It looks like they strapped a couple blades to a charcoal grill.
I'm wondering if this isn't a translation error - the real reference calls is a "cuadrotour" - not speaking whatever language it's supposed to be in (? Farsi) it's hard to interpret but it sure looks like "quad rotor" which is a much better description of the picture than 'flying saucer'.
No harmless bunnies here and you're correct, PSR does have an agenda (like everyone else) but the little blurb was nearly a point by point refutation of the ACs post. There were a whole bunch of posts touting Thorium, very few rebuttals to that point of view. IMHO, the biggest issue with Thorium cycle reactors is that there aren't any. They've been studied for decades but no one has yet to build a successful commercial sized unit. Perhaps the Indians will be able to get everything together and move forward, but one obviously should not plan much of a buildout on a technology that has yet to really work.
If you're going to do that, hell, just put up some big Tokamaks.
Weapons-grade fissionable material (U-233) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
Thorium is not actually a “fuel” because it is not fissile and therefore cannot be used to start or sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A fissile material, such as uranium235 (U235) or plutonium239 (which is made in reactors from uranium238), is required to kickstart the reaction. The enriched uranium fuel or plutonium fuel also maintains the chain reaction until enough of the thorium target material has been converted into fissile uranium233 (U 233) to take over much or most of the job. An advantage of thorium is that it absorbs slow neutrons relatively efficiently (compared to uranium238) to produce fissile uranium233.
The use of enriched uranium or plutonium in thorium fuel has proliferation implications. Although U235 is found in nature, it is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium, so the proportion of U235 must be industrially increased to make “enriched uranium” for use in reactors. Highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are nuclear weapons materials.
In addition, U233 is as effective as plutonium239 for making nuclear bombs. In most proposed thorium fuel cycles, reprocessing is required to separate out the U233 for use in fresh fuel. This means that, like uranium fuel with reprocessing, bombmaking material is separated out, making it vulnerable to theft or diversion. Some proposed thorium fuel cycles even require 20% enriched uranium in order to get the chain reaction started in existing reactors using thorium fuel. It takes 90% enrichment to make weaponsusable
uranium, but very little additional work is needed to move from 20% enrichment to 90% enrichment. Most of the separative work is needed to go from natural uranium, which ahs 0.7% uranium235 to 20% U235.
Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste;
Proponents claim that thorium fuel significantly reduces the volume, weight and longterm radiotoxicity of spent fuel. Using thorium in a nuclear reactor creates radioactive waste that proponents claim would only have to be isolated from the environment for 500 years, as opposed to the irradiated uraniumonly fuel that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates longlived fission products like technetium99 (halflife over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.
Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly. In a oncethrough mode, it will need both uranium enrichment (or plutonium separation) and thorium target rod production. In a breeder configuration, it will need reprocessing, which is costly. In addition, as noted, inhalation of thorium232 produces a higher dose than the same amount of uranium238 (either by radioactivity or by weight). Reprocessed thorium creates even more risks due to the highly radioactive U232 created in the reactor. This makes worker protection more difficult and expensive for a given level of annual dose.
(The article goes into a bit more detail. One does have to keep in mind that PSR is generally quite anti nuclear - but I think these are fairly reasonable counterarguments)
Lastly, no one has actually made a commercial level thorium cycle reactor despite decades of trying. It MIGHT have some advantages and engineering and research efforts should continue, but it's hardly a viable solution as of yet.
See above for the comments on Pebble Beds. It appears that even after decades of research and engineering into nuclear reactors, we still don't know enough to be confident that any particular design or implementation will behave the way the designers expect. Not exactly surprising since anything more complicated than a paper towel seems to have those same issues but it does mean that any progress will have to come slowly and hopefully carefully.
Just because it looks good in Autocad doesn't mean it will actually work correctly.
The problem is that the spectrum leases are not time-limited. If a license owner had to win a spectrum auction every 10 years, they would only license the spectrum they need. Holding unused spectrum would be much more expensive, and they would know that if they need more, they can bid on it in the future. Current spectrum holders could get a "discount" on bidding for renewals to make sure that we don't have undue churn in providers, but new players would be able to enter.
I'm quite sure Google would love this idea:)
How would you deal with amateur radio (and government / military / public service / business class)? Those frequencies aren't owned by a corporation. All the taxi companies are going to band together? Your system doesn't scale well.
Do you really want $RandomLuser to be mucking about in the transmitter stages? YOU might know what to do (and more importantly, what not to do), others not so much. Not really an issue for receivers but the idea of a couple of thousand off kilter transmitters polluting the spectrum in a large city doesn't make me jump for joy. Yes, especially for cells phones we're talking a tiny transmitter but you put out a hack that you can download and then you have an issue that's really hard to identify and clean up.
