I'd like to see a comparison of the total energy required to build this reactor (mining and purifying the uranium rod, and all the other activities and components) added together, with nothing left out, versus the total energy it will output in its lifespan.
Obviously most of these are one-off costs, so it would also be interesting to look at the energy put into a single uranium rod and the rest of the replacement costs, after the exhaustion period. (One presumes Galena will want energy after 30 years have elapsed.)
Also cost of produced energy bearing in mind approximate cost of $20 million per unit.
Is it computer controlled? If no operator, who carries out computer maintenance or is it designed to be hands-off and fault tolerant?
I don't believe your objection is valid. Look at the precedents:
NetBSD, and over 3500 packaged applications, is qualified for OVER 53 architectures!
Debian Linux is qualified for at least 10 architectures, including its library of over 12,000 applications.
OS X, like the above examples, is based on GCC, the most portable C compiler yet built. Portability has always been a design goal of OS X and its predecessor, NEXTSTEP, which ran identically on at least M68K, Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC, transparent to the developer (like BSD and Linux).
It would be child's play for Apple to switch today, now they have a fully portable O/S which already runs on x86... Plus it makes sense for reasons of market segmentation, especially to maintain profit margins on the consumer level gear.
It never did make sense to me to have the same expensive CPU in your grandma's (i|e)Mac as in a high-end G5 production workstation. The pro equipment would use the 64-bit PowerPC while the consumer price-sensitive models could switch to cheap AMD/Intel chips to maintain profit margins. Surely I'm not the only one who sees the sense in that?
It especially puzzled me why Apple didn't flirt with x86 architecture during the agonising wait for PowerPC to catch up performance-wise.
The results of a 1982 NRC/Sandia study into estimated consequences of a meltdown accident are summarised here.
"Early fatalities" are estimated as high as 70,000 (Philadelphia) or 100,000 (New Jersey). "Early injuries" can reach the 100,000s.
Safety Problem at Nuclear Plants Is Cited
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 -- The emergency cooling systems that are meant to protect nuclear reactors from melting down in case of a ruptured water pipe could fail after a few minutes of use at most reactors, according to a nuclear watchdog group that is citing a government study to argue that the problem makes a catastrophe at one power plant in New York 100 times more likely.
The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a New York environmental organization, Riverkeeper, plan to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week to ask that the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson River, should be shut until corrections are made. The problem, they argue, is that leaking water or steam would scour off pipe insulation, paint and other materials, forming debris that would clog the coolant pumps.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recognized the possibility years ago, and in September 1996 classified it as a serious problem, but does not anticipate that corrective action will be completed until early 2007. A commission official said, however, that the problem is complicated to solve and need not be fixed immediately because the accident that would require use of the safety system was unlikely in the first place.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contended that the emergency core cooling system "is virtually certain to fail at some plants."
"Right now you're relying on a pipe not breaking," he said.
According to Mr. Lochbaum and to data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the problem involves 69 plants of a design called pressurized water reactors, in which the water that is used to carry off the useful heat, and to keep the fuel from over-heating, is kept at a pressure of about 2,200 pounds per square inch. If a pipe breaks and the pressure is released, the water would boil into steam because it is heated to more than 500 degrees. The steam could not cool the fuel, and the fuel would melt.
So the plants are equipped with an automatic emergency core cooling system. Drawing water from a tank outside the reactor dome, the system can dump thousands of gallons a minute into the reactor, making up for even a large leak.
In this design, water from a broken pipe would flow into the reactor basement. The outdoor tank typically holds 125,000 to 300,000 gallons, and when it was nearly empty, the system would start drawing water from the basement instead. The problem is that if the water picks up debris along the way, that debris could clog the screens over the pipes that lead back to the emergency pumps.
At the request of the commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory studied the 69 plants, and found that for some, the risk of core damage was multiplied 100 times because of the debris problem. It ranked the plants but did not name them; Mr. Lochbaum's group used various detailed characteristics included in the report to determine which plant was which, and discovered that the Indian Point reactors were both in the worst five.
The plants' owner, Entergy, told the N.R.C. in August, in response to a letter sent by the commission to all plants, that it had analyzed the material available to become debris, including "failed paints," and would train its operators in ways to manage the problem, including pumping water in more slowly.
