By the time they decommission a reactor it is usually 30 or 40 years old. By that point everything is worn out. You could save some hardware and infrastructure; but, you would be replacing most of the equipment, including all the expensive bits. You'd basically end up tearing it all out and rebuilding it new. Car analogy: I'm restoring a 40 year old truck. Engine had to be torn down to raw casting and rebuilt with all new parts (only I didn't have to deal with neutron damage or metal embrittlement) The truck chassis and body: Well, I'm tearing everything off the frame and I'm starting from there. It will all get disassembled, cleaned, repaired and painted, then go back through a complete re-assembly process using factory manuals. When I'm done, it'll be a 30-40% new 40 year old truck. If you count my time at typical shop labor rates, it could end up costing almost as much as just going down to the dealer and stroking a check for a brand new one. The new one would probably be safer...
This is nonsense. Treating 10k children by giving them prophylactic iodine and periodically checking thyroids is not treating them for cancer. Several hundred children in the surrounding area did get thyroid cancer based on the result I just re-read. Almost all of them responded to treatment (they did not die).
Hundreds did not die daily in the cleanup. A million people did not die in the immediate aftermath. The amount of radioactive material released was large; the "liquidators" received an average dose of 16.5 REM. That's high but not at all lethal. It carries an increased cancer risk of a few percent at most. The city was evacuated but people continued to work in the plant for a decade afterwards, with at least two of the reactors remaining online generating power.
I'm sorry but that book is not based on reproducible, verifiable facts. WHO, IAEA, NIH, and a dozen others refute those numbers, putting the upper bound for death's directly attributable to the accident at between 5000 and 8000 people. On the order of 45 people died in the immediate aftermath. Not hundreds of thousands.
That study (which I just skimmed, I'll read it in more detail tonight) says that to supply 72GW of peak electrical demand with 99.9% reliability we would have to build 230GW of wind and solar capacity and build an energy storage system (they suggested hydrogen) of 51GW peak capacity (2.47GWh). For the times the renewables cannot meet demand, the study calls for maintaining 28.3 GW of fossil fuel plants and supporting infrastructure available, which is nearly the entire 31.5GW average load for PJM's customer region.
I still have to read the cost analysis portion of the study. I can't imagine it would be cheaper to build out 430% capacity rather than build 30GW of nuclear and another 40 or 50GW of peaking capacity (110% peak demand); but, I will read the article.
Yes, drives are available used (see ebay). I'm sure there is a contractor somewhere making decent money maintaining these. These drives were "robust" and would be fairly easy to repair. If you really needed a new one, the tech is easy to replicate. I wouldn't be surprised if someone maintains a facility to supply these on an as-needed basis (at an appropriately elevated price, of course). DOS 6.22 might be too new. My DOS 3.3 Sourcebook says it supported some 8" disk formats (that paralleled 5.25" formats) but that most of the 8" formats were obsoleted with DOS 2.x. Last 8" disk I saw was I believe a 250kB capacity used on a DEC PDP in an industrial application in the late 1980's.
I'm sorry that anyone has to experience cancer, especially a child. I've personally been on the receiving end of one of those diagnosis. However, the statistics show that the cancer rates have not increased any statistically significant amount over the background rate. This has been verified by numerous studies by independent groups from different countries. I'm sure a handful of those cases are caused by the additional environmental pollution from Chernobyl; but, it's in the 10's range. The deaths of the clean up workers are mostly well documented. Thousands did not die; again, the number is in the 10's order of magnitude.
We're not going to be there in 10 years. While it is theoretically possible to supply all our energy needs through a combination of renewables (excluding nuclear, which is often included as a renewable), capacity factor has been a problem. Even with storage, you can't make up for the capacity factor issue. The infrastructure investment requirements are also huge. We will still need big base load plants and nuclear fits that bill quite well.
Because most of the worlds infrastructure centers around supplying pressurized and boiling water designs? You'd have to invest in new infrastructure in addition to new reactors...
