Doesn't matter a damn what your intention is. Only matters what criminal scum intentions are.
As long as the car looked and "behaved" exactly like the other cars in the area, the police are off the "entrapment" hook BS. I.e., locked up no keys in ignition, parked normally... etc.
"Nuclear waste tends to be a bit more concentrated."
So? What does that have to do with the comments in this thread? I think that this is a good thing. The nuclear waste from meeting all the energy needs of a family of four for forty years would fit into a shoebox.
Besides, the big difference you neglect to mention is that nuclear waste from nuclear power plants isn't being released to the environment, coal ash is.
Excerpt: "Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons): Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons"
And:
"Thus, by combining U.S. coal combustion from 1937 (440 million tons) through 1987 (661 million tons) with an estimated total in the year 2040 (2516 million tons), the total expected U.S. radioactivity release to the environment by 2040 can be determined. That total comes from the expected combustion of 111,716 million tons of coal with the release of 477,027,320 millicuries in the United States. Global releases of radioactivity from the predicted combustion of 637,409 million tons of coal would be 2,721,736,430 millicuries.
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
Re:Jeez, get over yourselves
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 2
Rereading my previous comment does show a fair bit of bad attitude which I regret. It causes your thoughts to be discounted based on emotion rather than reasoned debate.
"Fortunately, people like you don't tend to get mod points too much. Perhaps you should read the guidelines for moderators, and think about why doing what you suggested would be an abuse of the privilege."
I post at kharma 50 all the time. I get mod points quite regularily, and yes I know the moderator guidelines quite well, and I do follow them. I also meta-moderate almost continuously. I do not abuse the priviledge, my comment in my post can be attributed to frustration at irrational political commentary, not to any actual actions on my part.
We produce more than the rest of the western world put together.
"I'll put this as politely as I can: no, you don't, at least not by any interpretation of that statement I can think of."
Data from 2000 World Fact Book top nine: #1 USA - $9.963 trillion #2 China - $4.5 trillion #3 India - $2.2 trillion #4 Japan - $3.15 trillion #5 Germany - $1.936 trillion #6 France $1.448 trillion #7 UK - $1.36 trillion #8 Italy - $1.273 trillion #9 Russia - $1.12 trillion
Discounting China and India whose numbers are more based on their large populations, the US produces more than three times as much as the next largest industrialized economy. So the statement about more than the rest of the world combined is indeed an exageration. But still it can't be deneid the USA is far and away the economic dominant player in the world, like it or not.
"Even if you did, you'd have to produce several times as much as the remaining western world to justify your greater efforts to destroy the environment, and you certainly aren't doing that."
Aside from ther general troll tone of this statement, what "efforts"? The USA spends more on environmental cleanup per capita, and on a gross basis (do you know what Superfund means?) than any other country on the planet. The USA also uses less energy per unit (more energy efficient) of industrial production than anyone else also. This isn't meant as braggadocio, it's simply cheaper that way. You end up making a larger return on your money.
Re:Jeez, get over yourselves
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2
"We produce more than the rest of the western world put together. If they don't like that, they have an easy solution -- stop buying what me make.
But then their own crippled industries would have to put up or shut up."
This was posted as AC. But since I agree with it, I'm reposting it with my +1 bonus.
"Ten to one says this post gets modded down as Flamebait by 15-year-olds from the US, modded up as Insightful by non-US adults. I wonder which will be first..."
I am a 39 year old adult USA male thank you very much and if I had any mod points I'd mod you down for being naive and immature.
GROW UP!
If someone doesn't agree with you it doesn't necesarily mean they are arrogant, or 15 years old. Did you ever consider the fact that you could be wrong? Or maybe your university professor with a political axe to grind presented an edited and one sided education?
Didn't think so. Eurotrash are sooo tiresomely snobbish, especially when calling someone else arrogant. Pot, kettle, black? Get it?
Idiodic fool.
Re:Shooting them down? I think there is a treaty..
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 3
Or practically any other goverments, including Japan. Which IIRC is WERE KYOTO IS fer cripes sake.
I think this was in that Disney movie Hercules. At a plnetary line up the Titans cage was exposed and Hades freed the Titans for his war on Mt.Olympus....
It was something like 12cent a kW/hr. If it was set at some arbitrary amount per month regardless of use, the more you used the less you paid per unit. E.g., I'm going to set the limit of what you pay for gasoline at $100 per month, regardless of how many miles you drive. Instead of say $1.85 per gallon. So you drive more, you pay more, just not an overly outrageous amount per gallon.
