Protect IP matters because Detriot is an industrial wasteland. Intellectual Property is becoming more and more of the product we have to export. Because of this we escalate its importance to the point where at some future point we must defend our intellectual property using men with guns on foreign soil, defending our right to charge what we will for the broadcast rights to Justin Bieber's latest album on the peoples of India and China - who don't want to hear that crap anyway.
The whole thing is sick. Eventually the world is going to call us to the carpet on that and make us make useful stuff for the value we get. And then what have we got?
The SAS 6G and SATA 3 (6Gbps) models of SSD go up to over 500GB now. Reading that in a few minutes is no big deal. Even the SATA II Intel 320 series does 600GB and sequential reads at 270 MB/s, which would be 600GB in (600000/270 seconds) - 2222 seconds or just over 37 minutes. My laptop has a better data rate, but I use off-brand components:-). This is no problem at all.
A spinning rust platter isn't ever going to dish that, but if this is a job you need done and you're willing to spend ten grand, I'll take your money all day.
And let's not have the Base2 Vs Base10 argument, OK? A 2.4 percent difference isn't going to change the outcome of this one.
Nokia is even outsourcing manufacturing and design now. One must wonder what they have to contribute then, except a Nokia sticker. For sure it doesn't take a lot of employees to produce the art on a sticker.
It's "humiliating desperation" to legally force someone to pay you to do absolutely nothing?
Yes. Us proud folk expect to earn what we get. We don't even like to be around folk who want to get and get giving nothing because there's no profit for us in it and their breath is sour.
To feel that earthquake you have to be particularly sensitive. It's not a room shaking quake. It's the sound of a rock cracking 3KM beneath your feet. To call it an earthquake because the sound registers on devices so senstitive they can hear a tree drop ten miles away is disingenuous and fear-mongering.
There is no place on Earth that doesn't have access to geothermal energy. It turns out that far beneath our feet the Earth is made of molten rock everywhere - even in the antarctic and below every ocean - and long before you get down to the molten rock there is rock hot enough to have heat to exploit as electrical power. Some of this is fossil heat from the formation of the planet. Some of it is the result of decay of natural nuclear fissibles (yes, nuclear reactors happen in nature, deep in the Earth! There are even some bacteria that are evolved to live on the byproducts of this energy...). Some of the heat is created by the internal friction caused by tidal motions created from the moon's gravitational pull. (BTW: The Earth's absorption of this energy is causing the moon's orbit to get further out over time, but using the heat created has no impact on this process). There is now no place on Earth we don't have the technology to dig down far enough to tap the geothermal energy - some places are just more efficient and economical than others. All that clean reliable base load power requires is one consistent deep reservoir of heat, and one consistent and rich resource of a material at a cooler temperature, like air or seawater. By heating a moderator that boils at less than the greater heat and condenses at less than the lesser heat the pressure differential created by the boiling moderator can be used to drive a turbine that turns to create electrical power. They use closed loop systems now, so the only outputs of the process are that the hot stuff gets cooler (to be replenished from effectively limitless resources), the cool stuff gets warmer (in the case of the ocean to be accommodated by water evaporation and such) and electrical power (plus plant and equipment). "Earthquakes" have been attributed to a shallow fracking process used to activate rocks for this energy exploitation, but calling the noises created by cracking these rocks "Earthquakes" is an overstatement. Nobody ever felt them. For the most part this step isn't necessary because there are deep hot porous rocks and in the rare case where it is, the rocks involved are almost always so deep that we can't hear their cracking noises. They are also so deep and hot that groundwater (and hence drinking water) never gets there. Once in a great while you hear about coincidental finds, like a recent british geothermal effort that found an informative limestone fossil layer and a previously unknown coal seam as well as a bountiful hot water aquifer. That was reported just a few days ago, but I can't find it right now.
