You mean it's more profitable, but not necessarily better in all respects. It may not be better in the sense of somebody steals a few tens of lbs of plutonium from the waste, and blows up a tiny suitcase bomb that generates a bigger mushroom cloud than Nagasaki in the middle of Wall Street, NY. There are two sides to everything, the good and the bad. Even to high population density. It'd be better if people spread out a little, as in urban sprawl going to extreme, but only if they could coexist with weed and native bugs and similar lifeforms, and not friggin lawn mow the shit out of all of nature where ever they go.
I wish I had a cat i could post about on Facebook. But it would die of a heatstroke if I left it at home in the apartment I live, and I sure as hell won't pay $300 a month to keep it air conditioned. This summer has been surprisingly mild, and it's almost over, and a cat might have survived fine. Though I still can't get a cat or even a potted flower, cuz I don't know what next summer is gonna be like. The plus side of such a heated attic-apartment is that it gets sterilized completely in the summertime from the heat, and I'm the only life form able to make it through the summer in it.
Who's the tea party candidate? I want less government oppression coming from the democrats, and less welfare money wasted on young people breeding out of control on it, instead of it going to the old people, military, roads, like it was supposed to, and things like NASA, that could put up space stations from Moon based materials, and secure the future of all life from Earth even in the event of a nuclear holocaust or global biotech invented military disease catastrophe. (Btw, I take any opportunity to say Fuck Monsanto and all their biotech crap, including things like Roundup (R)tm.) But because we have so many hungry mouths popping even more hungry mouths out of control starting with age 13 girls on welfare money, we cannot afford a space program. Fuck the democrats and their overbearing taxes like mandatory Obamacare on people trying to keep it together, collected to feed these people breeding out of control on the backs of, then outvoting, the hard working people who can only afford to raise one child and send him to college, while trying to stay out of bankruptcy.
I agree. Ideally the whole country and the world should run on fully wind, solar and hydro, and then we can ban things like nuclear, and even coal and natural gas burnt for simply electric power in major power plants, not used as a chemical feedstock. And there is enough solar input to the world to cover the world's energy needs, true it does require a huge huge huge area and infrastructure. See the image by Matthias Loster, for what kind of area would be needed to supply all of the world's energy needs(including transportation, industrial, household, etc,) if it were based on silicon based solar cells, at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... also at http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_la...
Note that the black dots on that picture represent a huge huge huge area of land fully covered with solar cells, possibly beyond our economic means to accomplish, so we may need, at least for the present time, a secure fallback on high energy density and guaranteed availability, no bullshit nuclear power. But we should make all effort and strive for the ability to leave behind nuclear completely, and fully rely on renewables only.
And wifi. A nuclear reactor without wifi capability, needed to post tweets on twitter, and snapshots on instagram, is just so retro. Time to step into to the 21st century.
Dig through my slashdot posts. Look for gallium and bismuth and argon, you might find some interesting mental food there. I started posting heavily here around April this year, but nobody has time to read through all my mentally heavy and circuitous thoughts.
Wikipedia has a policy on no original research or ideas, but as far as I know, you can say anything you friggin feel like on Slashdot, the only consequence is that your comment may get moderated down, and your karma getting messed up. But then you can come back and post as Anonymous Coward, without a karma issue.
Also, I just looked through my Wikipedia postings from 2006, looking for some energy density png image I posted, not finding it, but I noticed my comments on desert downdraft towers. Back then I had no idea about this water extraction part, I was thinking more of an artificial wind generation if there is no wind, and power harnessing like that. Which could still be an added bonus to such towers, guaranteed wind power as long as there is guaranteed sunshine. As long as there is an air density difference of cold air up high and very warm air near the sand surface, you can have either an updraft or downdraft tower, and once inertia is set in, it becomes self sustaining, possibly with some cycloning near the top tip and even throughout the tower if it's of huge diameter. But with a downdraft you get the option of super-atomizing any kind of liquid, and recovering through filters at the bottom, though then air friction and self sustaining draft becomes an issue. But you could possibly have multicyclones wet-vac style at the bottom, plus electrostatic precipitators that go after the tiniest droplets. You also don't get counter current contact, because both the air and the droplets fall downward, however you get a superhigh contact area from fog-like mist, so that should not be a problem. With a downdraft you don't get the risk of blowing your precious water hogging liquid out the top of the stack, and you have lots of real estate down there to work and massage out the tiny droplets, including massive, tortuous labyrinth path settling chambers the size of caves or auditoriums or football fields, something you cannot afford to put at the top of the stack.
The reason why most stacks or chimneys in the world operate in a strictly upward mode is that usually you have hot air at their bottom by burning some fuel, and that creates low air density that naturally rises, and induces a draft and sets off the inertia of the flow only upwards.
Yeah well anyway, for nonmilitary uses, or especially for buses, they should keep all nuclear materials out of public life. Buses should be nuclear powered by electricity or ammonia coming from a well guarded, high security and military operated nuclear power plant, or even if private, the military participates and is fully involved, and has authority to dictate terms of operation above and beyond any private property owners and investors. Nuclear is important but not a joke. It has a potential for vast quantities of energy, but you have to transpose that into lower energy density chemical storage carriers.
