Wind farms will not be built where they are needed but will be built in places where they are not, demonstrating the folly of it because the electricity can't be sold.
I think that wind farms will be located where the wind is prevailing otherwise what is the point, just as coal and nuclear plants are built near water for cooling. Transmission infrastructure will always be an issue no matter what the source and it's a part of building a grid to deliver the power.
First the point on funding, the figures and pdf that you cited did not mention the other funding sources available to nuclear power. Some of them are;
2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies via revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash.
Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (usually oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do.
Also Nuclear power needs a special insurance construct to be allowed to operate, this comes in the form of re-authorising the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money (closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident). Now I know this is insurance underwriting but no other industry needs a special legislative act just to exist.
Additionally assessments of the financial viability of Nuclear Power from some organistions;
Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"
an assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"
So it's not really a meme, there is just more to it than apparent on the surface.
Even being generous, I'd say wind probably covers at least 2 orders of magnitude more land area per MW than nuclear.
Indeed, The difference is that the area occupied by wind farming can still be used for farming whereas the area mined for uranium contains radioactive isotopes that have to be contained in the area. Acid leech mining has greatly reduce the surface area that Uranium mining takes even though it is illegal in Russia and the United States it is carried out in Australia. Further Wind power does not need to draw upon of be located near a large water source, as is the case with most nuclear power plants.
That's roughly the same as demolishing 10-30 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, not a single building. And they're spread over >1000 km^2.
The point is the energy expenditure on demolishing a nuclear power plant. I'll explain.
The IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply". In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary sources. However the conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.
The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear indust
People are going to bring up the inevitable comparison with Nuclear. So before they do Nuclear already has a healthy share of the DOE's development budget and it's only a good idea if you think a single energy solution will work. It won't. Wind is more scalable than Nuclear because 1 Gw of wind power can be brought on incrementally, 1Gw of nuclear power has to wait a minimum of ten years before the plant is complete. For the same reason a 1Gw reactor that is shut down produces 0Gw, A 1Gw wind farm with a wind generator shutdown produces almost full capacity minus the non-functioning generators.
Nuclear occupies the mining space as well as the reactor space in land so they are probably about even there.
The technology employed in a Nuclear reactor will be almost a decade out of date on day one of production presuming the very latest technology was implemented in the design. With a wind farm new technology can be implemented as old wind generators come off-line. This means the gap between technology updates for wind power are available much closer in time when compared to production, this means the rate of technology development in wind power is faster than nuclear.
Wind power has a much lower energy cost to tear down because it can be demolished like a normal building, Nuclear power plant have very special and costly concerns when you have to tear them down and time will eventually take its toll on the reactor building.
Before some one talks about "Only Nuclear can do base load", base load is a function of the entire grid not any one energy source.
American are extremely blessed with wind power and indeed other sources. The potential exists to solve most, if not all of America's energy requirements. Every technology professional stands to benefit from the flow on effects of all alternate energy solution AND still use nuclear as a longer term solution as the technology is developed in that area. It's difficult to believe that there is only enough imagination for a Nuclear solution when, clearly, Solar and wind are very appealing technologically.
NASA's budget is a fraction of the size of many other programs that are funded by the government; claiming that it is the reason people are hungry and poor is disingenuous at best. The Shuttle was a stepping stone; a "proof of concept" if you will. It was designed for boosting things into relatively low orbits around the Earth, and did fairly well at that task. It was also useful for establishing a long-term habitat in orbit - another stepping stone to bigger and better things. Cancelling the entire program "in honor of lives lost" would not have honored those lives. Their lives were lost in the pursuit of something bigger, something greater. Turning away from that challenge to bemoan fate and pick at navel lint "in their honor" would seem a poor way to remember them.
The Shuttle fleet WAS grounded a long time ago. The program was very nearly killed a few times, as Congress and the news media looked for places to lay blame for a tragedy. It was grounded, but eventually allowed to start back up when new safety precautions and tests were put in place. You don't improve by quitting after a failure, you improve by picking yourself back up and learning from what went wrong.
Is there waste, graft and corruption in NASA? Possibly. Okay, probably. I challenge you to find any organization of that size where no such thing exists. Heck, there aren't many organizations of ANY size that can claim to have perfect report cards. Deep pockets though? Hardly. If they were deep, they wouldn't worry about shutting down the Cassini-Huygens, Voyager or Hubble programs due to lack of funds. The machines still work, but you have to pay for the people, equipment and electricity to keep the programs running here on Earth.