I'm not disagreeing with you on the basic premises; we should be moving the tech forward. You need to stop worrying about the pressurized system though, and stop using that as a reason to not build more nuclear plants. Conventional fossil fuel plants (modern ones) operate at higher pressures and temperatures than nuclear power plants, where they have traditionally maintained lower temperatures, intentionally, because of the limitations of the zirconium cladding. The risk of failure of the pressurized system can be mitigated, and is in many of the Gen III+ systems that you mention. In a molten salt plant, the complexity and safety system requirements are just as bad for different reasons.
Fuel utilization is a problem... I think that can be improved, in the short term, by building more heavy water plants like CANDU. I'm not particularly a CANDU fanatic; CANDU plants have had issues with capacity factor. The design does have additional safety factors built in, can burn up more of the available fuel, and has shown a certain flexibility. Unfortunately, they're concentrating on building bigger plants, pushing toward 1200MWe in their advertised Gen III+ design, and not working on smaller modular designs.
I missed a point. You're assuming that the small reactors are abandoned when they use up their fuel load. I've seen a few ideas come out of industry source that suggest that's possible using reactors in the 10-50MWt range; but, I think they're only intending to leave the reactor long enough to cool down, as they do now with spent fuel, moving it to temporary storage in pools. The intent of most of the small modular reactors is to refuel them. Even the little 10MW Toshiba 4S design was advertised as designed to be sent back to the factory for fuel recycling.
1. small is cheaper. You can build a 100MW reactor for much less than you can build a 1500MW. It costs less to refuel. When it does go down for maintenance or repairs, it costs less to replace the power it was producing (the scale of the backup plant capacity is smaller). We are having problems getting the high cost 1500MW plants built; so, by making the cost an order of magnitude lower, it is hoped we can get the industry moving forward again
2. Cost savings, consistency in manufacturing and standardization. All the existing plants, even if they are based on a standard design, are one off custom implementations. Everything is built on-site. There is limited standardization. By making the plants in the 100 MW range, you can build the components in an assembly line and put them on a truck or train. You get all the benefits of standardized fixturing and manufacturing. Costs would go down due to stable volume production. When capacity needed to be expanded you could order another system.
Efficiency would suffer -- you'll probably get better efficiency from the big reactor -- and I'm willing to admit that. However, you'll get zero efficiency when you can't get anyone to fund a 1500MW reactor.
Before you go off and say it's not possible to build reactors on an "assembly line". I'm 5 miles from a shipyard that turns out a nuclear powered submarine per year. They're Navy spec reactors of roughly the same scale, fueled to run for 30 or 40 years. Components, including fuel, are brought in via train. It is proof that it can be done.
That's a fair assessment and one of the reasons (besides taste and texture) which meat substitutes haven't caught on. What if they could sell it for 30% less than the average cost of chicken? Would you consider it then? Since it's never going to have exactly the same texture and flavor as a real chicken, a reasonable question to ask is: At what price point is a meat substitute acceptable?
I'd honestly like to know what you're using. Which solder (or at least the metallurgical content) and which specific flux. I have to connect to carbon conductive inks printed on PVDF and Mylar. We're constantly having issues with connection failures when the product is put into the vibration tester.
As someone who saw the original movie when it first came out... only way that this works... Is to go waaaaay back in time. ( a long long long time ago in a galaxy far away) or to go forward far into the future (many generations after Luke and Anakin restore balance to the Force). There they could create new and interesting story lines that parallel the existing one(s).
It's only appropriate if there is evidence to directly tie the problems the family is having to the wells in question. If there is no evidence of a correlation, then it is a jury giving an award based on emotion, not fact. OMG Think of the Children and all that. Simply having the wells near their home is not, in fact, correlation.
I believe I said "In a lot of ways, these laws have outlived their usefulness." This all originally happened in the 1930's after private dealerships had taken a decade or two and gotten themselves, and their business arrangement with the manufacturer(s), established. The manufacturer's decided to change the relationship. The dealers went, as a combined front, to their local politicians for protection from the manufacturers, whom they could not hope to fight and win due to the shear size of the manufacturers resource pool. This happened nationwide more or less simultaneously; so, we have a series of similar laws for each state. As I mentioned, the manufacturers had the resources, controlled the product and the spare-parts stream; so, if the state governments had not stepped in franchise dealerships would have been wiped out in all but the smallest regions
Whether what we have now is better for it, I'm not sure I can agree to that. Cleary some dealerships are rotten to the core. Others are businesses that do have their customer's welfare in mind (they want you to come back, after all). This whole game of cars having an inflated MSRP, and having to negotiate over profit margins, option pricing, rebates and dealer cash grew out of this mess. I just bought a car six months ago.... I spent several weeks researching pricing and playing a number of different dealers against each other. Eventually the first dealer I approached gave me the best deal and got my business. Would I have been offered the same, or maybe a better price, dealing directly with the manufacturer based solely on price pressure from other brands? I don't know.
