Re:Nuclear energy works!
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years. It will probably outlast civilization as we know which hasn't lasted 10,000 years yet. One of the study issues for Yucca Mountain is how do you mark deadly waste so that someone ten thousand years from now will deduce that is lethal and leave it alone.
Geez. Another one. Please get an education in physics or read the radiation hazard page at Wikipedia. The worst part of the waste is not the one with the long half-life elements (i.e. Plutonium, Uranium). But the short half-life elements (Iodine-131, Strontium-90).
Usually the faster something decays, the more radiation it releases per unit of time. Something that takes a long time to decay is usually just somewhat warm to the touch. Like plutonium.
The ultimate proof of course, is that elements with an infinite half-life (want even higher half-life than that?) like Au-197 (plain Gold) emit zero radiation.
If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource. The shorter half-life elements will have decayed already.
Regarding Plutonium toxicity, it is way overblown. Sure it is a heavy metal, so is Lead, yet we don't get into a hissy fit about it. Last I heard, they still used Lead to make solder. You aren't going to be allowed to make plates and forks from the stuff, or have it in easily inhalable or drinkable powdered or soluble form (like they used to have in Gasoline), but as long as you use proper procedure it is not that big a deal.
Going boom and killing a bunch isn't as bad as killing a bunch and making the land uninhabitable for decades after.
Ok, let us assume another Chernobyl like accident can happen (which won't using modern reactor designs). That was orders of magnitude less worse than the nuclear bombs they dropped in Japan in WW2, and guess what, people live there now.
While I agree fossil fuels are also not a good choice, I don't see what you're trying to say here. Guess why Norway has among the highest GDP in the world? Hmm, maybe because it's the third largest oil exporter in the world...
Geez, if Norway has that much oil, then I wonder why we get most of it from Saudi Arabia. Could it be that *gasp* they have so little oil that if we used it as a single source it would run out in a couple of years?
Steel can also be used to make weapons. In fact, the
Hitites used to guard the secret of iron manufacture jealously. Should every chunk of steel be heavily guarded? Rad waste doesn't blow up. After sitting all that time in the pools at the power plant, most of the dangerous stuff like iodine-131 (half-life 8.05 days) has already decayed. Even that is only a real problem if it gets spread around as a thin dust around a populated area (pretty slim chance considering rad waste does not blow up and stuff like plutonium is heavy). Liquid Natural Gas can blow up, and yet it is transported all the time, all the way from the Middle East. So what's the problem?
Guess what dude. S*it happens. Steam turbines in coal or gas power plants blow up. Heck, steam boilers blow up. People get lung problems from coal dust. Gas blows up. Dams burst. Windmills kill birds. The question is: is nuclear power better than the alternatives, i.e. do the benefits outweight the faults or not.
Versus fossil fuels the answer seems to be a definite yes. Cleaner air, has sources in stable countries, etc.
Solar is currently 20% max efficiency. Which is good enough for a lot of things. It does take huge areas, but not much space per se. Regarding accidents, those will happen with anything. It is a matter of benefit/cost ratio. If I thought that
way I wouldn't even leave bed in the morning.
We have far worse issues other than solar heating.
Oil will not last forever at these sorts of prices you know? But my main immediate concern is city
air pollution.
Wind power is actually one of the best new power sources right now. Plenty of room to expand,
reasonably cheap, scales ok. The issue is one of
irregular power supply. But you should know better
than to expect silver bullets.
Hybrids are a good first step, although I
prefer gasoline or other, possibly synthetic,
hydrocarbons powering fuel cells.
No, we do not have a single efficient replacement
for coal or oil. But unless people start trying
alternatives *now* and making them more work, you
*will* get to a time where you have no other
alternative anyway and will have to make a much
harder transition.
I personally think coal is perfectly expendable
for electric generation with technology available
right now and can be replaced with a mix of renewables (wind, hydro, solar) and nuclear
power. Of course, where it makes economic sense,
coal should still be used.
Oil is much harder to replace, because unlike
electric generator replacement, you cannot just
swap generators. You need to swap all the
automobiles, fueling stations, etc. The first step
to solving the transportation problem must
be the creation of one, or several, energy
carriers that can replace fossil fuels. These must have similar density and energy when
looked at a holistic perspective (i.e. you should
look at the useful energy, that gets turned into
movement). They should also allow quick vehicle recharging, like gas does. There are also vehicle and energy carrier cost issues.