I think Mr AC's sentiment is pretty much what I was thinking of posting, so here it is.
When it is in private hands and someone gets hurt, the 'enlightened left' will dust off their "Corporate Greed" accusation book, thrown extensively at BP, to call for an endless series of conflicting demands. All leading to taking money away from the investors.
The general conclusion is that we will never have "artificial intelligence". Whenever some human mental capability is duplicated in a computer, that capability will no longer be considered a sign of intelligence, because a mere machine can do it. It will be part of Engineering instead.
It makes you wonder about the development of the brain as a computational device tasked by genetics for a specific species and programmed by circumstances. Maybe we won't need as many millions of years to produce a result but I'm quite certain the results will never be what we expect intelligence to be. Even natural results vary using the same platform (a brain) but then perhaps Intelligence is the inevitable outcome from an ever increasing complexity of network interaction. Perhaps Intelligence has no boundaries that we are able to quantify with existing science and our ability to conceptualise limits to the human brain/mind with our existing understanding will always be limited by those factors?
The only question is whether, after enough time, there will be any human capability left to say that humans are intelligent. It may be that, eventually, the only remaining "purely human" capability will be producing new humans.
To entertain a hypothesis what if telepathy is an extension of these electrical characteristics of the brain, no more unusual than wi/fi and that if this were possible what would networked minds be like? Perhaps a new type of intelligence where people were nodes? When it comes to intelligence I think the struggle to define exactly what it is, artificial or not, is not only made more complicated by the factors that you so rightly pointed out (the bar is always raised), but by factors we may not be able to measure yet. Like the rate of our own evolution, whether there are latent capabilities in human brain/mind just awaiting some evolutionary trigger. What about if/when we develop the capability to accelerate the evolution of our brains or to augment it with technology (ethical questions aside for now)?
Is the bouncer thing more common outside of the US, in the EU and Oz or something?
I can't remember a place where I *haven't* seen "doormen". They knock you back for the stupidest reasons like there is some power trip going on. They deliberately provoke people to see if they will react, tell them there shoes aren't right for the club, they don't like the haircut.
Mostly I react by having a laugh with them "But I paid 50 bucks for this shirt mate" to try and defuse them. The other thing is some of the bouncers come to our gym and know me, but it's because I know who they are I don't like the idea of them accessing my information, it's totally ripe for mis-use.
I have seen way too many times how the bouncers at a bar or club have thrown people out or simply not allowed them entry for no reason at all. Not to mention that trying to have a polite conversation with them can very well result in you being tackled to the ground and getting arrested for "assaulting" the bouncer (with his buddy of course telling the cops he saw the whole thing).
Bouncers at Australian pubs are mostly tools. It's not exactly a stellar career path. Some of them have associations with organised crime and drug dealing - last person on earth I would trust with any of my personal information, very prone to abuse.
My partner and I encountered it at a RSL club and I refused to have my license scanned, my partner wrote a letter and complained pointing out that we had no assurances how the data would be treated and that it also contravened the national privacy principals, which are not law but reputable organisation adhere to.
I can't say I know the answer, the pubs get violent sometimes and I do love a beer in a cold glass but sometimes a plastic cup might be a better idea. It's all about the class of the customer. I'm just glad that I look intimidating enough not to be messed with. I can look after myself but I think violent behavior is just a sign of poor character. As usual it's the lowest common denominator that brings us all down.
Is their engineering ahead? I dunno but they're not stupid and they're licensing the German tech as a starting point so there's no reason to think it won't be better.
So they haven't even dismantled this reactor that has been de-commissioned for over 20 years and they don't know how they're even going to do it yet.
I didn't even know about this - yet another pebble bed reactor FAIL - so thanks for pointing it out. I actually thought that the THTR PBMR was the first attempt and now I find it's actually their *second* attempt and it still didn't work yet you expect that the Chinese will do a better job?
I'd say that you are stretching optimism a bit too far there.
You're comparing nuclear physics of the 1960s with modern nuclear physics...?
Maybe you need a refresher course on the problems the early Uranium reactors had due to lack of physics knowledge, eg windscale.
