Shut down all industrial and agricultural activity near the river if you are concerned about contamination.
The paper mills contribute, the orchards contribute, the wine country contributes, the aluminum smelters contribute, the homes on the river contribute, the run off from farms contributes, the natural radioisotopes from cratonic materials contributes....
You're not understanding what I've written. I consume ORALLY a larger dose of iodine-129 to have a lower urinary tract radiogram performed than I would receive from drinkning Hanford groundwater.
And they do not give you a iodine tablet before the radiogram.
The production schedule for the new Vitrification Plant is far ahead of the basic science and engineering that form the foundation for its construction. Although I do not think that they will operate it with the risks for steam explosion that the article alludes to, it is more likely that the tax payers will pay more than the estimated $7B to construct it.
You heard it right, folks - $7B.
As for the groundwater contamination, that is nothing new. A tritium plume extending from the 200 Areas (where plutonium separation was performed) to the Columbia River has been in place since production started. It has fluctuated in size according to the politics of weapons production. The facilities have been shut down since the early 90's and are in various stages of decommissioning.
The issue of iodine-129 is a sticky point. It has a long half-life and had been dumped to the soil column without too much worry about the transport properties of the nuclide. It travels at the same rate through the vadose and groundwater as nitrate. It is very mobile. The toxicity of the isotope is in come dispute. I can get a higher radiation dose from a urniary test than I can get from consuming contaminated Hanford groundwater. I can also dispose of the contamination through my municipal water treatment facility, a practice prohibited for Hanford contractors.
As for the cesium-137 and strontium-90, those isotopes bind to soils high in the vadose and rarely reach groundwater. The are confined to zones near the surface, far from the river, and will be left in place to decay to background beneath low permeability covers. This is not a practice that the USDOE is forcing on the local community, but is a treatment alternative that is accepted by the USEPA and Washington Deparment of Ecology.
You've got to wonder how much longer they can stand this abuse.
Looking at their quarterly income and cash flow statements, one can only draw one conclusion; SCO will be out of cash in roughly three to four quarters without a significant cash injection from an interested party.
Their stock price sucks, their product sucks, their management sucks, and they have NO customer good will. They have no prospects for income and roughly $60M in cash. At $12M+ losses per quarter, they will barely make it to the close of FY05.
It is a sad truth that software pricing is feeling the pressure of low price or free products. And yes, they are products. If they weren't, why would we create them according to milestones or other "production" models?
But the author only replays the same old arguments without clearly defining a solution. Microsoft made this argument just weeks ago at an Asian market meeting where he claimed that open source and free software would undermine intellectual property development. No shit? Gee, Bill! Do you really think so?
No one has completely solved the problem of how to create wealth from free software. If they had, Bill and Company would have moved on it in a flash and we would all be complaining about how Microsoft has dominated free software. The low cost leader ALWAYS wins in an economic battle. Don't believe me? Go check out Wal-Mart sometime. 90% of the stuff they sell there will break in half the time of the next higher quality product. But the low cost stuff flies off the shelves.
I know there are exceptions. There are folks out there who will pay good money for quality products. And I know that there are companies who are making comfortable livings from free software via support contracts. But the idea expressed by the author is true:
"But you know as well as I do that if I am successful then inevitably some kid in his parents' basement will write his own Open Source version of the thing, for free."
Aye, so there's the rub. How do you create a world where one person can create a great software tool while simultaneously restricting the ability of that "kid in the basement" from doing likewise.
You can if you have the money to buy a congressman.
I don't pretend to have any solution to this problem. Now that more people have affordable power tools, they do not have to rely on the village smithy or the local carpenter for small repair jobs. There are even fewer jobs for stable hands. Economics often kill job categories. I think that people will still make a living writing code, but there will always be someone who can step in and write an application that performs the same task for free. The trick is to make as much money as you can before the kid in the basement strikes.
Perhaps this is an evolutionary progression from commodity closed source to an entirely open source software world. When one group has to rely on legislative action to maintain their economic model, that model has failed. A new model will eventually arise from this heap of smoldering dung we are currently being lowered into. Until that happens the only people making money from software will be lawyers and politicians.
>>This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet.
It does if you believe the currently popular spontaneous generation theories.
You are reading too much into the statement. They said it increases the chance of life. The absence of ANY water would substantially decrease the chance of life.
