"Reactor-in-a-shoebox" first proposed in the 50's
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
"Mr. Atom is your friend."
Atomic-powered cars would run for ten years without ever needing refueling. Miniature home-sized atomic generators would generate copious amounts of electricity and hot water for kids who like to take long baths. Atomic rockets would propel mankind through the solar system and towards the stars before the oh-so-futuristic date of 1980...
Personal atomic generation was eventually discovered to be a Bad Idea, and dismissed. You have to consider that the same sort of people who would be using these generators would be the geniuses who light up a cigarette and then go off to fill their car's gas tank with said cigarette dangling from their lower lip.
That having been said, I believe that we can use nuclear energy wisely to provide power. As this article mentions, there are much safer, proven designs that could conceivably be deployed with far less risk compared to America's dangerous aging water-cooled beasts.
Our problem is disposal.
We need a disposal answer before we do anything else with nuclear power. Many short-term storage facilities at our current reactors exceed their intended maximum capacities by several times. We have all of our long-term storage proposals mired in red tape. I suspect our nuclear plants are more dangerous to the public from what is stored at them than from their hot, operating cores.
Knowing this, we can all beat our chests and act outraged, but that does not solve the problem.:)
Gas-cooled reactors are a great proven technology, but at least here in the United States before we break ground on one more reactor we have to do something about the current amount of high-level waste scattered all around the country.
One quick point to the people who say nuclear waste should not be transported... The fuel pellets that produce the nuclear reaction that generates the waste have to get to the reactors somehow. They do not teleport. They arrive by rail, road, or ship. Nuclear material is transported all the time. Do you remember the last time N.E.S.T. was called out to decontaminate a neighborhood, a city, or a tract of farmland? If you do your memory is better than mine.
We need to put this stuff somewhere, long term, below ground. We have locations. Keeping it aboveground solves nothing, and actually creates more of a danger.
They may not have upped it. My memory may be incorrect. That was why I used the ~ -- approximately eleven.:) Ten is approximately eleven so I suspect you are right.:)
Heh, I was responding to the title of the/. article. If the article has been this deeply ridiculed just from the comments I really have no interest in going to the site to read the source. Whether neutron star core neutronium is opaque, translucent, or has pretty pink spots is truly getting into the realm of absurdity. I suspect it has no bearing whatsoever on anything we are likely to do or encounter for the next millenium or so.:)
Thanks for the correction regarding forces, I seldom have the opportunity to discuss them, and being a dabbler as opposed to one dedicated to the study of physics I knew the nature of the force if not the name of the force involved.
I do not believe there is a way for us to artificially create the kind of pressures required to generate neutronium, unless we were to use something like focused shockwaves from thermonuclear detonations, which would probably destroy any instruments we might use to capture the end product of the experiment.:)
are considerably more likely to have cores of diamond because they are hot, pressure is very high, and the chemical component for diamond is in abundance -- carbon. The core conditions of these worlds don't come anywhere close to the conditions found in a neutron star because a neutron star is not ultimately made by the kind of process which forms planets. Planets do not have gravity capable of overcoming the repulsive force (strong nuclear force, I do not remember the term?) that exists between positive and negative atomic particles. As far as we know any one trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium is the same as another trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium, precluding anything resembling chemistry.
I *AM* somewhat curious as to the hardness of neutronium. I suspect there would be no way of measuring it, but then again artificially producing it would probably prove extremely difficult, if not impossible.
My understanding of this theory is that String Theory's ~11 dimensions existed as a sort of continuous omnipresent framework within which were at least two universes, which collided, producing matter as we know it.
This theory posits that the spacetime fabric has always been there, and we're simply the byproduct of something contained within this fabric bumping into something else, like a cosmic static electricity spark.:)
Although it might be in crystalline form, neutronium is a substance made of pure neutrons...
At the gravity/density found in neutron stars protons and electrons are squeezed together creating neutrons. Ordinary matter, a proton/neutron nucleus orbited by a cloud of electrons, ceases to exist.
As I recall, one tablespoon of this "diamond" would weigh as much as Manhattan Island.:)
Perhaps our clearest records may come to us through our own broadcasts, IF, there is a way around C.
If we could sidestep Einstein right now, stationing a probe 40 ly out would get us fantastic coverage of the early 60's. 30 ly out would get us Vietnam. 20 ly out would get us Reagan, and the mullet.
I'd bet if there IS anyone out there listening we'll be very highly rated, at least for entertainment value.:)
In all seriousness I look for projects like http://www.keo.org to pass down records to far future generations. We have never before tried to think in two generation terms, much less in hundred or thousand generations. We have less than six hundred years of carefully-documented history.
