We should put nuclear waste on rockets and shoot them into space.
Why? By weight, 90% of the spent fuel is natural uranium, which can be used as fuel in fast reactors or other commercial purposes. 5% of the weight is high-level radioactive waste, which decays to safe levels in a few decades. The rest is trans-uranics, which can be recycled to use in new fuel.
The only reason why we have a "waste problem" in the US is because the government won't allow separating the dangerous-part-which-decays-quickly from the very-long-half-life-but-reusable-as-fuel parts. The reason why we can't do this separation is because we don't want to encourage rogue nations like Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
Someone once brought this home to me quite nicely - he said if 9 out of 10 doctors said your child had appendicitis, and only 1 said it was trapped gas, would you go home and 'wait and see'? Even if you were nervous about the risks of an operation, the risks of ignoring it are much worse - if it turns out to be appendicitis.
A more accurate analogy would be:
a) quit your job to live in a clinic indefinitely with a poor quality of life, spending $100,000 on experimental treatments before it bursts in the hope of delaying the problem that will inevitably come anyway, or b) keep your job and save up money, wait until the appendix bursts, and spend $10,000 to have the operation to fix the problem, and get on with your life.
I'm on the fence as to whether AGW is real or not. Even if it is, the climate scientists say it is inevitable over the next century. So why spend trillions of dollars and criple the world's economy when the problem can't be reversed anyway. Better to strive for thriving economies around the world that have that have enough prosperity and wealth to deal with the consequences, and in 100 years or so internal combustion engines and coal power will be obsolete anyway.
The nuclear power industry trains its operators in a similar manner to the navy. The whole plant is run like a naval ship in fact.
When something goes wrong, they depend on you having enough internalized knowledge about the plant, its controls, and its indicator systems to work out what's going on and (if necessary) do something about it. Once you've got stuff at least marginally under control, *then* you get the books out to check the applicable procedures to make sure you haven't forgotten something, and to figure out how to recover from whatever happened without causing any more problems.
This was the attitude that operators worked by pre-TMI. The TMI accident changed their whole approach and now they do the opposite of what you described. They have detailed procedures for how to handle any kind of normal operation or problem, and rely on their general knowledge of the plant to make sure that the procedure they are using is correct and applicable to the situation.
It's actually extremely simple to shut down a nuclear reactor. There are trip switches in multiple places in the control room and elsewhere. All of the automatic safety systems can automatically trip the plant as well. The problem is that a nuclear reactor continues to produce decay heat from fission produces in significant amount for many hours after shutdown, and this heat must continue to be removed by the cooling systems.
Please forgive my naive suggestion, but is there not a way that when shit starts hitting the fan in such a situation, there could be a "panic" button which tells the plant to "just insert all the control rods, put everything into the safest position possible and just shut everything down"? It would of course cost the power company millions to perform such an act, and I'm also assuming that since such a system doesn't seem to exist in the real world there must be good reason. Perhaps with a nuclear reactor it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what a totally safe shutdown condition is?
The reactor WAS shutdown when it melted down. The thing is with nuclear fission, is that the decay products continue to produce a lot of heat that decays exponentially. An hour after inserting all the control rods and shutting down, the core is still producing something like 1-5% power.
There are no less then 4 systems for keeping the core cooled. The primary coolant pumps for normal operation (2-4 of these depending on the size of the plant), the high-pressure safety pumps (one for each main coolant pump, each with TWO backups), the low-pressure safety pumps (if the entire system becomes depressurized due to a major catastrophe), and the residual heat removal system (for cooling the core while shut down). All of these systems were intentionally and mistakenly disabled by the operators at TMI.
I agree, but it seems we are in the minority here. ST4 had some good moments but the lame hippie plot of "omg we killed the whales and thus aliens will annihilate us in the future!" was pretty lame. It's like the whole movie was an ad for greenpeace or something.
Our president is already electronic. It feeds the text of its comments and speeches through a visual display to an attractive but hollow audio relay device.
An atomic rifle grenade would be physically impossible, since the minimum critical mass for pure weapons grade material is on the order of ~10 kg.
The smallest nuclear weapon ever developed (that public knowledge is available) is the Davy Crockett. The warhead weighed >20 kg and had a yield of ~0.5 kt.
I hear that using a platinum-iridium SATA cable by Monster for the low low price of $3800/in reduces the number of burning errors and increases the lifespan of your burned media too.
"Many pro-lifers see having children as punishment for having sex outside marriage; abortion is a way out of that punishment."
I'm pretty sure you got that backwards. Pro-choice'ers are the ones that think that teenage pregnancy is an unjust punishment. Hence President Obama's statement that he supports abortion because he doesn't think teenagers should be punished with a baby. Pro-lifer's consider life sacred, which is why they think destroying even embryos is wrong.
My opinion is this: when in history has a society deemed a part of its population sub-human and thus acceptable to end, and never later deemed the practice unacceptable? The same arguments that are used now to justify abortion were used to justify the slaughter of indians, blacks, jews, et al. I'm sure you are thinking my opinion is crack-pottery, that a living person whom happens to be black or jewish is completely different from a fertilized embryo. But remember, the same scientific arguments were used to justify minorities as being sub-human in ths past.
It's a slippery slope. Maybe harvesting embryo's isn't really bad. But pro-choicers continue to press for more extreme rights, e.g. post-birth "abortion", aka infanticide. And who knows, maybe in the future we'll discover the cure of Alzheimer disease is to harvest the neural cells from a fully-developed fetus, and we'll end up growing and harvesting thousands of fetuses for organ harvesting, with the justification that it saves lives of adults to do so, and for some scientific reason isn't really unethical.
According to the all-knowing wikipedia, the government debt increased from $6e12 to $9e12 during Bush's term. However, this was during a time of huge growth in the GDP. Looking at the graph as a percentage of GDP, government debt remained fairly constant.
I'm not at all a fan of Bush's big government spending, he should have reduced spending while he had the chance. That being said, I find it ridiculously hypocritical for Bush pundits to complain about his government spending then but not Obama's drastic spending now. Bush may have increased the government's debt by 50% during his 8 years in office, but Obama has increased it by 50% in his first 60 days, AND during a huge decrease in the GDP due to the recession.
I think a better analogy would be torrents being the guns. The pirate bay is like a gun store called "Gangsta's Guns: We sell to anybody, no questions asked & no background checks required!"
The store could in theory only sell guns legally to law abiding citizens. But the store's slogan, as well as advertising revenue, comes from the fact that they do sell guns to criminals, and the store owners are fully aware and complacent in the sale of guns to criminals by policy.
I know the analogy is not exact but I'm just playing devil's advoate here. If I were the prosecutor in this case, this is the argument I would use...
maybe not a LHC, but you could make a home-made cloud chamber. They make for nifty live demonstrations and you could even do interesting things like rig a digital camera CCD to it and try to figure out the energies of detected particles.
What I find irritating is that when Republicans are in power, the left ceaselessly berates them for being corrupt, whether they are or not. But when Democrats are in power and are demonstrably corrupt to the bone, their excuse is that "oh everyone is corrupt, that's just how our government is, live with it."
The problem isn't term limits. If there were term limits of one term, then corrupt lobbyists and elected officials would still get into office. Knowing they don't have to worry about any accountability since they can't be re-elected, they would then loot the system for all they can until their time runs out.
No, the problem isn't term limits. The problem is the government. They have thrown the constitution out the window and use the tax code and regulation system for their own gain.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
It's about as sane as Jimmy Carter banning the recycling of our own spent nuclear fuel out of proliferation concerns -- even though many other countries already and still do recycle their fuel.
In other words, Obama is saying "I'm neutering our own capabilities in the hope that our rivals will follow suit and neuter their own capabilities as well, even though our rivals have a far bigger incentive to develop space weapons and in some cases already have (China/lasers)".
This may apply to congress but it's the interstate commerce clause which gives the exeuctive branch its power. Basically, any executive order can be justified by this logic (and is done so):
* The activity in question is related to commerce. * In these modern times, commerce often occurs across state borders. * Therefore, the activity is interstate commerce and we have the power to regulate it (and by regulate, we mean tax, ban, subsidize, whatever we want).
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Why? By weight, 90% of the spent fuel is natural uranium, which can be used as fuel in fast reactors or other commercial purposes. 5% of the weight is high-level radioactive waste, which decays to safe levels in a few decades. The rest is trans-uranics, which can be recycled to use in new fuel.
The only reason why we have a "waste problem" in the US is because the government won't allow separating the dangerous-part-which-decays-quickly from the very-long-half-life-but-reusable-as-fuel parts. The reason why we can't do this separation is because we don't want to encourage rogue nations like Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
That was probably the original name of the treadmill, and in an amazing coincidence someone realized it spelled out COLBERT.
A more accurate analogy would be:
a) quit your job to live in a clinic indefinitely with a poor quality of life, spending $100,000 on experimental treatments before it bursts in the hope of delaying the problem that will inevitably come anyway, or
b) keep your job and save up money, wait until the appendix bursts, and spend $10,000 to have the operation to fix the problem, and get on with your life.
I'm on the fence as to whether AGW is real or not. Even if it is, the climate scientists say it is inevitable over the next century. So why spend trillions of dollars and criple the world's economy when the problem can't be reversed anyway. Better to strive for thriving economies around the world that have that have enough prosperity and wealth to deal with the consequences, and in 100 years or so internal combustion engines and coal power will be obsolete anyway.
The nuclear power industry trains its operators in a similar manner to the navy. The whole plant is run like a naval ship in fact.
This was the attitude that operators worked by pre-TMI. The TMI accident changed their whole approach and now they do the opposite of what you described. They have detailed procedures for how to handle any kind of normal operation or problem, and rely on their general knowledge of the plant to make sure that the procedure they are using is correct and applicable to the situation.
It's actually extremely simple to shut down a nuclear reactor. There are trip switches in multiple places in the control room and elsewhere. All of the automatic safety systems can automatically trip the plant as well. The problem is that a nuclear reactor continues to produce decay heat from fission produces in significant amount for many hours after shutdown, and this heat must continue to be removed by the cooling systems.
I don't know where you get your information but it is bogus. TMI uses standard design B&W reactor pressure vessels and containment buildings.
The reactor WAS shutdown when it melted down. The thing is with nuclear fission, is that the decay products continue to produce a lot of heat that decays exponentially. An hour after inserting all the control rods and shutting down, the core is still producing something like 1-5% power.
There are no less then 4 systems for keeping the core cooled. The primary coolant pumps for normal operation (2-4 of these depending on the size of the plant), the high-pressure safety pumps (one for each main coolant pump, each with TWO backups), the low-pressure safety pumps (if the entire system becomes depressurized due to a major catastrophe), and the residual heat removal system (for cooling the core while shut down). All of these systems were intentionally and mistakenly disabled by the operators at TMI.
I agree, but it seems we are in the minority here. ST4 had some good moments but the lame hippie plot of "omg we killed the whales and thus aliens will annihilate us in the future!" was pretty lame. It's like the whole movie was an ad for greenpeace or something.
The mindless jerks at the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation will be the first with their backs against the wall when the revolution comes.
Our president is already electronic. It feeds the text of its comments and speeches through a visual display to an attractive but hollow audio relay device.
An atomic rifle grenade would be physically impossible, since the minimum critical mass for pure weapons grade material is on the order of ~10 kg.
The smallest nuclear weapon ever developed (that public knowledge is available) is the Davy Crockett. The warhead weighed >20 kg and had a yield of ~0.5 kt.
I hear that using a platinum-iridium SATA cable by Monster for the low low price of $3800/in reduces the number of burning errors and increases the lifespan of your burned media too.
"Many pro-lifers see having children as punishment for having sex outside marriage; abortion is a way out of that punishment."
I'm pretty sure you got that backwards. Pro-choice'ers are the ones that think that teenage pregnancy is an unjust punishment. Hence President Obama's statement that he supports abortion because he doesn't think teenagers should be punished with a baby. Pro-lifer's consider life sacred, which is why they think destroying even embryos is wrong.