As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world.
Obviously, you've never been to Cleaveland! (rimshot!)
I work at Hanford. You haven't a clue about the past history and present condition of the facility. It is glaringly apparent by your comments:
I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.
The tone of your comment belies your bias. No matter what someone who has *been* to the site tells you, YOU know better.
Ah, yes... Nothing like a religious experience to convince you that your form of wisdom is *the* truth.
I overflew Hanford several years ago, and let me tell you, this place is not "cool".
You can tell a lot from a seat at ~8,000 ft, can't you? What was the condition of the facility located just south of the 223E facility in the 200 East Area? What? You couldn't tell?
No doubt their seismograph is to detect intruders, not to detect "vibrations from space" (lol).
No, the seismographs are installed to detect earthquakes. If you want to see their location, you can read the Annual Seismic Report online.
From the air, the truth becomes apparent, the LIGO is fairly distant from "real" hanford site,
Which "real" Hanford Site are you referring to? The Hanford Township? The reactors in the 100 Area? The separations facilities in the 200 Areas? The fuel fabrication facilities in the 300 Area?
Just what are you talking about?
and no doubt from ground level its seems just like any old desert like area.
That is because, despite what this twit is claiming, it is just like any old desert area. It just happens to have a HUGE inventory of radionuclides in the ground.
Lest anyone fail to catch my sarcasm, it is clear that people like rufusdufus refuse to read information publicly available to anyone in the world. I would not claim that Hanford is your next vacation destination, but it is also not the scary X-files-like place that this person claims it is.
The staff who work at Hanford are scientists and engineers engaged in the worlds largest environmental cleanup project, and we intend to do it right. Even if we *wanted* to hide anything, there is a federal consent decree that requires the Department of Energy to meet the both federal and state environmental regulations, as well as stakeholder groups like the native American tribes in our region.
Is Hanford contaminated? Yep. It has millions of curies of radioactive wastes in various forms that are currently being removed, repackaged, and stored until the US comes to grips with nuclear materials. When people actively spread misinformation about how we manage the site, it provides the policy makers with the ammunition to grind the cleanup to a halt. That is NOT in ANYONES best interest.
Whatever feelings people have regarding nuclear power or nuclear weapons, one would think that they would not approve of leaving it in the condition it was 20 years ago. That's what our work is trying to achieve.
And we are certainly extremely proud to have first-rate science projects like LIGO here at Hanford.
Actually, according to your link, he claims he didn't say it.
But the author in your link leaves open the possibility that he may have said it and then lists a bunch of facts that would have, at the time, made the statement appear reasonable.
Whether he said it or not is irrelevant to me. He is a terrible prognosticator on other issues related to technology. The only reason he is cited in tech-related articles is because his business has been successful, not because his technology has been superior.
Talk to us when the Libertarians actually have a seat, or better yet, a majority, in either house of Congress. Until then, they will always be also-rans.
What was the percentage representation of the Republican party in Congres in 1820?
The Whigs are gone because they failed to lead. The Republican and Democratic parties could follow the same path if a compelling candidate and platform can be constructed.
...quotes Harvard economist Richard Freeman:..."Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35,....Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?"
If everyone took this attitude, where will these newly minted $150K MBA get Ph.D.s to hire?
This is the same narrow thinking that jumps from country to country for the bottom-dollar wage slave not realizing that eventualy someone has to make a decent salary so that they can buy the widget or service that the cheap labor is creating.
I guess that all these rich MBAs think that Ph.D.s will just 'magic" themselves into existence.
One thing Microsoft is fanatical about is backward compatibility.
Except for their recent decision to deep-six backward compatibility.
I expect that there is a faction inside of Microsoft who is winning the debate on backward compatibility. They are probably using security as the 'nose under the tent' and that they will eventually bring in the camel as they convince upper management that cleaning the codebase makes sense for more than just security reasons.
I guess the message to Microsoft customers is: Don't expect those DOS apps to work forever.
Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows?
Nope. As the parent poster points out, most users get their OS installed at the time of purchase. Less than 1% of the non-research staff at a national laboratory in the US installs their own OS.
That means that probably a smaller percentage than that install their own OS at home. I get quite a few requests from colleagues to help rebuild their home machines (and I get nice presents at Xmas time as a result).
You realise that 200Kg of anything spread out to 10^-18 is going to be a lot of mass in total right but still only 200Kg of the actual substance.