For chemical energy storage, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... and also http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... . Btw, I'm the original creator of that MJ/L vs MJ/kg chart, back in like 2006, and some of the values on it I'm still not sure I did not make a mistake on, people should double check Wikipedia numbers. But the overall, large picture still stands, as far as trends go. I did it in Excel at first, then took a png screenshot of it, and some guy rewrote it in python. My posting of the original picture, is removed even from my wikipedia postings history, hmm, but I found it reposted here, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... by http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... but she kept it under my public domain notice though so it's all good. (I guess they might worry about steganography which is why svg's are better than pngs, but it's not like you cannot do steganography with svg's, only your bandwidth or payload is less. I'm ok if you repost it, but it would be nice if that meant you also double checked the numbers to make sure I did not make mistakes). Anyway, the guy who rewrote it in python left boron off the chart which really flies off the top in volumetric energy density as raw fuel, in absence of the oxygen containing oxide, which btw, would have to be recycled, so heavy, and it's an unfairly large number on the chart then. Also boron is deadly to all chitin based life such as bugs and fungi, and polluting the environment full of it, other than trace quantities here and there (which is actually needed), would devastate the ecosystem of this planet, for any plant based life that depends on flowers (which is pretty much all plant life, except evergreen flowerless conifer forests way up the cold mountainside). Also lithium borohydride might look an amazing material compared to gasoline and diesel, but the fact is that hydrocarbons like fat, gasoline and diesel are king, because LiBH4 is a solid, and needs some kind of solvent, plus the end result of combustion is lithium borate, a heavy solid or ash, as opposed to gases of CO2, H2O, and N2, (minor NOx) with liquid hydrocarbons or just H2O (and minor NOx) with ammonia. Also hydrogen is off the chart as far as density by weight goes - it makes a great rocket fuel, where weight is absolutely everything, for super heavy freight payload space rockets where containment pressure surface weight is small compared to the huge bulk volume, but it is really poor on storage by volume - but for things where weight is not everything - including automotive applications - plus the quantities are small and the relative containment cylinder weight is very heavy, hydrogen is neither good by weight, and especially it sucks by density by volume, not even beating zinc air batteries at 700 bar (or 700x14.503= 10,000 psi compression, and all batteries are notoriously poor in energy density. and in the liquid state it requires constant venting and boil off to keep the temperatures low, including filling the atmosphere with hydrogen gas that ends up in the troposphere and at the prevailing Earth temperatures, it has enough escape velocity to leave the planet (which is why Earth is not a gas covered giant like Ju
It's urban sprawl and grass cutting of bushy and wooded areas, now made vogue all over the world, just like forced insurance. It is the senseless grass cutting that keeps carbon storage in fertile areas low per acre, dumping it all into the atmosphere. The world population is growing out of control, and so does the lawn acreage expansion with it, together with food crop areas, though food crop has a good excuse. But a lawn grass layer 2 inches tall vs. a bushy layer 12 inches to 60 inches or forested layer 5 to 30 meters tall, that's a whole lot of difference in carbon storage ability, per acre. It is the senseless grass cutting, and senseless devastation of weed flower dependent bugs like butterflies, above everything else, that's gonna precipitate a global economic collapse, brought on on purpose by the mind controlling parasites that inhabit every living animal, including every human being.
Also male baby cattle, just because they happen to be born male and unable to provide milk profit later, kept lying low in tents for their entire short life span, so their meat remains tender, and commands a higher profit at the meat store, that seems like an unhappy, suffering, consent lacking scenario, and people should be able to eat the not-so-tender veal meat, like they can eat regular beef steak. It's like if I had to be an animal bred and raised for meat food, I'd like to live out a happy life, and when it's time for me to die, I'd like not to be a priori informed about it, it should just happen like I'd go to sleep, and never wake up. I would much prefer that situation compared to constant mental anguish and suffering throughout my life. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee. Sometimes that principle comes in handy. In fact the great game analyst, Johny Neumann came up with the forgiving tit for tat method as a best strategy: play tit for tat most of the time, but once in a while forgive, like 9 out of 10 tit for tat, good acts for good acts, bad acts for bad acts, but once in a while, 1 out of 10, or something like that, if you're stuck in a perpetual bad acts for bad acts response situation, make a good act for bad act response. Never make a bad act for good act response, though.
My great grandfather said, during the communist forced home entrances and kulak property confiscations - including forcing my (US born) grandmother to sweep off the attic from any bits of scattered grain, and leaving the house completely empty of food, only squash being left to eat, which the collectors did not consider food as it usually was grown as feed for pigs, so when my mother and her twin brother's skin turned yellow from eating orange pumpkin for weeks, they were sent home from school in fear of having hepatitis and spreading an infection - so during those days, my grandmother's father said the only thing they cannot take from you is what you know. Take care to learn as much as you can, which kind of means fight anyone who seeks to block you in that quest.
I took up verbal terrorism as a hobby, to fight the system, and Da Man. Power to the people! Long live the US Constitution, and the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness it tries to guarantee!
Such as: 1. freedom of speech, freedom of conscience 2. freedom to own weapons, right to self defense 3. freedom from quartering soldiers in private homes 4. freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures 5. freedom from forced self-incrimination 6. freedom from mock trials, excessive delays, right to trial by jury 7. freedom from double jeopardy, right to at least 6 jurors in a controversy over $20 8. freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, or excessive bail 9. freedom from assuming there are no further rights of individuals than thus enumerated 10. freedom from excessively centralized power, most rights reserved for individual states and individual citizens... (the 10 original ones 1791)
13. freedom from slavery or forced servitude unless as punishment obtained by due process, 1865 14. equal protection as citizens to all persons born on US soil, (even to illegal immigrant parents); also slave property value losses not redeemable to prior owners 1868.. 19. freedom from discrimination in voting rights based on sex, right of women (or transvestites) to vote 1919... etc, etc,
and they could amend it with amendment zero, freedom of thought, right to know the world, right to basic knowledge and culture, right to public domain information, property of intellectual nature only temporary
What kind of thing is having a fee for existence of life, per individual. As in you get a litter of 10 puppies, and you either have to kill or drown 6 of them, else you owe the government money not only for 4, but all 10 of them. Once you get used to licenses per pets, then you move on to livestock, then anything alive, and then come humans - you'll have to purchase a license for each child, payable as a tax to the government - else they exist out of order - and they take over the responsibility for that fee when they turn 18, or signed into adulthood by the parents at 16. The basic existence fee payable to the local powers that be - be it a democratic government or a feudal lord you have o swear fealty to - is gonna be around $9000 per individual per year. Dog licenses. What a fucking joke.
Some houses, such as that of Mark Twain, and old presidents, do enter public domain, sort of, like a museum item, but I think the inheritors get a fair purchase price for releasing it into public domain like private museum holder ship. Perhaps similar things could be applied to intellectual property that's really difficult to let go of, such as the looming Mickey Mouse entering into public domain in 2020, and Disney will lobby billions to yet again extend copyright law. I got this CD at Walmart, released by Disney, titled "Let it go", which I found really funny. It's like I was a zombie and led to it directly through mind control. So anyway, when it's time for Disney to let Mickey Mouse go, perhaps the people, the public, who become the next owners, could compensate Disney during such a difficult transaction, and pay them some decent sum from the tax funds to make such a transition easier, similar to how the Mark Twain house probably got a decent sum at the transaction from the inheritors into public display conservatorship.
