A liberal problem? Then how is it that, at least in the United States, it is those who are politically conservative (such as Michelle Bachmann) that tend to be antivaxxers?
I disagree with this - good doctors are respectful of their patient's intelligence, assuming the patient earns that respect. Sometimes a patient must make a difficult high-risk decision.
But this is a situation of stupid patients who are endangering others in society.
No, it's those who COULD receive a vaccine and refuse it that endanger those who CANNOT receive the vaccine for valid medical reasons (such as being immunocompromised).
When talking about the wealth of doctors, you need to take into account FAR more than raw salary.
1) Medical school typically results in a few hundred thousand dollars of debt incurred, ON TOP of whatever debt the doctor may have incurred during their undergraduate program 2) Undergraduate debt does not begin to get paid off during medical school - instead, debt increases (see 1) ) 3) After graduating medical school, a doctor must atcomplete residency (I believe this is typically a MINIMUM of 3 years) before they can practice. The typical salary for a medical resident (based on looking at the info packets for one of the local family medicine residency programs in my area) is well below the salary for an entry level engineer straight out of undergraduate school. (e.g. an engineer makes a higher salary four years earlier - note the time value of money here.). This is despite the fact that the resident has four more years of school during which they were racking up debt 4) Once the doctor finally finishes residency, they have to pay for malpractice insurance. This is a MAJOR cost driver for doctors.
4) is a major kicker here - Permitting a patient who has refused vaccination to spend time in the waiting room endangers other patients who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason (such as immunocompromised patients) - opening up the doors for malpractice suits from those patients.
No a "modern" water reactor is like a current internal combustion vehicle - It has vast increases in safety (crumple zones, ABS, stability control, power steering and brakes) and significant improvements in efficiency (improved engine control, improved design methodology), but the fundamental operating principles are the same. Is a non-hybrid internal combustion vehicle such as a GDI Hyundai Sonata not "modern"? I don't think so - they are still modern even though its fundamental operating principles are the same as a Model T.
It's vehicles that make major changes in operating principles like hybrids and all-electric vehicles that are the most analogous to alternative (fast reactors, subcritical reactors, etc.) nuclear designs.
Yup, the French make prolific use of cooling towers in order to reduce thermal impact on rivers.
Also keep in mind that this affects coal plants just as much as nuke plants, and will also affect combined cycle natural gas plants that use steam for a bottom cycle.
Existing CANDU designs can actually use LWR waste with only "dry reprocessing" - reshaping the spent fuel into a new form.
However that's only a slight improvement in efficiency.
The IFR-style approach would require LWR to be reprocessed prior to entering the IFR cycle - but yes, existing LWR waste can be used to fuel a breeder like the IFR.
Even without breeder reactors, reprocessing can greatly reduce the waste issue - just not nearly to the degree that an integrated breeder + pyroprocessing approach like the IFR could.
Yup - The two Best Buys I go to actually have semi-competent sales staff that never does upsells and cross-sells, and actually goes away when you say you don't need help.
However - both of them are in towns with large universities, so many of their staff are college kids looking for extra pizza money. These tend to be much better qualified for a tech sales job than the typical Best Buy employee.
I agree - if nuclear had more R&D in the 1980s and 1990s, most likely the waste challenge would be solved. There are plenty of candidate technologies for it - the IFR had the potential to provide 100% of this country's electrical needs for decades, if not a century, using only waste from our existing LWR installations as fuel. The waste from an IFR would be low-volume and only "hot" for a few hundred years, unlike current LWR waste.
As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.
At that point, we might have the energy storage technology to make solar and wind feasible - right now, we don't have the ability to make the output peaks of solar/wind match our demand peaks, or even come close.
You're correct here - Many of the safety features in this plant (and even its predecessors) would have allowed Fukushima to have survived the tsunami without any core damage.
For example, in addition to the diesels, the ABWR design has a gas turbine in the (heavily reinforced) turbine building.
The ESBWR design (similar in safety features to this AP1000) could have survived the loss of both that gas turbine and all of the diesels thanks to the PCCS - Maintaining PCCS operation only requires you to bring a fire truck onsite within 72 hours.
The numbers you cite are costs for nameplate capacity.