Although the retail cap was set at about 12cents a kW/hr in the retail market, the wholesale market (at least initially) had no such limits. This led the absurd situation where SCE and PG&E had to pay wholesale generators 150, 200, 400, 600, (at one point briefly 5500!!) cents a kW/hr, while still being able to charge customers only 12 cents a kW/hr!!
Continuing with the gasoline example, you own a gas station and the other buyers of bulk gasoline at the refinery start bidding up the price until it reaches $250.00 per gallon. But the PUC says, nope sorry you have to sell that gas no matter what for no more than $2.00 per gallon. This is essentially what happened. And is why PG&E went BK and SCE came within an eyelash of doing so.
Enova Corp. (SDG&E) was not effected because they had paid off their long term "stranded costs" and thus didn't fall under the same provisions our wonderful idiots in the CPUC DRA (Division of Ratepayer Advocates - a bunch of leftist lawyers) forced on PG&E and SCE.
"I dont fully know what it was like in CA (but I did get a $12/day surcharge at a SF hotel last June), but to my understanding, the limit was on cost per watt or something like that, not cost/month. Cost/watt would give conservation incentives by showing the person how much they were using"
You are a little confused about the price cap situation. There was always a retail price cap from the inception of AB1890. The retail cap applied to the end user consumers. The retail cap came about for the "something for nothing" crowd. It was a way of getting support for the whole package from consumer advocates (no matter they say they said back then). The wholesale cap(s) came about later as desperate damage control when it became painfully apparent that AB1890, the blue book and the CPUC had disconnected the wholesale and the retail markets from each other. That old supply and demand thing is much more robust than they thought. With the retail cap, there was no incentive for consumers to lower their use so demand stayed higher than it probably would have and this prolonged the shortage. The wholesale cap had a similar effect by discouraging generation companies from buying expensive generation plant fuel and then not being able to recoup that cost through wholesale prices. Another long term effect of both caps, but especially the retail cap was to discaurage spending on building new projects.
the whole rolling-blackout deal had nothing at all to do with the state of semi-deregulation, and everything to do with plain old securities fraud.
That may indeed have played a part, but the single biggest cause was the infamous "Blue Book" on wholesale (versus retail) deregulation plans that the CPUC staff published way back in the early 1990's. That book terrified the big utilities (and their bankers) away from investing the money to build new plants and transmission towers for ten years BEFORE the crises really hit. NIMBY played (and still plays) a big role also. The rolling blackouts situation was a decade in the making. This is well before any Enron or the other fifteen or so companies even had a chance to try and pull any shenanigans.
Also I too heard the so-cal didn't get hit that bad. Funny considering we provide more power and we also provide the majority of the water for the state. I'm voting to split CA. So-cal is a giant leech.
I work in the power industry and I live in SoCal, happily leeching away. In case you are interested the main reason Northern Cal has a demand vs generation+powerimports problem is that all you voters up there keep shooting down any opportunities to build power plants and transmission towers in Northern Cal. There isn't enough generation where the demand is and it's been almost impossible to get power lines or plants built. The main north-south lines are ALWAYS near full load. We need to build more generating plants where the loads are and build more lines for increased power transfer flexibility. Probably very unlikely given the perennial NIMBY mindset from my fellow Californians.
But I was thinking more of the summer, after Davis put in place his fixes (the exhortation to conserve, combined with discounts/rebates for conservation). Even though the chock-full-o-blackouts summer didn't materialize
The only thing that saved Davis was the weather. Pure and simple. The weather allowed enough rain for more hydro imports from Oregon and Washington states, and cooler temperatures with lower humidity on average across Northern and Southern California lowered demand.
Yes, the calls to conserve helped and were a good thing, but the lowered demand due to the weather was mulitple times more effective than ANY calls for conservation.
They are talking about getting data for a centrifuge on a spacecraft. Possibly to aid astronauts in acclimatizing to a destination planet on a long long trip, Mars for example. There is no mention of any spacedrive stuff....
"Maybe you could design it such that the launch apparatus is like those used today, but breaks off after exiting the atmosphere, where nuclear propulsion commences. (IE, you release no neutrons in to the reactor until the craft is a specified number of miles outside our atmosphere)."