Agreed. I am quite familiar with dillution effects. That is how several sites are dealing with tritium contamination (natural attenuation).
As for the ditches, keep in mind that the groundwater directly beneath these facilities has a concentration of 3.5 million pCi/L. The vadose above it is still feeding groundwater with highly-radioactive contamination.
Considering that the groundwater is dilluted you can imagine what the vadose concentrations will be.
Conversion of the pCi/L concentration to micrograms of tritium is left as an exercise for the reader.
And this is just one waste unit at just one DOE site.
And this is just one era of production at Hanford. The screaming hot stuff has already decayed away.
I'll get you a shovel and let you go mucking around in the 216-A-10 and 216-A-36B trenches if you are so confident about your claim about the 'rather small' amount of tritium available in the world.
As I said, that is just one of several sites in the Hanford Reservation. Another recent addition to the cribs, ponds, and ditches is a Washington State Approved Land Disposal Site (aka SALDS). That facility was created to accept tritium-contaminated water.
The Effluent Treatment facility has already shipped several large campaigns to that tile field. If you are interested in the radiological inventory, have a look at access.wa.gov. They have a fairly complete inventory of what was produced here at Hanford.
And that is just one of several DOE sites in states that include California, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Idaho.
Slashdot Mirror
Shut down all industrial and agricultural activity near the river if you are concerned about contamination.
The paper mills contribute, the orchards contribute, the wine country contributes, the aluminum smelters contribute, the homes on the river contribute, the run off from farms contributes, the natural radioisotopes from cratonic materials contributes....
Need I go on?
You're not understanding what I've written. I consume ORALLY a larger dose of iodine-129 to have a lower urinary tract radiogram performed than I would receive from drinkning Hanford groundwater.
And they do not give you a iodine tablet before the radiogram.
Yep and there are also kraft paper mills, aluminum plants, power generation facilities (hydro dams) and orchards.
That means you have dioxins, coal tar pitch, PCBs, and arsenic in the water that NEVER came from Hanford.
Bad spot when you owe $50,000.00 on a hpouse now worth $0.50.
Your friend got screwed.
Average housing prices in the Tri-Cities is roughly $100/sq ft.
That is comparable to anywhere in the US.
Go Bombers!
WOOT!
How many unaccounted for fuel rods are currently missing?.
None.
The production schedule for the new Vitrification Plant is far ahead of the basic science and engineering that form the foundation for its construction. Although I do not think that they will operate it with the risks for steam explosion that the article alludes to, it is more likely that the tax payers will pay more than the estimated $7B to construct it.
You heard it right, folks - $7B.
As for the groundwater contamination, that is nothing new. A tritium plume extending from the 200 Areas (where plutonium separation was performed) to the Columbia River has been in place since production started. It has fluctuated in size according to the politics of weapons production. The facilities have been shut down since the early 90's and are in various stages of decommissioning.
The issue of iodine-129 is a sticky point. It has a long half-life and had been dumped to the soil column without too much worry about the transport properties of the nuclide. It travels at the same rate through the vadose and groundwater as nitrate. It is very mobile. The toxicity of the isotope is in come dispute. I can get a higher radiation dose from a urniary test than I can get from consuming contaminated Hanford groundwater. I can also dispose of the contamination through my municipal water treatment facility, a practice prohibited for Hanford contractors.
As for the cesium-137 and strontium-90, those isotopes bind to soils high in the vadose and rarely reach groundwater. The are confined to zones near the surface, far from the river, and will be left in place to decay to background beneath low permeability covers. This is not a practice that the USDOE is forcing on the local community, but is a treatment alternative that is accepted by the USEPA and Washington Deparment of Ecology.
You've got to wonder how much longer they can stand this abuse.
Looking at their quarterly income and cash flow statements, one can only draw one conclusion; SCO will be out of cash in roughly three to four quarters without a significant cash injection from an interested party.
Their stock price sucks, their product sucks, their management sucks, and they have NO customer good will. They have no prospects for income and roughly $60M in cash. At $12M+ losses per quarter, they will barely make it to the close of FY05.
I would hate to work there.
Hmmmm.... I don't buy that one either.
It is a sad truth that software pricing is feeling the pressure of low price or free products. And yes, they are products. If they weren't, why would we create them according to milestones or other "production" models?