Even in Arizona, solar rarely exceeds 20% capacity factor. 90%+ capacity factor is normal for nuclear plants.
So, once capacity factor is taken into account: $6.36/watt, divided by 0.9 = $7.06 per watt for nuclear $3/watt, divided by 0.2 = $15 per watt for solar in Arizona, $20/watt or more in areas with less sun
Burning it may be cleaner than coal - but getting it out of the ground in a safe and clean manner is proving to be far less clear-cut.
I live on top of the Marcellus Shale formation - I'd rather have a nuke plant or two open up a mile from me than to have gas drilling anywhere in this state. The drilling companies have an attitude of "it's safe, we're drilling responsibly, trust us, nothing has ever gone wrong, that spill didn't happen, we don't need to change anything because it's fine the way it is". Compared to the nuclear industry - "Even though we already have the lowest deaths per terawatt-hour count of any form of power generation, we're STILL working to improve our safety designs." - This is the thing that earns the most trust from me, the fact that they are constantly striving to improve safety, instead of constantly denying that there could possibly be any problems and refusing to change anything.
What we learned from Fukushima is that this is EXACTLY what we need to do - we need to start building modernized reactors that roll in decades of safety research and engineering into their design, as opposed to repeatedly service-life-extending old clunkers with ancient safety designs.
And if we don't go with nuclear - what's our other option? Gas, the industry which has contaminated more groundwater in the past five years with drilling activities than almost the entire history of civilian nuclear power?
The nuclear industry has an excellent track record - it took decades before the first incident of a civilian reactor letting out any measurable contamination, and that incident was triggered by a natural disaster that killed over 25,000 people instantly, hitting a reactor that was so old that it was originally scheduled for permanent shutdown prior to the earthquake.
(I don't consider Chernobyl to be a civilian reactor - even if the Soviets tried to claim it was "civilian", the only reason one builds graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors is to have the option of using it as a cheap source of weapons plutonium.)
Correct - The only Verizon phones with SIM slots are: 1) "global" phones that were dual-mode GSM/CDMA2000 for global roaming 2) LTE devices, since LTE requires a SIM. The SIM is, to my knowledge, not used for the legacy CDMA interfaces.
Much of this is a change of focus... Instead of beefy desktop CPUs running bloated OS, the focus is becoming more on portable devices.
Basically, this is "We're hanging in there in the desktop/laptop market, but rather than hang on to our piece of a shrinking pie, we want to get in on the pie that's getting bigger".
ARM is superior in low-power applications. It's highest-end CPUs maybe match Intel Atom, but often have far more peripherals (such as a fairly decent GPU and 1080p multi-format video decoding all on a tiny chip about the size of your thumbnail. Seriously - I can almost completely cover an OMAP4 with my thumb.)
My experience was that until the Kindle Fire, most Android devices around the world DID have the Market and C2DM.
The Kindle Fire is the first Android device other than cheap Chinese KIRFs that I've seen without Market support. It's the first device to actually sell in any significant quantity without Market support.
"Perhaps Google could come up with a standard for pushing all these control signals and keep alives through a single gateway. That way apps could piggyback on each other to reduce traffic." They already have it - it's called Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
That's one thing I wish wireless providers would "get" - rather than marketing insanely high transfer rates with ridiculously low caps, they should sell tiered rates...
The T-Mobile and AT&T "unlimited" policy of full speed up to a ridiculously restrictive throttle wall is ridiculous - it makes FAR more sense to reduce the initial speed, and make the throttle a little gentler. If throttling of high users weren't so severe (a "soft cap" that degraded as your usage got higher, instead of a "hard threshold" after which your device is nearly unusable) people wouldn't be so damn pissed off.
I would have no problem with trading peak and average speeds in order for not worrying about "brick wall" overage thresholds. Plus, this would be better for the network - instead of congestion when people's billing cycles reset the limits, data would be spread more evenly over the month.
Was this a third-party app or an official Google app? If it's third-party, Google has no control. One packet every 3 minutes is, honestly, pretty damn good for some apps. Skype can cause a device to wake up once every few seconds (which is the main reason it's an epic battery hog).