In my eyes part of our growth as a sentient species will involve us learning how to carefully chronicle ourselves for distant-future generations, and how to think and plan in greater than ten year terms.
We still exist very much in the now, as short-lived creatures with even shorter-lived goals -- this may make no sense. My eyes are beginning to cross from fatigue. G'night.
My recollection may be off, but I remember reading that the shuttle re-enters the atmosphere at (up to) Mach 25. It does not burn up. I also remember reading that tiles on the shuttle's nose and wing edges have been replaced with a new material that has insulation properties similar to the previous ceramic skin.
Materials science has kept up with advances in speed.
Obviously from the termination of this flight nose down in the Pacific this plane is pilotless. But at 42.6 G constant acceleration, with a flesh pilot, well... the impact in the Pacific really wouldn't matter, would it?:)))
Heh, I was going to write a cutesy post about how the speed of light had been exceeded by three hundred times in a lab in New Jersey, then I find http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/08/03/lig ht/index.html, a post on Salon.com about how the scientist's results had been misrepresented by the media.
... and the more Michael's ego is attacked in these postings, the longer this article with its misinformation will linger on/.'s front page, out of nothing more than petty spite.
I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect the lack of correction is about the vanity for/.'s 37337 few, not lives...
Don't accuse Slashdot of integrity, or burden them with expectations of accuracy. They only claim to be anything other than an entertainment site when it suits their purposes.
The simple fact of the matter is that the people who approve stories on/. do so with a highly editorial slant. For a "serious" story to be approved it must have one of the following elements:
Something fashionably geeky, without being too "out there", i.e. something with a popular countercultural theme.
Something about one of/.'s preferred companies.
Something negative about one of/.'s great villains.
Something that/. can contribute their "me too" to, not something daringly original. Risks are only taken if one of these other conditions are met
If you see/.'s editors as anything more than a clique with greater than average social power, welcome to sad reality. This is a commercial enterprise run by a close-knit group of people who share common ideologies. The boat rocks when they want it to, in the fashion they dictate, and the seas are only as stormy as finances allow.
You know to me it is quite a commentary in regards to the general quality of/. that so many people are taking these stories seriously. Does anyone else remember nano-pants?
I love the lengthy treatises being written by some people to discredit these stories. Even more frightening are the people who appear to feel the stories actually have merit ("Good heavens, where will the moon hit? I must buy property on the other side of the Earth.")
Instead of buying property on the other side of the Earth, I suggest you simply look up the next time it rains hard and inhale deeply for several minutes -- or do the same in the shower. I hear a good inflow of water cleans out the sinus passages.
As a courtesy to humanity please do this before you reproduce.:)
Thankfully, desktop supercomputers like the one mentioned here exist to carry us into the brave new world of security by massively recursive recursion.:)
The first five readers trying to bring the war to Slashdot's attention would have their stories rejected.
Five days after the war began, Slashdot would announce the war as if it were new news.
The discussion thread for news of the war would fill up with all the FP! posts, and "all your post are belong to us..." type stuff.
A reader submission about an edible 3-d display would knock the war into second place.
The announcement of the latest revision of the Linux kernel would bump the war into third place.
All the karma whores would give up trying to post to the war thread and switch over to posting in the Linux thread.
The war would be bumped from Slashdot's front page less than twenty hours after it was announced, by news of O'Reilly books' being purchased by AOL, which would end up drawing three times the posts to its thread as the war drew...
As I recall Tom's went into an "agreement" with C|Net, but that's a good point. I do not believe it has ever really been clarified on their site, but I have noticed for the most part he tends to bite all hands equally.:)
Ace's and Anand are still completely independent.
Basically trust no one except yourself, and only trust yourself after you have gathered enough information to make an informed decision. How's that?:)
According to the obit posted March 22nd on ABCNews.com Mr. Hanna was gone, deceased, dead, an ex animator, holding his breath forever, taking the long blink, taking the dirt nap, etc. three days ago.
Your headline makes it sound like he died today. You mean he wasn't really dead, but now he is, cuz you say so? So you mean you killed him again?!
Caveat emptor, any or all of this could be hype.:)
I think I currently trust AMD's word more than I trust Intel's. The ones I tend to trust most are Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, and Aces' Hardware.
I see ZD-Net, C|Net, and and their ilk as being informative as long as you take their endorsement of any platform with a skeptical grain of salt. When you surf these sites you have to keep in mind that each has its own interests tied closely to various hardware manufacturers.
At least Tom's, Anand's, and Aces' have no overt interest in the succes of one of the big tech companies over another. That's a positive mark for them in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mr. Atom is your friend."
