about now, with global temps dropping 8 to 10C absurdly fast - the worst toward the poles. Ice caps spread to the 50th parralels north and south. Mass extinctions, including maybe us. Extreme weather events. Ports become dry land as the oceans drop 400 feet. This condition to last at least 90,000 years. That was the plan, so let's have a realistic baseline to your apocalyptic prediction AC.
It is important to note that the 2C you are talking about is surface air temperature. It is less than 1 percent of our climate overall. The oceans are a vast reservoir of thermal sink, as is the stratosphere. 2C over the Holocene minimum does not even seem like enough buffer against the return of the ice to some. It isn't even up to the Holocene optimum which was not long enough ago to have a significant impact on evolution. Local effects will be more extreme - milder arctic winters and longer growing seasons should improve crops in Russia, Canada and northern Europe. Africa will see more precipitation turning the Sahara into grassland again. Oceans will rise some, but they have risen 400 feet already. This may stress reefs, but really - they are millions of years old and have seen this before.
We lose New Orleans and Florida, but they were just on loan to us anyway. Ports save a little money on dredging expenses. Not a big deal.
What we gain is 50,000 years of uninterrupted warmth to do our human evolution thing. To discover fusion, mine the asteroids, explore the stars, find a way to close the carbon cycle. That is preferable to an imminent return of glaciation, the inevitable nuclear winter and population bottleneck that costs our culture and science which might naturally ensue.
We manage nuclear's waste by storing it 40 feet above the ground in concrete ponds that are not earthquake safe. It would be nice if we could at least get that stuff down to ground level in some dry casks. But we don't even have the dry cask production capacity to handle 5 of ongoing annual spent fuel production. Instead we license those ponds in the sky for ever-denser storage packing they were not designed for, reducing safety tolerances.
In the Warmish Apocalypse the Sahara returns to grassland and verdant fields of grain oddly enough, as it was 5,000 years ago when alligators and hippopotamuses prowled the ground where dunes now stand. Something about changing precipitation patterns and increased uptake of water vapor over the tropical Atlantic.
Many of the modern proposals involve mining only the overfull spent fuel ponds of existing reactors, recycling their toxic payload into 100x the energy they gave up their first time through and producing less toxic outputs from waste we already have. Surely you can't have a problem with that?
We are definitely not taking advantage of advances in nuclear energy. The basic principles of a PWR were established when nuclear power was only a few years old. It was chosen for simplicity and speed to market, not inspired holistic life cycle efficiency. There was an urgency to get those turbines turning. Unfortunately now we have all this spent fuel, which has enough energy in it to provide 100x all the nuclear power ever generated before we ever need to mine another gram of fuel. If we don't burn it up in the new reactors we have to bury it for 100,000 years, and where is the sense in that when we could use it up first an then bury a much safer waste?
We should exploit the other opportunities too. Efficiency in home heating and cooling with insulation and heat pumps, LED lighting, mobile processors and low-E displays, electric autos, rooftop PV solar, wind, PV solar, thermal solar, geothermal where appropriate.
One big problem is that we need a big, rich company like a Google, Microsoft or Apple to pull this off for us. Those companies are obviously able to make investments on this scale but are looking for a quicker turnover on their investment. They lack the patience for the long term commitment to an investment which, honestly might not work out for reasons other than the science. Political activity or another Fukushima incident could derail it and lose the whole investment.
Now that the US Navy of all people has found a way to convert electricity and seawater into jet fuel, maybe that will get the fossil fuel giants engaged in the nuclear solution. Running industrial refineries to close the carbon cycle may be a more reliable means of generating their traditional product in a way that doesn't suffer from the diminishing return of an ever more difficult to find and extract mineral resource.
There is another technology, Integral Fast Reactor, that also looks promising. My problem with nuclear power as we are doing it now is a lack of a plan for the spent fuel which has accumulated to unmanageable and dangerous levels. These technologies that burn spent fuel solve both the source and trash problems at once. We are still left with the proliferation problem but that is not as much an issue domestically. Both Thorium and IFR would create a good supply of Pu-238 we desperately need for NASA space probes.
If Apple and Samsung are going to dance this much they should build their own hall. And while they're at it Apple should ask Google to dance because that is what she really wants.