Google's own apps are about as efficient as they can be in order to minimize periodic data, because keepalives and checkins wake the device, draining battery. The problem is that some major carriers have broken NAT boxes ( http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/slides/s374.pdf ), forcing Google to reduce keepalive intervals so that these carriers don't kill TCP connections - which forces an expensive (in terms of time, battery, and network resources) connection setup sequence.
Considering that Google has a SERIOUS interest in making control signal intervals as long as possible for battery life purposes - if they are too often, the carriers only have themselves to blame. Too many carriers have aggressive NAT firewalls with short TCP connection timeouts, and it's much better for the handset AND the carrier to send a keepalive within that timeout period than to have to detect a dead connection and set up a new one.
Google "netpiculet" or look at my last post earlier on this article for an eye-opener of how network providers shoot themselves in the foot.
If Google is sending control signals too often - DoCoMo should take it up with the carriers that deployed broke-ass NAT boxes that forced Google to do this.
Docomo seems to claim that it's background sync/checking traffic - but Google makes a point of reducing this as much as possible. There's good reason to do this - the less often data is transferred to keep "checked in", the less often a device needs to wake up, and the better battery life is.
This is, for example, why IM apps that use Google C2DM (Such as Google Talk - but any IM app author can use C2DM) have a minimal impact on battery life, while poorly written apps that are not even remotely suited to mobile devices (like Skype) are massive battery hogs.
In your example, the gym still offers the $650/year plan. In AT&T's case, only those who have it already can keep it - it has been this way for 1-2 years now.
In addition, AT&T is doing everything they can to force people off of the unlimited plan: 1) Capping those supposedly in the "top 5%" of data users - however, some people have gotten capping nastygrams when their monthly usage was BELOW the 2GB cap of the highest non-tethering plans! 2) Forcing users off of the unlimited plan by accusing them of tethering - even though using a browser that uses a desktop useragent (such as Dolphin HD) will trigger this even if you are not tethering at all.
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A liberal problem? Then how is it that, at least in the United States, it is those who are politically conservative (such as Michelle Bachmann) that tend to be antivaxxers?
I disagree with this - good doctors are respectful of their patient's intelligence, assuming the patient earns that respect. Sometimes a patient must make a difficult high-risk decision.
But this is a situation of stupid patients who are endangering others in society.
No, it's those who COULD receive a vaccine and refuse it that endanger those who CANNOT receive the vaccine for valid medical reasons (such as being immunocompromised).
When talking about the wealth of doctors, you need to take into account FAR more than raw salary.
1) Medical school typically results in a few hundred thousand dollars of debt incurred, ON TOP of whatever debt the doctor may have incurred during their undergraduate program
2) Undergraduate debt does not begin to get paid off during medical school - instead, debt increases (see 1) )
3) After graduating medical school, a doctor must atcomplete residency (I believe this is typically a MINIMUM of 3 years) before they can practice. The typical salary for a medical resident (based on looking at the info packets for one of the local family medicine residency programs in my area) is well below the salary for an entry level engineer straight out of undergraduate school. (e.g. an engineer makes a higher salary four years earlier - note the time value of money here.). This is despite the fact that the resident has four more years of school during which they were racking up debt
4) Once the doctor finally finishes residency, they have to pay for malpractice insurance. This is a MAJOR cost driver for doctors.
4) is a major kicker here - Permitting a patient who has refused vaccination to spend time in the waiting room endangers other patients who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason (such as immunocompromised patients) - opening up the doors for malpractice suits from those patients.
No a "modern" water reactor is like a current internal combustion vehicle - It has vast increases in safety (crumple zones, ABS, stability control, power steering and brakes) and significant improvements in efficiency (improved engine control, improved design methodology), but the fundamental operating principles are the same. Is a non-hybrid internal combustion vehicle such as a GDI Hyundai Sonata not "modern"? I don't think so - they are still modern even though its fundamental operating principles are the same as a Model T.
It's vehicles that make major changes in operating principles like hybrids and all-electric vehicles that are the most analogous to alternative (fast reactors, subcritical reactors, etc.) nuclear designs.
Yup, the French make prolific use of cooling towers in order to reduce thermal impact on rivers.
Also keep in mind that this affects coal plants just as much as nuke plants, and will also affect combined cycle natural gas plants that use steam for a bottom cycle.