And no, Iceland's eruptions were due to the fact that they hadn't tapped the geothermal energy as electrical power. Otherwise those volcanos would have had nice tight caps. But really, Iceland doesn't need that much electrical power. That's probably more electrical power than all of North America needs, right there in Iceland. Did you know that Iceland already uses geothermal energy directly as heat to heat streets and sidewalks, shops and housing, community pools and so on as well as providing electrical power? I suppose if they wanted to stabilize Iceland's volcanos they could run some conduit into the volcano and pump as much of the Atlantic through it as possible. Actually, for live volcanos they might want to use molten salt as an intermediate step, and salt wouldn't be too hard to get when you're boiling off that much seawater. Might be some side effects though. Maybe they could run an undersea insulated pipeline or some HV cables and defrost Greenland as well. There's more than enough heat there to defrost all of Iceland and Greenland, and provide electricity besides.
Yellowstone's caldera has enough geothermal power to drive all of the Western Hemisphere's electrical needs for the next thousand years, if you had enough extension cord to plug the rest of the world in, and were OK with despoiling this natural wonderland in the interest of powering the Western Hemisphere - and coincindentally reducin
He thinks he can avoid you reading the parent comment by modding it down. He's mistaken. You'll read it now because it was modded down and I cared enough to bump it, and because he didn't want you to read it. There's good stuff in there. Trust me. If you don't think so you're free to mod me down twice for the same comment, more so since I've given this one all my bumps, which I almost never do.
The pro-nuclear lobby has been at the GP, but I'll go ahead and answer this.
Modern geothermal takes less water than nuclear. One tenth as much actually and greywater can be used for those little inputs. And since everything that comes up from the ground goes back into the ground, there are no emissions or outputs whatsoever except electricity. There is no fuel, no fuel waste, no radioactivity, no danger in earthquake, tornado, hurricane or flood. No danger of losing the source of fuel in global conflicts because there is no fuel. The damned thing works under water, and probably should - there are offshore thermal resources and ocean water makes a great thermal delta. It's cheaper too.
In context with the present fine article, there is absolutely no situation where geothermal energy could contaminate the entire Missouri and Mississippi rivers from the site to the sea, all of the fields irrigated thereby, and the entire Gulf of Mexico with nuclear waste. Which is a significant advantage over the current situation referenced in the fine article.
Mollified? I thought not. You folk don't care if there's now a better answer. You've got one drum and you're going to bang it. You just want to work your current fission deal no matter what it costs the rest of us. I have a question for you: If you don't give a fuck what we think, why should we give a fuck what you think? You're a one-issue constituency with a disproven business model. Let me show you the onion on my belt. Now could you please get your fissibles off my lawn?
Define alert. Define routine. Reconcile the difference. It's an oxymoron. These two terms are not compatible. A "routine alert" is an oxymoron. That's what the word "oxymoron" means. Words mean things. If they didn't, communication would become impossible. If it's routine, it's not an alert. If it's an alert, it's not routine. The terms are mutually exclusive.
The only possible world where these terms could be in agreement is a world that is routinely on alert. I don't want to live in that world. Do you?
This site stores the spent fuel for both Nebraska plants - a little in dry casks which should be safe, but most in in-ground cooling ponds. Presumably these ponds are now under the Missouri river. Cooling ponds need to be continuously cooled in order to stay cool. Spent fuel ought not come in contact with a flowing river. That by itself would be very bad, as the radiation would contaminate normal river debris but I'm not worried about that as the river's breadth would dilute it a few miles downstream. Cooling is known failed and the article doesn't say if the ponds are covered and structurally engineered to withstand being covered with several meters of river. If the ponds are in the ground and the site is underwater, it seems likely the ponds are under the river. If the structure of the cooling ponds is compromised by the weight of water, the river is silting up the spent fuel with debris normally found in a flooded river: mud, trees, the debris of homes washed downriver. But that's not the worst of it.