But the author only replays the same old arguments without clearly defining a solution. Microsoft made this argument just weeks ago at an Asian market meeting where he claimed that open source and free software would undermine intellectual property development. No shit? Gee, Bill! Do you really think so?
No one has completely solved the problem of how to create wealth from free software. If they had, Bill and Company would have moved on it in a flash and we would all be complaining about how Microsoft has dominated free software. The low cost leader ALWAYS wins in an economic battle. Don't believe me? Go check out Wal-Mart sometime. 90% of the stuff they sell there will break in half the time of the next higher quality product. But the low cost stuff flies off the shelves.
I know there are exceptions. There are folks out there who will pay good money for quality products. And I know that there are companies who are making comfortable livings from free software via support contracts. But the idea expressed by the author is true:
"But you know as well as I do that if I am successful then inevitably some kid in his parents' basement will write his own Open Source version of the thing, for free."
Aye, so there's the rub. How do you create a world where one person can create a great software tool while simultaneously restricting the ability of that "kid in the basement" from doing likewise.
You can if you have the money to buy a congressman.
I don't pretend to have any solution to this problem. Now that more people have affordable power tools, they do not have to rely on the village smithy or the local carpenter for small repair jobs. There are even fewer jobs for stable hands. Economics often kill job categories. I think that people will still make a living writing code, but there will always be someone who can step in and write an application that performs the same task for free. The trick is to make as much money as you can before the kid in the basement strikes.
Perhaps this is an evolutionary progression from commodity closed source to an entirely open source software world. When one group has to rely on legislative action to maintain their economic model, that model has failed. A new model will eventually arise from this heap of smoldering dung we are currently being lowered into. Until that happens the only people making money from software will be lawyers and politicians.
Competition is a great thing.
When it gets down to one company, who will they be competing with?
The consumer.
I thank you for your apology.
One piece of friendly advice: You shouldn't let anything on this site bother you that much.
Of course the humor on Slashdot is sophomoric. It is frequented by people whose average age is bracketed by sophomores (high school to college).
Didn't we have one of those darn Razorbacks in da Whitehouse a few years ago?
Nope. Billy-Bob's resume includes the following mascots:
Bull Terrier named "Hoya" (Georgetown University)
Viking (Oxford University - Hockey Team)
Bulldog named "Handsome Dan" (Yale University)
And had your reading comprehension been higher...
And had your sensitivity level been lower, you would have taken my comment as a well-intended joke.
You have just proven to everyone on this thread that you are indeed humorless and thin skinned.
But it can't be funny 'cause you said sh*t.
>>This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet.
It does if you believe the currently popular spontaneous generation theories.
You are reading too much into the statement. They said it increases the chance of life. The absence of ANY water would substantially decrease the chance of life.
Ex owner of 124 Spyder
Ahhhh.... That was a great 'looking' car, wasn't it?
I guess that pretty much sums up this proposed marriage - great looking but unreliable.
I cannot overstate the alien devastation that is at the Hanford site.
Actually, you just did.
As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world.
Obviously, you've never been to Cleaveland! (rimshot!)
I work at Hanford. You haven't a clue about the past history and present condition of the facility. It is glaringly apparent by your comments:
I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.
The tone of your comment belies your bias. No matter what someone who has *been* to the site tells you, YOU know better.
Ah, yes... Nothing like a religious experience to convince you that your form of wisdom is *the* truth.
I overflew Hanford several years ago, and let me tell you, this place is not "cool".
You can tell a lot from a seat at ~8,000 ft, can't you? What was the condition of the facility located just south of the 223E facility in the 200 East Area? What? You couldn't tell?
No doubt their seismograph is to detect intruders, not to detect "vibrations from space" (lol).
No, the seismographs are installed to detect earthquakes. If you want to see their location, you can read the Annual Seismic Report online.
From the air, the truth becomes apparent, the LIGO is fairly distant from "real" hanford site,
Which "real" Hanford Site are you referring to? The Hanford Township? The reactors in the 100 Area? The separations facilities in the 200 Areas? The fuel fabrication facilities in the 300 Area?
Just what are you talking about?
and no doubt from ground level its seems just like any old desert like area.
That is because, despite what this twit is claiming, it is just like any old desert area. It just happens to have a HUGE inventory of radionuclides in the ground.