I was referring to the THTR-300 which was commissioned in 1985. The issues were engineering issues along with a pending half a billion Euros to properly decommission the reactor.
Do you seriously think that Chinese engineering is 30 years ahead of German engineering?
...and it's even more infuriating that the lefties forced us to abandon practical forms of energy (like nuclear) some 30+ years ago using the same fear tactics that they are now using to get us to waste our time on windmills and solar farms.
Uh you mean like an understanding of the science and engineering? What a poor excuse for ignorance calling this a political discussion to win points. If you want to bemoan the failure of the nuclear industry then blame lines that were used to sell nuclear power in the first place;
Power too cheap to meter...
Lightning will never strike twice...
The waste problem will be a non-issue by 1984...
if it's possible to solve the engineering issues the why hasn't it been done? Why does the Price-Anderson act *still* exist? Still drinking that kool aid I see...
Speaking as a conservative, and for most of the conservatives that I know, I'd love to see us move in the same direction as China.
Riiight. So speaking as a conservative you want to see the US moving in the same direction as Communist China. You're saying that the communist system is better. As a conservative that's an interesting position. I reckon the perpetual energy generated by the consternation in your mind is enough to power the world...roflYSST!!! What is it about the communist system you like best, comrade conservative?
Talk to me about limited natural resources and the need to create reliable, abundant energy for a growing population and emerging societies, and I'm listening.
Sure, you mean like the energy expended on extracting uranium vs what is generated, ie the Net Energy Output. There is plenty of that science stuff to back it up, but let's try a pop quiz since you're sooo enlightened, comrade. Why don't you quote the energy expenditure on soft ore and hard ore that contains U-235 or let me know when you figure out what the actual concentrations of uranium are per ton of rock. Then we might be able to have that conversation...comrade.
I've been running across tantalizing scraps of info about thorium reactors and their supposed advantages for years. I half thought the theory must be questionable (obviously I'm no physicist) largely because if it were so promising, why would thorium designs not be prevalent in Europe or the US?
Predominately because it doesn't produce weapons grade material as a daughter product. Our atomic industry is based on the capability to produce weapons from our energy industry.
Thorium reactors could be good *if* the spent fuel stream is dealt with properly. Looking at the decay chain all the half-lives appear to highly energetic. I believe some isotope of Thallium is the eventual waste product, a highly energetic gamma emitter. It implies a short half life but I doubt it's th-208 or 209 I guess you'd have to understand the decay chain better. But China has a great record will dealing with environmental issues responsibly, so it should all be hunky dory!!
This is exciting news. Seems like China is the place to be if you're looking to experiment with new (or old, rediscovered) ideas.
Of course, if German engineering can't make a Thorium based pebble bed reactor work properly then the Chinese at just the people with the right engineering skills to make it all happen...
Ah, so you've achieved progress in a non-US government, which was not all what was implied.
Try it on a congressmen, I assure you they are quite a different breed.
I don't care.
"What exactly did you do and what exactly did it cause?" was your question to me so now you can tell me what you have attempted or actually achieved that justifies that presumption?
The EFF's findings are completely structural issues, and are *exactly* the scenarios I faced in my country except that you have more rights under your constitution than I do under mine and I keep going - what your excuse? The things that are *possible* under our constitution are completely impossible under yours. So don't take it personally, but it's that attitude that is a big motivator for apathetic behavior - if you choose to wallow there then just be silent.
If you want to believe you are powerless in the "land of the free" then don't spend your energy de-motivating others who want to actually participate in democracy as you just assist manifesting that powerlessness. That's what vested interests want.
If you are going to attempt to use your cynicism to hide your apathy then the only conclusion left to draw is that it's you that's bullshitting me. Don't attempt to discount my achievements just because you are too much of a coward to stand up for your own rights in your own country.
Bullshit. What exactly did you do and what exactly did it cause?
With a mail merge I lobbied;
both sides of the Parliament against a bill proposed (and expected to pass) to enact law to subject websites to the same ratings systems that movies and TV programs have to conform to. The bill did not pass. I received replies from many ministers and was invited to be an advisor for the house on Information Technology issues.
against a bill designed to outlaw network security tools and apply a maximum 15 years jail for those who possessed them. I received no replies as many others lobbied as well. The bill was defeated.
for modification to anti-terrorism laws against body cavity searches of minors, strict lianbility and other modifications to the wording of the bill (I read the entire bill and made notes). I realised that nothing was going to stop that bill from passing but that some of its affects could be mitigated by simple wording changes. I noted that most of the changes I proposed were carried.