The whole point is to ELIMINATE chemical rockets and go to fission rockets. The vast majority of the work is done getting to low earth orbit. Thats where it makes the most sense to use a much higher thrust to weight engine.
The focus of the article was elimination of chemical rockets and use of nuclear heated helium gas rockets for all launches, low earth orbit and up.
All launches would benefit from a thrust to weight ratio perspective. He did mention that if Hydrogen gas were used there would be some radioactive fallout from the gas. I imagine that would be from neutron reactions with the Hydrogen breeding tritium and deuterium as the Hydrogen is blased out of the reactor. Use of Helium instead would be less efficient but not result in any appreciable nuetron activation.
"So forget the radiation, a more immediate effect than radiation is 'thermal pollution' - eg all that heat has to go somewhere, and in coastal areas, putting it back in the ocean basically kills the ecosystem deader than the radiation ever could."
Well I know of at least two studies that lasted over a decade and they both show mixed effects to thermal pollution. I.e., some species populations exploded in the 15 - 25F warmer area near the plant outfall pipes, and some species populations fell. As to the effects on marine plants, the noise level in the data was too high to really conclude anything at all (the variations observed were within the parameters of natural variations in plant growth).
There is a definite effect, but is the effect of sufficient widespread damage to warrant shutdowns? I don't think so.
"I agree, that's a big problem. The US spends millions a year trying to contain wastes in temporary storage facilities. But putting it in Yucca Mountain doesn't keep nuclear swimming pools away from population centers; instead, it creates what amounts to a giant nuclear lake just a little ways away from one major population center."
You left out that it's actually 95 miles away, under 1000+ feet of rock, stored inside some of the toughest corrosion resistant metal containers known to our science, those containers inside thick (I mean meters thick) concrete vaults.
"That would be incorrect. It's no safer than the current alternative of temporary storage, but when (not if) the waste gets loose, it only affects Nevada."
May not be safer (it seems much safer to me), but what is harder to watch and keep secure, 50+ sites or 1 site?
"No new nuclear power plants have been commissioned since 1979. All orders for nuclear power plants since 1973 have been cancelled. You're ill informed."
See my previous post in this thread, you are the ill informed person here, so much so that you lose quite a bit a credibility, since the facts are so easily checked.
"Countries around the world are halting the use of nuclear power. France, who gets most of its power from nukes, has cancelled all new projects."
Because they are quite happy with the reserve margins they currently have in their generation, not from some irrational fear of nuclear waste.
"There are several better ways of going about this - I won't go into detail, but they are: shoot it into the sun (bad idea), put it under the ice caps (bad idea), store it in the Pacific muck (good idea), put it in a subduction zone (no one knows if it's a good idea), or store it under the water table of a large city (bad idea) - oh, wait, that last one is already being done."
Yeah, all of these methods of final disposal can be accomplished even if Yucca mountain is filled. Yucca mountain is a storage site fer cripes sake! This stuff isn't going to be "dumped" off the back of a truck and buried. By the very nature of the design of these cannisters, they can be moved again at a later date if a more safe storage idea is agreed upon. Also, you left out our best (from an engineering point of view - never the one chosen of course) and that is MOX fuel reburning and reprocessing fuel. But that is a whole different argument.
"Also, you say 'right now' in your post - it's right now and looking like forever. There haven't been any new nuke plants commissioned since 1979. All orders after 1973 have been cancelled. Nuclear power is on its way out as a consumer power supply."
Wrong wrong wrong! No new nuclear plants have been ordered since 1979. There were several plants that completed construction and low power testing and received full power licenses all through the 1980's and even the first part of the 1990's! Look up the Seabrook Station (1990) in NH and check out it's entering commercial service date. Also ANO2 (1980), San Onofre (1984), Diablo Canyon (1985), Commanche Peak (1993), Watts Bar (1996). I could go on and on. But facts aren't going to dissuade you obviously, never mind.
Don't forget that almost every power generator above about 500MW on this planet is cooled by pressurized H2 blanket and a H2 to water heat exchanger. H2 has passable heat transfer properties, but more important doesn't conduct electricity. So you can use it in your 20,000V stator coils of your big baseload power plant to remove I2R losses.
Slashdot Mirror
One correction, the USA is NOT a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A significant difference.
I.e., it's not "mob rule", but the Constitution, and the resulting body of law from it that rule.
You forget the Swiss. I believe they could be a pretty good neutral police force.
Doesn't matter a damn what your intention is. Only matters what criminal scum intentions are.