I live in the US, but if I find old electronics put out in the trash, I can barely resist not stopping and putting it in the trunk. Like a perfectly good 40 inch CRT TV, with vibrant color. Why would you even take that apart. I used to pick apart electronics as a hobby, and even dream about automating things around the home - electronics, such as amateur radio, and sensors, is an awesome thing - to the point of where they give me a job, where the process really needs and begs for automation, - but that's a great way to invite hacking and sabotage on yourself - and whatever automation it has, like digital flow meters, they constantly, constantly, constantly fail on you, or are obviously remote control hacked and display obviously false information, and my best answer there is that you can somewhat rely on your own human biological senses of sight, smell and hearing, a lot more than anything a digital or analog sensor can display to you, including judging flow rates of a solution from mere appearance, knowing it just went from 5 gallons per minute to 7 gallons per minute, not 3.2 like your flow meter says (and the ones fucking with you with incorrect process numbers have not yet realized you realized they are fucking with you), and often you don't have time to fuck with the flow meter and calibrate it or make it work right, also its readings max out at 7 gpm due to friction, and when you visually look at your process flow you might have 9 gallons or even 11 per minute, and that highest sustainable flow that you can get at acceptable quality is everything when it comes to company profit. So I kinda got disenchanted by digital electronics bigtime, and even analog electronics, and have come to know the value and reliability and cheapness of biotech sensors with a brain, such as a plain human being, or a dog with a sense of smell. With biotech, through reproduction, you get a really high tech self reliant piece of equipment that's very hard to beat on price with artificial and dumb and most importantly, unreliable things. But back country counties now have dog license fees, enacted like 2 years ago, which is bullshit, because there is no home security system better than dogs with extreme sense of smell and hearing that nothing else beats in this world (even if they lack color vision, they more than make up for it by smell and hearing), but under expensive licenses they want you to get easily hackable electronic home security systems. If I ever had dogs I'd refuse to register and pay licenses for them. What kind of bullshit is that?
Intellectual property is ultimately public domain, in all legal systems so far. The property part should entail the respect part to the creators, not the "price" abuse by powermongering intellectual property hogging firms. I think they should maintain a DRM free, free to pirate as much as you want intellectual property world, and it should come down to everyone's matter of conscience, within their own financial means to sort of "donate', or "live up to the law", and pay for the copyright to the owners. If they are broke, they should not pay anything, especially if they could live in abstinence of such a thing - and then you can't claim the opportunity cost as an IP owner. Cash in on the guilt part if you're an intellectual property owner, but don't deny knowledge from people that cannot afford it. I have donated $10 to the writer of Ace of Penguins, DJ Delorie, not because it's such great software, in fact it's not even that great, but because I respect him, even if he does not claim property rights over his creation. And the IP hogging management firms were completely absent from the transaction. I also paid ImageLine, the creators of Fruit Loops Studio, for version 5 of their software, some decent amount, not the outrageous prices they charge for their stuff though. I also bought Windows 2000, Office 2000, Visual Studio 6, Windows XP, Office XP at my college book store, when I was in college over a decade ago, each for $10, so a total like $50. Microsoft was pimping their stuff like drugs to college kids, at a very low price or consideration, at an age when the engineering computer labs had a good mix of Sun Microsystems workstations, VAX computers, and Windows computers, with Linux really looming on the front, as a way to get and keep everyone addicted, and to exterminate the competition. I don't really feel guilty for buying that stuff so cheap, or even pirating their shit, when they already made trillions on it from everybody else, and it's not like the programmers get paid most of it, I mean they used to get paid decent, like $80,000 fresh out of college, then run the crap out of them to where they burn out in 2 years, and you go through them like underwear and none have a career with you. Those programmers should have been paid $500,000 each at least, for anything fair and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should have been satisfied and happy each amassing 1 billion instead of a couple tens of billion for themselves. But those days were the Microsoft heydays, when they did have actual competition, and they were forced to do good business, unlike the lazy fat pigs they turned into today, having exterminated all competition but some remnants here and there, and all the stuff they've come up with since - the bloatload and inefficiency of dotnet compared to the speed of Win32/VB Classic, bloat of Vista sux, Office 2007+ with that stupid ribbon and megamegabytes of disk space waste, etc - all suck compared to what we used to have with Win2000, Office 2000 and Visual Studio 6. I feel for them these days under the low priced competition from Arm, Chromebooks, and the like, at least 6 months ago so it seemed at Micro Center's laptop offerings, like the sky was falling on Microsoft, but I just checked, and things seem to be better, but even Micro Center is pimping Windows 7 things as opposed to Windows 8.1, as in more traditional Windows, not this new smart phone like world where everyone gets used to constant cellular antenna geolocation tracking, every mouseclick logged in an anti 5th amendment way, and keeping all their precious data on the cloud, ready to get blackmailed over access to it, and I go as far as removing even Windows 7 from this HP Mini 200 Intel Atom 7 Watt CPU+Chipset 9 hr Li battery thing, and installing Windows XP SP3 on it from an HP recovery disk, which flies circles around Win 7 in both speed and user experience, and can run old school software I'm used to, such as my favorite piece of software ever, the EULA-less American Heritage Talking Dictionary for Windows 95 from Softkey, where def
You own the food you swallowed unless they force you to regurgitate it, and then you don't own that either. Usually, in a society you have your own underwear, unless your girlfriend steals it from you, in which case you don't really own that either, but you have your coat, your knife, that are personal property, then also your house or your tent, even under a nomadic way of life. Nomads don't have land as property because they have vast amounts of it, and usually none of it is very fertile, or agriculture is just not worth it - for instance, because of military reasons, as in someone steals your harvest, so you're not gonna spend a whole year tending to land just to watch the crops stolen, even in a very fertile land situation. In a stable, honest society, where people respect each other, agriculture and private land property is possible, but even that gets abused into the naturally tending weak get weaker strong get stronger feudalist landlord/tenant or serf situation, to where, when you compare, you are not that much better off than you used to be as a nomad without land property. Similar situations go for intellectual property, it has two sides to it, the good and respecting side, and the bad, abusing, and exploitative side, and it's all often simply a matter of a number, as in price. The feudal lord had a yearly 10% of your property confiscation tax - he'd enter your private home, and take 10% of everything you got - which, btw. might have been less than present democratic tax rates. But the very fact that someone can enter your home and just take personal stuff, just because the two of you were born into a situation where one is assumed as an "owner" of all surrounding land - by birthright and what not, whatever went down a couple generations ago, - and everyone else owes him for that, is not a very tasty one. The founding fathers of the US envisioned a self reliant, landlord- tenant free (as in huge property owner vs. serf or indentured servant or slave - free) yeoman farmer democracy, instead we have urban slave to somebody throwing you a bone of a job, or welfare shame bankrupting the system situation, and the price of food has been kept very low, while property taxes on farms very high comparatively, with some exceptions, plus modern farming requires machinery that decays and it's overly expensive compared to income, and farmers are in perpetual debt. Growing your own food and surviving in absence of someone throwing your a job should be like a right, but it's complicated, because there is such a thing as economies of scale, and a large farm can afford efficient equipments like combines, and cooperatives of small farms, they are communists contraptions that don't work, everyone abuses the tragedy of the commons, such as a collectivized combine, everyone runs the crap out of it but does not pay for the maintenance, let the other guy take care of it, or pay for it instead. So we have the bulk of the population living in cities and begging for someone to give them a job, and food is a petty item on their list of expenses compared to housing, or landlord tenant cost, which even applies for homeowners paying mortgage, they are like indentured servants for 30 years, and the banks get the tallest sky scrapers downtown from this setup, while creating a tulip mania out of the housing market.