So you're arguing that you should be able to use the "I bought it in another state" loophole to avoid sales taxes? Then why would anyone buy anything in their home state? You're arguing that we should all drive over the nearest border and pick up what we want tax free. Or order 100% of our goods from internet providers out of state, to avoid all sales taxes. If you do that, you eliminate a tax revenue stream. Lawmakers know this, and they write the law to prevent it.
OK, I'll give you credit that your basic premise is good; but, I take exception to the Windows 8 example. They made it easier to use in some cases, and harder in others. In my application, it often takes an extra step to reach what I want, without creating a bunch of extra tiles and desktop icons. Yeah, it's only one swipe or a mouse click more, but that's going in the wrong direction.
the original reason for the laws requiring and protecting franchises has nothing to do with resolving problems. It had to do with protecting small dealerships from monopolistic behaviors of the big three back when this whole car thing was still new. After they got established, they wanted to eliminate the franchise dealers and open their own branded sales and service centers. They (the manufacturers) started doing underhanded things like refusing to sell parts to existing franchisees. Dealerships becoming the manufacturer's authorized service centers did fall out of this, as part of the deal.
In a lot of ways, these laws have outlived their usefulness.
As to targeting the top "0.0001%": Most automotive technology is introduced at the upper end of the product line. This has been true since the early 1900's, with rare exceptions. (Ford's innovations with the model T, most of which were in the manufacturing, are among the earliest examples of exceptions). Modern technologies like direct injection engines, heads up displays, rearview cameras, navigation and so on, show up in the $50-75k cars from most manufacturers before they filter down to the Civics, Focuses, and Sentras of the world market. By the time they do show up in the $15-25k bracket the tech is well tested and most of the bugs are usually worked out.
I'll grant you that Tesla's first target customers are the ones with lots of disposable income. He's pushing new technologies to the most profitable end of the market first, in order to get established. Tesla has repeatedly indicated they intend to put $50k and eventually $35k cars onto the market. Frankly, they're too small to go after the $15k-20k bracket, where the profit margins on cars get thin, and they clearly know that. They're partnering with other manufacturers like Daimler and Toyota to get their technology into other markets, markets outside of their current reach.
Perhaps we just missed the previous spacefaring super race. They avoided our planet, for whatever reason.... Maybe they had something equivalent to a Prime Directive, or perhaps they just hadn't quite gotten here yet, or maybe our planet was too cold by their standards and they passed it by since there were plenty of options that more closely met their requirements. Then they all died. Disease. Failure of some biological experiment. War. Reason doesn't matter, to us right now. Could we be overthinking the problem?
That's why at the start of the war... If they survived 25 missions, they got to go home. Statistically they were unlikely to live that long. Many re-upped though, just because they couldn't walk away and leave everyone else behind to continue fighting without them.
Back in my day, we didn't complain about the cold and lack of oxygen. We rode in unpressurized planes with open gun ports. Sure, it was cold -- we wore fur lined jackets and liked it. Our oxygen masks smelled like engine exhaust and we were grateful. You didn't here us whine about 'being crushed by landing gear' or 'being thrown from the plane'. We were being shot at. Hell, we were lucky to have landing gear at all when we got back.
So, stop your bitching and get off my damn lawn.
Written for my grandfather who manned a gun in a WWII bomber.
