"that the towers to choose from might be more geographically diverse than usual"
Which completely breaks the frequency/channel reuse planning of the cellular network.
Disclaimer: UMTS soft-handoffs make things a lot more complex than just frequencies and channels, but let's assume the classic "hard handoff" approach. Each mobile device can indeed hear multiple towers, but the network is designed such that those towers are NOT on the same frequency. In normal circumstances, a mobile device will never be heard by or hear from more than one tower operating on the same frequency.
However, once the device goes airborne, it can hear from and be heard by FAR more towers, including ones that were never intended to be able to see the same mobile device simultaneously. The spectrum allocation and reuse design of the network goes down the tubes because the base assumptions on propagation no longer apply.
An example: Towers A, B, and C are all adjacent to each other. The network is designed on the assumption that a device could hear/be heard by all three simultaneously. So it's not a problem if they are. Tower D is geographically separated from towers A, B, and C. Because it should never hear/be heard by a device communicating with A, B, or C, it is not designed to handle this. (For example, it could reuse the same channel allocations as tower A.) If a mobile terminal goes airborne, this assumption goes down the tubes, and a device communicating with A will interfere with D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network - take a look at the 1/4 frequency reuse diagram. See how at the left there are three towers, with frequency assignments F1, F3, F1? The two towers on F1 are not suppose to ever have good propagation simultaneously to a single mobile device, and terrestrial cell networks are specifically designed to ensure this. However, if a cell phone goes airborne above the tower on F3, it will have equal propagation to the two towers on F1, and may in fact have better propagation than to the tower directly under it (since the tower's antennas are designed to direct the beam horizontally or at a downward angle.)
No, they can't run their own wireless network when they're on final instrument landing approach.
There's a huge difference between cruise altitude (if anything in the cabin interferes with aircraft systems at this point, the aircraft manufacturer REALLY screwed up) and landing approach in bad weather - 100 foot navigational error can mean death, and the system used for such landings (ILS) is notoriously sensitive and finicky to the point where entire portions of airports have to be blocked off just so nothing reflects the ILS beam.
1) FAA or no FAA, you're violating FCC rules. Cell phones are not licensed for airborne operation because it screws up the premise of a device only being able to "hear" towers in adjacent cells. (Special exception: shielded cabin combined with a microcell that causes the phone's automatic power control to kick in.)
2) GSM phones are notorious for bad EMI. (The classic "GSM buzz" at the GSM TDMA frame repetition rate.)
1) 10 minutes before landing/after takeoff - this is a blanket ban on ALL electronics, with transmitters or not. During this period is when the majority of aircraft accidents happen, and is when the navigation system has to be the most precise. On landing, 100 feet of error can kill you. The primary method for bad-weather landings for years was ILS, which is well known for being an EXTREMELY sensitive and finicky system - even clock leakage from electronics completely devoid of a radio could cause issues. Once you're at cruise altitude - 100 feet of navigational error is almost meaningless, and you also aren't relying on ILS anyway.
2) Transmitter device ban. Two reasons here - One is in general, transmitters are much more likely to cause problems. However, the FAA DOES allow transmitters on aircraft as long as they don't violate FCC regulations and the aircraft operator has verified that the device does not cause a safety hazard. Most airlines don't want to take the liability risk of the latter, with the exception of highly tested systems like AirCell's. The second is the FCC - airborne cell phones are illegal, because it messes up with the way the cell network's capacity is allocated. (Multiple cells able to see the same mobile terminal is BAD.) The only cases where airborne cell phones have been permitted are cases where the cabin is extra-shielded and a microcell is present to cause the phone's automatic transmit power control to kick in and reduce power. Even using a cell phone in a hot air balloon with no instruments whatsoever is illegal.
(This is why I hate it when I see high altitude balloon projects that say "Hey, we're legal per FAA regulation blahblah" but use a cell phone for comms - they didn't bother to also read up on FCC regs.)