And Disney is screwing everyone alright by lobbying for the copyright extension from 2000 to 2020, new stuff entering into public domain frozen and suspended for 20 years, and the last automatically public domain material is stuck at 1923, for 20 years, and I can sit here twirl my thumbs waiting for that. Because of Mickey Mouse, I can't freely read scientific stuff published in 1924, like organic chemistry things, or even vacuum tube things. Fuck Disney. If it were up to Disney and the bloodsuckers like them, intellectual property management firms, they'd modify copyright law to have perpetual copyright, or practically perpetual. But the fact is, that the principle still stands, that copyright is only temporary, and eventually everything enters the public domain, even if Disney has succeeded in lobbying to pervert the laws to make copyright last practically forever, or almost forever. The original copyright term in the US was 14 years, renewable to 28 years total. Eventually we'll have copyright that lasts "only" 1325 years, and then I will really need a lot of patient thumb twirling before something finally enters public domain. As long as we keep the principle, that intellectual property is ultimately public domain, and private only temporarily, it's all good.
Not really. I really liked the job itself, other than making lawn mowing equipment. It's like I'm all against forced grass cutting, and they make me earn my money by making grass cutting equipment. I was simply late 1 min at a time until I pointed out on attendance. Obnoxious. It's better than having to earn your daily bread by being a Nazi gas chamber operator, but it's somewhat along the same topic. It's kind of a nice job, all you have to do is press the button, and get paid a whole lot of money for it, but other people suffer in case of the gas chamber, or other bugs in case of the lawnmowers. I mean I don't really mind grass cutting if people want to do it, as long as they don't do it to an excess. And especially not allowing someone to have their land "au naturel" and letting the native bugs and and "weed" flowers exist like they have for 600 million years, and cutting their grass by force through city ordinance, and charging them for it and threatening with foreclosure and messing up their credits if they don't pay, that's an outright crime and abuse of power by government. Native weed and native bugs are beautiful. What's not beautiful is the ugly city employees attacking them with lawn mowing equipment against the owner's wishes, and leaving a devastation behind, and they send you a bill for it too. It's like I'll rape your preteen daughter, then murder her before your eyes, then I send you a bill for my effort to do it.
Because that's what these intellectual property hogging punks made him do. That's what they always do. They are not in the 50/50 let's share business, but in the we can throw anyone a bone and they should kiss our asses for it business. These punk are in the business of collecting ideas, buying them for a measly price, then relicensing it at a huge price, and make profit. Money makes the world go round, for them, it's their money at the expense of everyone else around them. That's life. It's like, if I have an idea, why should I sell it to them for $1, and agree that it's their intellectual property, when it's something I might want to do in the future, and then I'd be required to repurchase the rights to it for $1 billion. Stupid you if you sign anything over to these punks. The way to greet intellectual property management firms knocking on your door trying to "screw" you out of your liberty to think and act freely by bribing you with a dollar to turn those ideas into property, into their property, is with a shotgun barrel to their nose.
OK. So you lower them. Or hang them from above, and below, and you pull it from below, to guide it into the hole. It's a little more complicated than pulling up. If you don't pull from below, and it dangles about at 1600C glowing white heat, it may be hard to aim the tip to lower directly into the hole, unless you have, say, a whole yard clearance on each side. And at such temperatures concrete may not be stable, but instead you might need boron, or graphite loaded with boron, but graphite might ignite if there is a meteorite fireball crash into the reactor, and there oxygen access to it, but boron is both high melting point, and it covers with a glassy oxide that boils at 1860C, unlike CO or CO2 that's a gas. High melting oxides like MgO or ZrO2 both are solid to near 2700C, but their borates glasses might melt low. Neither MgO or ZrO2 absorb neutrons well, but Hf is decent, and similar in properties to Zr. So the ideal neutron absorbing coffin material might be Hf which melts at 2200C, and whose oxide melts at 2700C. Tungsten also burns in air, absorbs neutrons decently, but its oxides are lower melting and more volatile. They get all this Hf anyway when they clean it out from the Zr structural materials. Btw, ThO2, thoria is the highest melting oxide, a ceramic, at 3300C, and its useful as a nuclear fuel rod in that state, as long as it don't crack (you may need like a thin low thermal transfer resistant and low neutron absorbing molybdenum crucible to hold it in, hanging in the reactor space. But hanging is possibly not the ideal state under high velocity argon gas, but tethered at both ends probably is, so pulling down, or even falling down in case of a catastrophy, is probably best. You're right. Suppose the whole thing melts, and it falls down and melts the containment coffin material too and alloys with it. It still a successful shutdown when the neutron absorbers get melt-alloyed. Instead of tethered by a string in the bottom, they could have a dummy section even made of different materials, halfway stuck into the coffin-hole, and only the top part of the rod participating in the fast neutron exchange reactions, then you flip the rods. Once half of it is stuck into the slot (still having a lot of clearance from each side, how high can you go? a whole yard on each side?), in case of a meteorite hit catastrophe the rest should be nicely guided. You could also have a neutron reflector cover over the holes with less clearance, but lower melting pt than the coffin material, say zr that melts at 1855 or so, compared to hf at 2200 and moly at 2600, so in case of a runaway that gets the rods stuck in that cover, and a meltdown from that, the cover melts and drops the rods at 1900C, which is still lower than the 2200 hf melting point, so your coffin does not melt right away. I should go back and clean up this blah blah, and make it sound more professional, but I'm not doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean it's more profitable, but not necessarily better in all respects. It may not be better in the sense of somebody steals a few tens of lbs of plutonium from the waste, and blows up a tiny suitcase bomb that generates a bigger mushroom cloud than Nagasaki in the middle of Wall Street, NY. There are two sides to everything, the good and the bad. Even to high population density. It'd be better if people spread out a little, as in urban sprawl going to extreme, but only if they could coexist with weed and native bugs and similar lifeforms, and not friggin lawn mow the shit out of all of nature where ever they go.