A spokesman for Indian Point, Jim Steets, said that he had not seen the petition, but that "the N.R.C. has attached some level of urgency, which we're complying with."
At the N.R.C., Sunil Weerakkody, the section chief for fire protection and special studies, said that in decades of nuclear plant operation, the emergency core cooling system had been used only eight times, and that no accident had reached the stages at which pumping from the basement was required.
Heard About the Near-Accident at the Ohio Nuclear Plant? I'm Not Surprised
By Victor Gilinsky
Sunday, April 28, 2002
You wouldn't know it from the bland pronouncements of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but the U.S. nuclear industry just had its closest brush with disaster since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, located about 30 miles east of Toledo, Ohio, was operating with a rust hole in the top of its reactor pressure vessel -- a hole wide and deep enough to put your fist into. All that was left to contain the reactor's highly pressurized supply of cooling water around the reactor core was a three-eighths inch liner of stainless steel, and the liner had started to bulge ominously. If the liner had burst, it would have drained cooling water vital for safety and also threatened the reactor's emergency shutdown system.
The plant operator's neglect is bad enough. If this had occurred in Russia, we would be saying it could never happen here. Equally disturbing is the NRC's barely audible response.
. . . A workman discovered the rust hole by luck -- when he happened to bang into one of the control rod tubes coming out of the top of the reactor and it moved. If the reactor had gone back into operation, as it very nearly did, the consequences could have been enormous in terms of public safety as well as the future of the nuclear industry.
Actually, no, DNA doesn't necessarily lose. The organism dies, yes, but if it is cute enough, it gets to procreate first, and its DNA is thereby perpetuated.
According to Richard Dawkins' thought-provoking book The Selfish Gene, specific genes can survive for millions of years in the pool. And, if some of the females I've seen are any guide, I'm not surprised...
Thus the MI-5, CIA,CSIS, Interpol, or whatever can freely develop their own internal software under the GPL, and deploy it throughout their systems. The requirement to include source only applies if they distribute the product. I expect intelligence agencies don't normally distribute sensitive software outside the agency.
Please explain the benefit of putting private, internal software under the General Public License?
(Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft in particular and corrupt lobbyists in general. I am also a GPL developer.)
Aha! I was looking for an angle from which to push VB off the ledge. BASIC did, and does, stand for BEGINNERS' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, hence the simple imperative syntax, declaration free variables and a myriad of other design decisions meant to smooth the road for beginners. And it works well as a beginner's language - it was the first computer language learned by millions, including myself.
But it's hard to take VB seriously as a "production" language, no matter how widely abused for real-world purposes, or how cute its IDE is, or how sentimental M$ is about the product that launched their global crime spree.
Perhaps just a coincidence, but VB is a godawful beer, too.
Chuck Moore strikes me as a perfect example of a computer science iconoclast. His groundbreaking language designs became the model for PostScript and Open Firmware - among the most ubiquitous, useful, and indispensable interpreters in the world... More at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChuckMoore (which describes him as "Radical thinker and inventor").
How are the statements "not poach many of Apple's potential customers" and "a potentially large market share increase" compatible?
Why would Apple tolerate *any* lost custom? I fully expect they'll "sue him out of existence". Or at least threaten him out of existence...
The argument "I'd be using a Mac except I can't afford one" is rather lame considering the very reasonable prices for second hand hardware. Certainly beats buying a new PC.
A Mac's working life is still at least 3 years; I run a studio of 20 Macs and we have beige G3s still in service as desktops with no complaints, 8500s in service as Linux servers, etc...
The words 'travesty' and 'boycott'
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Review: Solaris
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· Score: 1
Were invented for occasions such as idiotic superfluous remakes like this. Bankrupt the Hollywood beancounters responsible before they roll cameras again.
My statement that the violence is mainly provoked and carried out on the part of the Australian police is not mere opinion. An Australian historian has written this account of police violence at S11. No doubt he was amazed to find such things occurring in a country that believes itself "free". The thing that angers me is that the media outlets which have the widest airing - the infantile Herald Sun publication, for one - actually defend this fascist outrage, doing their readership, and indeed all Australians, a tragic disservice.