My opinion is this: when in history has a society deemed a part of its population sub-human and thus acceptable to end, and never later deemed the practice unacceptable? The same arguments that are used now to justify abortion were used to justify the slaughter of indians, blacks, jews, et al. I'm sure you are thinking my opinion is crack-pottery, that a living person whom happens to be black or jewish is completely different from a fertilized embryo. But remember, the same scientific arguments were used to justify minorities as being sub-human in ths past.
It's a slippery slope. Maybe harvesting embryo's isn't really bad. But pro-choicers continue to press for more extreme rights, e.g. post-birth "abortion", aka infanticide. And who knows, maybe in the future we'll discover the cure of Alzheimer disease is to harvest the neural cells from a fully-developed fetus, and we'll end up growing and harvesting thousands of fetuses for organ harvesting, with the justification that it saves lives of adults to do so, and for some scientific reason isn't really unethical.
virtually no one... except the president of the united states?
According to the all-knowing wikipedia, the government debt increased from $6e12 to $9e12 during Bush's term. However, this was during a time of huge growth in the GDP. Looking at the graph as a percentage of GDP, government debt remained fairly constant.
I'm not at all a fan of Bush's big government spending, he should have reduced spending while he had the chance. That being said, I find it ridiculously hypocritical for Bush pundits to complain about his government spending then but not Obama's drastic spending now. Bush may have increased the government's debt by 50% during his 8 years in office, but Obama has increased it by 50% in his first 60 days, AND during a huge decrease in the GDP due to the recession.
The right to a free attorney (for anything except capital crimes) did not exist until 1963.
The satellite probably landed on some poor unsuspecting family of penguins. NASA has thus officially killed more wildlife than global warming.
I think a better analogy would be torrents being the guns. The pirate bay is like a gun store called "Gangsta's Guns: We sell to anybody, no questions asked & no background checks required!"
The store could in theory only sell guns legally to law abiding citizens. But the store's slogan, as well as advertising revenue, comes from the fact that they do sell guns to criminals, and the store owners are fully aware and complacent in the sale of guns to criminals by policy.
I know the analogy is not exact but I'm just playing devil's advoate here. If I were the prosecutor in this case, this is the argument I would use...
maybe not a LHC, but you could make a home-made cloud chamber. They make for nifty live demonstrations and you could even do interesting things like rig a digital camera CCD to it and try to figure out the energies of detected particles.
What I find irritating is that when Republicans are in power, the left ceaselessly berates them for being corrupt, whether they are or not. But when Democrats are in power and are demonstrably corrupt to the bone, their excuse is that "oh everyone is corrupt, that's just how our government is, live with it."
The problem isn't term limits. If there were term limits of one term, then corrupt lobbyists and elected officials would still get into office. Knowing they don't have to worry about any accountability since they can't be re-elected, they would then loot the system for all they can until their time runs out.
No, the problem isn't term limits. The problem is the government. They have thrown the constitution out the window and use the tax code and regulation system for their own gain.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
It's about as sane as Jimmy Carter banning the recycling of our own spent nuclear fuel out of proliferation concerns -- even though many other countries already and still do recycle their fuel.
In other words, Obama is saying "I'm neutering our own capabilities in the hope that our rivals will follow suit and neuter their own capabilities as well, even though our rivals have a far bigger incentive to develop space weapons and in some cases already have (China/lasers)".
Reduced to physics? Reduced to physics!! Grr.
If its being 'reduced' to physics, then is the rest of it unscientific alchemy?
Mathematics.
They also had the greatest collection of scientific geniuses the world has ever seen working on one program with unlimited funding for 4 years.
This may apply to congress but it's the interstate commerce clause which gives the exeuctive branch its power. Basically, any executive order can be justified by this logic (and is done so):
* The activity in question is related to commerce.
* In these modern times, commerce often occurs across state borders.
* Therefore, the activity is interstate commerce and we have the power to regulate it (and by regulate, we mean tax, ban, subsidize, whatever we want).