So I call your claim of bullshit and I raise you a 'fuck off'. I'll also presume your cynicism has prevented you from doing anything. It's often used as an excuse by apathetic people.
Just for a moment let's give the public a mite more credit. I peg them at "we're upset but what can we really do?"
Lobby. They have computers, they have word processors. 1 letter and a mail merge reaches a whole lot of politicians. I've done it and it works. They will ignore an email but a respectful single page letter gets a lot of attention. So apathy is a pretty good description.
The American public is too apathetic about the political institution in this country to actual pay attention to what it does or to even have a hope of real change.
It's not that they're apathetic, it's that they just don't care...
This was a waste of perfectly good life. Not a race to push technology to new limits.
My apologies to all the great engineers and people who risk their lives in this pursuit but I don't see any evidence that the engineering mindset that used to dictated the way NASA worked exists anymore. It seems that the management mindsets that refuse to understand the complexity of the operations involved are still alive and well at NASA.
The political shenanigans that pull NASA every which way but a proper technological solution demonstrate that a properly engineered space program is not the objective. Instead budget allocations, pork barreling and other ways to channel money has turned NASA into a waterlogged ball that only gets kicked to see what comes out of it.
I'm sure it doesn't mean the end but I fear this does not bode well for the future of manned space flight.
The lessons from the accidents are applicable in modern management today, everywhere. Obviously the stakes aren't as high but just reading the CAIB document is very educational if you have to work in an organisation.
I remember Challenger, I'd just left school and was coming back from a holiday, I'd been on a plane when it happened.
Great! It will be a big sun-hot arrow pointing right back at us saying, "Here are some young pushovers!"
Indeed. At the very least we would have to be engaged in building our own planetary system, this would be the minimum level of space faring we are engaged with before a project like this is even feasible. I doubt it would happen any other way than being constructed in orbit. So we should most certainly be at some stage of space faring maturity ourselves, I sure the project designers only have their project goals as a consideration though.
I think though that just planning the project has value itself and demonstrates how far away from actual interstellar flight we are with existing state of the art, though I wonder what the next generation interstellar probe will be called, Icarus II?
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
All they need to do is to use the roof of a vehicle or a hand rail to get the device steady, I do the same thing when I'm using a camera. There exists some very simple techniques you can use with your hand to sight a target at a distance and how long does it take to have a laser pointed into your eyes to blind you even for a matter of seconds. It's not a matter of math, it's a simple technique used in rescue situations to get the attention of an aircraft.
I acknowledge media beat up etc etc, but before you call this bullshit and say these guys are pussies why don't you get someone to shine a laser across your eyes and let us all know how long you were blinded for. Personally, I don't want anyone to fuck with the pilots who are flying the aircraft I'm on and I fly out of that airport quite frequently. So please do the experiment, record how much harm it did and how long it took for your eyesight to recover. You're are man enough to have a laser pointed into your eyes, right?
Yeah it's irresponsible to point lasers at airplanes. Call me if ever there's a serious incident that puts an aircraft in danger.
Even if there never is a serious situation the inconvenience from the inevitable security clampdown from this is just as bad. I think that's serious enough.
Like any aircraft accident it will be a combination of factors that overload the pilots abilities to operate the aircraft safely, won't it. Perhaps a tired flight crew with some piece of faulty equipment gets distracted at a critical moment. Even if it just delayed the aircraft I certainly don't think it's a risk you would be prepared to take with the flight crew of your aircraft.
That argument doesn't work. Either you believe it or you don't. If you don't take the Genesis literally, you don't take the sin he died for literally either. You can't choose! Either you believe in I.D. or you're a poor christian, and Jesus died in vain.
very good, I was almost temted to mod you funny for that...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that wind farms will be located where the wind is prevailing otherwise what is the point, just as coal and nuclear plants are built near water for cooling. Transmission infrastructure will always be an issue no matter what the source and it's a part of building a grid to deliver the power.
First the point on funding, the figures and pdf that you cited did not mention the other funding sources available to nuclear power. Some of them are;
2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies via revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash.
Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (usually oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do.