This is one of the key reasons I am a much bigger supporter of the nuclear industry than the gas industry. The nuclear industry admits to their mistakes and constantly strives to improve safety - look at the vast improvements in safety design from BWR to ABWR to ESBWR even before the first BWR accident in history. When an accident occurs, changes are made to prevent it from happening again.
The gas industry, on the other hand, simply says "we are safe". They won't tell you what is within the fracturing fluid, they won't admit when they've fucked up and deny it every turn, and of course - since they believe (or at least would like us to believe) they're safe and all that groundwater contamination and spills never happened, they don't make any safety improvements.
Well, decay heat management is really the key here. TMI's meltdown occurred after a SCRAM (decay heat). Chernobyl failed when the operators were preparing to run a dangerous test of decay heat management systems. Fukushima - all about decay heat.
It's REALLY hard if not impossible to eliminate the issue of decay heat. However, with properly sized passive cooling you could probably make it possible to sustain decay heat management indefinitely - you wouldn't be classified as "cold shutdown" (reactor still pressurized and over 100C) but far away from melting.
ESBWR can achieve 72 hours of passive cooling. At that point all that is required is a fire truck to refill the coolant pools. After that, the next needed refill is likely to be significantly later as decay heat output would have dropped significantly. Also, couple the pools to a passive cooling tower and I would guess you can likely extend that time significantly.
No, they just cranked up the gas plants and coal plants to make up for the shortfall. Nuclear exit strategy's dirty little secret - NO ONE has proposed a viable nuclear exit strategy that didn't involve a buildout of coal and gas plants.
Unlike me, you have the luxury of not living on top of a large natural gas bearing shale formation. As I've said in other posts - I'll take living immediately adjacent to a modernized nuclear plant over the commencement of hydrofracturing operations in my state any time without hesitation. Nuclear has a proven track record that is consistently improving. After all - if you don't count Soviet nuclear power (fundamentally dangerous for a variety of reasons), it has taken 40-50 years for civilian nuclear power (note: another reason not to count Soviet "civilian" nuclear power is because their reactors had fundamental design decisions that chose weapons production viability over safety - even if they never used THAT reactor for producing weapons materials, it was designed to allow that capability) to expose anyone to a hazard, and that took a record-breaking disaster (25,000+ deaths as a direct result) hitting one of the oldest operational plants in the world.
Silverlight is NOT cross-platform, so you failed there. Since Microsoft doesn't release an "early" spec so that alternative implementations (such as Moonlight) can get started early and release their implementations when MS releases a new version of Silverlight, we get a situation identical to Adobe's "we're open! really!" when they aren't. Implementations for alternative platforms are unable to even start working on implementing new Silverlight features until MS releases their implementation.
Actually, it seems worse than that - Moonlight still only supports Silverlight 2.0. But while you may not jump to the latest and greatest Silverlight immediately - nearly all of the other Silverlight devs out there do. End result is that I have yet to see an example of Silverlight that worked with Moonlight other than in "example galleries" for Silverlight.
Even not counting the DRM issues (At least Adobe's Linux implementation is "content provider friendly", i.e. works with all Flash-based sites), even non-DRM Silverlight devs always move to the latest and greatest version of Silverlight as soon as it comes out.
That's why to this day, I have yet to ever see an actual Silverlight site that worked with Monolight. I know the "enhanced" maps used in the New York State Parks reservations system didn't work with monolight last time I tried. Netflix doesn't work, and those are actually about the only Silverlight deployments I've personally encountered.
And a pretty good example of why it has failed... Had Netflix chosen Adobe Flash, they wouldn't be having so much trouble supporting platforms other than Windows.
As much as I dislike Flash (it's a poorly written CPU hog), Silverlight is even worse. Yes it performs better - but only on the single officially supported platform.
To Silverlight developers - boo-hoo, cry me a river. You brought this upon yourselves by immediately transitioning your content to new versions of Silverlight as soon as Microsoft released them without waiting for other platform's implementations (like Monolight) to catch up with the new features. End result is your content only worked in Windows, so users hated Silverlight-based sites and went out of the way to avoid them. (Potentially to your competition.) If it is indeed true that MS is moving away from Silverlight, I am not surprised. Producing Windows-only solutions simply does not work in the current market.