Lest anyone fail to catch my sarcasm, it is clear that people like rufusdufus refuse to read information publicly available to anyone in the world. I would not claim that Hanford is your next vacation destination, but it is also not the scary X-files-like place that this person claims it is.
The staff who work at Hanford are scientists and engineers engaged in the worlds largest environmental cleanup project, and we intend to do it right. Even if we *wanted* to hide anything, there is a federal consent decree that requires the Department of Energy to meet the both federal and state environmental regulations, as well as stakeholder groups like the native American tribes in our region.
Is Hanford contaminated? Yep. It has millions of curies of radioactive wastes in various forms that are currently being removed, repackaged, and stored until the US comes to grips with nuclear materials. When people actively spread misinformation about how we manage the site, it provides the policy makers with the ammunition to grind the cleanup to a halt. That is NOT in ANYONES best interest.
Whatever feelings people have regarding nuclear power or nuclear weapons, one would think that they would not approve of leaving it in the condition it was 20 years ago. That's what our work is trying to achieve.
And we are certainly extremely proud to have first-rate science projects like LIGO here at Hanford.
Actually, according to your link, he claims he didn't say it.
But the author in your link leaves open the possibility that he may have said it and then lists a bunch of facts that would have, at the time, made the statement appear reasonable.
Whether he said it or not is irrelevant to me. He is a terrible prognosticator on other issues related to technology. The only reason he is cited in tech-related articles is because his business has been successful, not because his technology has been superior.
Talk to us when the Libertarians actually have a seat, or better yet, a majority, in either house of Congress. Until then, they will always be also-rans.
What was the percentage representation of the Republican party in Congres in 1820?
The Whigs are gone because they failed to lead. The Republican and Democratic parties could follow the same path if a compelling candidate and platform can be constructed.
...quotes Harvard economist Richard Freeman: ..."Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, ....Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?"
If everyone took this attitude, where will these newly minted $150K MBA get Ph.D.s to hire?
This is the same narrow thinking that jumps from country to country for the bottom-dollar wage slave not realizing that eventualy someone has to make a decent salary so that they can buy the widget or service that the cheap labor is creating.
I guess that all these rich MBAs think that Ph.D.s will just 'magic" themselves into existence.
One thing Microsoft is fanatical about is backward compatibility.
Except for their recent decision to deep-six backward compatibility.
I expect that there is a faction inside of Microsoft who is winning the debate on backward compatibility. They are probably using security as the 'nose under the tent' and that they will eventually bring in the camel as they convince upper management that cleaning the codebase makes sense for more than just security reasons.
I guess the message to Microsoft customers is: Don't expect those DOS apps to work forever.
Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows?
Nope. As the parent poster points out, most users get their OS installed at the time of purchase. Less than 1% of the non-research staff at a national laboratory in the US installs their own OS.
That means that probably a smaller percentage than that install their own OS at home. I get quite a few requests from colleagues to help rebuild their home machines (and I get nice presents at Xmas time as a result).
You realise that 200Kg of anything spread out to 10^-18 is going to be a lot of mass in total right but still only 200Kg of the actual substance.
Agreed. I am quite familiar with dillution effects. That is how several sites are dealing with tritium contamination (natural attenuation).
As for the ditches, keep in mind that the groundwater directly beneath these facilities has a concentration of 3.5 million pCi/L. The vadose above it is still feeding groundwater with highly-radioactive contamination.
Considering that the groundwater is dilluted you can imagine what the vadose concentrations will be.
Conversion of the pCi/L concentration to micrograms of tritium is left as an exercise for the reader.
And this is just one waste unit at just one DOE site.
And this is just one era of production at Hanford. The screaming hot stuff has already decayed away.
I'll get you a shovel and let you go mucking around in the 216-A-10 and 216-A-36B trenches if you are so confident about your claim about the 'rather small' amount of tritium available in the world.
As I said, that is just one of several sites in the Hanford Reservation. Another recent addition to the cribs, ponds, and ditches is a Washington State Approved Land Disposal Site (aka SALDS). That facility was created to accept tritium-contaminated water.
The Effluent Treatment facility has already shipped several large campaigns to that tile field. If you are interested in the radiological inventory, have a look at access.wa.gov. They have a fairly complete inventory of what was produced here at Hanford.
And that is just one of several DOE sites in states that include California, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Idaho.