California and Texas need to learn two words: De-Salination. yes, it's expensive. You got choices... Thirst and dead crops or spend money on desalination plants. Well, there are two more options... (1) Invent a method to alter weather patterns and steal someone else's rain. or. (2) declare independence and go to war with the U.S., annex neighboring states and pipeline water from the Mississippi directly to Texas.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time they decommission a reactor it is usually 30 or 40 years old. By that point everything is worn out. You could save some hardware and infrastructure; but, you would be replacing most of the equipment, including all the expensive bits. You'd basically end up tearing it all out and rebuilding it new. Car analogy: I'm restoring a 40 year old truck. Engine had to be torn down to raw casting and rebuilt with all new parts (only I didn't have to deal with neutron damage or metal embrittlement) The truck chassis and body: Well, I'm tearing everything off the frame and I'm starting from there. It will all get disassembled, cleaned, repaired and painted, then go back through a complete re-assembly process using factory manuals. When I'm done, it'll be a 30-40% new 40 year old truck. If you count my time at typical shop labor rates, it could end up costing almost as much as just going down to the dealer and stroking a check for a brand new one. The new one would probably be safer...
uh, slight correction... Yucca Mountain is empty because of the people screaming NIMBY. It was shut down before receiving the first shipment of waste.
This is nonsense. Treating 10k children by giving them prophylactic iodine and periodically checking thyroids is not treating them for cancer. Several hundred children in the surrounding area did get thyroid cancer based on the result I just re-read. Almost all of them responded to treatment (they did not die).
Hundreds did not die daily in the cleanup. A million people did not die in the immediate aftermath. The amount of radioactive material released was large; the "liquidators" received an average dose of 16.5 REM. That's high but not at all lethal. It carries an increased cancer risk of a few percent at most. The city was evacuated but people continued to work in the plant for a decade afterwards, with at least two of the reactors remaining online generating power.
I'm sorry but that book is not based on reproducible, verifiable facts. WHO, IAEA, NIH, and a dozen others refute those numbers, putting the upper bound for death's directly attributable to the accident at between 5000 and 8000 people. On the order of 45 people died in the immediate aftermath. Not hundreds of thousands.
That study (which I just skimmed, I'll read it in more detail tonight) says that to supply 72GW of peak electrical demand with 99.9% reliability we would have to build 230GW of wind and solar capacity and build an energy storage system (they suggested hydrogen) of 51GW peak capacity (2.47GWh). For the times the renewables cannot meet demand, the study calls for maintaining 28.3 GW of fossil fuel plants and supporting infrastructure available, which is nearly the entire 31.5GW average load for PJM's customer region.
I still have to read the cost analysis portion of the study. I can't imagine it would be cheaper to build out 430% capacity rather than build 30GW of nuclear and another 40 or 50GW of peaking capacity (110% peak demand); but, I will read the article.
Yes, drives are available used (see ebay). I'm sure there is a contractor somewhere making decent money maintaining these. These drives were "robust" and would be fairly easy to repair. If you really needed a new one, the tech is easy to replicate. I wouldn't be surprised if someone maintains a facility to supply these on an as-needed basis (at an appropriately elevated price, of course). DOS 6.22 might be too new. My DOS 3.3 Sourcebook says it supported some 8" disk formats (that paralleled 5.25" formats) but that most of the 8" formats were obsoleted with DOS 2.x. Last 8" disk I saw was I believe a 250kB capacity used on a DEC PDP in an industrial application in the late 1980's.
I'm sorry that anyone has to experience cancer, especially a child. I've personally been on the receiving end of one of those diagnosis. However, the statistics show that the cancer rates have not increased any statistically significant amount over the background rate. This has been verified by numerous studies by independent groups from different countries. I'm sure a handful of those cases are caused by the additional environmental pollution from Chernobyl; but, it's in the 10's range. The deaths of the clean up workers are mostly well documented. Thousands did not die; again, the number is in the 10's order of magnitude.
We're not going to be there in 10 years. While it is theoretically possible to supply all our energy needs through a combination of renewables (excluding nuclear, which is often included as a renewable), capacity factor has been a problem. Even with storage, you can't make up for the capacity factor issue. The infrastructure investment requirements are also huge. We will still need big base load plants and nuclear fits that bill quite well.
Because most of the worlds infrastructure centers around supplying pressurized and boiling water designs? You'd have to invest in new infrastructure in addition to new reactors...