An additional note: To my knowledge, Silverlight is not supported on any mobile platform (except maybe WP7, which is such a smalltime player as to be irrelevant). It is definitely not supported by iOS or Android, the two largest holders of mobile device market share. It is your fault for ignoring the explosion of mobile devices and sticking with a technology not supported by iOS or Android.
Given the rampant groundwater and stream contamination resulting from hydrofracturing operations south of me in Pennsylvania - I'll take a brand-new modern nuke plant in my area over the commencement of gas drilling operations without any hesitation.
CANDU is not fundamentally 2nd/3rd gen - it's got a long history of evolution parallel to PWRs and BWRs.
It is also not fundamentally safer - in fact I suspect one of the reasons you don't see ANY CANDUs in the US is the same reason you don't see any graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors in the US - as I understand it, building a reactor with ANY positive void coefficient is not permitted in the US, and like the RBMK that went boom at Chernobyl, CANDUs have a positive void coefficient. Fortunately, other aspects of the design (including some fairly long time constants that make transients rare) mitigate that positive void coefficient for the most part - but still, they DO have a positive void coefficient.
Um, no, it's not. Show one example of a civilian nuclear reactor in the United States being used for weapons production. Also note that we're one of the few countries that does NOT reprocess their spent nuclear fuels, with proliferation fears being the primary reason why.
By their nature, the type of reactors used in the USA are not very suitable for producing weapons materials. They are difficult to refuel frequently, so the plutonium produced is contaminated with Pu-240 (bad for weapons). So reactors used for weapons production tend to be designed for frequent refueling to reduce the Pu-240 content. This generally results in various graphite-moderated designs. To my knowledge, the USA never used weapons reactors for civilian power generation. The UK may have (Magnox reactors), and the Soviets most assuredly did. (The graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl was perfect for weapons production - it could even be refueled while operational.)
At this point, many countries are actually dismantling weapons and using the plutonium to fuel reactors (MOX fuel), or in the case of HEU weapons- diluting it to produce reactor LEU. See Megatons for Megawatts - many of our civilian reactors are fueled by dismantled Russian bombs.
I disagree. Anything is possible - but at what cost?
A knee-jerk reaction to an incident at one of the oldest reactors in the world, triggered by a record breaking natural disaster, is the LAST thing we need in an economy that is already weak due to rising energy costs.
If we pull a Germany, I'm going to have to start learning French or Chinese I think...
Coal power is a major polluter, both air AND soil/water. Look at the Kingston fly ash spill... Natural gas may burn clean, but the process for extracting it from the ground has contaminated more water resources and sickened more people in 5-10 years than the entire history of United States nuclear power generation. We're tapped out on hydro - and that isn't completely safe either (Banqiao Dam anyone?) Wind and solar are too variable for more than 10-20% penetration given the current energy storage technology we have. In Washington or Oregon, they have frequently had to shut down wind farms because the windiest times were also the rainiest, which meant that the hydro facilities were cranking at full capacity. Denmark exports a significant portion of its wind power and then buys it back from their nuclear/hydro-enabled neighbors, and many believe this is at a significant loss. (Denmark sells it when it's abundant and hence cheap, and buys it back when it's more expensive.)
Nuclear isn't perfect either - but of all of the power generation technologies out there, it has the cleanest and safest track record. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only times in the history of nuclear power generation that more than a handful of members of the public have been exposed to anything but negligible hazards. (Note: I don't count incidents related to weapons detonation or production such as Kyshtm, since most countries are dismantling weapons instead of producing them.) Technically you could even throw Chernobyl into the weapons category, since its flawed and dangerous design compromised safety in favor of suitability for weapons production.
Natural gas drilling operations in only 5-10 years of hydrofracturing shale plays have contaminated more water supplies and sickened more people than the entire history of nuclear power in the United States.