From the original design this would probably not be a problem as old spent fuel which is still very active but not commercially viable would have no chance to "go critical" since it was spaced adequately to prevent that. Unfortunately we've not had the promised national disposal site this last three decades and spent fuel ponds have been re-certified over and over again for more and more material far past their original design limits and these ponds may contain more than three times their original design limits and ten times the fuel in the reactors themselves - dangerously close to sustaining a critical reaction outside of containment. Of course additional cooling becomes mandatory as the more densely you stack this nuclear material the more likely it is to "go critical" and create a self-sustaining fission reaction - particularly in the presence of water and unknown debris, and particularly if the cladding is burned off. The cooling in these ponds, river notwithstanding, is now known to be failed according to the fine article and no repair date is estimated. As the fuel heats, it expands - which makes it closer to the other fuel, and proximity is one of the things that make nuclear fuels work so the design constraints of the spent fuel ponds are important, as are the moderators such as water and clays. Thermal heat does impact radioactive output to some small degree.
The worst possible case in this scenario involves some 30+ active nuclear reactors worth of commercially unviable but still powerful nuclear fuel going uncontrolled critical, superheating, burning off its zirconium cladding and releasing unimaginable quantities of nuclear byproducts - particularly iodine and cesium - inside the flowing Missouri river that covers it, which by happenstance irrigates more than half the crops our nation produces. It's the biggest possible nuclear energy fiasco that makes the recent fiscal difficulties look trivial. The entire downstream lengths of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers would become uninhabitable and un-navigable for a hundred years or more from this site to New Orleans, and we can't irrigate crops with radioactive water because we then get radioactive crops and radioactive soil that grows radioactive crops long after the radioactive water is gone. Which leads to another American Dust Bowl as farmers suddenly refuse to irrigate crops with radioactive water. And of course flooding too, as the normally used water passes unused downstream. The entire Gulf of Mexico becomes a no-go zone to ships that want to thereafter make port somewhere else. Even if it doesn't happen there's a good novel in the possibility.
My post is a plea: someone please comfort me. Tell me those ponds are above the current level of the river. Tell me they're designed for this. Tell me they have containment of the spent fuel ponds. Please, for God's sake, tell me the fuel can't go critical. Jesus, lie to me if you have to. I'd like to go to sleep tonight. The article, the summary and the comments don't answer these questions.
If somebody dies from the criticality radiation overheating the fuel, burning Zirconium cladding in the presence of water, performing decomposition of steam into its hydrogen and oxygen components and creating the conditions for an inevitable hydroxy flash explosion, does that count as the radiation killing the people in the explosion? Because if so, the death toll is currently two. Or do you just count that a coincidental industrial accident that could happen anywhere that much Zirconium gets that hot in the presence of water - which is nowhere else on Earth but a nuclear meltdown? Do you blame the faulty vents the nuclear engineers said were costly and unnecessary instead? If you were in the blast zone of that much Hydrox fuel mixed with radioactive steam, but shielded from the blast itself it seems likely you would die from the radiation exposure later, but these two took the brunt of the blast and were killed instantly. The four (!) shockwaves from these blasts look to have moved half a kilometer horizontally and several klicks vertically (each!), co-incident with the destruction of the building shells. The only reason Tokyo is still habitable is that the wind wasn't blowing that way those days - and it often is. Radiation is one of the risks of nuclear energy, but we've known for a long time it's not the only one.
In my mind nuclear energy killed those two men, and teh eebil corporate profit motive that skimped on safety measures is just indicative of how sick nuclear energy has become and is only an aggravating factor. The key error was allowing the plant in the first place. Nuclear proponents will defend now the permanent storage of endless quantities of spent-fuel in above ground pools because the dry casks are too costly. It's just more efficient to leave them there, in pools containing up to ten times the fuel they were designed for. Those proponents will defend the endless extension of plants designed to operate thirty years well into sixty, and claim it's necessary because new designs aren't being approved. This is madness.