I'm not disagreeing with you on the basic premises; we should be moving the tech forward. You need to stop worrying about the pressurized system though, and stop using that as a reason to not build more nuclear plants. Conventional fossil fuel plants (modern ones) operate at higher pressures and temperatures than nuclear power plants, where they have traditionally maintained lower temperatures, intentionally, because of the limitations of the zirconium cladding. The risk of failure of the pressurized system can be mitigated, and is in many of the Gen III+ systems that you mention. In a molten salt plant, the complexity and safety system requirements are just as bad for different reasons.
Fuel utilization is a problem... I think that can be improved, in the short term, by building more heavy water plants like CANDU. I'm not particularly a CANDU fanatic; CANDU plants have had issues with capacity factor. The design does have additional safety factors built in, can burn up more of the available fuel, and has shown a certain flexibility. Unfortunately, they're concentrating on building bigger plants, pushing toward 1200MWe in their advertised Gen III+ design, and not working on smaller modular designs.
I missed a point. You're assuming that the small reactors are abandoned when they use up their fuel load. I've seen a few ideas come out of industry source that suggest that's possible using reactors in the 10-50MWt range; but, I think they're only intending to leave the reactor long enough to cool down, as they do now with spent fuel, moving it to temporary storage in pools. The intent of most of the small modular reactors is to refuel them. Even the little 10MW Toshiba 4S design was advertised as designed to be sent back to the factory for fuel recycling.
They are wanted for two reasons.
1. small is cheaper. You can build a 100MW reactor for much less than you can build a 1500MW. It costs less to refuel. When it does go down for maintenance or repairs, it costs less to replace the power it was producing (the scale of the backup plant capacity is smaller). We are having problems getting the high cost 1500MW plants built; so, by making the cost an order of magnitude lower, it is hoped we can get the industry moving forward again
2. Cost savings, consistency in manufacturing and standardization. All the existing plants, even if they are based on a standard design, are one off custom implementations. Everything is built on-site. There is limited standardization. By making the plants in the 100 MW range, you can build the components in an assembly line and put them on a truck or train. You get all the benefits of standardized fixturing and manufacturing. Costs would go down due to stable volume production. When capacity needed to be expanded you could order another system.
Efficiency would suffer -- you'll probably get better efficiency from the big reactor -- and I'm willing to admit that. However, you'll get zero efficiency when you can't get anyone to fund a 1500MW reactor.
Before you go off and say it's not possible to build reactors on an "assembly line". I'm 5 miles from a shipyard that turns out a nuclear powered submarine per year. They're Navy spec reactors of roughly the same scale, fueled to run for 30 or 40 years. Components, including fuel, are brought in via train. It is proof that it can be done.
That's a fair assessment and one of the reasons (besides taste and texture) which meat substitutes haven't caught on. What if they could sell it for 30% less than the average cost of chicken? Would you consider it then? Since it's never going to have exactly the same texture and flavor as a real chicken, a reasonable question to ask is: At what price point is a meat substitute acceptable?
I'd honestly like to know what you're using. Which solder (or at least the metallurgical content) and which specific flux. I have to connect to carbon conductive inks printed on PVDF and Mylar. We're constantly having issues with connection failures when the product is put into the vibration tester.
As someone who saw the original movie when it first came out... only way that this works... Is to go waaaaay back in time. ( a long long long time ago in a galaxy far away) or to go forward far into the future (many generations after Luke and Anakin restore balance to the Force). There they could create new and interesting story lines that parallel the existing one(s).
It's only appropriate if there is evidence to directly tie the problems the family is having to the wells in question. If there is no evidence of a correlation, then it is a jury giving an award based on emotion, not fact. OMG Think of the Children and all that. Simply having the wells near their home is not, in fact, correlation.
I believe I said "In a lot of ways, these laws have outlived their usefulness." This all originally happened in the 1930's after private dealerships had taken a decade or two and gotten themselves, and their business arrangement with the manufacturer(s), established. The manufacturer's decided to change the relationship. The dealers went, as a combined front, to their local politicians for protection from the manufacturers, whom they could not hope to fight and win due to the shear size of the manufacturers resource pool. This happened nationwide more or less simultaneously; so, we have a series of similar laws for each state. As I mentioned, the manufacturers had the resources, controlled the product and the spare-parts stream; so, if the state governments had not stepped in franchise dealerships would have been wiped out in all but the smallest regions
Whether what we have now is better for it, I'm not sure I can agree to that. Cleary some dealerships are rotten to the core. Others are businesses that do have their customer's welfare in mind (they want you to come back, after all). This whole game of cars having an inflated MSRP, and having to negotiate over profit margins, option pricing, rebates and dealer cash grew out of this mess. I just bought a car six months ago.... I spent several weeks researching pricing and playing a number of different dealers against each other. Eventually the first dealer I approached gave me the best deal and got my business. Would I have been offered the same, or maybe a better price, dealing directly with the manufacturer based solely on price pressure from other brands? I don't know.