Prior to Fukushima (triggered by a disaster that killed 25,000+ within hours), it would be more contamination/sickness than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear power generation.
Note: I'm not counting weapons-related (detonation or production) contamination incidents, since most countries are dismantling weapons instead of building them.
Coal power is also estimated to kill around 14,000 people per year due to air pollution.
Yup. There are two primary ways of stopping a reaction in most plants: 1) Control rod insertion - No permanent damage, but as stated above, nuke plants have some multi-hour and even multi-day time constants involved, so restarting immediately after a power drop is difficult and potentially dangerous. It CAN be done - the French do a lot of load-following, so do nuclear powered ships, but you have to know what you're doing. The Chernobyl crew were extremely poorly trained in terms of handling xenon poisoning. 2) Borate injection. Boric acid is corrosive, so if the reactor isn't designed to handle it or it isn't cleaned relatively rapidly, it permanently damages the reactor. In first-gen BWRs like Fukushima, borate injection = reactor writeoff. In ABWRs and newer, borate injection does not equal reactor writeoff, removing many psychologicl barriers to doing it.
I don't know about waste heat running a cooling system, but modern plant designs don't need offsite power (or any power for that matter) for at least 72 hours - they are passively cooled by convection/gravity/other passive processes. (For example, the ESBWR effectively has giant heatpipes going up to big water pools on the roof.)
The 72 hour number could probably be increased significantly with some more heatpipes and cooling towers - but even with the current ESBWR design, a plain old fire truck within 72 hours is a LOT better than a specialized generator within 6-12.
Doesn't help - see Chernobyl. Chernobyl was test to handle a loss of offsite power contingency plan during a scheduled reactor shutdown that went HORRIBLY wrong.
I wish I had mod points... That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.
The worst nuclear power disaster in history was caused by a safety test that went wrong... Obviously there were compounding factors (reactor design flaws, operator errors during the test, a request from the Kiev grid operator to keep the reactor running a few hours longer than planned due to an outage at another plant), but it still remains - if the plant had been undergoing a normal shutdown instead of a test/experiment, the disaster would not have happened or even have come close to happening.
This is how I've always used ATK and it works great.
Especially for browser-nuking.
Other main task is Facebook-nuking.
Unfortunately for Motorola, while some apps DO have poor quality control, as much as Google would like to, they are NOT going to disapprove an official Facebook app unless it REALLY sucks. Some apps you just can't disapprove. It winds up being a no-win situation.
And yes, the worst offenders in terms of sucking down battery are often super-popular apps. Facebook is one. Not much experience with Skype myself.
CSipSimple is a less popular one that's utterly horrific in terms of battery life. Even if you set all of its settings to effectively be "use on demand" - ATK it, and it comes right back. While it's running, it drains battery rapidly.
However, Motorola should shut up, since as stated earlier, some of the worst offenders in terms of bad phone performance are their very own apps. Motoblur is a phone-slowing performance hog, it is routinely bundled with crappy carrier apps, and Motorola makes sure that you can't un-bundle that crap.
AWS is slightly more standard for 3G use than the AT&T 3G bands.
2-3 other countries use AWS for 3G.
No other country uses the U.S. 2G bands to also provide 3G service.
However, an iPhone 3G purchased in Europe is more likely to support the AT&T 3G bands than the AWS 3G bands simply due to hardware commonality with the U.S. iPhones.
So your best best, if you NEED 3G, is AT&T or one of their MVNOs. I know at least one AT&T MVNO exists (my parents use it), I thought it was U.S. Cellular but I seem to be wrong.
Wrong - many areas charge residents more during peak periods. California is especially known for this, and it's one of the reasons (lots of sun being the other) why residential solar power is fairly popular there. Peak solar generation times happen to coincide with peak electricity cost times.
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"that the towers to choose from might be more geographically diverse than usual"
Which completely breaks the frequency/channel reuse planning of the cellular network.