In a Melbourne street, just before dawn on Tuesday 12 September 2000, television cameras recorded a significant event in Australia's political history. Baton-wielding police, from the paramilitary Force Response Unit, swooped upon 50 citizens who were holding a political assembly on a major public issue. The police wore helmets and visors, making their faces unrecognisable. Furthermore, most had removed their personal name tags from their jackets, thereby becoming unaccountable.
The 50 civilians were sitting passively and quietly on the pavement at a vehicle gateway outside Melbourne's Crown Casino....
those in power will call any protest action "violent" or "illegal" in order to simultaneously suppress it and discredit it.
Quite true; and that is just what is happening here. The majority of violence occurring in Australian protests - in particular the "S11" anti-globalisation, anti-WEF demonstration (September 2000) - was on the part of the police. Many protesters were isolated from the crowd and beaten; a woman was run over by a police car; etc etc. (I live in Melbourne, Australia, and work near where this demonstration was held.)
Anti-globalisation and anti-war principles are more threatening than ever to our corrupt industry-government coalition, and so-called violence is transparently a convenient excuse to lie about the protestors' agenda in order to suppress it. Australians have no reason to be smug about their "freedom" relative to the rest of the world; with the lunatics in power, combined with an ignorant and apathetic populace, we're rapidly losing even the pretence.
With apologies to Multicians everywhere, the correct capitalisation is of course Multics. One early reference to the concept of a "computer utility" appears in this introductory paper by F.J. Corbato and V.A. Vyssotsky.
It's no mystery why this announcement gives everyone deja vu - a principal idea behind MULTICS (and novel at the time) was that of the "computing utility". Guess it was just 40-odd years ahead of its time...
You're quite right, of course. My post failed to address the issue of the lack of a PowerPC Pascal compiler in MPW circa 1993. (In Apple's defence, by then, there must have been relatively few serious projects using Pascal. The big boys - e.g. Quark, Adobe - were using THINK or MPW C a long time before this.)
I was mainly clarifying that there was no sudden shift from Lisa Pascal to C - Lisa Pascal was obsoleted by MPW, and MPW Pascal was obsoleted by PowerPC, only much later.
(THINK/Lightspeed Pascal was 68K only, IIRC.)
The history of C compilers on the Mac is even more complicated - I remember using Whitesmiths C (integrated with the Apple Editor/Assembler in about 1986), Aztec C, Lightspeed (then THINK) C, gcc 1.37 under MPW, MPW C/PPCC, then MPW SC/MrC, now gcc/Darwin... etc. And I've left some out I think.
they screwed developers by the Lisa Pascal to C switch. It wasn't just that C became the preferred development enviornment, it was because they decided not to support Pascal at all.
There never was a sudden transition from Lisa Pascal to C. Pascal was a fully supported language under MPW from 1986(?) until as late as 1997 - by which time it made sense to 'drop Pascal' and standardise on the PowerPC C compiler (Pascal on any platform, let alone Lisa Pascal, was decidedly not in widespread use by that time). There were also many other fully supported non-Apple Pascal environments during the 68K era, including THINK Pascal and TML Pascal.
(BTW, the 68K MPW Pascal compilers still work fine under the latest PowerPC MPW environment.)
Re:problem with web lang books
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Programming PHP
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· Score: 1
While what you say makes perfect sense, I'm guessing that publishers do otherwise because, when told "Go learn PHP!", the average dude is more likely to buy a single book that appears to cover everything, than two complementary books. Especially when the common aversion to reading is taken into account.
Slashdot Mirror
I was not trying to make an unfavourable comparison with the generation methods you mention; you are too quick to make that inference.
I'd like to see a comparison of the total energy required to build this reactor (mining and purifying the uranium rod, and all the other activities and components) added together, with nothing left out, versus the total energy it will output in its lifespan.
Obviously most of these are one-off costs, so it would also be interesting to look at the energy put into a single uranium rod and the rest of the replacement costs, after the exhaustion period. (One presumes Galena will want energy after 30 years have elapsed.)
Also cost of produced energy bearing in mind approximate cost of $20 million per unit.