It's not necessary, and it's not cheap. Nuclear energy - once promised as "too cheap to meter" costs more than almost any other form of energy even before you consider the fuel disposal costs that can't be bourne yet because disposal is just not available. As this goes on the cost of risk gets unacceptably high. Hell, it was already unacceptably high when governments agreed to commission plants that in their normal operation create spent fuel without a plan for how to dispose of that spent fuel. Who on Earth thinks it's a great idea to create garbage without a plan to be rid of it? Do you stack your garbage in your yard? Why should these plants be allowed to do this? At least your garbage is considerably less toxic than the normal output of these plants. Theoretically eventually you come to the point where the plant's entire energy output is consumed cooling the spent fuel - diminishing returns that immediately thereafter spiral out of control as the fuel used create energy to cool the fuel needs to be cooled. Admittedly this dire situation is some 500 or more years hence, but it is out there. If we're worried about global warming why are we not worried about creating several hundred times each nuclear plant's energy output in artificially radioactive spent fuel heat engines that will continue to heat the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years?
Now the questions on my mind not answered by the fine article, the summary nor the comments: This nuclear energy site is the repository for spent fuel for both nuclear plants for Nebraska. They store much of this spent fuel in in-ground wet ponds, not dry casks sealed from environmental hazards. How much spent fuel is in these ponds? Are these ponds currently under the river? Are they contained, or is the river cooling the fuel rods and depositing its mud and flood debris into the spent fuel ponds? What is the risk of recriticality in these ponds if they're inundated with mud? Cooling ha
Both nuclear plants issued flooding alerts earlier this month, although they were routine as the river's rise has been expected.
Yeah, that's not fear mongering. That's pooh-poohing. Everywhere in the article it says something scary, it surrounded with a calming rhetoric. WTF is a "routine" nuclear plant "alert", other than an oxymoron?
The federal commission had inspectors at the plant 20 miles north of Omaha when the 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Water surrounded the auxiliary and containment buildings at the plant, it said in a statement.
The Omaha Public Power District has said the complex will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides. Its spokesman, Jeff Hanson, said the berm wasn't critical to protecting the plant but a crew will look at whether it can be patched.
See? Inspectors were standing by, but couldn't avert the collapse. The berm isn't critical but after this is over they'll probably fix it anyway, just in case.
No mention that Fort Calhoun is the spent fuel repository for both Nebraska reactors, and that the spent fuel is kept in in-ground pools which seem likely right now to be under the Missouri river. The soothing, cooling Missouri river, wending its way to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico - providing essential irrigation for America's breadbasket along the way.
Nope nope. This is not fear mongering at all. Quite the opposite.
The article isn't about feeling sorry for him. It's about being aware that this has happened so that others potentially impacted by similar terms can evaluate their positions. Something like a sign on the beach that reads "Some swimmers recently eaten by sharks."
The company in question is Skype, which just entered into an agreement to be bought out by Microsoft for $8.4 billion - something over three times the market's prior evaluation of the company's market value. It's reasonable to assume that the options did increase in value if they were true options, which they weren't. The right to buy something at a set price sometime in the future, when bundled with a requirement that you sell it at that price, is not an options contract in the normal sense. It has no value at all.
It's a cycle and I don't claim to be on the upstroke of it. The wheel will turn no matter what I do and these ideas will rise to the top one day even if I'm not alive to see it.
This isn't Windows Phone 1. This is Windows Phone 7. As in: they've been at this a long while - 15 years at least. If they ditched their legacy it's because it wasn't worth carrying forward but let's not pretend that didn't happen.
Microsoft is good at marketing when they can tell their OEMs to shut up and take it. If they could tell HP and Dell to shut up and take it, HP would not have bought Palm and Dell would not be giving forth Android tablets. That's not the current mobile market. There's a lot of evidence available that points of sale are shifting WP7 product to the back shelf due to lack of demand, or removing it from the shelves entirely. That's not an uphill struggle - it's whistling in the dark.
Microsoft doesn't have any leverage here so they have to bring world shaking product. And they haven't got that in 'em
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Protect IP matters because Detriot is an industrial wasteland. Intellectual Property is becoming more and more of the product we have to export. Because of this we escalate its importance to the point where at some future point we must defend our intellectual property using men with guns on foreign soil, defending our right to charge what we will for the broadcast rights to Justin Bieber's latest album on the peoples of India and China - who don't want to hear that crap anyway.