I wish I had a cat i could post about on Facebook. But it would die of a heatstroke if I left it at home in the apartment I live, and I sure as hell won't pay $300 a month to keep it air conditioned. This summer has been surprisingly mild, and it's almost over, and a cat might have survived fine. Though I still can't get a cat or even a potted flower, cuz I don't know what next summer is gonna be like. The plus side of such a heated attic-apartment is that it gets sterilized completely in the summertime from the heat, and I'm the only life form able to make it through the summer in it.
Who's the tea party candidate? I want less government oppression coming from the democrats, and less welfare money wasted on young people breeding out of control on it, instead of it going to the old people, military, roads, like it was supposed to, and things like NASA, that could put up space stations from Moon based materials, and secure the future of all life from Earth even in the event of a nuclear holocaust or global biotech invented military disease catastrophe. (Btw, I take any opportunity to say Fuck Monsanto and all their biotech crap, including things like Roundup (R)tm.) But because we have so many hungry mouths popping even more hungry mouths out of control starting with age 13 girls on welfare money, we cannot afford a space program. Fuck the democrats and their overbearing taxes like mandatory Obamacare on people trying to keep it together, collected to feed these people breeding out of control on the backs of, then outvoting, the hard working people who can only afford to raise one child and send him to college, while trying to stay out of bankruptcy.
I agree. Ideally the whole country and the world should run on fully wind, solar and hydro, and then we can ban things like nuclear, and even coal and natural gas burnt for simply electric power in major power plants, not used as a chemical feedstock. And there is enough solar input to the world to cover the world's energy needs, true it does require a huge huge huge area and infrastructure. See the image by Matthias Loster, for what kind of area would be needed to supply all of the world's energy needs(including transportation, industrial, household, etc,) if it were based on silicon based solar cells, at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... also at http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_la...
Note that the black dots on that picture represent a huge huge huge area of land fully covered with solar cells, possibly beyond our economic means to accomplish, so we may need, at least for the present time, a secure fallback on high energy density and guaranteed availability, no bullshit nuclear power. But we should make all effort and strive for the ability to leave behind nuclear completely, and fully rely on renewables only.
And wifi. A nuclear reactor without wifi capability, needed to post tweets on twitter, and snapshots on instagram, is just so retro. Time to step into to the 21st century.
macpacheco,
Dig through my slashdot posts. Look for gallium and bismuth and argon, you might find some interesting mental food there. I started posting heavily here around April this year, but nobody has time to read through all my mentally heavy and circuitous thoughts.
Yours &c,
sillybilly
Wikipedia has a policy on no original research or ideas, but as far as I know, you can say anything you friggin feel like on Slashdot, the only consequence is that your comment may get moderated down, and your karma getting messed up. But then you can come back and post as Anonymous Coward, without a karma issue.
Also, I just looked through my Wikipedia postings from 2006, looking for some energy density png image I posted, not finding it, but I noticed my comments on desert downdraft towers. Back then I had no idea about this water extraction part, I was thinking more of an artificial wind generation if there is no wind, and power harnessing like that. Which could still be an added bonus to such towers, guaranteed wind power as long as there is guaranteed sunshine. As long as there is an air density difference of cold air up high and very warm air near the sand surface, you can have either an updraft or downdraft tower, and once inertia is set in, it becomes self sustaining, possibly with some cycloning near the top tip and even throughout the tower if it's of huge diameter. But with a downdraft you get the option of super-atomizing any kind of liquid, and recovering through filters at the bottom, though then air friction and self sustaining draft becomes an issue. But you could possibly have multicyclones wet-vac style at the bottom, plus electrostatic precipitators that go after the tiniest droplets. You also don't get counter current contact, because both the air and the droplets fall downward, however you get a superhigh contact area from fog-like mist, so that should not be a problem. With a downdraft you don't get the risk of blowing your precious water hogging liquid out the top of the stack, and you have lots of real estate down there to work and massage out the tiny droplets, including massive, tortuous labyrinth path settling chambers the size of caves or auditoriums or football fields, something you cannot afford to put at the top of the stack.
The reason why most stacks or chimneys in the world operate in a strictly upward mode is that usually you have hot air at their bottom by burning some fuel, and that creates low air density that naturally rises, and induces a draft and sets off the inertia of the flow only upwards.
Yeah well anyway, for nonmilitary uses, or especially for buses, they should keep all nuclear materials out of public life. Buses should be nuclear powered by electricity or ammonia coming from a well guarded, high security and military operated nuclear power plant, or even if private, the military participates and is fully involved, and has authority to dictate terms of operation above and beyond any private property owners and investors. Nuclear is important but not a joke. It has a potential for vast quantities of energy, but you have to transpose that into lower energy density chemical storage carriers.