Is it computer controlled? If no operator, who carries out computer maintenance or is it designed to be hands-off and fault tolerant?
NetBSD, and over 3500 packaged applications, is qualified for OVER 53 architectures!
Debian Linux is qualified for at least 10 architectures, including its library of over 12,000 applications.
OS X, like the above examples, is based on GCC, the most portable C compiler yet built. Portability has always been a design goal of OS X and its predecessor, NEXTSTEP, which ran identically on at least M68K, Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC, transparent to the developer (like BSD and Linux).
It would be child's play for Apple to switch today, now they have a fully portable O/S which already runs on x86... Plus it makes sense for reasons of market segmentation, especially to maintain profit margins on the consumer level gear.
It never did make sense to me to have the same expensive CPU in your grandma's (i|e)Mac as in a high-end G5 production workstation. The pro equipment would use the 64-bit PowerPC while the consumer price-sensitive models could switch to cheap AMD/Intel chips to maintain profit margins. Surely I'm not the only one who sees the sense in that?
It especially puzzled me why Apple didn't flirt with x86 architecture during the agonising wait for PowerPC to catch up performance-wise.
I think this should be filed under "i'm-gonna-sit-right-down-and-write-myself-a-Lette rman"
The results of a 1982 NRC/Sandia study into estimated consequences of a meltdown accident are summarised here. "Early fatalities" are estimated as high as 70,000 (Philadelphia) or 100,000 (New Jersey). "Early injuries" can reach the 100,000s.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 -- The emergency cooling systems that are meant to protect nuclear reactors from melting down in case of a ruptured water pipe could fail after a few minutes of use at most reactors, according to a nuclear watchdog group that is citing a government study to argue that the problem makes a catastrophe at one power plant in New York 100 times more likely.
The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a New York environmental organization, Riverkeeper, plan to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week to ask that the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson River, should be shut until corrections are made. The problem, they argue, is that leaking water or steam would scour off pipe insulation, paint and other materials, forming debris that would clog the coolant pumps.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recognized the possibility years ago, and in September 1996 classified it as a serious problem, but does not anticipate that corrective action will be completed until early 2007. A commission official said, however, that the problem is complicated to solve and need not be fixed immediately because the accident that would require use of the safety system was unlikely in the first place.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contended that the emergency core cooling system "is virtually certain to fail at some plants."
"Right now you're relying on a pipe not breaking," he said.
According to Mr. Lochbaum and to data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the problem involves 69 plants of a design called pressurized water reactors, in which the water that is used to carry off the useful heat, and to keep the fuel from over-heating, is kept at a pressure of about 2,200 pounds per square inch. If a pipe breaks and the pressure is released, the water would boil into steam because it is heated to more than 500 degrees. The steam could not cool the fuel, and the fuel would melt.
So the plants are equipped with an automatic emergency core cooling system. Drawing water from a tank outside the reactor dome, the system can dump thousands of gallons a minute into the reactor, making up for even a large leak.
In this design, water from a broken pipe would flow into the reactor basement. The outdoor tank typically holds 125,000 to 300,000 gallons, and when it was nearly empty, the system would start drawing water from the basement instead. The problem is that if the water picks up debris along the way, that debris could clog the screens over the pipes that lead back to the emergency pumps.
At the request of the commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory studied the 69 plants, and found that for some, the risk of core damage was multiplied 100 times because of the debris problem. It ranked the plants but did not name them; Mr. Lochbaum's group used various detailed characteristics included in the report to determine which plant was which, and discovered that the Indian Point reactors were both in the worst five.
The plants' owner, Entergy, told the N.R.C. in August, in response to a letter sent by the commission to all plants, that it had analyzed the material available to become debris, including "failed paints," and would train its operators in ways to manage the problem, including pumping water in more slowly.
A spokesman for Indian Point, Jim Steets, said that he had not seen the petition, but that "the N.R.C. has attached some level of urgency, which we're complying with."
At the N.R.C., Sunil Weerakkody, the section chief for fire protection and special studies, said that in decades of nuclear plant operation, the emergency core cooling system had been used only eight times, and that no accident had reached the stages at which pumping from the basement was required.