Yes.
Existing CANDU designs can actually use LWR waste with only "dry reprocessing" - reshaping the spent fuel into a new form.
However that's only a slight improvement in efficiency.
The IFR-style approach would require LWR to be reprocessed prior to entering the IFR cycle - but yes, existing LWR waste can be used to fuel a breeder like the IFR.
Even without breeder reactors, reprocessing can greatly reduce the waste issue - just not nearly to the degree that an integrated breeder + pyroprocessing approach like the IFR could.
Yup - The two Best Buys I go to actually have semi-competent sales staff that never does upsells and cross-sells, and actually goes away when you say you don't need help.
However - both of them are in towns with large universities, so many of their staff are college kids looking for extra pizza money. These tend to be much better qualified for a tech sales job than the typical Best Buy employee.
I agree - if nuclear had more R&D in the 1980s and 1990s, most likely the waste challenge would be solved. There are plenty of candidate technologies for it - the IFR had the potential to provide 100% of this country's electrical needs for decades, if not a century, using only waste from our existing LWR installations as fuel. The waste from an IFR would be low-volume and only "hot" for a few hundred years, unlike current LWR waste.
As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.
At that point, we might have the energy storage technology to make solar and wind feasible - right now, we don't have the ability to make the output peaks of solar/wind match our demand peaks, or even come close.
You're correct here - Many of the safety features in this plant (and even its predecessors) would have allowed Fukushima to have survived the tsunami without any core damage.
For example, in addition to the diesels, the ABWR design has a gas turbine in the (heavily reinforced) turbine building.
The ESBWR design (similar in safety features to this AP1000) could have survived the loss of both that gas turbine and all of the diesels thanks to the PCCS - Maintaining PCCS operation only requires you to bring a fire truck onsite within 72 hours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
The numbers you cite are costs for nameplate capacity.
Even in Arizona, solar rarely exceeds 20% capacity factor. 90%+ capacity factor is normal for nuclear plants.
So, once capacity factor is taken into account:
$6.36/watt, divided by 0.9 = $7.06 per watt for nuclear
$3/watt, divided by 0.2 = $15 per watt for solar in Arizona, $20/watt or more in areas with less sun
Burning it may be cleaner than coal - but getting it out of the ground in a safe and clean manner is proving to be far less clear-cut.
I live on top of the Marcellus Shale formation - I'd rather have a nuke plant or two open up a mile from me than to have gas drilling anywhere in this state. The drilling companies have an attitude of "it's safe, we're drilling responsibly, trust us, nothing has ever gone wrong, that spill didn't happen, we don't need to change anything because it's fine the way it is". Compared to the nuclear industry - "Even though we already have the lowest deaths per terawatt-hour count of any form of power generation, we're STILL working to improve our safety designs." - This is the thing that earns the most trust from me, the fact that they are constantly striving to improve safety, instead of constantly denying that there could possibly be any problems and refusing to change anything.
What we learned from Fukushima is that this is EXACTLY what we need to do - we need to start building modernized reactors that roll in decades of safety research and engineering into their design, as opposed to repeatedly service-life-extending old clunkers with ancient safety designs.
And if we don't go with nuclear - what's our other option? Gas, the industry which has contaminated more groundwater in the past five years with drilling activities than almost the entire history of civilian nuclear power?
The nuclear industry has an excellent track record - it took decades before the first incident of a civilian reactor letting out any measurable contamination, and that incident was triggered by a natural disaster that killed over 25,000 people instantly, hitting a reactor that was so old that it was originally scheduled for permanent shutdown prior to the earthquake.
(I don't consider Chernobyl to be a civilian reactor - even if the Soviets tried to claim it was "civilian", the only reason one builds graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors is to have the option of using it as a cheap source of weapons plutonium.)
Correct - The only Verizon phones with SIM slots are:
1) "global" phones that were dual-mode GSM/CDMA2000 for global roaming
2) LTE devices, since LTE requires a SIM. The SIM is, to my knowledge, not used for the legacy CDMA interfaces.
Much of this is a change of focus... Instead of beefy desktop CPUs running bloated OS, the focus is becoming more on portable devices.