I live in north-west Scotland. You guys call it "Hurricane Season" and evacuate, we call it "January" and avoid putting washing on the line.
To be fair, there is a difference between trying to survive in a godforsaken, pestilent, mosquito infested swamp and a godforsaken windswept barren ice covered pestilent bog. Not exactly sure what the major difference is, likely either the mosquitoes or the Texans.
You're right but you miss the real point. During hunter-gatherer existence there were no cities of millions of pre zombies oozing out of concrete jungles. Unless you're in an area that is very rural, even the overpopulated deer herds in the middle of the US will be trimmed out in a couple of weeks.
Anyone who thinks 'evacuation' from an urbanized area is possible in the US ought to watch rush hour in major cities a couple of times. If you live in an urban area and are serious about being prepared for some form of catastrophe, you need to be able to survive in place for at least a couple of weeks. Let all of the beta testers try out the evacuation routes first.
A question. In an urban environment, where the device is unaware of the surrounding geometry, how is it going to compensate for all the sound reflections ?
The acoustic signature of a reflection is different from a direct wave (timing, phase, amplitude). It's not a trivial process to decide which is which and that is why you first saw these things as big, bulky items hung on the front of some vehicle. As time and research progressed, they were likely able to clean up the algorithms and hardware, thus the itty bitty thing in TFA.
And of course just to tick everybody off I must ask one question. Why do people get all worked up over Firefly? I enjoyed it and wish it had keep running but it wasn't really hard science fiction. Frankly it was "The Outlaw Jose Wales" in space. That isn't a bad thing but people get so worked up over it.
Why are we hoisting in a bucket at a time by helicopter when we could use the same flight to lift in an drop a weighted firehose which would provide a stream of water? Would require less exposure to radiation by the flight crews. Also drop one on each of the reactors now while you still have access, don't wait till they blow.
How exactly would you do that? You do realize that if you just drop a 3 inch diameter, high pressure hose on the ground and turn it on, it will whip around and destroy a bunch of things - firehoses pack a big wallop if let go of. If you use a low pressure hose, you're going to need it placed carefully. Look at the videos of the helicopters dropping water - they didn't linger at all. In fact, their aim was so bad I got the impression that they were more bombing runs than careful drops - presumably because of the radiation. Placing hoses would be much, much harder. There is a lot of local radiation around the reactors - otherwise all of this would be rather trivial.
Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
You go ahead and run it.... The problem is that closeup you're dealing with enough radiation to kill a human in minutes. Even if you were brave enough to drive the truck there, you might not survive long enough to get out, pick up the large, heavy hose, hurk it up several flights of non existent stairs, bolt it down and turn it on. I'm a bit surprised that we don't see any robotics at least trying to get close. Possibly the thermal and radiation environment precludes anything not specifically designed for this sort of behavior.
The big problem I have (with my retrospectascope) is that they KNEW that there were very large tsunamis in the past. They KNEW that predicting wave height in any given place for any potential tsunami is impossible. Putting up a 100 foot or even a 100 meter concrete wall isn't especially difficult - it's a bit expensive but it's certainly do able. They KNEW that 'predicting' earthquakes is very imprecise and so far has an rather poor track record.
So tumble that through the ringer of planning and funding a major engineering endeavor and you end up with some engineering assumptions that look pretty damned stupid.
Above all, don't pat yourselves on your (so far) only minimally irradiated backs. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. And while defense in depth has worked to a significant degree I will be you those engineers responsible for siting ALL the backup generators seaward of the reactors are having second thoughts. As are the geologists who suggested that a 5 meter tsunami was as large as need be covered for, despite pretty clear geological evidence of 30 meter waves in the past and the longstanding knowledge that specific wave heights vary with a large number of variables.
Why the hell nobody thought of putting a 30 meter wall in front of a reactor complex is beyond me. No, you don't have to seal the whole coast - just in front of those glowing things.
Nature will yet throw us something unexpected. Bet on it.
Oh stop whining. We, as usual, are ignoring both TFA and TFS. We're just happily bouncing our keyboards and gabbing about random things. I'm sure you've noticed that the comments have nothing at all to do with the subject, the article, each other or the laws of Thermodynamics. It's just about Apple and occasionally Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." Heinlein
Have you tried hanging out with some furries? You might at least get the tail part.
It looks like they strapped a couple blades to a charcoal grill.
I'm wondering if this isn't a translation error - the real reference calls is a "cuadrotour" - not speaking whatever language it's supposed to be in (? Farsi) it's hard to interpret but it sure looks like "quad rotor" which is a much better description of the picture than 'flying saucer'.
I warned you. I warned you, didn't I? .....