"Our bes
According to Richard Dawkins' thought-provoking book The Selfish Gene, specific genes can survive for millions of years in the pool. And, if some of the females I've seen are any guide, I'm not surprised...
err, actually, Real Death stuff.
Please explain the benefit of putting private, internal software under the General Public License?
(Disclaimer: I hate Microsoft in particular and corrupt lobbyists in general. I am also a GPL developer.)
But it's hard to take VB seriously as a "production" language, no matter how widely abused for real-world purposes, or how cute its IDE is, or how sentimental M$ is about the product that launched their global crime spree.
Perhaps just a coincidence, but VB is a godawful beer, too.
GPL Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator plugins including a growing menagerie of file formats;
sample lex/yacc infix algebraic expression parser;
PDP-8 assembler;
other stuff.
So far no dates but I remain optimistic.
sorry, that link is: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChuckMoore
Chuck Moore strikes me as a perfect example of a computer science iconoclast. His groundbreaking language designs became the model for PostScript and Open Firmware - among the most ubiquitous, useful, and indispensable interpreters in the world...
More at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChuckMoore (which describes him as "Radical thinker and inventor").
How are the statements "not poach many of Apple's potential customers" and "a potentially large market share increase" compatible?
Why would Apple tolerate *any* lost custom? I fully expect they'll "sue him out of existence". Or at least threaten him out of existence...
The argument "I'd be using a Mac except I can't afford one" is rather lame considering the very reasonable prices for second hand hardware. Certainly beats buying a new PC.
A Mac's working life is still at least 3 years; I run a studio of 20 Macs and we have beige G3s still in service as desktops with no complaints, 8500s in service as Linux servers, etc...
Were invented for occasions such as idiotic superfluous remakes like this. Bankrupt the Hollywood beancounters responsible before they roll cameras again.
Anti-globalisation and anti-war principles are more threatening than ever to our corrupt industry-government coalition, and so-called violence is transparently a convenient excuse to lie about the protestors' agenda in order to suppress it. Australians have no reason to be smug about their "freedom" relative to the rest of the world; with the lunatics in power, combined with an ignorant and apathetic populace, we're rapidly losing even the pretence.
With apologies to Multicians everywhere, the correct capitalisation is of course Multics. One early reference to the concept of a "computer utility" appears in this introductory paper by F.J. Corbato and V.A. Vyssotsky.
It's no mystery why this announcement gives everyone deja vu - a principal idea behind MULTICS (and novel at the time) was that of the "computing utility". Guess it was just 40-odd years ahead of its time...
You're quite right, of course. My post failed to address the issue of the lack of a PowerPC Pascal compiler in MPW circa 1993. (In Apple's defence, by then, there must have been relatively few serious projects using Pascal. The big boys - e.g. Quark, Adobe - were using THINK or MPW C a long time before this.)
I was mainly clarifying that there was no sudden shift from Lisa Pascal to C - Lisa Pascal was obsoleted by MPW, and MPW Pascal was obsoleted by PowerPC, only much later.
(THINK/Lightspeed Pascal was 68K only, IIRC.)
The history of C compilers on the Mac is even more complicated - I remember using Whitesmiths C (integrated with the Apple Editor/Assembler in about 1986), Aztec C, Lightspeed (then THINK) C, gcc 1.37 under MPW, MPW C/PPCC, then MPW SC/MrC, now gcc/Darwin... etc. And I've left some out I think.
There never was a sudden transition from Lisa Pascal to C. Pascal was a fully supported language under MPW from 1986(?) until as late as 1997 - by which time it made sense to 'drop Pascal' and standardise on the PowerPC C compiler (Pascal on any platform, let alone Lisa Pascal, was decidedly not in widespread use by that time). There were also many other fully supported non-Apple Pascal environments during the 68K era, including THINK Pascal and TML Pascal.
(BTW, the 68K MPW Pascal compilers still work fine under the latest PowerPC MPW environment.)
While what you say makes perfect sense, I'm guessing that publishers do otherwise because, when told "Go learn PHP!", the average dude is more likely to buy a single book that appears to cover everything, than two complementary books. Especially when the common aversion to reading is taken into account.