You are confused. Monica Lewinsky was the witness to attest that Clinton did garner sexual favors from interns. The sexual harassment suit was by Paula Jones, whom was NOT willing to give sexual favors and thought that her boss making such advances was a highly hostile work environment.
Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair. Clinton was impeached for pressuring a subordinate intern for sexual favors, lying in court, and pressuring witnesses to lie in court.
> a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water
, a design which was chosen over thorium reactor designs because thorium reactors do not produce any significant amount of "waste" plutonium required for nuclear weapons production.
Fixed that incomplete thought for you.
That is not accurate. Thorium breeder reactors produce weapons-grade U-233. And a reactor designed to use liquid fuel with on-site reprocessing can very easily extract this weapons grade material. It is even easier to do so than a U-238 breeder reactor cause you don't have to worry about burnup requirements limiting Pu-240 production.
The reason why we went with UO2 based reactors instead of thorium ones is simply because that is where our knowledge base stemmed from. UO2 worked and thorium didn't offer any significant advantage worth starting over from scratch on.
The car analogy doesn't really work in this case. The most expensive parts of the plant are the containment building, which doesn't wear out, and the reactor vessel, which can be annealed. The most expensive part of building a new plant is the interest on the loan to pay for it while it is under construction for 5+ years. You can refit an old plant in much less time and you don't need the huge loan from the onset. Although it's true you don't get to take advantage of a new and safer design. I wouldn't want to refit an old gen 1 boiler like Fukushima but the old PWR's have proven to be very robust (e.g. TMI).
When you demo your brilliant design that doesn't suffer from those problems, and from all the problems that your panacea has. Let me know when you schedule your presentation, thanks.
Um, we already have. EBR-IIstarted in 1965, and it worked perfectly for 30 years until it was shut down by Clinton in 1995.
Luckily we have about 10,000 - 1,000,000 years worth of energy in uranium and thorium (depending on how fast you think energy needs will grow). Plenty of time to work out fusion and expand into space.
Regulator and lobbyists do not have a 'field', their skills are not related to any particular domain or technology.
Yes we must purge the FDA of all doctors, the NRC of all engineers, FWS of all biologists, etc because clearly they are all beholden to their special interests and thus can't be trusted.
Yup, and if you're lucky, the cops will only kill your dog and won't shoot you dead in your bed for waking up startled in the middle of the night upon hearing your door being busted in on a no-knock warrant based on an anonymous tip. And if your family is lucky the police won't lie about it to cover it up by planing a guns/drugs after the fact.
Power transmission isn't that simple. Your naivete is routed in a lack of technical knowledge. Most backfed electricity is wasted because control systems designed to balance the grid cannot cope with thousands of variable intermittent sources. But government laws force power companies to buy it anyway, which causes negative electricity prices where the power company pays users to waste excess electricity. It's not a win-win for utilities, it's a lose-lose. How are you helping the problem of global warming, by creating through government regulations, a system where people are paid to waste electricity?
An engineering problem in the sense that there is not enough matter in the universe to accelerate a spacecraft at 1 g for 2 years using any currently plausible propulsion method.
On the contrary there is a lot of information there. When a government official says "I may or may not respect the constitution" that mean he has already decided that he will do whatever he wants regardless of constitutional authority and obeys the law only when it is convenient to do so.
Yep, only problem is because most other people rely on buffet-style all-you-can-eat-for-fixed-price, the cash price for many services is stupendously high.
Last year I had a month-long cold of some sort and needed a checkup to find out what was wrong and get anti-biotics. I don't have a family doctor because the last two I've had retired (drove out of business due to poor medicare reimbursement rates), so I went to Patient First. I asked them how much the checkup would cost, and they said they could not tell me until after the services were performed. Great.
Got a bill in the mail a month later for $300 for a 5 minute checkup and chest x-ray. Anti-biotics were another $80. I don't mind paying these prices if that's what they actually cost. That's what the HSA is for. The problem is they would not tell me what the costs would be up front, and I had no way of shopping around for better prices at competing clinics. That's like going to McDonalds for a hamburger, but they won't tell you what the price is until they mail it to you a month later. And the cost of the burger ends up depending on how hungry you were at the time and how many poor people and illegal immigrants they had to give free hamburgers to.