No harmless bunnies here and you're correct, PSR does have an agenda (like everyone else) but the little blurb was nearly a point by point refutation of the ACs post. There were a whole bunch of posts touting Thorium, very few rebuttals to that point of view. IMHO, the biggest issue with Thorium cycle reactors is that there aren't any. They've been studied for decades but no one has yet to build a successful commercial sized unit. Perhaps the Indians will be able to get everything together and move forward, but one obviously should not plan much of a buildout on a technology that has yet to really work.
If you're going to do that, hell, just put up some big Tokamaks.
Weapons-grade fissionable material (U-233) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
Thorium is not actually a “fuel” because it is not fissile and therefore cannot be used to start or sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A fissile material, such as uranium235 (U235) or plutonium239 (which is made in reactors from uranium238), is required to kickstart the reaction. The enriched uranium fuel or plutonium fuel also maintains the chain reaction until enough of the thorium target material has been converted into fissile uranium233 (U 233) to take over much or most of the job. An advantage of thorium is that it absorbs slow neutrons relatively efficiently (compared to uranium238) to produce fissile uranium233. The use of enriched uranium or plutonium in thorium fuel has proliferation implications. Although U235 is found in nature, it is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium, so the proportion of U235 must be industrially increased to make “enriched uranium” for use in reactors. Highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are nuclear weapons materials.
In addition, U233 is as effective as plutonium239 for making nuclear bombs. In most proposed thorium fuel cycles, reprocessing is required to separate out the U233 for use in fresh fuel. This means that, like uranium fuel with reprocessing, bombmaking material is separated out, making it vulnerable to theft or diversion. Some proposed thorium fuel cycles even require 20% enriched uranium in order to get the chain reaction started in existing reactors using thorium fuel. It takes 90% enrichment to make weaponsusable uranium, but very little additional work is needed to move from 20% enrichment to 90% enrichment. Most of the separative work is needed to go from natural uranium, which ahs 0.7% uranium235 to 20% U235.
Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste;
Proponents claim that thorium fuel significantly reduces the volume, weight and longterm radiotoxicity of spent fuel. Using thorium in a nuclear reactor creates radioactive waste that proponents claim would only have to be isolated from the environment for 500 years, as opposed to the irradiated uraniumonly fuel that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates longlived fission products like technetium99 (halflife over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.
Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly. In a oncethrough mode, it will need both uranium enrichment (or plutonium separation) and thorium target rod production. In a breeder configuration, it will need reprocessing, which is costly. In addition, as noted, inhalation of thorium232 produces a higher dose than the same amount of uranium238 (either by radioactivity or by weight). Reprocessed thorium creates even more risks due to the highly radioactive U232 created in the reactor. This makes worker protection more difficult and expensive for a given level of annual dose.
(The article goes into a bit more detail. One does have to keep in mind that PSR is generally quite anti nuclear - but I think these are fairly reasonable counterarguments)
Lastly, no one has actually made a commercial level thorium cycle reactor despite decades of trying. It MIGHT have some advantages and engineering and research efforts should continue, but it's hardly a viable solution as of yet.
See above for the comments on Pebble Beds. It appears that even after decades of research and engineering into nuclear reactors, we still don't know enough to be confident that any particular design or implementation will behave the way the designers expect. Not exactly surprising since anything more complicated than a paper towel seems to have those same issues but it does mean that any progress will have to come slowly and hopefully carefully.
Just because it looks good in Autocad doesn't mean it will actually work correctly.
The problem is that the spectrum leases are not time-limited. If a license owner had to win a spectrum auction every 10 years, they would only license the spectrum they need. Holding unused spectrum would be much more expensive, and they would know that if they need more, they can bid on it in the future. Current spectrum holders could get a "discount" on bidding for renewals to make sure that we don't have undue churn in providers, but new players would be able to enter.
I'm quite sure Google would love this idea :)
How would you deal with amateur radio (and government / military / public service / business class)? Those frequencies aren't owned by a corporation. All the taxi companies are going to band together? Your system doesn't scale well.
Do you really want $RandomLuser to be mucking about in the transmitter stages? YOU might know what to do (and more importantly, what not to do), others not so much. Not really an issue for receivers but the idea of a couple of thousand off kilter transmitters polluting the spectrum in a large city doesn't make me jump for joy. Yes, especially for cells phones we're talking a tiny transmitter but you put out a hack that you can download and then you have an issue that's really hard to identify and clean up.
US: bankrupt UK: bankrupt ...
France: close to bankrupt, just not so well known
Belgium: bankrupt country without a government goes to war
Libya - Nearly 2 million barrels of oil per day
Now, does it make sense?
It was going to be France, UK and Italy, but for some reason the US did not want to miss the party.
Remember it was US general Norman Schwarzkopf who said "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."
I'm in Alaska, ... couple bottles of booze and beer ready to go.
Only a couple? In Alaska? Seems pretty light from what I can tell from my neighbors.