Disclaimer: UMTS soft-handoffs make things a lot more complex than just frequencies and channels, but let's assume the classic "hard handoff" approach. Each mobile device can indeed hear multiple towers, but the network is designed such that those towers are NOT on the same frequency. In normal circumstances, a mobile device will never be heard by or hear from more than one tower operating on the same frequency.
However, once the device goes airborne, it can hear from and be heard by FAR more towers, including ones that were never intended to be able to see the same mobile device simultaneously. The spectrum allocation and reuse design of the network goes down the tubes because the base assumptions on propagation no longer apply.
An example: Towers A, B, and C are all adjacent to each other. The network is designed on the assumption that a device could hear/be heard by all three simultaneously. So it's not a problem if they are. Tower D is geographically separated from towers A, B, and C. Because it should never hear/be heard by a device communicating with A, B, or C, it is not designed to handle this. (For example, it could reuse the same channel allocations as tower A.) If a mobile terminal goes airborne, this assumption goes down the tubes, and a device communicating with A will interfere with D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network - take a look at the 1/4 frequency reuse diagram. See how at the left there are three towers, with frequency assignments F1, F3, F1? The two towers on F1 are not suppose to ever have good propagation simultaneously to a single mobile device, and terrestrial cell networks are specifically designed to ensure this. However, if a cell phone goes airborne above the tower on F3, it will have equal propagation to the two towers on F1, and may in fact have better propagation than to the tower directly under it (since the tower's antennas are designed to direct the beam horizontally or at a downward angle.)
No, they can't run their own wireless network when they're on final instrument landing approach.
There's a huge difference between cruise altitude (if anything in the cabin interferes with aircraft systems at this point, the aircraft manufacturer REALLY screwed up) and landing approach in bad weather - 100 foot navigational error can mean death, and the system used for such landings (ILS) is notoriously sensitive and finicky to the point where entire portions of airports have to be blocked off just so nothing reflects the ILS beam.
1) FAA or no FAA, you're violating FCC rules. Cell phones are not licensed for airborne operation because it screws up the premise of a device only being able to "hear" towers in adjacent cells. (Special exception: shielded cabin combined with a microcell that causes the phone's automatic power control to kick in.)
2) GSM phones are notorious for bad EMI. (The classic "GSM buzz" at the GSM TDMA frame repetition rate.)
Nope. There are two separate electronics bans:
1) 10 minutes before landing/after takeoff - this is a blanket ban on ALL electronics, with transmitters or not. During this period is when the majority of aircraft accidents happen, and is when the navigation system has to be the most precise. On landing, 100 feet of error can kill you. The primary method for bad-weather landings for years was ILS, which is well known for being an EXTREMELY sensitive and finicky system - even clock leakage from electronics completely devoid of a radio could cause issues. Once you're at cruise altitude - 100 feet of navigational error is almost meaningless, and you also aren't relying on ILS anyway.
2) Transmitter device ban. Two reasons here - One is in general, transmitters are much more likely to cause problems. However, the FAA DOES allow transmitters on aircraft as long as they don't violate FCC regulations and the aircraft operator has verified that the device does not cause a safety hazard. Most airlines don't want to take the liability risk of the latter, with the exception of highly tested systems like AirCell's. The second is the FCC - airborne cell phones are illegal, because it messes up with the way the cell network's capacity is allocated. (Multiple cells able to see the same mobile terminal is BAD.) The only cases where airborne cell phones have been permitted are cases where the cabin is extra-shielded and a microcell is present to cause the phone's automatic transmit power control to kick in and reduce power. Even using a cell phone in a hot air balloon with no instruments whatsoever is illegal.
(This is why I hate it when I see high altitude balloon projects that say "Hey, we're legal per FAA regulation blahblah" but use a cell phone for comms - they didn't bother to also read up on FCC regs.)
Depends on the timing.
Specifically - if you're using ILS (typically during the final landing approach in bad weather), it's pretty easy to mess it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#Limitations_and_alternatives
Um, Dimock?