Atomic-powered cars would run for ten years without ever needing refueling. Miniature home-sized atomic generators would generate copious amounts of electricity and hot water for kids who like to take long baths. Atomic rockets would propel mankind through the solar system and towards the stars before the oh-so-futuristic date of 1980 ...
Personal atomic generation was eventually discovered to be a Bad Idea, and dismissed. You have to consider that the same sort of people who would be using these generators would be the geniuses who light up a cigarette and then go off to fill their car's gas tank with said cigarette dangling from their lower lip.
That having been said, I believe that we can use nuclear energy wisely to provide power. As this article mentions, there are much safer, proven designs that could conceivably be deployed with far less risk compared to America's dangerous aging water-cooled beasts.
Our problem is disposal.
We need a disposal answer before we do anything else with nuclear power. Many short-term storage facilities at our current reactors exceed their intended maximum capacities by several times. We have all of our long-term storage proposals mired in red tape. I suspect our nuclear plants are more dangerous to the public from what is stored at them than from their hot, operating cores.
Knowing this, we can all beat our chests and act outraged, but that does not solve the problem. :)
Gas-cooled reactors are a great proven technology, but at least here in the United States before we break ground on one more reactor we have to do something about the current amount of high-level waste scattered all around the country.
One quick point to the people who say nuclear waste should not be transported ... The fuel pellets that produce the nuclear reaction that generates the waste have to get to the reactors somehow. They do not teleport. They arrive by rail, road, or ship. Nuclear material is transported all the time. Do you remember the last time N.E.S.T. was called out to decontaminate a neighborhood, a city, or a tract of farmland? If you do your memory is better than mine.
We need to put this stuff somewhere, long term, below ground. We have locations. Keeping it aboveground solves nothing, and actually creates more of a danger.
They may not have upped it. My memory may be incorrect. That was why I used the ~ -- approximately eleven. :) Ten is approximately eleven so I suspect you are right. :)
Heh, I was responding to the title of the /. article. If the article has been this deeply ridiculed just from the comments I really have no interest in going to the site to read the source. Whether neutron star core neutronium is opaque, translucent, or has pretty pink spots is truly getting into the realm of absurdity. I suspect it has no bearing whatsoever on anything we are likely to do or encounter for the next millenium or so. :)
Thanks for the correction regarding forces, I seldom have the opportunity to discuss them, and being a dabbler as opposed to one dedicated to the study of physics I knew the nature of the force if not the name of the force involved.
I do not believe there is a way for us to artificially create the kind of pressures required to generate neutronium, unless we were to use something like focused shockwaves from thermonuclear detonations, which would probably destroy any instruments we might use to capture the end product of the experiment. :)
Thanks again for your comments.
are considerably more likely to have cores of diamond because they are hot, pressure is very high, and the chemical component for diamond is in abundance -- carbon. The core conditions of these worlds don't come anywhere close to the conditions found in a neutron star because a neutron star is not ultimately made by the kind of process which forms planets. Planets do not have gravity capable of overcoming the repulsive force (strong nuclear force, I do not remember the term?) that exists between positive and negative atomic particles. As far as we know any one trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium is the same as another trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium, precluding anything resembling chemistry.
I *AM* somewhat curious as to the hardness of neutronium. I suspect there would be no way of measuring it, but then again artificially producing it would probably prove extremely difficult, if not impossible.
My understanding of this theory is that String Theory's ~11 dimensions existed as a sort of continuous omnipresent framework within which were at least two universes, which collided, producing matter as we know it.
This theory posits that the spacetime fabric has always been there, and we're simply the byproduct of something contained within this fabric bumping into something else, like a cosmic static electricity spark. :)
Although it might be in crystalline form, neutronium is a substance made of pure neutrons ...
At the gravity/density found in neutron stars protons and electrons are squeezed together creating neutrons. Ordinary matter, a proton/neutron nucleus orbited by a cloud of electrons, ceases to exist.
As I recall, one tablespoon of this "diamond" would weigh as much as Manhattan Island. :)
Perhaps our clearest records may come to us through our own broadcasts, IF, there is a way around C.
If we could sidestep Einstein right now, stationing a probe 40 ly out would get us fantastic coverage of the early 60's. 30 ly out would get us Vietnam. 20 ly out would get us Reagan, and the mullet.
I'd bet if there IS anyone out there listening we'll be very highly rated, at least for entertainment value. :)
In all seriousness I look for projects like http://www.keo.org to pass down records to far future generations. We have never before tried to think in two generation terms, much less in hundred or thousand generations. We have less than six hundred years of carefully-documented history.
In my eyes part of our growth as a sentient species will involve us learning how to carefully chronicle ourselves for distant-future generations, and how to think and plan in greater than ten year terms.