So you're arguing that you should be able to use the "I bought it in another state" loophole to avoid sales taxes? Then why would anyone buy anything in their home state? You're arguing that we should all drive over the nearest border and pick up what we want tax free. Or order 100% of our goods from internet providers out of state, to avoid all sales taxes. If you do that, you eliminate a tax revenue stream. Lawmakers know this, and they write the law to prevent it.
OK, I'll give you credit that your basic premise is good; but, I take exception to the Windows 8 example. They made it easier to use in some cases, and harder in others. In my application, it often takes an extra step to reach what I want, without creating a bunch of extra tiles and desktop icons. Yeah, it's only one swipe or a mouse click more, but that's going in the wrong direction.
the original reason for the laws requiring and protecting franchises has nothing to do with resolving problems. It had to do with protecting small dealerships from monopolistic behaviors of the big three back when this whole car thing was still new. After they got established, they wanted to eliminate the franchise dealers and open their own branded sales and service centers. They (the manufacturers) started doing underhanded things like refusing to sell parts to existing franchisees. Dealerships becoming the manufacturer's authorized service centers did fall out of this, as part of the deal.
In a lot of ways, these laws have outlived their usefulness.
As to targeting the top "0.0001%": Most automotive technology is introduced at the upper end of the product line. This has been true since the early 1900's, with rare exceptions. (Ford's innovations with the model T, most of which were in the manufacturing, are among the earliest examples of exceptions). Modern technologies like direct injection engines, heads up displays, rearview cameras, navigation and so on, show up in the $50-75k cars from most manufacturers before they filter down to the Civics, Focuses, and Sentras of the world market. By the time they do show up in the $15-25k bracket the tech is well tested and most of the bugs are usually worked out.
I'll grant you that Tesla's first target customers are the ones with lots of disposable income. He's pushing new technologies to the most profitable end of the market first, in order to get established. Tesla has repeatedly indicated they intend to put $50k and eventually $35k cars onto the market. Frankly, they're too small to go after the $15k-20k bracket, where the profit margins on cars get thin, and they clearly know that. They're partnering with other manufacturers like Daimler and Toyota to get their technology into other markets, markets outside of their current reach.
Perhaps we just missed the previous spacefaring super race. They avoided our planet, for whatever reason.... Maybe they had something equivalent to a Prime Directive, or perhaps they just hadn't quite gotten here yet, or maybe our planet was too cold by their standards and they passed it by since there were plenty of options that more closely met their requirements. Then they all died. Disease. Failure of some biological experiment. War. Reason doesn't matter, to us right now. Could we be overthinking the problem?
That's why at the start of the war... If they survived 25 missions, they got to go home. Statistically they were unlikely to live that long. Many re-upped though, just because they couldn't walk away and leave everyone else behind to continue fighting without them.
typo... hate it when that happens (and autocorrect "fixes" it)
Bah. You kids these days...
Back in my day, we didn't complain about the cold and lack of oxygen. We rode in unpressurized planes with open gun ports. Sure, it was cold -- we wore fur lined jackets and liked it. Our oxygen masks smelled like engine exhaust and we were grateful. You didn't here us whine about 'being crushed by landing gear' or 'being thrown from the plane'. We were being shot at. Hell, we were lucky to have landing gear at all when we got back.
So, stop your bitching and get off my damn lawn.
Written for my grandfather who manned a gun in a WWII bomber.
California and Texas need to learn two words: De-Salination. yes, it's expensive. You got choices... Thirst and dead crops or spend money on desalination plants. Well, there are two more options... (1) Invent a method to alter weather patterns and steal someone else's rain. or. (2) declare independence and go to war with the U.S., annex neighboring states and pipeline water from the Mississippi directly to Texas.