As long as the car looked and "behaved" exactly like the other cars in the area, the police are off the "entrapment" hook BS. I.e., locked up no keys in ignition, parked normally... etc.
"Nuclear waste tends to be a bit more concentrated."
So? What does that have to do with the comments in this thread? I think that this is a good thing. The nuclear waste from meeting all the energy needs of a family of four for forty years would fit into a shoebox.
Besides, the big difference you neglect to mention is that nuclear waste from nuclear power plants isn't being released to the environment, coal ash is.
Yes. Here is a link.
Excerpt:
"Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons"
And:
"Thus, by combining U.S. coal combustion from 1937 (440 million tons) through 1987 (661 million tons) with an estimated total in the year 2040 (2516 million tons), the total expected U.S. radioactivity release to the environment by 2040 can be determined. That total comes from the expected combustion of 111,716 million tons of coal with the release of 477,027,320 millicuries in the United States. Global releases of radioactivity from the predicted combustion of 637,409 million tons of coal would be 2,721,736,430 millicuries.
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
Rereading my previous comment does show a fair bit of bad attitude which I regret. It causes your thoughts to be discounted based on emotion rather than reasoned debate.
"Fortunately, people like you don't tend to get mod points too much. Perhaps you should read the guidelines for moderators, and think about why doing what you suggested would be an abuse of the privilege."
I post at kharma 50 all the time. I get mod points quite regularily, and yes I know the moderator guidelines quite well, and I do follow them. I also meta-moderate almost continuously. I do not abuse the priviledge, my comment in my post can be attributed to frustration at irrational political commentary, not to any actual actions on my part.
We produce more than the rest of the western world put together.
"I'll put this as politely as I can: no, you don't, at least not by any interpretation of that statement I can think of."
Data from 2000 World Fact Book top nine:
#1 USA - $9.963 trillion
#2 China - $4.5 trillion
#3 India - $2.2 trillion
#4 Japan - $3.15 trillion
#5 Germany - $1.936 trillion
#6 France $1.448 trillion
#7 UK - $1.36 trillion
#8 Italy - $1.273 trillion
#9 Russia - $1.12 trillion
Discounting China and India whose numbers are more based on their large populations, the US produces more than three times as much as the next largest industrialized economy. So the statement about more than the rest of the world combined is indeed an exageration. But still it can't be deneid the USA is far and away the economic dominant player in the world, like it or not.
"Even if you did, you'd have to produce several times as much as the remaining western world to justify your greater efforts to destroy the environment, and you certainly aren't doing that."
Aside from ther general troll tone of this statement, what "efforts"? The USA spends more on environmental cleanup per capita, and on a gross basis (do you know what Superfund means?) than any other country on the planet. The USA also uses less energy per unit (more energy efficient) of industrial production than anyone else also. This isn't meant as braggadocio, it's simply cheaper that way. You end up making a larger return on your money.
"We produce more than the rest of the western world put together. If they don't like that, they have an easy solution -- stop buying what me make.
But then their own crippled industries would have to put up or shut up."
This was posted as AC. But since I agree with it, I'm reposting it with my +1 bonus.
"Ten to one says this post gets modded down as Flamebait by 15-year-olds from the US, modded up as Insightful by non-US adults. I wonder which will be first..."
I am a 39 year old adult USA male thank you very much and if I had any mod points I'd mod you down for being naive and immature.
GROW UP!
If someone doesn't agree with you it doesn't necesarily mean they are arrogant, or 15 years old. Did you ever consider the fact that you could be wrong? Or maybe your university professor with a political axe to grind presented an edited and one sided education?
Didn't think so. Eurotrash are sooo tiresomely snobbish, especially when calling someone else arrogant. Pot, kettle, black? Get it?
Idiodic fool.
Or practically any other goverments, including Japan. Which IIRC is WERE KYOTO IS fer cripes sake.
But who gets an earful, USA.
And change to a LOUDER exhaust system. Louder is always faster....
For more ideas check HERE!
I think this was in that Disney movie Hercules. At a plnetary line up the Titans cage was exposed and Hades freed the Titans for his war on Mt.Olympus....
It was something like 12cent a kW/hr. If it was set at some arbitrary amount per month regardless of use, the more you used the less you paid per unit. E.g., I'm going to set the limit of what you pay for gasoline at $100 per month, regardless of how many miles you drive. Instead of say $1.85 per gallon. So you drive more, you pay more, just not an overly outrageous amount per gallon.