Ultimately I doubt the carrier will be hydrogen.
It is just too low density, unless you find a good
way to pack it, which is what hydrocarbons do
anyway, so what's the point in trying to find
weird replacements? Just make some synthetic hydrocarbons.
The project Orion design most people remember was for a huge vessel built like a battleship (it was even made of steel) to carry along a manned crew. You have to remember this was originally designed in 1958, hence this sort of design.
If you just want to make a robotic probe, it would be smaller. Of course, if it is interstellar range (Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away) you want, it will still be positively huge if you want to get there in reasonable timescales. The Wikipedia page has some numbers.
There is no way around this size problem, according to known science, except if you put the fuel outside the ship. Which is what laser beamed solar sails are all about. If they can get them to work reliably...
But for manned deep space exploration, nuclear propulsion is still the best bet. Solar sails would be too frail and low thrust.
You have H-Bombs (fusion), so you do not need to mine as much Uranium to make a device with a similar explosive energy. Besides, these bombs will be smaller than the usual megaton city busters, more like tactical nukes (to blow up bridges, etc) used to be.
You could recycle old nuclear weapons to make the Orion propulsion devices, there are a load of these stockpiled right now. There are also other interesting ideas for how to make a fusion bomb without using a messy fission device as a trigger (using heavy powered lasers, chemical explosives, plasma guns, anti-matter, etc). Interestingly most of these ideas also apply to useable fusion power generation. Read about the NIF (National Ignition Facility) of the US and similar facilities in France and elsewhere for more on this matter.
Of course these other ideas are violently opposed by Greens and other similar people because they would make nuclear weapon proliferation a bigger issue in their view. Their way of thinking is, since the nukes would be cleaner, they would be used more widely. I think this issue is bogus. You do not use a stick of dynamite to kill a fly. It is a matter of economics. And if we do go into global thermonuclear war someday, wouldn't it be nicer if the weapons actually were cleaner? Sheesh.
Yeah, this is full of holes. And the worst thing is that it can mess with my wallet. No thank you.
A probably better solution IMHO would be:
ISPs block their users SMTP port (so you can't run your own mail server) unless you pay a small extra monthly subscription fee for an extra service. Most people do not want to run their own e-mail server anyway. Then ISPs add virus and spam blocking on their own source SMTP server.
This is sort of like the snail mail company x-raying mail for bombs and irradiating it to kill anthrax.
Known insecure ISPs would be added to a blacklist that you would automatically be subscribed at your own ISP. It would also have a whitelist so you could still permit some e-mail to come through.
Then you require bayesian like filtering (heck, Thunderbird and Eudora have it) on every mail client.
Current solutions are less efficient because they only filter spam at the destination, but not at the source.
Regarding fragmentation, it is quite simple. If Linus is working on 2.6.x with the OS vendors, like RedHat and SuSE, continuously folding new things that are known good, like the 2.4.x maintainer did, while still striving for compatibility and stability I see that as positive.
If however Linus merely intends to carry on business as usual for an unstable series, doing bleeding edge development that forces you to rewrite all the OS drivers and tools, hosing fundamental blocks of the OS, further and further drifting away from the OS vendors, without forking it into a new unstable series, the vacuum will grow between the Linus kernel and the distro kernels. As the vacuum grows, centrifugal forces will increase and join to create a new stable kernel, not controlled by Linus or tied to a certain distro.
Yes, glibc is the major problem regarding binary compatibility.
The kernel is a smaller problem, but you still have the small matter of tools. You often need to interact with the kernel using tools that are continuously deprecated. Replaced by new tools that ocasionally you need to relearn from scratch because someone changed the binary interface for that kernel functionality and the new tool programmer decided to make a completely different command line interface for doing exactly the same things the old tool did.
IMHO this will just increase the fragmentation between the vendor kernels. There should really be one, and only one stable kernel used by all the vendors. We have enough problems with binary compatibility in Linux already.
The Russians tried to launch that solar sail, but the launch failed. Besides, they were only doing the launch (the Russians have cheap launchers), since the solar sail was funded by the Planetary Society.
Regarding ISS, the Russians aren't the only ones doing expensive and tardy messes.
This is the typical fallacy. Fuel weight by itself is irrelevant since you will need a tank to hold it. You need to take into acount the whole cost, tank+fuel weight. Also take into account that a larger tank means a larger vessel which requires a larger (heavier) exterior shell.