For chemical energy storage, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... and also http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... . Btw, I'm the original creator of that MJ/L vs MJ/kg chart, back in like 2006, and some of the values on it I'm still not sure I did not make a mistake on, people should double check Wikipedia numbers. But the overall, large picture still stands, as far as trends go. I did it in Excel at first, then took a png screenshot of it, and some guy rewrote it in python. My posting of the original picture, is removed even from my wikipedia postings history, hmm, but I found it reposted here, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... by http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... but she kept it under my public domain notice though so it's all good. (I guess they might worry about steganography which is why svg's are better than pngs, but it's not like you cannot do steganography with svg's, only your bandwidth or payload is less. I'm ok if you repost it, but it would be nice if that meant you also double checked the numbers to make sure I did not make mistakes). Anyway, the guy who rewrote it in python left boron off the chart which really flies off the top in volumetric energy density as raw fuel, in absence of the oxygen containing oxide, which btw, would have to be recycled, so heavy, and it's an unfairly large number on the chart then. Also boron is deadly to all chitin based life such as bugs and fungi, and polluting the environment full of it, other than trace quantities here and there (which is actually needed), would devastate the ecosystem of this planet, for any plant based life that depends on flowers (which is pretty much all plant life, except evergreen flowerless conifer forests way up the cold mountainside). Also lithium borohydride might look an amazing material compared to gasoline and diesel, but the fact is that hydrocarbons like fat, gasoline and diesel are king, because LiBH4 is a solid, and needs some kind of solvent, plus the end result of combustion is lithium borate, a heavy solid or ash, as opposed to gases of CO2, H2O, and N2, (minor NOx) with liquid hydrocarbons or just H2O (and minor NOx) with ammonia. Also hydrogen is off the chart as far as density by weight goes - it makes a great rocket fuel, where weight is absolutely everything, for super heavy freight payload space rockets where containment pressure surface weight is small compared to the huge bulk volume, but it is really poor on storage by volume - but for things where weight is not everything - including automotive applications - plus the quantities are small and the relative containment cylinder weight is very heavy, hydrogen is neither good by weight, and especially it sucks by density by volume, not even beating zinc air batteries at 700 bar (or 700x14.503= 10,000 psi compression, and all batteries are notoriously poor in energy density. and in the liquid state it requires constant venting and boil off to keep the temperatures low, including filling the atmosphere with hydrogen gas that ends up in the troposphere and at the prevailing Earth temperatures, it has enough escape velocity to leave the planet (which is why Earth is not a gas covered giant like Ju
It's urban sprawl and grass cutting of bushy and wooded areas, now made vogue all over the world, just like forced insurance. It is the senseless grass cutting that keeps carbon storage in fertile areas low per acre, dumping it all into the atmosphere. The world population is growing out of control, and so does the lawn acreage expansion with it, together with food crop areas, though food crop has a good excuse. But a lawn grass layer 2 inches tall vs. a bushy layer 12 inches to 60 inches or forested layer 5 to 30 meters tall, that's a whole lot of difference in carbon storage ability, per acre. It is the senseless grass cutting, and senseless devastation of weed flower dependent bugs like butterflies, above everything else, that's gonna precipitate a global economic collapse, brought on on purpose by the mind controlling parasites that inhabit every living animal, including every human being.
Also male baby cattle, just because they happen to be born male and unable to provide milk profit later, kept lying low in tents for their entire short life span, so their meat remains tender, and commands a higher profit at the meat store, that seems like an unhappy, suffering, consent lacking scenario, and people should be able to eat the not-so-tender veal meat, like they can eat regular beef steak. It's like if I had to be an animal bred and raised for meat food, I'd like to live out a happy life, and when it's time for me to die, I'd like not to be a priori informed about it, it should just happen like I'd go to sleep, and never wake up. I would much prefer that situation compared to constant mental anguish and suffering throughout my life. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee. Sometimes that principle comes in handy. In fact the great game analyst, Johny Neumann came up with the forgiving tit for tat method as a best strategy: play tit for tat most of the time, but once in a while forgive, like 9 out of 10 tit for tat, good acts for good acts, bad acts for bad acts, but once in a while, 1 out of 10, or something like that, if you're stuck in a perpetual bad acts for bad acts response situation, make a good act for bad act response. Never make a bad act for good act response, though.
My great grandfather said, during the communist forced home entrances and kulak property confiscations - including forcing my (US born) grandmother to sweep off the attic from any bits of scattered grain, and leaving the house completely empty of food, only squash being left to eat, which the collectors did not consider food as it usually was grown as feed for pigs, so when my mother and her twin brother's skin turned yellow from eating orange pumpkin for weeks, they were sent home from school in fear of having hepatitis and spreading an infection - so during those days, my grandmother's father said the only thing they cannot take from you is what you know. Take care to learn as much as you can, which kind of means fight anyone who seeks to block you in that quest.
I took up verbal terrorism as a hobby, to fight the system, and Da Man.
Power to the people! Long live the US Constitution, and the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness it tries to guarantee!
Such as: ... (the 10 original ones 1791)
1. freedom of speech, freedom of conscience
2. freedom to own weapons, right to self defense
3. freedom from quartering soldiers in private homes
4. freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures
5. freedom from forced self-incrimination
6. freedom from mock trials, excessive delays, right to trial by jury
7. freedom from double jeopardy, right to at least 6 jurors in a controversy over $20
8. freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, or excessive bail
9. freedom from assuming there are no further rights of individuals than thus enumerated
10. freedom from excessively centralized power, most rights reserved for individual states and individual citizens
13. freedom from slavery or forced servitude unless as punishment obtained by due process, 1865 .. ...
14. equal protection as citizens to all persons born on US soil, (even to illegal immigrant parents); also slave property value losses not redeemable to prior owners 1868
19. freedom from discrimination in voting rights based on sex, right of women (or transvestites) to vote 1919
etc, etc,
and they could amend it with amendment zero, freedom of thought, right to know the world, right to basic knowledge and culture, right to public domain information, property of intellectual nature only temporary
Imagine how quickly you'd go bankrupt in a situation like this, simply from the dog license fees: http://lolheaven.com/this-man-...
What kind of thing is having a fee for existence of life, per individual. As in you get a litter of 10 puppies, and you either have to kill or drown 6 of them, else you owe the government money not only for 4, but all 10 of them. Once you get used to licenses per pets, then you move on to livestock, then anything alive, and then come humans - you'll have to purchase a license for each child, payable as a tax to the government - else they exist out of order - and they take over the responsibility for that fee when they turn 18, or signed into adulthood by the parents at 16. The basic existence fee payable to the local powers that be - be it a democratic government or a feudal lord you have o swear fealty to - is gonna be around $9000 per individual per year. Dog licenses. What a fucking joke.
Some houses, such as that of Mark Twain, and old presidents, do enter public domain, sort of, like a museum item, but I think the inheritors get a fair purchase price for releasing it into public domain like private museum holder ship. Perhaps similar things could be applied to intellectual property that's really difficult to let go of, such as the looming Mickey Mouse entering into public domain in 2020, and Disney will lobby billions to yet again extend copyright law. I got this CD at Walmart, released by Disney, titled "Let it go", which I found really funny. It's like I was a zombie and led to it directly through mind control. So anyway, when it's time for Disney to let Mickey Mouse go, perhaps the people, the public, who become the next owners, could compensate Disney during such a difficult transaction, and pay them some decent sum from the tax funds to make such a transition easier, similar to how the Mark Twain house probably got a decent sum at the transaction from the inheritors into public display conservatorship.