This is one of the key reasons I am a much bigger supporter of the nuclear industry than the gas industry. The nuclear industry admits to their mistakes and constantly strives to improve safety - look at the vast improvements in safety design from BWR to ABWR to ESBWR even before the first BWR accident in history. When an accident occurs, changes are made to prevent it from happening again.
The gas industry, on the other hand, simply says "we are safe". They won't tell you what is within the fracturing fluid, they won't admit when they've fucked up and deny it every turn, and of course - since they believe (or at least would like us to believe) they're safe and all that groundwater contamination and spills never happened, they don't make any safety improvements.
Well, decay heat management is really the key here. TMI's meltdown occurred after a SCRAM (decay heat). Chernobyl failed when the operators were preparing to run a dangerous test of decay heat management systems. Fukushima - all about decay heat.
It's REALLY hard if not impossible to eliminate the issue of decay heat. However, with properly sized passive cooling you could probably make it possible to sustain decay heat management indefinitely - you wouldn't be classified as "cold shutdown" (reactor still pressurized and over 100C) but far away from melting.
ESBWR can achieve 72 hours of passive cooling. At that point all that is required is a fire truck to refill the coolant pools. After that, the next needed refill is likely to be significantly later as decay heat output would have dropped significantly. Also, couple the pools to a passive cooling tower and I would guess you can likely extend that time significantly.
No, they just cranked up the gas plants and coal plants to make up for the shortfall. Nuclear exit strategy's dirty little secret - NO ONE has proposed a viable nuclear exit strategy that didn't involve a buildout of coal and gas plants.
Unlike me, you have the luxury of not living on top of a large natural gas bearing shale formation. As I've said in other posts - I'll take living immediately adjacent to a modernized nuclear plant over the commencement of hydrofracturing operations in my state any time without hesitation. Nuclear has a proven track record that is consistently improving. After all - if you don't count Soviet nuclear power (fundamentally dangerous for a variety of reasons), it has taken 40-50 years for civilian nuclear power (note: another reason not to count Soviet "civilian" nuclear power is because their reactors had fundamental design decisions that chose weapons production viability over safety - even if they never used THAT reactor for producing weapons materials, it was designed to allow that capability) to expose anyone to a hazard, and that took a record-breaking disaster (25,000+ deaths as a direct result) hitting one of the oldest operational plants in the world.
Silverlight is NOT cross-platform, so you failed there. Since Microsoft doesn't release an "early" spec so that alternative implementations (such as Moonlight) can get started early and release their implementations when MS releases a new version of Silverlight, we get a situation identical to Adobe's "we're open! really!" when they aren't. Implementations for alternative platforms are unable to even start working on implementing new Silverlight features until MS releases their implementation.
Actually, it seems worse than that - Moonlight still only supports Silverlight 2.0. But while you may not jump to the latest and greatest Silverlight immediately - nearly all of the other Silverlight devs out there do. End result is that I have yet to see an example of Silverlight that worked with Moonlight other than in "example galleries" for Silverlight.
Even not counting the DRM issues (At least Adobe's Linux implementation is "content provider friendly", i.e. works with all Flash-based sites), even non-DRM Silverlight devs always move to the latest and greatest version of Silverlight as soon as it comes out.
That's why to this day, I have yet to ever see an actual Silverlight site that worked with Monolight. I know the "enhanced" maps used in the New York State Parks reservations system didn't work with monolight last time I tried. Netflix doesn't work, and those are actually about the only Silverlight deployments I've personally encountered.
And a pretty good example of why it has failed... Had Netflix chosen Adobe Flash, they wouldn't be having so much trouble supporting platforms other than Windows.
As much as I dislike Flash (it's a poorly written CPU hog), Silverlight is even worse. Yes it performs better - but only on the single officially supported platform.
To Silverlight developers - boo-hoo, cry me a river. You brought this upon yourselves by immediately transitioning your content to new versions of Silverlight as soon as Microsoft released them without waiting for other platform's implementations (like Monolight) to catch up with the new features. End result is your content only worked in Windows, so users hated Silverlight-based sites and went out of the way to avoid them. (Potentially to your competition.) If it is indeed true that MS is moving away from Silverlight, I am not surprised. Producing Windows-only solutions simply does not work in the current market.