Dinitrogen tetroxide is poisonous and so is Unsymmetrical Dimethyl Hydrazine - UDMH (look near the bottom). See also . I doubt that the chemicals produced in the burning of those two are not poisonous.
Actually, I suspect most of the exaust will be clean. H2O, N2 and CO2 (you are burning N2O4 and (CH3)2NNH2 after all). Of course, the engine may not be burning cleanly, but still... You may want someone with better knowledge of chemistry than me to confirm this.:-)
Solids are usually much worse, because they have Cl (Clorine).
Slashdot Mirror
Geez. Another one. Please get an education in physics or read the radiation hazard page at Wikipedia. The worst part of the waste is not the one with the long half-life elements (i.e. Plutonium, Uranium). But the short half-life elements (Iodine-131, Strontium-90).
Usually the faster something decays, the more radiation it releases per unit of time. Something that takes a long time to decay is usually just somewhat warm to the touch. Like plutonium.
The ultimate proof of course, is that elements with an infinite half-life (want even higher half-life than that?) like Au-197 (plain Gold) emit zero radiation.
If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource. The shorter half-life elements will have decayed already.
Regarding Plutonium toxicity, it is way overblown. Sure it is a heavy metal, so is Lead, yet we don't get into a hissy fit about it. Last I heard, they still used Lead to make solder. You aren't going to be allowed to make plates and forks from the stuff, or have it in easily inhalable or drinkable powdered or soluble form (like they used to have in Gasoline), but as long as you use proper procedure it is not that big a deal.
That should be a "fun" ride for people with vertigo...
So, err, which chart was right? And where do I get 2003 data? :-)
Ok, let us assume another Chernobyl like accident can happen (which won't using modern reactor designs). That was orders of magnitude less worse than the nuclear bombs they dropped in Japan in WW2, and guess what, people live there now.
While I agree fossil fuels are also not a good choice, I don't see what you're trying to say here. Guess why Norway has among the highest GDP in the world? Hmm, maybe because it's the third largest oil exporter in the world...
Geez, if Norway has that much oil, then I wonder why we get most of it from Saudi Arabia. Could it be that *gasp* they have so little oil that if we used it as a single source it would run out in a couple of years?
Steel can also be used to make weapons. In fact, the Hitites used to guard the secret of iron manufacture jealously. Should every chunk of steel be heavily guarded? Rad waste doesn't blow up. After sitting all that time in the pools at the power plant, most of the dangerous stuff like iodine-131 (half-life 8.05 days) has already decayed. Even that is only a real problem if it gets spread around as a thin dust around a populated area (pretty slim chance considering rad waste does not blow up and stuff like plutonium is heavy). Liquid Natural Gas can blow up, and yet it is transported all the time, all the way from the Middle East. So what's the problem?
Guess what dude. S*it happens. Steam turbines in coal or gas power plants blow up. Heck, steam boilers blow up. People get lung problems from coal dust. Gas blows up. Dams burst. Windmills kill birds. The question is: is nuclear power better than the alternatives, i.e. do the benefits outweight the faults or not. Versus fossil fuels the answer seems to be a definite yes. Cleaner air, has sources in stable countries, etc.
We have far worse issues other than solar heating. Oil will not last forever at these sorts of prices you know? But my main immediate concern is city air pollution.
Wind power is actually one of the best new power sources right now. Plenty of room to expand, reasonably cheap, scales ok. The issue is one of irregular power supply. But you should know better than to expect silver bullets.
Hybrids are a good first step, although I prefer gasoline or other, possibly synthetic, hydrocarbons powering fuel cells.
No, we do not have a single efficient replacement for coal or oil. But unless people start trying alternatives *now* and making them more work, you *will* get to a time where you have no other alternative anyway and will have to make a much harder transition.
I personally think coal is perfectly expendable for electric generation with technology available right now and can be replaced with a mix of renewables (wind, hydro, solar) and nuclear power. Of course, where it makes economic sense, coal should still be used.
Oil is much harder to replace, because unlike electric generator replacement, you cannot just swap generators. You need to swap all the automobiles, fueling stations, etc. The first step to solving the transportation problem must be the creation of one, or several, energy carriers that can replace fossil fuels. These must have similar density and energy when looked at a holistic perspective (i.e. you should look at the useful energy, that gets turned into movement). They should also allow quick vehicle recharging, like gas does. There are also vehicle and energy carrier cost issues.