Although the retail cap was set at about 12cents a kW/hr in the retail market, the wholesale market (at least initially) had no such limits. This led the absurd situation where SCE and PG&E had to pay wholesale generators 150, 200, 400, 600, (at one point briefly 5500!!) cents a kW/hr, while still being able to charge customers only 12 cents a kW/hr!!
Continuing with the gasoline example, you own a gas station and the other buyers of bulk gasoline at the refinery start bidding up the price until it reaches $250.00 per gallon. But the PUC says, nope sorry you have to sell that gas no matter what for no more than $2.00 per gallon. This is essentially what happened. And is why PG&E went BK and SCE came within an eyelash of doing so.
Enova Corp. (SDG&E) was not effected because they had paid off their long term "stranded costs" and thus didn't fall under the same provisions our wonderful idiots in the CPUC DRA (Division of Ratepayer Advocates - a bunch of leftist lawyers) forced on PG&E and SCE.
"I dont fully know what it was like in CA (but I did get a $12/day surcharge at a SF hotel last June), but to my understanding, the limit was on cost per watt or something like that, not cost/month. Cost/watt would give conservation incentives by showing the person how much they were using"
You are a little confused about the price cap situation. There was always a retail price cap from the inception of AB1890. The retail cap applied to the end user consumers. The retail cap came about for the "something for nothing" crowd. It was a way of getting support for the whole package from consumer advocates (no matter they say they said back then). The wholesale cap(s) came about later as desperate damage control when it became painfully apparent that AB1890, the blue book and the CPUC had disconnected the wholesale and the retail markets from each other. That old supply and demand thing is much more robust than they thought. With the retail cap, there was no incentive for consumers to lower their use so demand stayed higher than it probably would have and this prolonged the shortage. The wholesale cap had a similar effect by discouraging generation companies from buying expensive generation plant fuel and then not being able to recoup that cost through wholesale prices. Another long term effect of both caps, but especially the retail cap was to discaurage spending on building new projects.
Ok, put down the paint can and step away from the fumes.
Now pack up your belongings and move to communist China which it appears is where you really want to live.
the whole rolling-blackout deal had nothing at all to do with the state of semi-deregulation, and everything to do with plain old securities fraud.
That may indeed have played a part, but the single biggest cause was the infamous "Blue Book" on wholesale (versus retail) deregulation plans that the CPUC staff published way back in the early 1990's. That book terrified the big utilities (and their bankers) away from investing the money to build new plants and transmission towers for ten years BEFORE the crises really hit. NIMBY played (and still plays) a big role also. The rolling blackouts situation was a decade in the making. This is well before any Enron or the other fifteen or so companies even had a chance to try and pull any shenanigans.
What the retail price caps did was:
Prevent the consumer from "feeling" the pain of his/her choices, so no incentive to lower usage.
Discouraged investment in new sources of power.
Also I too heard the so-cal didn't get hit that bad. Funny considering we provide more power and we also provide the majority of the water for the state. I'm voting to split CA. So-cal is a giant leech.
I work in the power industry and I live in SoCal, happily leeching away. In case you are interested the main reason Northern Cal has a demand vs generation+powerimports problem is that all you voters up there keep shooting down any opportunities to build power plants and transmission towers in Northern Cal. There isn't enough generation where the demand is and it's been almost impossible to get power lines or plants built. The main north-south lines are ALWAYS near full load. We need to build more generating plants where the loads are and build more lines for increased power transfer flexibility. Probably very unlikely given the perennial NIMBY mindset from my fellow Californians.
But I was thinking more of the summer, after Davis put in place his fixes (the exhortation to conserve, combined with discounts/rebates for conservation). Even though the chock-full-o-blackouts summer didn't materialize
The only thing that saved Davis was the weather. Pure and simple. The weather allowed enough rain for more hydro imports from Oregon and Washington states, and cooler temperatures with lower humidity on average across Northern and Southern California lowered demand.
Yes, the calls to conserve helped and were a good thing, but the lowered demand due to the weather was mulitple times more effective than ANY calls for conservation.
Wish I had a mod point for ya. You are spot on (speaking as an person with some direct experience in the field).
You might want to actually read the article.
They are talking about getting data for a centrifuge on a spacecraft. Possibly to aid astronauts in acclimatizing to a destination planet on a long long trip, Mars for example. There is no mention of any spacedrive stuff....