Also Nuclear power needs a special insurance construct to be allowed to operate, this comes in the form of re-authorising the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money (closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident). Now I know this is insurance underwriting but no other industry needs a special legislative act just to exist.
Additionally assessments of the financial viability of Nuclear Power from some organistions;
Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"
an assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"
So it's not really a meme, there is just more to it than apparent on the surface.
Indeed, The difference is that the area occupied by wind farming can still be used for farming whereas the area mined for uranium contains radioactive isotopes that have to be contained in the area. Acid leech mining has greatly reduce the surface area that Uranium mining takes even though it is illegal in Russia and the United States it is carried out in Australia. Further Wind power does not need to draw upon of be located near a large water source, as is the case with most nuclear power plants.
The point is the energy expenditure on demolishing a nuclear power plant. I'll explain.
The IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply". In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary sources. However the conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.
The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear indust
Nuclear occupies the mining space as well as the reactor space in land so they are probably about even there.
The technology employed in a Nuclear reactor will be almost a decade out of date on day one of production presuming the very latest technology was implemented in the design. With a wind farm new technology can be implemented as old wind generators come off-line. This means the gap between technology updates for wind power are available much closer in time when compared to production, this means the rate of technology development in wind power is faster than nuclear.
Wind power has a much lower energy cost to tear down because it can be demolished like a normal building, Nuclear power plant have very special and costly concerns when you have to tear them down and time will eventually take its toll on the reactor building.
Before some one talks about "Only Nuclear can do base load", base load is a function of the entire grid not any one energy source.
American are extremely blessed with wind power and indeed other sources. The potential exists to solve most, if not all of America's energy requirements. Every technology professional stands to benefit from the flow on effects of all alternate energy solution AND still use nuclear as a longer term solution as the technology is developed in that area. It's difficult to believe that there is only enough imagination for a Nuclear solution when, clearly, Solar and wind are very appealing technologically.
NASA's budget is a fraction of the size of many other programs that are funded by the government; claiming that it is the reason people are hungry and poor is disingenuous at best. The Shuttle was a stepping stone; a "proof of concept" if you will. It was designed for boosting things into relatively low orbits around the Earth, and did fairly well at that task. It was also useful for establishing a long-term habitat in orbit - another stepping stone to bigger and better things. Cancelling the entire program "in honor of lives lost" would not have honored those lives. Their lives were lost in the pursuit of something bigger, something greater. Turning away from that challenge to bemoan fate and pick at navel lint "in their honor" would seem a poor way to remember them.
The Shuttle fleet WAS grounded a long time ago. The program was very nearly killed a few times, as Congress and the news media looked for places to lay blame for a tragedy. It was grounded, but eventually allowed to start back up when new safety precautions and tests were put in place. You don't improve by quitting after a failure, you improve by picking yourself back up and learning from what went wrong.
Is there waste, graft and corruption in NASA? Possibly. Okay, probably. I challenge you to find any organization of that size where no such thing exists. Heck, there aren't many organizations of ANY size that can claim to have perfect report cards. Deep pockets though? Hardly. If they were deep, they wouldn't worry about shutting down the Cassini-Huygens, Voyager or Hubble programs due to lack of funds. The machines still work, but you have to pay for the people, equipment and electricity to keep the programs running here on Earth.
I think Mr AC's sentiment is pretty much what I was thinking of posting, so here it is.
Was it all that safe in government hands?
When it is in private hands and someone gets hurt, the 'enlightened left' will dust off their "Corporate Greed" accusation book, thrown extensively at BP, to call for an endless series of conflicting demands. All leading to taking money away from the investors.
blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...blah...
But let us read the fine submission again:
enough to lift a human weighing up to 150 kilos.
That is one fucking big human that has no business being in the air.
or in the water...
It makes you wonder about the development of the brain as a computational device tasked by genetics for a specific species and programmed by circumstances. Maybe we won't need as many millions of years to produce a result but I'm quite certain the results will never be what we expect intelligence to be. Even natural results vary using the same platform (a brain) but then perhaps Intelligence is the inevitable outcome from an ever increasing complexity of network interaction. Perhaps Intelligence has no boundaries that we are able to quantify with existing science and our ability to conceptualise limits to the human brain/mind with our existing understanding will always be limited by those factors?