IE11 on XP is a cue that they have divorced the old thinking. If you see that, you will know this is the dawn of a new age. You know they can do it. The browsers they are competing against can. But they won't do it because they rely on the latest IE to sell the latest Windows, fragmenting their user base.
OK we are going to talk about Bob. Bob was Melinda French's idea. Melinda was the Marissa Mayer of her day. Hard body rock climber / magazine model / super genius rock star programmer / usability expert. The paradigm was a sort of 2D representation of the familiar world for the novice user - a VR not unlike Oculus Rift is today. The hardware and software weren't yet up to it. But Bill letting her reach for the stars and getting in a late night scrum with her now and then? Well I try not to hold it against a man that he did the thing I, in his place, would have done. For all the miserable inane products foisted on us by Microsoft, the myriad ways they have thwarted progress, subverted security and manipulated the dialog of computer science until it is a cartoon I hate them. But for me, Bob gets a pass. Bob was a long shot at a transformational paradigm that was just too early. And Mrs. Melinda Gates has still got it goin' on.
Structured programming has been a thing since the 1960's. AFAIK, the derogatory term "spaghetti code" has existed since before Dijkstra's "goto statement considered harmful" in 1968. Of course it is possible to make spaghetti with structured code too, but that is art.
Slashdot Mirror
It's OK. In the winter the gorillas will freeze to death.
On Netflix now is "Pandora's Promise". Released last year, this documentary talks about the specific IFR type nuclear power referenced in the fine article. It is a little one-sided, but pretty interesting overall. The reactor can enrich depleted uranium, and burn it over and over until all the uranium is gone. It is not prone to meltdown, either.
How are you going to get Russia, Canada and northern Europe to agree to cooperate with a plan that prevents their climate from approaching utopia? It is not in their interest.
Admiral Rickover preferred once-through BWRs to breeders for practical reasons to get nuclear power launched in a realistic timeframe. The jury is still out on whether he erred in haste. As a legacy of that decision we have all this spent fuel and nowhere to put it. We may as well burn it all up while we figure that out. The once-through design burns up 0.65 percent of it. Breeders burn up 99.7 percent of the trash.
There are several proven designs that meet your two points. IFR burns the spent fuel that is bothering you. They deliberately shut down its cooling twice and the reactor finds thermal equilibrium without becoming dangerously hot because thermal expansion of the fuel shuts down fission. It can be done.
Danger of what? Extinctions? The natural course was to return to glaciation right about now, with global temps dropping 8 to 10C absurdly fast - the worst toward the poles. Ice caps spread to the 50th parralels north and south. Mass extinctions, including maybe us. Extreme weather events. Ports become dry land as the oceans drop 400 feet. This condition to last at least 90,000 years. That was the plan, so let's have a realistic baseline to your apocalyptic prediction AC.
Using surface air temperatures is ridiculous. It is such a small portion of the thermal mass that you may as well use the daily weather. Start there.
It is important to note that the 2C you are talking about is surface air temperature. It is less than 1 percent of our climate overall. The oceans are a vast reservoir of thermal sink, as is the stratosphere. 2C over the Holocene minimum does not even seem like enough buffer against the return of the ice to some. It isn't even up to the Holocene optimum which was not long enough ago to have a significant impact on evolution. Local effects will be more extreme - milder arctic winters and longer growing seasons should improve crops in Russia, Canada and northern Europe. Africa will see more precipitation turning the Sahara into grassland again. Oceans will rise some, but they have risen 400 feet already. This may stress reefs, but really - they are millions of years old and have seen this before.
We lose New Orleans and Florida, but they were just on loan to us anyway. Ports save a little money on dredging expenses. Not a big deal.
What we gain is 50,000 years of uninterrupted warmth to do our human evolution thing. To discover fusion, mine the asteroids, explore the stars, find a way to close the carbon cycle. That is preferable to an imminent return of glaciation, the inevitable nuclear winter and population bottleneck that costs our culture and science which might naturally ensue.
We manage nuclear's waste by storing it 40 feet above the ground in concrete ponds that are not earthquake safe. It would be nice if we could at least get that stuff down to ground level in some dry casks. But we don't even have the dry cask production capacity to handle 5 of ongoing annual spent fuel production. Instead we license those ponds in the sky for ever-denser storage packing they were not designed for, reducing safety tolerances.