Basically, this is "We're hanging in there in the desktop/laptop market, but rather than hang on to our piece of a shrinking pie, we want to get in on the pie that's getting bigger".
ARM is superior in low-power applications. It's highest-end CPUs maybe match Intel Atom, but often have far more peripherals (such as a fairly decent GPU and 1080p multi-format video decoding all on a tiny chip about the size of your thumbnail. Seriously - I can almost completely cover an OMAP4 with my thumb.)
My experience was that until the Kindle Fire, most Android devices around the world DID have the Market and C2DM.
The Kindle Fire is the first Android device other than cheap Chinese KIRFs that I've seen without Market support. It's the first device to actually sell in any significant quantity without Market support.
"Perhaps Google could come up with a standard for pushing all these control signals and keep alives through a single gateway. That way apps could piggyback on each other to reduce traffic."
They already have it - it's called Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
That's one thing I wish wireless providers would "get" - rather than marketing insanely high transfer rates with ridiculously low caps, they should sell tiered rates...
The T-Mobile and AT&T "unlimited" policy of full speed up to a ridiculously restrictive throttle wall is ridiculous - it makes FAR more sense to reduce the initial speed, and make the throttle a little gentler. If throttling of high users weren't so severe (a "soft cap" that degraded as your usage got higher, instead of a "hard threshold" after which your device is nearly unusable) people wouldn't be so damn pissed off.
I would have no problem with trading peak and average speeds in order for not worrying about "brick wall" overage thresholds. Plus, this would be better for the network - instead of congestion when people's billing cycles reset the limits, data would be spread more evenly over the month.
At that point you're probably better off writing your own reliability protocol layered over UDP...
Was this a third-party app or an official Google app? If it's third-party, Google has no control. One packet every 3 minutes is, honestly, pretty damn good for some apps. Skype can cause a device to wake up once every few seconds (which is the main reason it's an epic battery hog).
Google's own apps are about as efficient as they can be in order to minimize periodic data, because keepalives and checkins wake the device, draining battery. The problem is that some major carriers have broken NAT boxes ( http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/slides/s374.pdf ), forcing Google to reduce keepalive intervals so that these carriers don't kill TCP connections - which forces an expensive (in terms of time, battery, and network resources) connection setup sequence.
They already do - it's called Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
If C2DM is sending syncs/keepalives every 3-5 minutes, it's because broken carrier NAT boxes are forcing them to.
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/slides/s374.pdf
Considering that Google has a SERIOUS interest in making control signal intervals as long as possible for battery life purposes - if they are too often, the carriers only have themselves to blame. Too many carriers have aggressive NAT firewalls with short TCP connection timeouts, and it's much better for the handset AND the carrier to send a keepalive within that timeout period than to have to detect a dead connection and set up a new one.
Google "netpiculet" or look at my last post earlier on this article for an eye-opener of how network providers shoot themselves in the foot.
If Google is sending control signals too often - DoCoMo should take it up with the carriers that deployed broke-ass NAT boxes that forced Google to do this.
Docomo seems to claim that it's background sync/checking traffic - but Google makes a point of reducing this as much as possible. There's good reason to do this - the less often data is transferred to keep "checked in", the less often a device needs to wake up, and the better battery life is.
This is, for example, why IM apps that use Google C2DM (Such as Google Talk - but any IM app author can use C2DM) have a minimal impact on battery life, while poorly written apps that are not even remotely suited to mobile devices (like Skype) are massive battery hogs.
If Google's services are "checking in" that often on DoCoMo, it's probably because DoCoMo's NAT boxes are broken - http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/slides/s374.pdf
No, I actually like being able to use my phone within 15 miles of where I live/work.
One thing you are forgetting here:
In your example, the gym still offers the $650/year plan. In AT&T's case, only those who have it already can keep it - it has been this way for 1-2 years now.
In addition, AT&T is doing everything they can to force people off of the unlimited plan:
1) Capping those supposedly in the "top 5%" of data users - however, some people have gotten capping nastygrams when their monthly usage was BELOW the 2GB cap of the highest non-tethering plans!
2) Forcing users off of the unlimited plan by accusing them of tethering - even though using a browser that uses a desktop useragent (such as Dolphin HD) will trigger this even if you are not tethering at all.