So basically "slow down over there, you're making the rest of us look bad" enshrined into law.
Next thing you know, they'll be passing a law so that companies must pay salary based on employees need rather then their productivity, because it's not fair that an engineer with a big family gets paid less than a single engineer just because he's not as good at the job.
I swear, it's as if these people read the first half of Atlas Shrugged and said "oh hey, that's a good idea, let's do that!"
Advocating a boycott is fine. Advocating an employee be fired as a punitive measure, when their job has nothing to do with the issue itself, is not fine.
There is a big difference between calling for your supporters to not use a product, and demanding that some person whom opposes your viewpoint be fired from their job which is wholly unrelated to the issue itself, purely as a punitive measure.
Tragedy of the commons. In Japan, people own their land and property. In Haiti, there is no private property rights. No one bothers to care and maintain things that belong to someone else or could be taken away from them at any time.
Everything Facebook as bought up until now have been products relating to the use of Facebook and social media content. This is the first company that Facebook has bought that is hardware oriented and not a product which is integral to Facebook. Therefore it is hard to extrapolate their previous acquisitions to what they will do with Oculus. I look at the situation (optimistically) as sort of like Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, starting SpaceX. Hopefully Zuckerburg is interested in Oculus because he thinks it is a worthwhile technology to invest in, not because he wants to absorb it into Facebook.
Can someone explain to me why a reactor can overheat and meltdown like in Japan... but not have the energy to spin the turbines to power cooling?
How can it get so hot that it boils the water way even under ridiculous pressures... but that heat can't be used to power turbines?
Am I to believe that reactors actually generate more power when shutdown than when powered up?
I just can't fathom why a plant can SCRAM and then overheat... but be unable to cool itself. Someones design is WAY fucked up me thinks. Its generating too much steam... USE IT...
It can. The main problem with this type of operation is that the main generator and turbine are not designed for very low power operation, there is not enough steam pressure to drive them below a minimum threshold (~5-10% power). The Chernobyl accident occurred during an attempted test to see for how long the reactor could run its cooling pumps on decay heat after shutdown (the accident was not caused by this test directly, but due to the inappropriate actions by the operators leading up to the test).
The problem is mostly engineering and the way plants are designed. While there are steam-driven and axillary cooling systems, on older plants they can only provide decay heat cooling for a limited time, and generally require at least some power to operate valves and monitor levels. They were not designed to cope with an extended loss of all electrical power. Some newer plant types are designed to be passively safe, such as the ESBWR, which can remain safe with zero electrical power or operator actions due to its natural circulation design and enormous gravity-fed cooling pools.
Your last part is right on. The fed is printing money like a firehose to fill the enormous whirlpool of money being poofed out of existence by bad debt, and debt being paid off. This is why we haven't seen much if any inflation even though we are printing dollars - the expansion of dollars by the Fed is being countered by the destruction of dollars by removal of debt. The government certainly loves this situation - the ability to spend unlimited money without having to worry about inflation. The true cost of the hidden tax of government deficit spending is hidden in the losses of the economy as a whole due to the recession.
"... that some low level inflation is better than low level deflation."
Are you serious? The healthiest markets today are ALL deflationary markets. Look at smartphones, computers, consumer electronics. Any commodity that is either getting better for the same money, or cheaper to produce. That's deflation.
Government and big investment bankers have been pushing for an inflationary economy because for several reasons (time value of money being just one of them), it is INFLATION that helps the rich. It directly benefits Government, bankers, and Wall Street. It hurts everybody else by, among other thing, insidiously leeching from production and savings.
Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously. You cannot point to one product getting cheaper and say "that's deflation".
Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply.
Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash. The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
You are confused. Monica Lewinsky was the witness to attest that Clinton did garner sexual favors from interns. The sexual harassment suit was by Paula Jones, whom was NOT willing to give sexual favors and thought that her boss making such advances was a highly hostile work environment.
Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair. Clinton was impeached for pressuring a subordinate intern for sexual favors, lying in court, and pressuring witnesses to lie in court.