We still exist very much in the now, as short-lived creatures with even shorter-lived goals -- this may make no sense. My eyes are beginning to cross from fatigue. G'night.
My recollection may be off, but I remember reading that the shuttle re-enters the atmosphere at (up to) Mach 25. It does not burn up. I also remember reading that tiles on the shuttle's nose and wing edges have been replaced with a new material that has insulation properties similar to the previous ceramic skin.
Materials science has kept up with advances in speed.
Obviously from the termination of this flight nose down in the Pacific this plane is pilotless. But at 42.6 G constant acceleration, with a flesh pilot, well ... the impact in the Pacific really wouldn't matter, would it? :)))
Heh, I was going to write a cutesy post about how the speed of light had been exceeded by three hundred times in a lab in New Jersey, then I find http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/08/03/lig ht/index.html, a post on Salon.com about how the scientist's results had been misrepresented by the media.
On the other hand I did find this http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/lwan/demo.htm from the New Jersey lab.
They load the vehicle up. They take it over enemy territory.
The control computers determine the appropriate target and desync the rotors. Twenty tons of flaming steel fall onto enemy heads.
We MEANT to do that. Yah we did. :)
Some parts were apprently more beta than others ... :)
Or is this the Evil Mach Kernel proving itself?
Ya know, the last thing I want to do is climb into a device that moves me places at 300 + Mph, with the software that controls it still in beta.
No no no. Lemme guess, the control software was written in Qbasic? Visual Pascal? Logo?
Regarding mechanical friction, see http://www.eetimes.com/story/technology/OEG2001010 8S0690.
I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect the lack of correction is about the vanity for /.'s 37337 few, not lives ...
Hmmm. K. So Ng is just an abbreviation? For names like Ngo and Nguyen?
I stand corrected regarding the name, but it IS a sound used in Vietnamese to begin words. Which is not the case in English.
Don't accuse Slashdot of integrity, or burden them with expectations of accuracy. They only claim to be anything other than an entertainment site when it suits their purposes.
The simple fact of the matter is that the people who approve stories on /. do so with a highly editorial slant. For a "serious" story to be approved it must have one of the following elements:
If you see /.'s editors as anything more than a clique with greater than average social power, welcome to sad reality. This is a commercial enterprise run by a close-knit group of people who share common ideologies. The boat rocks when they want it to, in the fashion they dictate, and the seas are only as stormy as finances allow.
You know to me it is quite a commentary in regards to the general quality of /. that so many people are taking these stories seriously. Does anyone else remember nano-pants?
I love the lengthy treatises being written by some people to discredit these stories. Even more frightening are the people who appear to feel the stories actually have merit ("Good heavens, where will the moon hit? I must buy property on the other side of the Earth.")
Instead of buying property on the other side of the Earth, I suggest you simply look up the next time it rains hard and inhale deeply for several minutes -- or do the same in the shower. I hear a good inflow of water cleans out the sinus passages.
As a courtesy to humanity please do this before you reproduce. :)
Thank you.
This is Vietnamese name, pronounced "eng".
You must be one of the few people on /. who does not listen to TMBG. :) They do a song called "Ana Ng".
The real tongue twisters for most Westerners are the names that start with "ng", like Ngo. :)
My brain is dribbling out of my ears ...
Thankfully, desktop supercomputers like the one mentioned here exist to carry us into the brave new world of security by massively recursive recursion. :)
As I recall Tom's went into an "agreement" with C|Net, but that's a good point. I do not believe it has ever really been clarified on their site, but I have noticed for the most part he tends to bite all hands equally. :)
Ace's and Anand are still completely independent.
Basically trust no one except yourself, and only trust yourself after you have gathered enough information to make an informed decision. How's that? :)
According to the obit posted March 22nd on ABCNews.com Mr. Hanna was gone, deceased, dead, an ex animator, holding his breath forever, taking the long blink, taking the dirt nap, etc. three days ago.
Your headline makes it sound like he died today. You mean he wasn't really dead, but now he is, cuz you say so? So you mean you killed him again?!
You BASTARDS, you KILLED BILL HANNA!
Actually the 1.2 GHz 133 MHz FSB Thunderbird more than suffices in comparison to the 1.5 GHz P-4. Apologies for being unclear.
Caveat emptor, any or all of this could be hype. :)
I think I currently trust AMD's word more than I trust Intel's. The ones I tend to trust most are Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, and Aces' Hardware.
I see ZD-Net, C|Net, and and their ilk as being informative as long as you take their endorsement of any platform with a skeptical grain of salt. When you surf these sites you have to keep in mind that each has its own interests tied closely to various hardware manufacturers.
At least Tom's, Anand's, and Aces' have no overt interest in the succes of one of the big tech companies over another. That's a positive mark for them in my book.