I live in the US, but if I find old electronics put out in the trash, I can barely resist not stopping and putting it in the trunk. Like a perfectly good 40 inch CRT TV, with vibrant color. Why would you even take that apart. I used to pick apart electronics as a hobby, and even dream about automating things around the home - electronics, such as amateur radio, and sensors, is an awesome thing - to the point of where they give me a job, where the process really needs and begs for automation, - but that's a great way to invite hacking and sabotage on yourself - and whatever automation it has, like digital flow meters, they constantly, constantly, constantly fail on you, or are obviously remote control hacked and display obviously false information, and my best answer there is that you can somewhat rely on your own human biological senses of sight, smell and hearing, a lot more than anything a digital or analog sensor can display to you, including judging flow rates of a solution from mere appearance, knowing it just went from 5 gallons per minute to 7 gallons per minute, not 3.2 like your flow meter says (and the ones fucking with you with incorrect process numbers have not yet realized you realized they are fucking with you), and often you don't have time to fuck with the flow meter and calibrate it or make it work right, also its readings max out at 7 gpm due to friction, and when you visually look at your process flow you might have 9 gallons or even 11 per minute, and that highest sustainable flow that you can get at acceptable quality is everything when it comes to company profit. So I kinda got disenchanted by digital electronics bigtime, and even analog electronics, and have come to know the value and reliability and cheapness of biotech sensors with a brain, such as a plain human being, or a dog with a sense of smell. With biotech, through reproduction, you get a really high tech self reliant piece of equipment that's very hard to beat on price with artificial and dumb and most importantly, unreliable things. But back country counties now have dog license fees, enacted like 2 years ago, which is bullshit, because there is no home security system better than dogs with extreme sense of smell and hearing that nothing else beats in this world (even if they lack color vision, they more than make up for it by smell and hearing), but under expensive licenses they want you to get easily hackable electronic home security systems. If I ever had dogs I'd refuse to register and pay licenses for them. What kind of bullshit is that?
Intellectual property is ultimately public domain, in all legal systems so far.
The property part should entail the respect part to the creators, not the "price" abuse by powermongering intellectual property hogging firms.
I think they should maintain a DRM free, free to pirate as much as you want intellectual property world, and it should come down to everyone's matter of conscience, within their own financial means to sort of "donate', or "live up to the law", and pay for the copyright to the owners. If they are broke, they should not pay anything, especially if they could live in abstinence of such a thing - and then you can't claim the opportunity cost as an IP owner. Cash in on the guilt part if you're an intellectual property owner, but don't deny knowledge from people that cannot afford it.
I have donated $10 to the writer of Ace of Penguins, DJ Delorie, not because it's such great software, in fact it's not even that great, but because I respect him, even if he does not claim property rights over his creation. And the IP hogging management firms were completely absent from the transaction. I also paid ImageLine, the creators of Fruit Loops Studio, for version 5 of their software, some decent amount, not the outrageous prices they charge for their stuff though.
I also bought Windows 2000, Office 2000, Visual Studio 6, Windows XP, Office XP at my college book store, when I was in college over a decade ago, each for $10, so a total like $50. Microsoft was pimping their stuff like drugs to college kids, at a very low price or consideration, at an age when the engineering computer labs had a good mix of Sun Microsystems workstations, VAX computers, and Windows computers, with Linux really looming on the front, as a way to get and keep everyone addicted, and to exterminate the competition. I don't really feel guilty for buying that stuff so cheap, or even pirating their shit, when they already made trillions on it from everybody else, and it's not like the programmers get paid most of it, I mean they used to get paid decent, like $80,000 fresh out of college, then run the crap out of them to where they burn out in 2 years, and you go through them like underwear and none have a career with you. Those programmers should have been paid $500,000 each at least, for anything fair and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should have been satisfied and happy each amassing 1 billion instead of a couple tens of billion for themselves. But those days were the Microsoft heydays, when they did have actual competition, and they were forced to do good business, unlike the lazy fat pigs they turned into today, having exterminated all competition but some remnants here and there, and all the stuff they've come up with since - the bloatload and inefficiency of dotnet compared to the speed of Win32/VB Classic, bloat of Vista sux, Office 2007+ with that stupid ribbon and megamegabytes of disk space waste, etc - all suck compared to what we used to have with Win2000, Office 2000 and Visual Studio 6. I feel for them these days under the low priced competition from Arm, Chromebooks, and the like, at least 6 months ago so it seemed at Micro Center's laptop offerings, like the sky was falling on Microsoft, but I just checked, and things seem to be better, but even Micro Center is pimping Windows 7 things as opposed to Windows 8.1, as in more traditional Windows, not this new smart phone like world where everyone gets used to constant cellular antenna geolocation tracking, every mouseclick logged in an anti 5th amendment way, and keeping all their precious data on the cloud, ready to get blackmailed over access to it, and I go as far as removing even Windows 7 from this HP Mini 200 Intel Atom 7 Watt CPU+Chipset 9 hr Li battery thing, and installing Windows XP SP3 on it from an HP recovery disk, which flies circles around Win 7 in both speed and user experience, and can run old school software I'm used to, such as my favorite piece of software ever, the EULA-less American Heritage Talking Dictionary for Windows 95 from Softkey, where def
You own the food you swallowed unless they force you to regurgitate it, and then you don't own that either. Usually, in a society you have your own underwear, unless your girlfriend steals it from you, in which case you don't really own that either, but you have your coat, your knife, that are personal property, then also your house or your tent, even under a nomadic way of life. Nomads don't have land as property because they have vast amounts of it, and usually none of it is very fertile, or agriculture is just not worth it - for instance, because of military reasons, as in someone steals your harvest, so you're not gonna spend a whole year tending to land just to watch the crops stolen, even in a very fertile land situation. In a stable, honest society, where people respect each other, agriculture and private land property is possible, but even that gets abused into the naturally tending weak get weaker strong get stronger feudalist landlord/tenant or serf situation, to where, when you compare, you are not that much better off than you used to be as a nomad without land property. Similar situations go for intellectual property, it has two sides to it, the good and respecting side, and the bad, abusing, and exploitative side, and it's all often simply a matter of a number, as in price. The feudal lord had a yearly 10% of your property confiscation tax - he'd enter your private home, and take 10% of everything you got - which, btw. might have been less than present democratic tax rates. But the very fact that someone can enter your home and just take personal stuff, just because the two of you were born into a situation where one is assumed as an "owner" of all surrounding land - by birthright and what not, whatever went down a couple generations ago, - and everyone else owes him for that, is not a very tasty one. The founding fathers of the US envisioned a self reliant, landlord- tenant free (as in huge property owner vs. serf or indentured servant or slave - free) yeoman farmer democracy, instead we have urban slave to somebody throwing you a bone of a job, or welfare shame bankrupting the system situation, and the price of food has been kept very low, while property taxes on farms very high comparatively, with some exceptions, plus modern farming requires machinery that decays and it's overly expensive compared to income, and farmers are in perpetual debt. Growing your own food and surviving in absence of someone throwing your a job should be like a right, but it's complicated, because there is such a thing as economies of scale, and a large farm can afford efficient equipments like combines, and cooperatives of small farms, they are communists contraptions that don't work, everyone abuses the tragedy of the commons, such as a collectivized combine, everyone runs the crap out of it but does not pay for the maintenance, let the other guy take care of it, or pay for it instead. So we have the bulk of the population living in cities and begging for someone to give them a job, and food is a petty item on their list of expenses compared to housing, or landlord tenant cost, which even applies for homeowners paying mortgage, they are like indentured servants for 30 years, and the banks get the tallest sky scrapers downtown from this setup, while creating a tulip mania out of the housing market.