"Maybe you could design it such that the launch apparatus is like those used today, but breaks off after exiting the atmosphere, where nuclear propulsion commences. (IE, you release no neutrons in to the reactor until the craft is a specified number of miles outside our atmosphere)."
The whole point is to ELIMINATE chemical rockets and go to fission rockets. The vast majority of the work is done getting to low earth orbit. Thats where it makes the most sense to use a much higher thrust to weight engine.
The focus of the article was elimination of chemical rockets and use of nuclear heated helium gas rockets for all launches, low earth orbit and up.
All launches would benefit from a thrust to weight ratio perspective. He did mention that if Hydrogen gas were used there would be some radioactive fallout from the gas. I imagine that would be from neutron reactions with the Hydrogen breeding tritium and deuterium as the Hydrogen is blased out of the reactor. Use of Helium instead would be less efficient but not result in any appreciable nuetron activation.
"So forget the radiation, a more immediate effect than radiation is 'thermal pollution' - eg all that heat has to go somewhere, and in coastal areas, putting it back in the ocean basically kills the ecosystem deader than the radiation ever could."
Well I know of at least two studies that lasted over a decade and they both show mixed effects to thermal pollution. I.e., some species populations exploded in the 15 - 25F warmer area near the plant outfall pipes, and some species populations fell. As to the effects on marine plants, the noise level in the data was too high to really conclude anything at all (the variations observed were within the parameters of natural variations in plant growth).
There is a definite effect, but is the effect of sufficient widespread damage to warrant shutdowns? I don't think so.
"I agree, that's a big problem. The US spends millions a year trying to contain wastes in temporary storage facilities. But putting it in Yucca Mountain doesn't keep nuclear swimming pools away from population centers; instead, it creates what amounts to a giant nuclear lake just a little ways away from one major population center."
You left out that it's actually 95 miles away, under 1000+ feet of rock, stored inside some of the toughest corrosion resistant metal containers known to our science, those containers inside thick (I mean meters thick) concrete vaults.
"That would be incorrect. It's no safer than the current alternative of temporary storage, but when (not if) the waste gets loose, it only affects Nevada."
May not be safer (it seems much safer to me), but what is harder to watch and keep secure, 50+ sites or 1 site?
"No new nuclear power plants have been commissioned since 1979. All orders for nuclear power plants since 1973 have been cancelled. You're ill informed."
See my previous post in this thread, you are the ill informed person here, so much so that you lose quite a bit a credibility, since the facts are so easily checked.
"Countries around the world are halting the use of nuclear power. France, who gets most of its power from nukes, has cancelled all new projects."
Because they are quite happy with the reserve margins they currently have in their generation, not from some irrational fear of nuclear waste.
"There are several better ways of going about this - I won't go into detail, but they are: shoot it into the sun (bad idea), put it under the ice caps (bad idea), store it in the Pacific muck (good idea), put it in a subduction zone (no one knows if it's a good idea), or store it under the water table of a large city (bad idea) - oh, wait, that last one is already being done."
Yeah, all of these methods of final disposal can be accomplished even if Yucca mountain is filled. Yucca mountain is a storage site fer cripes sake! This stuff isn't going to be "dumped" off the back of a truck and buried. By the very nature of the design of these cannisters, they can be moved again at a later date if a more safe storage idea is agreed upon. Also, you left out our best (from an engineering point of view - never the one chosen of course) and that is MOX fuel reburning and reprocessing fuel. But that is a whole different argument.
"Also, you say 'right now' in your post - it's right now and looking like forever. There haven't been any new nuke plants commissioned since 1979. All orders after 1973 have been cancelled. Nuclear power is on its way out as a consumer power supply."
Wrong wrong wrong! No new nuclear plants have been ordered since 1979. There were several plants that completed construction and low power testing and received full power licenses all through the 1980's and even the first part of the 1990's! Look up the Seabrook Station (1990) in NH and check out it's entering commercial service date. Also ANO2 (1980), San Onofre (1984), Diablo Canyon (1985), Commanche Peak (1993), Watts Bar (1996). I could go on and on. But facts aren't going to dissuade you obviously, never mind.
Don't forget that almost every power generator above about 500MW on this planet is cooled by pressurized H2 blanket and a H2 to water heat exchanger. H2 has passable heat transfer properties, but more important doesn't conduct electricity. So you can use it in your 20,000V stator coils of your big baseload power plant to remove I2R losses.