In the Warmish Apocalypse the Sahara returns to grassland and verdant fields of grain oddly enough, as it was 5,000 years ago when alligators and hippopotamuses prowled the ground where dunes now stand. Something about changing precipitation patterns and increased uptake of water vapor over the tropical Atlantic.
France has had cheap nuclear for so long that they heat with electric and refuse to insulate. Sigh.
It was too cold anyway.
Many of the modern proposals involve mining only the overfull spent fuel ponds of existing reactors, recycling their toxic payload into 100x the energy they gave up their first time through and producing less toxic outputs from waste we already have. Surely you can't have a problem with that?
We are definitely not taking advantage of advances in nuclear energy. The basic principles of a PWR were established when nuclear power was only a few years old. It was chosen for simplicity and speed to market, not inspired holistic life cycle efficiency. There was an urgency to get those turbines turning. Unfortunately now we have all this spent fuel, which has enough energy in it to provide 100x all the nuclear power ever generated before we ever need to mine another gram of fuel. If we don't burn it up in the new reactors we have to bury it for 100,000 years, and where is the sense in that when we could use it up first an then bury a much safer waste?
We should exploit the other opportunities too. Efficiency in home heating and cooling with insulation and heat pumps, LED lighting, mobile processors and low-E displays, electric autos, rooftop PV solar, wind, PV solar, thermal solar, geothermal where appropriate.
One big problem is that we need a big, rich company like a Google, Microsoft or Apple to pull this off for us. Those companies are obviously able to make investments on this scale but are looking for a quicker turnover on their investment. They lack the patience for the long term commitment to an investment which, honestly might not work out for reasons other than the science. Political activity or another Fukushima incident could derail it and lose the whole investment.
Now that the US Navy of all people has found a way to convert electricity and seawater into jet fuel, maybe that will get the fossil fuel giants engaged in the nuclear solution. Running industrial refineries to close the carbon cycle may be a more reliable means of generating their traditional product in a way that doesn't suffer from the diminishing return of an ever more difficult to find and extract mineral resource.
There is another technology, Integral Fast Reactor, that also looks promising. My problem with nuclear power as we are doing it now is a lack of a plan for the spent fuel which has accumulated to unmanageable and dangerous levels. These technologies that burn spent fuel solve both the source and trash problems at once. We are still left with the proliferation problem but that is not as much an issue domestically. Both Thorium and IFR would create a good supply of Pu-238 we desperately need for NASA space probes.
Others are engaging in political activism. For Google to get a word in the discussion is the responsible thing to do.
So we are populating the comments with autogen now.
If Apple and Samsung are going to dance this much they should build their own hall. And while they're at it Apple should ask Google to dance because that is what she really wants.
OMG. The day a real computer scientist can justifiably declare IIS secure I will hang up my nerd hat and call it a career.
Wow. This is intended to be funny, yes?
When the start menu update comes I'll be ready to recommend Windows 8.x for people who have to have Windows. Until then the recommend is Windows 7.
And yes, I say it like that. "If you have to have Windows then this is the one."
IE11 on XP is a cue that they have divorced the old thinking. If you see that, you will know this is the dawn of a new age. You know they can do it. The browsers they are competing against can. But they won't do it because they rely on the latest IE to sell the latest Windows, fragmenting their user base.
OK we are going to talk about Bob. Bob was Melinda French's idea. Melinda was the Marissa Mayer of her day. Hard body rock climber / magazine model / super genius rock star programmer / usability expert. The paradigm was a sort of 2D representation of the familiar world for the novice user - a VR not unlike Oculus Rift is today. The hardware and software weren't yet up to it. But Bill letting her reach for the stars and getting in a late night scrum with her now and then? Well I try not to hold it against a man that he did the thing I, in his place, would have done. For all the miserable inane products foisted on us by Microsoft, the myriad ways they have thwarted progress, subverted security and manipulated the dialog of computer science until it is a cartoon I hate them. But for me, Bob gets a pass. Bob was a long shot at a transformational paradigm that was just too early. And Mrs. Melinda Gates has still got it goin' on.
Structured programming has been a thing since the 1960's. AFAIK, the derogatory term "spaghetti code" has existed since before Dijkstra's "goto statement considered harmful" in 1968. Of course it is possible to make spaghetti with structured code too, but that is art.
As opposed to commercial software, which limits liability to the cost of the distribution media. That 3 centsmakes all the difference.