Ultimately I doubt the carrier will be hydrogen. It is just too low density, unless you find a good way to pack it, which is what hydrocarbons do anyway, so what's the point in trying to find weird replacements? Just make some synthetic hydrocarbons.
You forgot solar and wind.
Ever heard about Molotov cocktails? What did you think they put inside the bottles?
Ever heard of vertical construction?
If you just want to make a robotic probe, it would be smaller. Of course, if it is interstellar range (Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away) you want, it will still be positively huge if you want to get there in reasonable timescales. The Wikipedia page has some numbers.
There is no way around this size problem, according to known science, except if you put the fuel outside the ship. Which is what laser beamed solar sails are all about. If they can get them to work reliably...
But for manned deep space exploration, nuclear propulsion is still the best bet. Solar sails would be too frail and low thrust.
You could recycle old nuclear weapons to make the Orion propulsion devices, there are a load of these stockpiled right now. There are also other interesting ideas for how to make a fusion bomb without using a messy fission device as a trigger (using heavy powered lasers, chemical explosives, plasma guns, anti-matter, etc). Interestingly most of these ideas also apply to useable fusion power generation. Read about the NIF (National Ignition Facility) of the US and similar facilities in France and elsewhere for more on this matter.
Of course these other ideas are violently opposed by Greens and other similar people because they would make nuclear weapon proliferation a bigger issue in their view. Their way of thinking is, since the nukes would be cleaner, they would be used more widely. I think this issue is bogus. You do not use a stick of dynamite to kill a fly. It is a matter of economics. And if we do go into global thermonuclear war someday, wouldn't it be nicer if the weapons actually were cleaner? Sheesh.
It was a word processor. I am certain they could find other uses for a word processor than a patent office.
A probably better solution IMHO would be:
ISPs block their users SMTP port (so you can't run your own mail server) unless you pay a small extra monthly subscription fee for an extra service. Most people do not want to run their own e-mail server anyway. Then ISPs add virus and spam blocking on their own source SMTP server.
This is sort of like the snail mail company x-raying mail for bombs and irradiating it to kill anthrax.
Known insecure ISPs would be added to a blacklist that you would automatically be subscribed at your own ISP. It would also have a whitelist so you could still permit some e-mail to come through.
Then you require bayesian like filtering (heck, Thunderbird and Eudora have it) on every mail client.
Current solutions are less efficient because they only filter spam at the destination, but not at the source.
Do you actually train it with the spams you got?
If however Linus merely intends to carry on business as usual for an unstable series, doing bleeding edge development that forces you to rewrite all the OS drivers and tools, hosing fundamental blocks of the OS, further and further drifting away from the OS vendors, without forking it into a new unstable series, the vacuum will grow between the Linus kernel and the distro kernels. As the vacuum grows, centrifugal forces will increase and join to create a new stable kernel, not controlled by Linus or tied to a certain distro.
The kernel is a smaller problem, but you still have the small matter of tools. You often need to interact with the kernel using tools that are continuously deprecated. Replaced by new tools that ocasionally you need to relearn from scratch because someone changed the binary interface for that kernel functionality and the new tool programmer decided to make a completely different command line interface for doing exactly the same things the old tool did.
IMHO this will just increase the fragmentation between the vendor kernels. There should really be one, and only one stable kernel used by all the vendors. We have enough problems with binary compatibility in Linux already.
I have had nothing but pain with their inkjets. Some of their older laserjets however were very good. Built like a tank.
That is what the government should say. But of course it doesn't. Guess what your representatives do on the real world...
If they didn't want the guests to answer their questions, why the heck did they ask them to come in the first place?
Most other news sources don't have anchormen shouting and silencing interviewers every time they try to make a point they don't like.
Regarding ISS, the Russians aren't the only ones doing expensive and tardy messes.
This is the typical fallacy. Fuel weight by itself is irrelevant since you will need a tank to hold it. You need to take into acount the whole cost, tank+fuel weight. Also take into account that a larger tank means a larger vessel which requires a larger (heavier) exterior shell.
Actually, I suspect most of the exaust will be clean. H2O, N2 and CO2 (you are burning N2O4 and (CH3)2NNH2 after all). Of course, the engine may not be burning cleanly, but still... You may want someone with better knowledge of chemistry than me to confirm this. :-)
Solids are usually much worse, because they have Cl (Clorine).