The whole thing is sick. Eventually the world is going to call us to the carpet on that and make us make useful stuff for the value we get. And then what have we got?
If they want America destroyed they need only leave us alone. We're doing fine at that without them.
The SAS 6G and SATA 3 (6Gbps) models of SSD go up to over 500GB now. Reading that in a few minutes is no big deal. Even the SATA II Intel 320 series does 600GB and sequential reads at 270 MB/s, which would be 600GB in (600000/270 seconds) - 2222 seconds or just over 37 minutes. My laptop has a better data rate, but I use off-brand components :-). This is no problem at all.
A spinning rust platter isn't ever going to dish that, but if this is a job you need done and you're willing to spend ten grand, I'll take your money all day.
And let's not have the Base2 Vs Base10 argument, OK? A 2.4 percent difference isn't going to change the outcome of this one.
They don't want a cut of the money. They just want Apple to stop suing them. But now that they're fighting things might get a little bitter.
Nokia is even outsourcing manufacturing and design now. One must wonder what they have to contribute then, except a Nokia sticker. For sure it doesn't take a lot of employees to produce the art on a sticker.
It's "humiliating desperation" to legally force someone to pay you to do absolutely nothing?
Yes. Us proud folk expect to earn what we get. We don't even like to be around folk who want to get and get giving nothing because there's no profit for us in it and their breath is sour.
If you as an organization adopt Office 365, what is your plan for getting your data out if you must? In is easy, but out is hard.
Get your shiny new lamps here. New lamps for old!
OK kids, let's see if we can help Rakarra find the flaw in his cunning plan.
To feel that earthquake you have to be particularly sensitive. It's not a room shaking quake. It's the sound of a rock cracking 3KM beneath your feet. To call it an earthquake because the sound registers on devices so senstitive they can hear a tree drop ten miles away is disingenuous and fear-mongering.
There is no place on Earth that doesn't have access to geothermal energy. It turns out that far beneath our feet the Earth is made of molten rock everywhere - even in the antarctic and below every ocean - and long before you get down to the molten rock there is rock hot enough to have heat to exploit as electrical power. Some of this is fossil heat from the formation of the planet. Some of it is the result of decay of natural nuclear fissibles (yes, nuclear reactors happen in nature, deep in the Earth! There are even some bacteria that are evolved to live on the byproducts of this energy...). Some of the heat is created by the internal friction caused by tidal motions created from the moon's gravitational pull. (BTW: The Earth's absorption of this energy is causing the moon's orbit to get further out over time, but using the heat created has no impact on this process). There is now no place on Earth we don't have the technology to dig down far enough to tap the geothermal energy - some places are just more efficient and economical than others. All that clean reliable base load power requires is one consistent deep reservoir of heat, and one consistent and rich resource of a material at a cooler temperature, like air or seawater. By heating a moderator that boils at less than the greater heat and condenses at less than the lesser heat the pressure differential created by the boiling moderator can be used to drive a turbine that turns to create electrical power. They use closed loop systems now, so the only outputs of the process are that the hot stuff gets cooler (to be replenished from effectively limitless resources), the cool stuff gets warmer (in the case of the ocean to be accommodated by water evaporation and such) and electrical power (plus plant and equipment). "Earthquakes" have been attributed to a shallow fracking process used to activate rocks for this energy exploitation, but calling the noises created by cracking these rocks "Earthquakes" is an overstatement. Nobody ever felt them. For the most part this step isn't necessary because there are deep hot porous rocks and in the rare case where it is, the rocks involved are almost always so deep that we can't hear their cracking noises. They are also so deep and hot that groundwater (and hence drinking water) never gets there. Once in a great while you hear about coincidental finds, like a recent british geothermal effort that found an informative limestone fossil layer and a previously unknown coal seam as well as a bountiful hot water aquifer. That was reported just a few days ago, but I can't find it right now.
And no, Iceland's eruptions were due to the fact that they hadn't tapped the geothermal energy as electrical power. Otherwise those volcanos would have had nice tight caps. But really, Iceland doesn't need that much electrical power. That's probably more electrical power than all of North America needs, right there in Iceland. Did you know that Iceland already uses geothermal energy directly as heat to heat streets and sidewalks, shops and housing, community pools and so on as well as providing electrical power? I suppose if they wanted to stabilize Iceland's volcanos they could run some conduit into the volcano and pump as much of the Atlantic through it as possible. Actually, for live volcanos they might want to use molten salt as an intermediate step, and salt wouldn't be too hard to get when you're boiling off that much seawater. Might be some side effects though. Maybe they could run an undersea insulated pipeline or some HV cables and defrost Greenland as well. There's more than enough heat there to defrost all of Iceland and Greenland, and provide electricity besides.
Yellowstone's caldera has enough geothermal power to drive all of the Western Hemisphere's electrical needs for the next thousand years, if you had enough extension cord to plug the rest of the world in, and were OK with despoiling this natural wonderland in the interest of powering the Western Hemisphere - and coincindentally reducin
He thinks he can avoid you reading the parent comment by modding it down. He's mistaken. You'll read it now because it was modded down and I cared enough to bump it, and because he didn't want you to read it. There's good stuff in there. Trust me. If you don't think so you're free to mod me down twice for the same comment, more so since I've given this one all my bumps, which I almost never do.
The pro-nuclear lobby has been at the GP, but I'll go ahead and answer this.
Modern geothermal takes less water than nuclear. One tenth as much actually and greywater can be used for those little inputs. And since everything that comes up from the ground goes back into the ground, there are no emissions or outputs whatsoever except electricity. There is no fuel, no fuel waste, no radioactivity, no danger in earthquake, tornado, hurricane or flood. No danger of losing the source of fuel in global conflicts because there is no fuel. The damned thing works under water, and probably should - there are offshore thermal resources and ocean water makes a great thermal delta. It's cheaper too.
In context with the present fine article, there is absolutely no situation where geothermal energy could contaminate the entire Missouri and Mississippi rivers from the site to the sea, all of the fields irrigated thereby, and the entire Gulf of Mexico with nuclear waste. Which is a significant advantage over the current situation referenced in the fine article.
Mollified? I thought not. You folk don't care if there's now a better answer. You've got one drum and you're going to bang it. You just want to work your current fission deal no matter what it costs the rest of us. I have a question for you: If you don't give a fuck what we think, why should we give a fuck what you think? You're a one-issue constituency with a disproven business model. Let me show you the onion on my belt. Now could you please get your fissibles off my lawn?
Define alert. Define routine. Reconcile the difference. It's an oxymoron. These two terms are not compatible. A "routine alert" is an oxymoron. That's what the word "oxymoron" means. Words mean things. If they didn't, communication would become impossible. If it's routine, it's not an alert. If it's an alert, it's not routine. The terms are mutually exclusive.
The only possible world where these terms could be in agreement is a world that is routinely on alert. I don't want to live in that world. Do you?
Did you include modern geothermal in your calc? If you did, run the numbers again. You're off by a couple orders.
This site stores the spent fuel for both Nebraska plants - a little in dry casks which should be safe, but most in in-ground cooling ponds. Presumably these ponds are now under the Missouri river. Cooling ponds need to be continuously cooled in order to stay cool. Spent fuel ought not come in contact with a flowing river. That by itself would be very bad, as the radiation would contaminate normal river debris but I'm not worried about that as the river's breadth would dilute it a few miles downstream. Cooling is known failed and the article doesn't say if the ponds are covered and structurally engineered to withstand being covered with several meters of river. If the ponds are in the ground and the site is underwater, it seems likely the ponds are under the river. If the structure of the cooling ponds is compromised by the weight of water, the river is silting up the spent fuel with debris normally found in a flooded river: mud, trees, the debris of homes washed downriver. But that's not the worst of it.