An additional note: To my knowledge, Silverlight is not supported on any mobile platform (except maybe WP7, which is such a smalltime player as to be irrelevant). It is definitely not supported by iOS or Android, the two largest holders of mobile device market share. It is your fault for ignoring the explosion of mobile devices and sticking with a technology not supported by iOS or Android.
While referencing small towns in PA and fossil fuel extraction - read up on Dimock...
I live above the Marcellus Shale gas formation.
Given the rampant groundwater and stream contamination resulting from hydrofracturing operations south of me in Pennsylvania - I'll take a brand-new modern nuke plant in my area over the commencement of gas drilling operations without any hesitation.
CANDU is not fundamentally 2nd/3rd gen - it's got a long history of evolution parallel to PWRs and BWRs.
It is also not fundamentally safer - in fact I suspect one of the reasons you don't see ANY CANDUs in the US is the same reason you don't see any graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors in the US - as I understand it, building a reactor with ANY positive void coefficient is not permitted in the US, and like the RBMK that went boom at Chernobyl, CANDUs have a positive void coefficient. Fortunately, other aspects of the design (including some fairly long time constants that make transients rare) mitigate that positive void coefficient for the most part - but still, they DO have a positive void coefficient.
Um, no, it's not. Show one example of a civilian nuclear reactor in the United States being used for weapons production. Also note that we're one of the few countries that does NOT reprocess their spent nuclear fuels, with proliferation fears being the primary reason why.
By their nature, the type of reactors used in the USA are not very suitable for producing weapons materials. They are difficult to refuel frequently, so the plutonium produced is contaminated with Pu-240 (bad for weapons). So reactors used for weapons production tend to be designed for frequent refueling to reduce the Pu-240 content. This generally results in various graphite-moderated designs. To my knowledge, the USA never used weapons reactors for civilian power generation. The UK may have (Magnox reactors), and the Soviets most assuredly did. (The graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl was perfect for weapons production - it could even be refueled while operational.)
At this point, many countries are actually dismantling weapons and using the plutonium to fuel reactors (MOX fuel), or in the case of HEU weapons- diluting it to produce reactor LEU. See Megatons for Megawatts - many of our civilian reactors are fueled by dismantled Russian bombs.
I disagree. Anything is possible - but at what cost?
A knee-jerk reaction to an incident at one of the oldest reactors in the world, triggered by a record breaking natural disaster, is the LAST thing we need in an economy that is already weak due to rising energy costs.
If we pull a Germany, I'm going to have to start learning French or Chinese I think...
Coal power is a major polluter, both air AND soil/water. Look at the Kingston fly ash spill...
Natural gas may burn clean, but the process for extracting it from the ground has contaminated more water resources and sickened more people in 5-10 years than the entire history of United States nuclear power generation.
We're tapped out on hydro - and that isn't completely safe either (Banqiao Dam anyone?)
Wind and solar are too variable for more than 10-20% penetration given the current energy storage technology we have. In Washington or Oregon, they have frequently had to shut down wind farms because the windiest times were also the rainiest, which meant that the hydro facilities were cranking at full capacity. Denmark exports a significant portion of its wind power and then buys it back from their nuclear/hydro-enabled neighbors, and many believe this is at a significant loss. (Denmark sells it when it's abundant and hence cheap, and buys it back when it's more expensive.)
Nuclear isn't perfect either - but of all of the power generation technologies out there, it has the cleanest and safest track record. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only times in the history of nuclear power generation that more than a handful of members of the public have been exposed to anything but negligible hazards. (Note: I don't count incidents related to weapons detonation or production such as Kyshtm, since most countries are dismantling weapons instead of producing them.) Technically you could even throw Chernobyl into the weapons category, since its flawed and dangerous design compromised safety in favor of suitability for weapons production.
Natural gas drilling operations in only 5-10 years of hydrofracturing shale plays have contaminated more water supplies and sickened more people than the entire history of nuclear power in the United States.