Burnup is the standard science and industry term for fission energy produced per kg of fuel.
> a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water
, a design which was chosen over thorium reactor designs because thorium reactors do not produce any significant amount of "waste" plutonium required for nuclear weapons production.
Fixed that incomplete thought for you.
That is not accurate. Thorium breeder reactors produce weapons-grade U-233. And a reactor designed to use liquid fuel with on-site reprocessing can very easily extract this weapons grade material. It is even easier to do so than a U-238 breeder reactor cause you don't have to worry about burnup requirements limiting Pu-240 production.
The reason why we went with UO2 based reactors instead of thorium ones is simply because that is where our knowledge base stemmed from. UO2 worked and thorium didn't offer any significant advantage worth starting over from scratch on.
The car analogy doesn't really work in this case. The most expensive parts of the plant are the containment building, which doesn't wear out, and the reactor vessel, which can be annealed. The most expensive part of building a new plant is the interest on the loan to pay for it while it is under construction for 5+ years. You can refit an old plant in much less time and you don't need the huge loan from the onset. Although it's true you don't get to take advantage of a new and safer design. I wouldn't want to refit an old gen 1 boiler like Fukushima but the old PWR's have proven to be very robust (e.g. TMI).
When will this people learn ?
When you demo your brilliant design that doesn't suffer from those problems, and from all the problems that your panacea has. Let me know when you schedule your presentation, thanks.
Um, we already have. EBR-II started in 1965, and it worked perfectly for 30 years until it was shut down by Clinton in 1995.
Luckily we have about 10,000 - 1,000,000 years worth of energy in uranium and thorium (depending on how fast you think energy needs will grow). Plenty of time to work out fusion and expand into space.
Regulator and lobbyists do not have a 'field', their skills are not related to any particular domain or technology.
Yes we must purge the FDA of all doctors, the NRC of all engineers, FWS of all biologists, etc because clearly they are all beholden to their special interests and thus can't be trusted.
Yup, and if you're lucky, the cops will only kill your dog and won't shoot you dead in your bed for waking up startled in the middle of the night upon hearing your door being busted in on a no-knock warrant based on an anonymous tip. And if your family is lucky the police won't lie about it to cover it up by planing a guns/drugs after the fact.
No.
Power transmission isn't that simple. Your naivete is routed in a lack of technical knowledge. Most backfed electricity is wasted because control systems designed to balance the grid cannot cope with thousands of variable intermittent sources. But government laws force power companies to buy it anyway, which causes negative electricity prices where the power company pays users to waste excess electricity. It's not a win-win for utilities, it's a lose-lose. How are you helping the problem of global warming, by creating through government regulations, a system where people are paid to waste electricity?
Really? You actually prefer this: http://www.google.com/images?q=coal+ash
Over this? http://www.google.com/images?q=dry+cask
All of the spent fuel ever generated by a nuclear plant for 30+ years, inertly stored in an area smaller than the parking lot.
An engineering problem in the sense that there is not enough matter in the universe to accelerate a spacecraft at 1 g for 2 years using any currently plausible propulsion method.
On the contrary there is a lot of information there. When a government official says "I may or may not respect the constitution" that mean he has already decided that he will do whatever he wants regardless of constitutional authority and obeys the law only when it is convenient to do so.
Yep, only problem is because most other people rely on buffet-style all-you-can-eat-for-fixed-price, the cash price for many services is stupendously high.
Last year I had a month-long cold of some sort and needed a checkup to find out what was wrong and get anti-biotics. I don't have a family doctor because the last two I've had retired (drove out of business due to poor medicare reimbursement rates), so I went to Patient First. I asked them how much the checkup would cost, and they said they could not tell me until after the services were performed. Great.
Got a bill in the mail a month later for $300 for a 5 minute checkup and chest x-ray. Anti-biotics were another $80. I don't mind paying these prices if that's what they actually cost. That's what the HSA is for. The problem is they would not tell me what the costs would be up front, and I had no way of shopping around for better prices at competing clinics. That's like going to McDonalds for a hamburger, but they won't tell you what the price is until they mail it to you a month later. And the cost of the burger ends up depending on how hungry you were at the time and how many poor people and illegal immigrants they had to give free hamburgers to.