And Disney is screwing everyone alright by lobbying for the copyright extension from 2000 to 2020, new stuff entering into public domain frozen and suspended for 20 years, and the last automatically public domain material is stuck at 1923, for 20 years, and I can sit here twirl my thumbs waiting for that. Because of Mickey Mouse, I can't freely read scientific stuff published in 1924, like organic chemistry things, or even vacuum tube things. Fuck Disney. If it were up to Disney and the bloodsuckers like them, intellectual property management firms, they'd modify copyright law to have perpetual copyright, or practically perpetual. But the fact is, that the principle still stands, that copyright is only temporary, and eventually everything enters the public domain, even if Disney has succeeded in lobbying to pervert the laws to make copyright last practically forever, or almost forever. The original copyright term in the US was 14 years, renewable to 28 years total. Eventually we'll have copyright that lasts "only" 1325 years, and then I will really need a lot of patient thumb twirling before something finally enters public domain. As long as we keep the principle, that intellectual property is ultimately public domain, and private only temporarily, it's all good.
No kidding. That reminds me the joke: what's the difference between a hooker and a lawyer? The hooker stops screwing you when you're dead.
Not really. I really liked the job itself, other than making lawn mowing equipment. It's like I'm all against forced grass cutting, and they make me earn my money by making grass cutting equipment. I was simply late 1 min at a time until I pointed out on attendance. Obnoxious. It's better than having to earn your daily bread by being a Nazi gas chamber operator, but it's somewhat along the same topic. It's kind of a nice job, all you have to do is press the button, and get paid a whole lot of money for it, but other people suffer in case of the gas chamber, or other bugs in case of the lawnmowers. I mean I don't really mind grass cutting if people want to do it, as long as they don't do it to an excess. And especially not allowing someone to have their land "au naturel" and letting the native bugs and and "weed" flowers exist like they have for 600 million years, and cutting their grass by force through city ordinance, and charging them for it and threatening with foreclosure and messing up their credits if they don't pay, that's an outright crime and abuse of power by government. Native weed and native bugs are beautiful. What's not beautiful is the ugly city employees attacking them with lawn mowing equipment against the owner's wishes, and leaving a devastation behind, and they send you a bill for it too. It's like I'll rape your preteen daughter, then murder her before your eyes, then I send you a bill for my effort to do it.
Educators are notoriously exploited, and not lazy at all.
Because that's what these intellectual property hogging punks made him do. That's what they always do. They are not in the 50/50 let's share business, but in the we can throw anyone a bone and they should kiss our asses for it business. These punk are in the business of collecting ideas, buying them for a measly price, then relicensing it at a huge price, and make profit. Money makes the world go round, for them, it's their money at the expense of everyone else around them. That's life. It's like, if I have an idea, why should I sell it to them for $1, and agree that it's their intellectual property, when it's something I might want to do in the future, and then I'd be required to repurchase the rights to it for $1 billion. Stupid you if you sign anything over to these punks. The way to greet intellectual property management firms knocking on your door trying to "screw" you out of your liberty to think and act freely by bribing you with a dollar to turn those ideas into property, into their property, is with a shotgun barrel to their nose.
OK. So you lower them. Or hang them from above, and below, and you pull it from below, to guide it into the hole. It's a little more complicated than pulling up. If you don't pull from below, and it dangles about at 1600C glowing white heat, it may be hard to aim the tip to lower directly into the hole, unless you have, say, a whole yard clearance on each side. And at such temperatures concrete may not be stable, but instead you might need boron, or graphite loaded with boron, but graphite might ignite if there is a meteorite fireball crash into the reactor, and there oxygen access to it, but boron is both high melting point, and it covers with a glassy oxide that boils at 1860C, unlike CO or CO2 that's a gas. High melting oxides like MgO or ZrO2 both are solid to near 2700C, but their borates glasses might melt low. Neither MgO or ZrO2 absorb neutrons well, but Hf is decent, and similar in properties to Zr. So the ideal neutron absorbing coffin material might be Hf which melts at 2200C, and whose oxide melts at 2700C. Tungsten also burns in air, absorbs neutrons decently, but its oxides are lower melting and more volatile. They get all this Hf anyway when they clean it out from the Zr structural materials. Btw, ThO2, thoria is the highest melting oxide, a ceramic, at 3300C, and its useful as a nuclear fuel rod in that state, as long as it don't crack (you may need like a thin low thermal transfer resistant and low neutron absorbing molybdenum crucible to hold it in, hanging in the reactor space. But hanging is possibly not the ideal state under high velocity argon gas, but tethered at both ends probably is, so pulling down, or even falling down in case of a catastrophy, is probably best. You're right. Suppose the whole thing melts, and it falls down and melts the containment coffin material too and alloys with it. It still a successful shutdown when the neutron absorbers get melt-alloyed. Instead of tethered by a string in the bottom, they could have a dummy section even made of different materials, halfway stuck into the coffin-hole, and only the top part of the rod participating in the fast neutron exchange reactions, then you flip the rods. Once half of it is stuck into the slot (still having a lot of clearance from each side, how high can you go? a whole yard on each side?), in case of a meteorite hit catastrophe the rest should be nicely guided. You could also have a neutron reflector cover over the holes with less clearance, but lower melting pt than the coffin material, say zr that melts at 1855 or so, compared to hf at 2200 and moly at 2600, so in case of a runaway that gets the rods stuck in that cover, and a meltdown from that, the cover melts and drops the rods at 1900C, which is still lower than the 2200 hf melting point, so your coffin does not melt right away. I should go back and clean up this blah blah, and make it sound more professional, but I'm not doing that.