You don't have near enough coffee. The rest looks OK though.
I live in north-west Scotland. You guys call it "Hurricane Season" and evacuate, we call it "January" and avoid putting washing on the line.
To be fair, there is a difference between trying to survive in a godforsaken, pestilent, mosquito infested swamp and a godforsaken windswept barren ice covered pestilent bog. Not exactly sure what the major difference is, likely either the mosquitoes or the Texans.
Nice start. The rest of us would ask you to bring a few changes of underwear.
You're right but you miss the real point. During hunter-gatherer existence there were no cities of millions of pre zombies oozing out of concrete jungles. Unless you're in an area that is very rural, even the overpopulated deer herds in the middle of the US will be trimmed out in a couple of weeks.
Anyone who thinks 'evacuation' from an urbanized area is possible in the US ought to watch rush hour in major cities a couple of times. If you live in an urban area and are serious about being prepared for some form of catastrophe, you need to be able to survive in place for at least a couple of weeks. Let all of the beta testers try out the evacuation routes first.
I'm kind of ashamed to be posting that meme, but at last it's somewhat appropriate.
Well, if that is a space ship, we're doomed.
A question. In an urban environment, where the device is unaware of the surrounding geometry, how is it going to compensate for all the sound reflections ?
The acoustic signature of a reflection is different from a direct wave (timing, phase, amplitude). It's not a trivial process to decide which is which and that is why you first saw these things as big, bulky items hung on the front of some vehicle. As time and research progressed, they were likely able to clean up the algorithms and hardware, thus the itty bitty thing in TFA.
Progress!
And of course just to tick everybody off I must ask one question. Why do people get all worked up over Firefly? I enjoyed it and wish it had keep running but it wasn't really hard science fiction. Frankly it was "The Outlaw Jose Wales" in space. That isn't a bad thing but people get so worked up over it.
Jewell Staite
Summer Glua
Gina Torres
Morena Baccarin
Oh, and it's a Western.
Why are we hoisting in a bucket at a time by helicopter when we could use the same flight to lift in an drop a weighted firehose which would provide a stream of water? Would require less exposure to radiation by the flight crews. Also drop one on each of the reactors now while you still have access, don't wait till they blow.
How exactly would you do that? You do realize that if you just drop a 3 inch diameter, high pressure hose on the ground and turn it on, it will whip around and destroy a bunch of things - firehoses pack a big wallop if let go of. If you use a low pressure hose, you're going to need it placed carefully. Look at the videos of the helicopters dropping water - they didn't linger at all. In fact, their aim was so bad I got the impression that they were more bombing runs than careful drops - presumably because of the radiation. Placing hoses would be much, much harder. There is a lot of local radiation around the reactors - otherwise all of this would be rather trivial.
We need big robots.
I don't know, look at Florida. I can't think of anything more utterly depressing than that relentless heat and glare.
Trenton, New Jersey?
Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
You go ahead and run it.... The problem is that closeup you're dealing with enough radiation to kill a human in minutes. Even if you were brave enough to drive the truck there, you might not survive long enough to get out, pick up the large, heavy hose, hurk it up several flights of non existent stairs, bolt it down and turn it on. I'm a bit surprised that we don't see any robotics at least trying to get close. Possibly the thermal and radiation environment precludes anything not specifically designed for this sort of behavior.
I'll bet we see some next time.
The big problem I have (with my retrospectascope) is that they KNEW that there were very large tsunamis in the past. They KNEW that predicting wave height in any given place for any potential tsunami is impossible. Putting up a 100 foot or even a 100 meter concrete wall isn't especially difficult - it's a bit expensive but it's certainly do able. They KNEW that 'predicting' earthquakes is very imprecise and so far has an rather poor track record.
So tumble that through the ringer of planning and funding a major engineering endeavor and you end up with some engineering assumptions that look pretty damned stupid.
Of the technological terror you've created.
Above all, don't pat yourselves on your (so far) only minimally irradiated backs. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. And while defense in depth has worked to a significant degree I will be you those engineers responsible for siting ALL the backup generators seaward of the reactors are having second thoughts. As are the geologists who suggested that a 5 meter tsunami was as large as need be covered for, despite pretty clear geological evidence of 30 meter waves in the past and the longstanding knowledge that specific wave heights vary with a large number of variables.
Why the hell nobody thought of putting a 30 meter wall in front of a reactor complex is beyond me. No, you don't have to seal the whole coast - just in front of those glowing things.
Nature will yet throw us something unexpected. Bet on it.
Oh stop whining. We, as usual, are ignoring both TFA and TFS. We're just happily bouncing our keyboards and gabbing about random things. I'm sure you've noticed that the comments have nothing at all to do with the subject, the article, each other or the laws of Thermodynamics. It's just about Apple and occasionally Microsoft.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you another time.