How many of those 7 million signups are forced signups by prison inmates?
So basically "slow down over there, you're making the rest of us look bad" enshrined into law.
Next thing you know, they'll be passing a law so that companies must pay salary based on employees need rather then their productivity, because it's not fair that an engineer with a big family gets paid less than a single engineer just because he's not as good at the job.
I swear, it's as if these people read the first half of Atlas Shrugged and said "oh hey, that's a good idea, let's do that!"
Boycotting them is fine. Using public media outlets demanding the business owner be fired as a punitive measure is not.
Advocating a boycott is fine. Advocating an employee be fired as a punitive measure, when their job has nothing to do with the issue itself, is not fine.
There is a big difference between calling for your supporters to not use a product, and demanding that some person whom opposes your viewpoint be fired from their job which is wholly unrelated to the issue itself, purely as a punitive measure.
Tragedy of the commons. In Japan, people own their land and property. In Haiti, there is no private property rights. No one bothers to care and maintain things that belong to someone else or could be taken away from them at any time.
Everything Facebook as bought up until now have been products relating to the use of Facebook and social media content. This is the first company that Facebook has bought that is hardware oriented and not a product which is integral to Facebook. Therefore it is hard to extrapolate their previous acquisitions to what they will do with Oculus. I look at the situation (optimistically) as sort of like Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, starting SpaceX. Hopefully Zuckerburg is interested in Oculus because he thinks it is a worthwhile technology to invest in, not because he wants to absorb it into Facebook.
Can someone explain to me why a reactor can overheat and meltdown like in Japan ... but not have the energy to spin the turbines to power cooling?
How can it get so hot that it boils the water way even under ridiculous pressures ... but that heat can't be used to power turbines?
Am I to believe that reactors actually generate more power when shutdown than when powered up?
I just can't fathom why a plant can SCRAM and then overheat ... but be unable to cool itself. Someones design is WAY fucked up me thinks. Its generating too much steam ... USE IT ...
It can. The main problem with this type of operation is that the main generator and turbine are not designed for very low power operation, there is not enough steam pressure to drive them below a minimum threshold (~5-10% power). The Chernobyl accident occurred during an attempted test to see for how long the reactor could run its cooling pumps on decay heat after shutdown (the accident was not caused by this test directly, but due to the inappropriate actions by the operators leading up to the test).
The problem is mostly engineering and the way plants are designed. While there are steam-driven and axillary cooling systems, on older plants they can only provide decay heat cooling for a limited time, and generally require at least some power to operate valves and monitor levels. They were not designed to cope with an extended loss of all electrical power. Some newer plant types are designed to be passively safe, such as the ESBWR, which can remain safe with zero electrical power or operator actions due to its natural circulation design and enormous gravity-fed cooling pools.
Braindead soundbites like this gem from 2008?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PMmY20nJ8E
Your last part is right on. The fed is printing money like a firehose to fill the enormous whirlpool of money being poofed out of existence by bad debt, and debt being paid off. This is why we haven't seen much if any inflation even though we are printing dollars - the expansion of dollars by the Fed is being countered by the destruction of dollars by removal of debt. The government certainly loves this situation - the ability to spend unlimited money without having to worry about inflation. The true cost of the hidden tax of government deficit spending is hidden in the losses of the economy as a whole due to the recession.
"... that some low level inflation is better than low level deflation."
Are you serious? The healthiest markets today are ALL deflationary markets. Look at smartphones, computers, consumer electronics. Any commodity that is either getting better for the same money, or cheaper to produce. That's deflation.
THIS is what your "low-level inflation" has done over the last 100 years.
Government and big investment bankers have been pushing for an inflationary economy because for several reasons (time value of money being just one of them), it is INFLATION that helps the rich. It directly benefits Government, bankers, and Wall Street. It hurts everybody else by, among other thing, insidiously leeching from production and savings.
Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously. You cannot point to one product getting cheaper and say "that's deflation".
Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply.
Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash. The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody.