Even if private individuals could use the NICS system there's no point in making a law requiring it. The honest people will use it whether it is required or not since it protects them from liability, while the criminals will just ignore the law regardless.
We should have laws for things that are inherently wrong, like murder. Owning a gun is not inherently wrong, and therefore should not be prohibited since the attempt to do to won't prevent criminals from getting guns illegally anyway.
$100 million is nothing compared to the scope of the problem. The Manhattan project was around $25 billion over about 4 years. The Apollo program cost $170 billion over about 15 years. The reason why fusion hasn't worked yet is simply because it hasn't been funded to those levels yet.
The notions that solar power doesn't work and that solar power hurts utility company's profits are not mutually exclusive. It is called negative power prices. Due to laws requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power at any time, combined with the inability to store or transport natural gas supplies due to lack of pipelines, the cost of electricity often becomes negative where the power company pays customers to waste electricity because of unpredictable excess capacity. This hurts utility company earnings as well as being wasteful and counterproductive to the economy and environment.
Oh yeah? Just ask this guy. He was absolutely arrested for not consenting to a search by lying cops. And as shown in the video, the prosecutor states that if he wasn't lucky to have had a clear recording they would have no qualms about and would have gotten away with lying to convict him. The linked video is full of all sorts of blatant gestapo corruption on the part of the cops AND the court (at one point the judge called the sheriff to arrest him for not letting the prosecutor see exculpatory evidence, when sheriff arrived he simply told the judge he couldn't arrest him for that).
Thorium is not fuel, it is only fertile material which can be turned into Uranium in a breeder reactor (which requires high-enriched uranium or plutonium to operate). Thorium has the same properties as Uranium in terms of risk of melting down. Making a reactor melt-down-proof is a matter of reactor and coolant type, not fuel. Same goes for nature of spent fuel/radioactive waste. The only real advantage of using thorium as a breeder material instead of natural uranium is that it is more common and cheaper.
EBR-II was a 60 MW sodium cooled fast breeder reactor with on-site reprocessing that successfully operated from 1965 until 1994 when the program was cancelled by Bill Clinton.
There's a simpler way of looking at the electric car conundrum. Of all the energy used in the industrialized world, about half is used for transportation in the form of oil. In order to replace all cars with electrics, we would have to literally double all electric generation and transmission capability. No small undertaking.
Actually that is not true either. The plants were in fact originally designed to load follow and were only later adapted to constant full power operation based on economic factors. It is not hard at all to engineer the plants to load follow. And xenon poisoning has nothing to do with it, the primary challenge is in axial offset control which becomes more difficult later in the cycle, but only because the cycles are optimized to run at constant full power with maximum fuel loading. It would only require modest adjustments typical of cycle-to-cycle operational changes to design to load follow. IAANE.
1) No. Wind and solar vary with clouds and wind patterns and have no correlation to usage patterns. Renewables do not cut into anyone's profits, only natural gas does that with massive oversupply with lack of storage/transmission capability. In fact, renewables tend to be big profit cash cows for industries because of government subsidies that pay for them to build them, even when and where they don't work, and then they get to write off the losses from taxes. Why do you think there are so many idle wind power farms all over the country?
2) Renewables are also highly centralized in that they are totally dependent on federal government subsidies and all the cronyism and corruption that comes along with it. The rest of point two I won't even go into as it is just loony bullshit.
3) What do you think causes the cost overruns? Environmentalist protests and lawsuits. Nice catch 22 there.
Wind and solar have variable output, so they need to be partnered with flexible power generation. Nuclear is fundamentally inflexible because you can't quickly ramp up or down electricity output from a nuclear power plant.
Wrong. Nuclear power can load follow (ramp up and down rapidly to meet instantaneous demand) perfectly fine. They just typically do not because they are large baseload plants and there is no reason to run them anything lower than 100% when you need fossil fuel plants to make up the difference. IAANE.
The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:
Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.
The issue is not the average energy price across the country. The problem is local, where natural gas is produced in such abundance but cannot be stored or transported, they practically give it away, which nuclear (nor coal or any other generation method aside from hydro) can compete with.
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption;
If we built fast reactors, we would have enough fuel, in the form of depleted uranium sitting around idle in barrels at enrichment plants, to supply the entire planet's energy for about 1000 years.
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption; Well beyond the life expectancy of any of our reactors. The only reason for this program was to provide a failing country with a cheap way of disposing of highly hazardous materials without losing face. It is the proverbial "turning a negative into a positive". It will have zero effect on our energy costs or programs.
Zero effect, eh?
An oil sheik farts in the wrong direction and gas prices go up by 10 cents a gallon, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue instantly.
What in the FUCK makes you think the powers-that-be won't take this non-story and turn it into the next US energy crisis to justify a 20% increase in costs?
Sorry for being so harsh, but your last statement there pegged my bullshit meter.
The small increase in nuclear fuel price due to the ending of this program is insignificant. Fuel price is only a small cost of nuclear power, and enrichment cost only a fraction of that. The real problem for nuclear power is the bottoming out of energy prices due to the huge oversupply of natural gas from fracking. The latter being responsible for the closing of two power plants this year.
Your precious gun bans 'dont stop those from being in the hands of criminals... So why do you think more of them will help?
Gun ban and gun regulation isn't the same thing.
In northern Europe guns are heavily regulated and they don't have nearly as much violent gun crime as the U.S.
This might not necessarily be because of gun regulation, not having gun nuts around is probably the big thing but I don't think killing them off is an acceptable solution.
The vast majority of gun crime in the US is related to drugs or gang related. 50% of the gun crime in the US is perpetrated by 4% of the population in the 7 largest major cities (several of which have total gun bans already - New York, Chicago, etc). The gun crime in these areas is similar to that of other countries which have total gun bans, such as Mexico, Russia, Brazil, etc. These countries (and parts of the US) have high gun crime not because of lax gun laws, but because of a degradation of the rule of law and civil society. Most parts of the US, especially rural areas, have far less crime than anywhere in Europe.
Spoilerish. Two astronauts tied together falling past a structure, once one of them grabs on and withstands the shock of the other astronaut snapping the tether taut, he should rebound back towards the secured astronaut, not dangle as if still being pulled by gravity. This would not be the case if, say, they were on a rotating structure or on a rocket making a significant burn but neither is the case.
My impression of that scene was that the cords tangling Bullocks' character were barely taught enough to stop her momentum and rebound, and if Clooney did not let go the cords would have broken at the other end leaving them both floating away. Like two people bungee jumping, while decelerating under tension, they notice the cord start to break due to excessive weight, so one guy detaches himself and falls to his death while the remaining elasticity of the cord is enough to save the other.
For the amount of money we spent on one year of so-called stimulus, we could have built ~300 new gen 4 nuclear reactors, converting the country to 80% nuclear power (the remaining being hydro in areas where it already exists). We have enough depleted uranium sitting around refined and unused in barrels at enrichment plants to supply fast reactors for about 10,000-50,000 years, without having to mine a single lump of ore. With all the leftover coal and natural gas, we could convert to fuel for transportation use. 100% energy independence for a 1000 years and tens of millions of new jobs. What did we get instead? Bailouts for unsustainable government union pensions and crony kickbacks. And guess who's going to be running our healthcare from now on? Lol.
If you recall, they did have the chance to not pass it in the first place and did not! The democrats used "budget reconciliation" and "deemed the bill passed" after they lost their crucial last senate seat vote when Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat!
Actually no, this isn't just a loophole, it is by design. Cutting budgets for programs is the principle way the house of representatives has to exercise their power. For example, if the President decided to unilaterally declare war, the only way congress would have to stop him is to defund the military.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if private individuals could use the NICS system there's no point in making a law requiring it. The honest people will use it whether it is required or not since it protects them from liability, while the criminals will just ignore the law regardless.
We should have laws for things that are inherently wrong, like murder. Owning a gun is not inherently wrong, and therefore should not be prohibited since the attempt to do to won't prevent criminals from getting guns illegally anyway.
$100 million is nothing compared to the scope of the problem. The Manhattan project was around $25 billion over about 4 years. The Apollo program cost $170 billion over about 15 years. The reason why fusion hasn't worked yet is simply because it hasn't been funded to those levels yet.
The notions that solar power doesn't work and that solar power hurts utility company's profits are not mutually exclusive. It is called negative power prices. Due to laws requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power at any time, combined with the inability to store or transport natural gas supplies due to lack of pipelines, the cost of electricity often becomes negative where the power company pays customers to waste electricity because of unpredictable excess capacity. This hurts utility company earnings as well as being wasteful and counterproductive to the economy and environment.
Oh yeah? Just ask this guy. He was absolutely arrested for not consenting to a search by lying cops. And as shown in the video, the prosecutor states that if he wasn't lucky to have had a clear recording they would have no qualms about and would have gotten away with lying to convict him. The linked video is full of all sorts of blatant gestapo corruption on the part of the cops AND the court (at one point the judge called the sheriff to arrest him for not letting the prosecutor see exculpatory evidence, when sheriff arrived he simply told the judge he couldn't arrest him for that).
Thorium is not fuel, it is only fertile material which can be turned into Uranium in a breeder reactor (which requires high-enriched uranium or plutonium to operate). Thorium has the same properties as Uranium in terms of risk of melting down. Making a reactor melt-down-proof is a matter of reactor and coolant type, not fuel. Same goes for nature of spent fuel/radioactive waste. The only real advantage of using thorium as a breeder material instead of natural uranium is that it is more common and cheaper.
EBR-II was a 60 MW sodium cooled fast breeder reactor with on-site reprocessing that successfully operated from 1965 until 1994 when the program was cancelled by Bill Clinton.
There's a simpler way of looking at the electric car conundrum. Of all the energy used in the industrialized world, about half is used for transportation in the form of oil. In order to replace all cars with electrics, we would have to literally double all electric generation and transmission capability. No small undertaking.
Actually that is not true either. The plants were in fact originally designed to load follow and were only later adapted to constant full power operation based on economic factors. It is not hard at all to engineer the plants to load follow. And xenon poisoning has nothing to do with it, the primary challenge is in axial offset control which becomes more difficult later in the cycle, but only because the cycles are optimized to run at constant full power with maximum fuel loading. It would only require modest adjustments typical of cycle-to-cycle operational changes to design to load follow. IAANE.
Everyone one of your points is entirely false.
1) No. Wind and solar vary with clouds and wind patterns and have no correlation to usage patterns. Renewables do not cut into anyone's profits, only natural gas does that with massive oversupply with lack of storage/transmission capability. In fact, renewables tend to be big profit cash cows for industries because of government subsidies that pay for them to build them, even when and where they don't work, and then they get to write off the losses from taxes. Why do you think there are so many idle wind power farms all over the country?
2) Renewables are also highly centralized in that they are totally dependent on federal government subsidies and all the cronyism and corruption that comes along with it. The rest of point two I won't even go into as it is just loony bullshit.
3) What do you think causes the cost overruns? Environmentalist protests and lawsuits. Nice catch 22 there.
Wind and solar have variable output, so they need to be partnered with flexible power generation. Nuclear is fundamentally inflexible because you can't quickly ramp up or down electricity output from a nuclear power plant.
See this short video for a nice explanation of the incompatibility:
http://www.ilsr.org/coal-nucle...
Wrong. Nuclear power can load follow (ramp up and down rapidly to meet instantaneous demand) perfectly fine. They just typically do not because they are large baseload plants and there is no reason to run them anything lower than 100% when you need fossil fuel plants to make up the difference. IAANE.
Applying this analogy to AGW, your model predicts the outcome of 15 coin tosses will be 15 heads +/- 15 tails.
The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:
And while people do say all those things, none of them are the official position of a major political party in the U.S.
"I was told by voting section management that cases are not going to be brought against black defendants on [behalf] of white victims."
--J. Christian Adams, US Department of Justice under Eric Holder (link)
The issue is not the average energy price across the country. The problem is local, where natural gas is produced in such abundance but cannot be stored or transported, they practically give it away, which nuclear (nor coal or any other generation method aside from hydro) can compete with.
Oops forgot to clarify, the decays are beta decay, where a neutron in the nucleus turns into a proton and ejects an electron and antineutrino.
U-238 and hit it with a neutron to make Pu-239
IANANuclear Engineer, but isn't it a proton that's needed for that?
</pedantic>
After U-238 absorbs a neutron it becomes U-239, which decays (half life = 23 m) to Np-239, which decays (half life = 2 d) again to Pu-239.
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption;
If we built fast reactors, we would have enough fuel, in the form of depleted uranium sitting around idle in barrels at enrichment plants, to supply the entire planet's energy for about 1000 years.
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption; Well beyond the life expectancy of any of our reactors. The only reason for this program was to provide a failing country with a cheap way of disposing of highly hazardous materials without losing face. It is the proverbial "turning a negative into a positive". It will have zero effect on our energy costs or programs.
Zero effect, eh?
An oil sheik farts in the wrong direction and gas prices go up by 10 cents a gallon, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue instantly.
What in the FUCK makes you think the powers-that-be won't take this non-story and turn it into the next US energy crisis to justify a 20% increase in costs?
Sorry for being so harsh, but your last statement there pegged my bullshit meter.
The small increase in nuclear fuel price due to the ending of this program is insignificant. Fuel price is only a small cost of nuclear power, and enrichment cost only a fraction of that. The real problem for nuclear power is the bottoming out of energy prices due to the huge oversupply of natural gas from fracking. The latter being responsible for the closing of two power plants this year.
Your precious gun bans 'dont stop those from being in the hands of criminals... So why do you think more of them will help?
Gun ban and gun regulation isn't the same thing.
In northern Europe guns are heavily regulated and they don't have nearly as much violent gun crime as the U.S.
This might not necessarily be because of gun regulation, not having gun nuts around is probably the big thing but I don't think killing them off is an acceptable solution.
The vast majority of gun crime in the US is related to drugs or gang related. 50% of the gun crime in the US is perpetrated by 4% of the population in the 7 largest major cities (several of which have total gun bans already - New York, Chicago, etc). The gun crime in these areas is similar to that of other countries which have total gun bans, such as Mexico, Russia, Brazil, etc. These countries (and parts of the US) have high gun crime not because of lax gun laws, but because of a degradation of the rule of law and civil society. Most parts of the US, especially rural areas, have far less crime than anywhere in Europe.
Your precious gun bans 'dont stop those from being in the hands of criminals... So why do you think more of them will help?
And your precious guns don't stop those criminals from shooting people... So why do you think more of them will help?
Why do police carry guns then?
My impression of that scene was that the cords tangling Bullocks' character were barely taught enough to stop her momentum and rebound, and if Clooney did not let go the cords would have broken at the other end leaving them both floating away. Like two people bungee jumping, while decelerating under tension, they notice the cord start to break due to excessive weight, so one guy detaches himself and falls to his death while the remaining elasticity of the cord is enough to save the other.
For the amount of money we spent on one year of so-called stimulus, we could have built ~300 new gen 4 nuclear reactors, converting the country to 80% nuclear power (the remaining being hydro in areas where it already exists). We have enough depleted uranium sitting around refined and unused in barrels at enrichment plants to supply fast reactors for about 10,000-50,000 years, without having to mine a single lump of ore. With all the leftover coal and natural gas, we could convert to fuel for transportation use. 100% energy independence for a 1000 years and tens of millions of new jobs. What did we get instead? Bailouts for unsustainable government union pensions and crony kickbacks. And guess who's going to be running our healthcare from now on? Lol.
If you recall, they did have the chance to not pass it in the first place and did not! The democrats used "budget reconciliation" and "deemed the bill passed" after they lost their crucial last senate seat vote when Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat!
Actually no, this isn't just a loophole, it is by design. Cutting budgets for programs is the principle way the house of representatives has to exercise their power. For example, if the President decided to unilaterally declare war, the only way congress would have to stop him is to defund the military.