You're talking about Hanford. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.
Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.
Over $30 billions (pdf) have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.
Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.
Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.
They started buying it up in 2005 or before, when all the long distance telecoms were going belly up and they could get it for pennies on the dollar of the installation cost. They have also been buying Peering points. This is not just in the US, but globally. In 2010 they were rumored to have more network than all but two global ISPs, and there is reason to believe that estimate was way low.
The point of these purchases was to get out ahead of a deep pocket competitor (guess who) who might try and lock them out of the Internet, drive up their transport costs or otherwise "cut off their air supply". It was defensive insurance, but they use it to keep their network costs down, investing in hardware technologies in-house to the point where nobody moves bits cheaper than Google. They have been wondering what to do with the excess for a long time, since bandwidth of this fiber has increased at a logarithmic rate due to progress in signalling technology and is now many hundreds or thousands of times Google's own considerable needs.
The person operating HP's business from day to day isn't named "Meg". HP's Chief Operating Officer is Microsoft's former Windows Business guy named Bill Veghte. Bill Veghte has operational control of HP and Meg Whitman is his PR meatpuppet: a figurehead with zero actual operational responsibility, just like she likes it.
You haven't heard about this because we're all familiar with how Microsoft is sending out its former executives like Elop and Veghte to wrest operational control of their partners' operations to try and main control of their Wintel PC ecosystem and regain some fraction of the control they had back when they were the 800lb gorilla on the field. Veghte is running HP on the down low. Any day now they'll get control of Dell too through an LBO. A fat lot of good that will do them: we're tired of this Machiavellian bullshit and the prevention of progress it sustains. HP and Dell together don't make even HTC, let alone a Samsung. Microsoft and all their still-loyal partners together don't make an Apple, let alone an Apple + IBM + Google + Samsung. Microsoft is not only not even no longer the king of the technology hill: they're playing king of the one-of-many foothills.
I must be a fairly unusual individual because I don't care for pot. Yes, I've tried it many times over 30 years, but apparently it doesn't work for me like it works for other people because I don't find the experience at all pleasurable. Maybe I'm disabled in some way. I don't have a problem with other people liking it or using it and I never did. I think it should be legal. It's just not for me.
That said, of all the people I know well enough to know if they use pot (or something equally illegal), almost all of them do. It's always been that way. Now that I live in a state where it's legal random acquaintances and even strangers are trying to push the stuff on me like I've never seen it before and just need to be convinced to join their club. Look at me. I have grey hair. I am obviously from the '60s. Are you stupid?
Yeah, I get it. It's legal now. Party time. Woohoo! Knock yourself out. You got a beer?
I'm quite happy with my Asus Transformer. The only problem I had with it was it cost me an unplanned $300 to buy the kids junior level Android tabs so I could use it without too much interference.
This is really for the grandparent. Nobody can write apps for the desktop mode of Windows RT except Microsoft. It is forbidden. Also, the "desktop" doesn't support legacy apps. Sideloading is likewise forbidden, and it's not Win32 capable anyway as it's ARM. These bits of trivia were overlooked by the parent poster for some unknowable reason, even though they were the point of your question.
Well they built 3 million and have sold 1.1 million so far. Since the stock is getting old (hell, it was born old in mobile-device time) something has to break.
Not really, no. They were really careful to make sure that without Windows RT these devices are paperweights. There is not, and is not likely to be, a crack in time for it to be a useful hacked device while the hardware is still interesting. Buy a secondhand Transformer Prime for $150 on eBay instead - that's all this is anyway, except the TF201 doesn't have this lockdown problem.
It's the millions of comments and reviews like this that are killing Microsoft's hardware partners on WinRT. "Loved WinRT - intuitive, responsive, loved the hell out of the OS. Returned this (VivoTab RT, Dell XPS 10, Lenovo Yoga 11) to the vendor because I also bought the Surface RT and prefer it because x,y,z. Four stars for this though, as you might like it." And where do these comments and articles come from? Microsoft's own marketing campaigns, fed by the billions in profits their partners funnel them, amplified by their Bing search engine. With friends like this Microsoft's hardware partners don't need enemies.
If you want to survive as a manufacturer never ever ever screw your distributors. Word gets around.
There are a lot of companies that go about their business trying to compete with innovation and differentiation like they should. Only a few take this IP prevention of competitive innovation route. Those need to be avoided. The law is an ass, and anybody can sue anybody over anything these days - but if you're the sort who brags about suing everybody you can for any thing you can, not only am I not going to pursue what I might do with your products: I wouldn't give you a ride in my car, in a blizzard, nor have any other thing to do with you. You are the drama queen normal folk need to stay away from to keep their life on track.
This is for meetings to select the Top Guys who will look into the challenges and opportunities, work up some papers on various potential solutions to investigate. Not to actually go anywhere yet. Except maybe DC and Florida. Pretty sure there will be some trips to DC and Florida.
I don't care if Oracle released it under the BSD license. They claimed in this suit to have copyrights on max() and min() as if they invented that shit. It took a judge who was a programmer also to call them out on it or that stupid shit would have gone to a jury ignorant of the technology history. "I could implement that in 15 minutes" or some such he said. They claim to have various patents to prevent all of Java, Unix, Linux, Windows and every other thing involving technology everywhere in this universe and any alternates that subordinate all of the open source licenses they grant.
A company like that, their output is toxic. The safest course is not to deal with them or anything claiming to be derived from them at all. That means nothing from Solaris (not even ZFS or its derivatives), no MySQL (forks should be safe for now), No BTRFS, no Java - or anything even in the most remote sense related to Java. If they would sue over the API, what wouldn't they sue over?
It's a shame as Oracle has bought up some of the greatest stuff in IT - but perhaps that's the point. Uncle Larry isn't and has never been in the giving stuff away business and has no respect for the folks who are. He's found great success in the selling stuff business so when he finds givers in dire straits he takes their scalps and then scalps their customers too.
I have no interest in buying him another island. I've got useful stuff to do.
They wanted control of what Android has become. They would have had it: Google tried to negotiate terms that would have given them that. But they wouldn't grant the licence necessary to let Android become what it has become. So Google had to do something else. It worked out for us. Android would not have been accepted as fast, nor progressed as fast, nor been as lightweight, if Sun had taken that deal. We wouldn't have as many of these amazing new things.
Personally after having followed the case and read through what Oracle has claimed here I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.
Stationkeeping is pretty easy when the asteroid you're mining is 30% water, like chondrites are. Water makes LH2/LO2 with sufficient electrical inputs.
Earth-moon L3 is on the opposite side of the earth from the moon, as you know. It's a nice spot for a telescope to look for NEAs. As you pointed out it's not stable. Therefore it's not a good spot for a space station with human inhabitants. Yes, it would be a good spot for a LH2/LO2 distillery with good 0-energy transits to L2, as that sort of operation could manage their stationkeeping by changing the orientation of their thermal outputs. But refining is a messy business that messes up telescopes, so it's best if we reserved that one for astronomy. L2's angular momentum makes it a better fuel depot and jumping off spot for people in a hurry, like humans vulnerable to cosmic radiation. I think L3 is the "least best" of all the Earth-moon Lagrange points. It's where you park the least important stuff. Computing a vector from L3 to interplanetary missions seems more iffy to me than L2, which is relatively straightforward. Almost all of the paths from L3 to interplanetary space lead through L2 anyway.
Earth-moon L2 is permanently eclipsed from Earth by the moon. We can't see it from here. That's a downside. As a relay for the far side of the moon you're right: it works - as long as we have relays in orbit around the moon to relay to it. Just one would do, in a polar orbit around the moon on a plane perpendicular to the earth-moon angle, or close to it. That lunar satellite though would then have almost all the coverage L2 would directly except for the smallest "polar" patch pointed at L2 hidden by terrain. On the upside there is no more angular momentum advantaged path to interplanetary space than Earth-moon L2. Not even sun-Earth L2.
Getting to Earth-moon L3 and then killing your inertia seems costly in Delta-V to me relative to L2. Of course having their proximate gravity well L4 and L5 don't have this as much of a problem. Care to weigh in on that? You seem to know more about this than I do.
Of course all of the Lagrange points are part of an interplanetary highway that after 4 billion years have some traffic flowing. For capturing asteroids with robots this is good. For human habitation it may be bad.
Microsoft has a significant investment in Facebook. It's kind of like Netflix avoiding Android right up until they just couldn't anymore - and then Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings leaving Microsoft's board of directors shortly thereafter to "focus on his own company's needs".
Well yeah, L4 and L5 are more stable. L2 requires station keeping - but not much. I don't think L1 or L3 would be very useful. You got me on the falling out piece - I had forgot. I should think habitations at L4 and L5 where they won't fall out, refining and fuel depot at L2. Anyway, as long as we're talking about exploring the solar system on a low energy budget, I suppose folks will want to read about the Interplanetary Transport Network.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about Hanford. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.
Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.
Over $30 billions (pdf) have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.
Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.
Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.
The spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not in any sense "normal."
They started buying it up in 2005 or before, when all the long distance telecoms were going belly up and they could get it for pennies on the dollar of the installation cost. They have also been buying Peering points. This is not just in the US, but globally. In 2010 they were rumored to have more network than all but two global ISPs, and there is reason to believe that estimate was way low.
The point of these purchases was to get out ahead of a deep pocket competitor (guess who) who might try and lock them out of the Internet, drive up their transport costs or otherwise "cut off their air supply". It was defensive insurance, but they use it to keep their network costs down, investing in hardware technologies in-house to the point where nobody moves bits cheaper than Google. They have been wondering what to do with the excess for a long time, since bandwidth of this fiber has increased at a logarithmic rate due to progress in signalling technology and is now many hundreds or thousands of times Google's own considerable needs.
So don't buy it. There is nothing wrong with designing a product for a specific subset of the market, like people who have always on connections.
It just turns out that personal computers aren't what you thought they were.
You guys just don't get it. There is no advantage in explaining it to you.
The person operating HP's business from day to day isn't named "Meg". HP's Chief Operating Officer is Microsoft's former Windows Business guy named Bill Veghte. Bill Veghte has operational control of HP and Meg Whitman is his PR meatpuppet: a figurehead with zero actual operational responsibility, just like she likes it.
You haven't heard about this because we're all familiar with how Microsoft is sending out its former executives like Elop and Veghte to wrest operational control of their partners' operations to try and main control of their Wintel PC ecosystem and regain some fraction of the control they had back when they were the 800lb gorilla on the field. Veghte is running HP on the down low. Any day now they'll get control of Dell too through an LBO. A fat lot of good that will do them: we're tired of this Machiavellian bullshit and the prevention of progress it sustains. HP and Dell together don't make even HTC, let alone a Samsung. Microsoft and all their still-loyal partners together don't make an Apple, let alone an Apple + IBM + Google + Samsung. Microsoft is not only not even no longer the king of the technology hill: they're playing king of the one-of-many foothills.
I must be a fairly unusual individual because I don't care for pot. Yes, I've tried it many times over 30 years, but apparently it doesn't work for me like it works for other people because I don't find the experience at all pleasurable. Maybe I'm disabled in some way. I don't have a problem with other people liking it or using it and I never did. I think it should be legal. It's just not for me.
That said, of all the people I know well enough to know if they use pot (or something equally illegal), almost all of them do. It's always been that way. Now that I live in a state where it's legal random acquaintances and even strangers are trying to push the stuff on me like I've never seen it before and just need to be convinced to join their club. Look at me. I have grey hair. I am obviously from the '60s. Are you stupid?
Yeah, I get it. It's legal now. Party time. Woohoo! Knock yourself out. You got a beer?
I'm quite happy with my Asus Transformer. The only problem I had with it was it cost me an unplanned $300 to buy the kids junior level Android tabs so I could use it without too much interference.
This is really for the grandparent. Nobody can write apps for the desktop mode of Windows RT except Microsoft. It is forbidden. Also, the "desktop" doesn't support legacy apps. Sideloading is likewise forbidden, and it's not Win32 capable anyway as it's ARM. These bits of trivia were overlooked by the parent poster for some unknowable reason, even though they were the point of your question.
Well they built 3 million and have sold 1.1 million so far. Since the stock is getting old (hell, it was born old in mobile-device time) something has to break.
Not really, no. They were really careful to make sure that without Windows RT these devices are paperweights. There is not, and is not likely to be, a crack in time for it to be a useful hacked device while the hardware is still interesting. Buy a secondhand Transformer Prime for $150 on eBay instead - that's all this is anyway, except the TF201 doesn't have this lockdown problem.
It's the millions of comments and reviews like this that are killing Microsoft's hardware partners on WinRT. "Loved WinRT - intuitive, responsive, loved the hell out of the OS. Returned this (VivoTab RT, Dell XPS 10, Lenovo Yoga 11) to the vendor because I also bought the Surface RT and prefer it because x,y,z. Four stars for this though, as you might like it." And where do these comments and articles come from? Microsoft's own marketing campaigns, fed by the billions in profits their partners funnel them, amplified by their Bing search engine. With friends like this Microsoft's hardware partners don't need enemies.
If you want to survive as a manufacturer never ever ever screw your distributors. Word gets around.
Or hold out for the Microsoft Ultrabook.
There are a lot of companies that go about their business trying to compete with innovation and differentiation like they should. Only a few take this IP prevention of competitive innovation route. Those need to be avoided. The law is an ass, and anybody can sue anybody over anything these days - but if you're the sort who brags about suing everybody you can for any thing you can, not only am I not going to pursue what I might do with your products: I wouldn't give you a ride in my car, in a blizzard, nor have any other thing to do with you. You are the drama queen normal folk need to stay away from to keep their life on track.
This is for meetings to select the Top Guys who will look into the challenges and opportunities, work up some papers on various potential solutions to investigate. Not to actually go anywhere yet. Except maybe DC and Florida. Pretty sure there will be some trips to DC and Florida.
I'm kind of impressed that so many mods dug this far down into the tree to mod this up. Maybe /. isn't dead after all.
BTW: How the FTC approved Oracle buying the owner of MySQL bears investigation. Somebody got paid to put that through, and we ought to hunt him down.
I don't care if Oracle released it under the BSD license. They claimed in this suit to have copyrights on max() and min() as if they invented that shit. It took a judge who was a programmer also to call them out on it or that stupid shit would have gone to a jury ignorant of the technology history. "I could implement that in 15 minutes" or some such he said. They claim to have various patents to prevent all of Java, Unix, Linux, Windows and every other thing involving technology everywhere in this universe and any alternates that subordinate all of the open source licenses they grant.
A company like that, their output is toxic. The safest course is not to deal with them or anything claiming to be derived from them at all. That means nothing from Solaris (not even ZFS or its derivatives), no MySQL (forks should be safe for now), No BTRFS, no Java - or anything even in the most remote sense related to Java. If they would sue over the API, what wouldn't they sue over?
It's a shame as Oracle has bought up some of the greatest stuff in IT - but perhaps that's the point. Uncle Larry isn't and has never been in the giving stuff away business and has no respect for the folks who are. He's found great success in the selling stuff business so when he finds givers in dire straits he takes their scalps and then scalps their customers too.
I have no interest in buying him another island. I've got useful stuff to do.
They wanted control of what Android has become. They would have had it: Google tried to negotiate terms that would have given them that. But they wouldn't grant the licence necessary to let Android become what it has become. So Google had to do something else. It worked out for us. Android would not have been accepted as fast, nor progressed as fast, nor been as lightweight, if Sun had taken that deal. We wouldn't have as many of these amazing new things.
Personally after having followed the case and read through what Oracle has claimed here I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.
It might be helpful here to know that Microsoft was an early investor in Facebook, and retains a significant stake.
Stationkeeping is pretty easy when the asteroid you're mining is 30% water, like chondrites are. Water makes LH2/LO2 with sufficient electrical inputs.
Earth-moon L3 is on the opposite side of the earth from the moon, as you know. It's a nice spot for a telescope to look for NEAs. As you pointed out it's not stable. Therefore it's not a good spot for a space station with human inhabitants. Yes, it would be a good spot for a LH2/LO2 distillery with good 0-energy transits to L2, as that sort of operation could manage their stationkeeping by changing the orientation of their thermal outputs. But refining is a messy business that messes up telescopes, so it's best if we reserved that one for astronomy. L2's angular momentum makes it a better fuel depot and jumping off spot for people in a hurry, like humans vulnerable to cosmic radiation. I think L3 is the "least best" of all the Earth-moon Lagrange points. It's where you park the least important stuff. Computing a vector from L3 to interplanetary missions seems more iffy to me than L2, which is relatively straightforward. Almost all of the paths from L3 to interplanetary space lead through L2 anyway.
Earth-moon L2 is permanently eclipsed from Earth by the moon. We can't see it from here. That's a downside. As a relay for the far side of the moon you're right: it works - as long as we have relays in orbit around the moon to relay to it. Just one would do, in a polar orbit around the moon on a plane perpendicular to the earth-moon angle, or close to it. That lunar satellite though would then have almost all the coverage L2 would directly except for the smallest "polar" patch pointed at L2 hidden by terrain. On the upside there is no more angular momentum advantaged path to interplanetary space than Earth-moon L2. Not even sun-Earth L2.
Getting to Earth-moon L3 and then killing your inertia seems costly in Delta-V to me relative to L2. Of course having their proximate gravity well L4 and L5 don't have this as much of a problem. Care to weigh in on that? You seem to know more about this than I do.
Of course all of the Lagrange points are part of an interplanetary highway that after 4 billion years have some traffic flowing. For capturing asteroids with robots this is good. For human habitation it may be bad.
Microsoft has a significant investment in Facebook. It's kind of like Netflix avoiding Android right up until they just couldn't anymore - and then Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings leaving Microsoft's board of directors shortly thereafter to "focus on his own company's needs".
Well yeah, L4 and L5 are more stable. L2 requires station keeping - but not much. I don't think L1 or L3 would be very useful. You got me on the falling out piece - I had forgot. I should think habitations at L4 and L5 where they won't fall out, refining and fuel depot at L2. Anyway, as long as we're talking about exploring the solar system on a low energy budget, I suppose folks will want to read about the Interplanetary Transport Network.