From the original design this would probably not be a problem as old spent fuel which is still very active but not commercially viable would have no chance to "go critical" since it was spaced adequately to prevent that. Unfortunately we've not had the promised national disposal site this last three decades and spent fuel ponds have been re-certified over and over again for more and more material far past their original design limits and these ponds may contain more than three times their original design limits and ten times the fuel in the reactors themselves - dangerously close to sustaining a critical reaction outside of containment. Of course additional cooling becomes mandatory as the more densely you stack this nuclear material the more likely it is to "go critical" and create a self-sustaining fission reaction - particularly in the presence of water and unknown debris, and particularly if the cladding is burned off. The cooling in these ponds, river notwithstanding, is now known to be failed according to the fine article and no repair date is estimated. As the fuel heats, it expands - which makes it closer to the other fuel, and proximity is one of the things that make nuclear fuels work so the design constraints of the spent fuel ponds are important, as are the moderators such as water and clays. Thermal heat does impact radioactive output to some small degree.
The worst possible case in this scenario involves some 30+ active nuclear reactors worth of commercially unviable but still powerful nuclear fuel going uncontrolled critical, superheating, burning off its zirconium cladding and releasing unimaginable quantities of nuclear byproducts - particularly iodine and cesium - inside the flowing Missouri river that covers it, which by happenstance irrigates more than half the crops our nation produces. It's the biggest possible nuclear energy fiasco that makes the recent fiscal difficulties look trivial. The entire downstream lengths of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers would become uninhabitable and un-navigable for a hundred years or more from this site to New Orleans, and we can't irrigate crops with radioactive water because we then get radioactive crops and radioactive soil that grows radioactive crops long after the radioactive water is gone. Which leads to another American Dust Bowl as farmers suddenly refuse to irrigate crops with radioactive water. And of course flooding too, as the normally used water passes unused downstream. The entire Gulf of Mexico becomes a no-go zone to ships that want to thereafter make port somewhere else. Even if it doesn't happen there's a good novel in the possibility.
My post is a plea: someone please comfort me. Tell me those ponds are above the current level of the river. Tell me they're designed for this. Tell me they have containment of the spent fuel ponds. Please, for God's sake, tell me the fuel can't go critical. Jesus, lie to me if you have to. I'd like to go to sleep tonight. The article, the summary and the comments don't answer these questions.
If somebody dies from the criticality radiation overheating the fuel, burning Zirconium cladding in the presence of water, performing decomposition of steam into its hydrogen and oxygen components and creating the conditions for an inevitable hydroxy flash explosion, does that count as the radiation killing the people in the explosion? Because if so, the death toll is currently two. Or do you just count that a coincidental industrial accident that could happen anywhere that much Zirconium gets that hot in the presence of water - which is nowhere else on Earth but a nuclear meltdown? Do you blame the faulty vents the nuclear engineers said were costly and unnecessary instead? If you were in the blast zone of that much Hydrox fuel mixed with radioactive steam, but shielded from the blast itself it seems likely you would die from the radiation exposure later, but these two took the brunt of the blast and were killed instantly. The four (!) shockwaves from these blasts look to have moved half a kilometer horizontally and several klicks vertically (each!), co-incident with the destruction of the building shells. The only reason Tokyo is still habitable is that the wind wasn't blowing that way those days - and it often is. Radiation is one of the risks of nuclear energy, but we've known for a long time it's not the only one.
In my mind nuclear energy killed those two men, and teh eebil corporate profit motive that skimped on safety measures is just indicative of how sick nuclear energy has become and is only an aggravating factor. The key error was allowing the plant in the first place. Nuclear proponents will defend now the permanent storage of endless quantities of spent-fuel in above ground pools because the dry casks are too costly. It's just more efficient to leave them there, in pools containing up to ten times the fuel they were designed for. Those proponents will defend the endless extension of plants designed to operate thirty years well into sixty, and claim it's necessary because new designs aren't being approved. This is madness.