Prior to Fukushima (triggered by a disaster that killed 25,000+ within hours), it would be more contamination/sickness than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear power generation.
Note: I'm not counting weapons-related (detonation or production) contamination incidents, since most countries are dismantling weapons instead of building them.
Coal power is also estimated to kill around 14,000 people per year due to air pollution.
Yup. There are two primary ways of stopping a reaction in most plants:
1) Control rod insertion - No permanent damage, but as stated above, nuke plants have some multi-hour and even multi-day time constants involved, so restarting immediately after a power drop is difficult and potentially dangerous. It CAN be done - the French do a lot of load-following, so do nuclear powered ships, but you have to know what you're doing. The Chernobyl crew were extremely poorly trained in terms of handling xenon poisoning.
2) Borate injection. Boric acid is corrosive, so if the reactor isn't designed to handle it or it isn't cleaned relatively rapidly, it permanently damages the reactor. In first-gen BWRs like Fukushima, borate injection = reactor writeoff. In ABWRs and newer, borate injection does not equal reactor writeoff, removing many psychologicl barriers to doing it.
I don't know about waste heat running a cooling system, but modern plant designs don't need offsite power (or any power for that matter) for at least 72 hours - they are passively cooled by convection/gravity/other passive processes. (For example, the ESBWR effectively has giant heatpipes going up to big water pools on the roof.)
The 72 hour number could probably be increased significantly with some more heatpipes and cooling towers - but even with the current ESBWR design, a plain old fire truck within 72 hours is a LOT better than a specialized generator within 6-12.
Doesn't help - see Chernobyl. Chernobyl was test to handle a loss of offsite power contingency plan during a scheduled reactor shutdown that went HORRIBLY wrong.
I wish I had mod points... That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.
The worst nuclear power disaster in history was caused by a safety test that went wrong... Obviously there were compounding factors (reactor design flaws, operator errors during the test, a request from the Kiev grid operator to keep the reactor running a few hours longer than planned due to an outage at another plant), but it still remains - if the plant had been undergoing a normal shutdown instead of a test/experiment, the disaster would not have happened or even have come close to happening.
Most critical sign that the article poster has a lot to learn:
SHA-512 is a hashing algorithm that is a component of digital signature techniques (among other uses). It is NOT an encryption algorithm!!!!
This is how I've always used ATK and it works great.
Especially for browser-nuking.
Other main task is Facebook-nuking.
Unfortunately for Motorola, while some apps DO have poor quality control, as much as Google would like to, they are NOT going to disapprove an official Facebook app unless it REALLY sucks. Some apps you just can't disapprove. It winds up being a no-win situation.
And yes, the worst offenders in terms of sucking down battery are often super-popular apps. Facebook is one. Not much experience with Skype myself.
CSipSimple is a less popular one that's utterly horrific in terms of battery life. Even if you set all of its settings to effectively be "use on demand" - ATK it, and it comes right back. While it's running, it drains battery rapidly.
However, Motorola should shut up, since as stated earlier, some of the worst offenders in terms of bad phone performance are their very own apps. Motoblur is a phone-slowing performance hog, it is routinely bundled with crappy carrier apps, and Motorola makes sure that you can't un-bundle that crap.
AWS is slightly more standard for 3G use than the AT&T 3G bands.
2-3 other countries use AWS for 3G.
No other country uses the U.S. 2G bands to also provide 3G service.
However, an iPhone 3G purchased in Europe is more likely to support the AT&T 3G bands than the AWS 3G bands simply due to hardware commonality with the U.S. iPhones.
So your best best, if you NEED 3G, is AT&T or one of their MVNOs. I know at least one AT&T MVNO exists (my parents use it), I thought it was U.S. Cellular but I seem to be wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_MVNO
Wrong - many areas charge residents more during peak periods. California is especially known for this, and it's one of the reasons (lots of sun being the other) why residential solar power is fairly popular there. Peak solar generation times happen to coincide with peak electricity cost times.