It's not necessary, and it's not cheap. Nuclear energy - once promised as "too cheap to meter" costs more than almost any other form of energy even before you consider the fuel disposal costs that can't be bourne yet because disposal is just not available. As this goes on the cost of risk gets unacceptably high. Hell, it was already unacceptably high when governments agreed to commission plants that in their normal operation create spent fuel without a plan for how to dispose of that spent fuel. Who on Earth thinks it's a great idea to create garbage without a plan to be rid of it? Do you stack your garbage in your yard? Why should these plants be allowed to do this? At least your garbage is considerably less toxic than the normal output of these plants. Theoretically eventually you come to the point where the plant's entire energy output is consumed cooling the spent fuel - diminishing returns that immediately thereafter spiral out of control as the fuel used create energy to cool the fuel needs to be cooled. Admittedly this dire situation is some 500 or more years hence, but it is out there. If we're worried about global warming why are we not worried about creating several hundred times each nuclear plant's energy output in artificially radioactive spent fuel heat engines that will continue to heat the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years?
Now the questions on my mind not answered by the fine article, the summary nor the comments: This nuclear energy site is the repository for spent fuel for both nuclear plants for Nebraska. They store much of this spent fuel in in-ground wet ponds, not dry casks sealed from environmental hazards. How much spent fuel is in these ponds? Are these ponds currently under the river? Are they contained, or is the river cooling the fuel rods and depositing its mud and flood debris into the spent fuel ponds? What is the risk of recriticality in these ponds if they're inundated with mud? Cooling ha
Both nuclear plants issued flooding alerts earlier this month, although they were routine as the river's rise has been expected.
Yeah, that's not fear mongering. That's pooh-poohing. Everywhere in the article it says something scary, it surrounded with a calming rhetoric. WTF is a "routine" nuclear plant "alert", other than an oxymoron?
The federal commission had inspectors at the plant 20 miles north of Omaha when the 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Water surrounded the auxiliary and containment buildings at the plant, it said in a statement. The Omaha Public Power District has said the complex will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides. Its spokesman, Jeff Hanson, said the berm wasn't critical to protecting the plant but a crew will look at whether it can be patched.
See? Inspectors were standing by, but couldn't avert the collapse. The berm isn't critical but after this is over they'll probably fix it anyway, just in case.
No mention that Fort Calhoun is the spent fuel repository for both Nebraska reactors, and that the spent fuel is kept in in-ground pools which seem likely right now to be under the Missouri river. The soothing, cooling Missouri river, wending its way to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico - providing essential irrigation for America's breadbasket along the way.
Nope nope. This is not fear mongering at all. Quite the opposite.
The article isn't about feeling sorry for him. It's about being aware that this has happened so that others potentially impacted by similar terms can evaluate their positions. Something like a sign on the beach that reads "Some swimmers recently eaten by sharks."
The company in question is Skype, which just entered into an agreement to be bought out by Microsoft for $8.4 billion - something over three times the market's prior evaluation of the company's market value. It's reasonable to assume that the options did increase in value if they were true options, which they weren't. The right to buy something at a set price sometime in the future, when bundled with a requirement that you sell it at that price, is not an options contract in the normal sense. It has no value at all.
They were optical scanners in the 1980s too. Plus ca change and all that.
Whoever moderated this informative should be banned from moderation forever.
It's a cycle and I don't claim to be on the upstroke of it. The wheel will turn no matter what I do and these ideas will rise to the top one day even if I'm not alive to see it.
This isn't Windows Phone 1. This is Windows Phone 7. As in: they've been at this a long while - 15 years at least. If they ditched their legacy it's because it wasn't worth carrying forward but let's not pretend that didn't happen.
Microsoft is good at marketing when they can tell their OEMs to shut up and take it. If they could tell HP and Dell to shut up and take it, HP would not have bought Palm and Dell would not be giving forth Android tablets. That's not the current mobile market. There's a lot of evidence available that points of sale are shifting WP7 product to the back shelf due to lack of demand, or removing it from the shelves entirely. That's not an uphill struggle - it's whistling in the dark.
Microsoft doesn't have any leverage here so they have to bring world shaking product. And they haven't got that in 'em
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!
When I'm stuck a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And Grin,
And Say,
Oh!
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
A way!
Annie