To entertain a hypothesis what if telepathy is an extension of these electrical characteristics of the brain, no more unusual than wi/fi and that if this were possible what would networked minds be like? Perhaps a new type of intelligence where people were nodes? When it comes to intelligence I think the struggle to define exactly what it is, artificial or not, is not only made more complicated by the factors that you so rightly pointed out (the bar is always raised), but by factors we may not be able to measure yet. Like the rate of our own evolution, whether there are latent capabilities in human brain/mind just awaiting some evolutionary trigger. What about if/when we develop the capability to accelerate the evolution of our brains or to augment it with technology (ethical questions aside for now)?
These things are always fun to think about.
I wonder if they are still using the BSD backend that Hotmail originally used?
I can't remember a place where I *haven't* seen "doormen". They knock you back for the stupidest reasons like there is some power trip going on. They deliberately provoke people to see if they will react, tell them there shoes aren't right for the club, they don't like the haircut.
Mostly I react by having a laugh with them "But I paid 50 bucks for this shirt mate" to try and defuse them. The other thing is some of the bouncers come to our gym and know me, but it's because I know who they are I don't like the idea of them accessing my information, it's totally ripe for mis-use.
Bouncers at Australian pubs are mostly tools. It's not exactly a stellar career path. Some of them have associations with organised crime and drug dealing - last person on earth I would trust with any of my personal information, very prone to abuse.
My partner and I encountered it at a RSL club and I refused to have my license scanned, my partner wrote a letter and complained pointing out that we had no assurances how the data would be treated and that it also contravened the national privacy principals, which are not law but reputable organisation adhere to.
I can't say I know the answer, the pubs get violent sometimes and I do love a beer in a cold glass but sometimes a plastic cup might be a better idea. It's all about the class of the customer. I'm just glad that I look intimidating enough not to be messed with. I can look after myself but I think violent behavior is just a sign of poor character. As usual it's the lowest common denominator that brings us all down.
I thought you meant the AVR reactor.
Is their engineering ahead? I dunno but they're not stupid and they're licensing the German tech as a starting point so there's no reason to think it won't be better.
So they haven't even dismantled this reactor that has been de-commissioned for over 20 years and they don't know how they're even going to do it yet.
I didn't even know about this - yet another pebble bed reactor FAIL - so thanks for pointing it out. I actually thought that the THTR PBMR was the first attempt and now I find it's actually their *second* attempt and it still didn't work yet you expect that the Chinese will do a better job?
I'd say that you are stretching optimism a bit too far there.
You're comparing nuclear physics of the 1960s with modern nuclear physics...?
Maybe you need a refresher course on the problems the early Uranium reactors had due to lack of physics knowledge, eg windscale .
I was referring to the THTR-300 which was commissioned in 1985. The issues were engineering issues along with a pending half a billion Euros to properly decommission the reactor.
Do you seriously think that Chinese engineering is 30 years ahead of German engineering?
Uh you mean like an understanding of the science and engineering? What a poor excuse for ignorance calling this a political discussion to win points. If you want to bemoan the failure of the nuclear industry then blame lines that were used to sell nuclear power in the first place;
Power too cheap to meter...
Lightning will never strike twice...
The waste problem will be a non-issue by 1984...
if it's possible to solve the engineering issues the why hasn't it been done? Why does the Price-Anderson act *still* exist? Still drinking that kool aid I see...
Riiight. So speaking as a conservative you want to see the US moving in the same direction as Communist China. You're saying that the communist system is better. As a conservative that's an interesting position. I reckon the perpetual energy generated by the consternation in your mind is enough to power the world...roflYSST!!! What is it about the communist system you like best, comrade conservative?
Sure, you mean like the energy expended on extracting uranium vs what is generated, ie the Net Energy Output. There is plenty of that science stuff to back it up, but let's try a pop quiz since you're sooo enlightened, comrade. Why don't you quote the energy expenditure on soft ore and hard ore that contains U-235 or let me know when you figure out what the actual concentrations of uranium are per ton of rock. Then we might be able to have that conversation...comrade.
Predominately because it doesn't produce weapons grade material as a daughter product. Our atomic industry is based on the capability to produce weapons from our energy industry.
Thorium reactors could be good *if* the spent fuel stream is dealt with properly. Looking at the decay chain all the half-lives appear to highly energetic. I believe some isotope of Thallium is the eventual waste product, a highly energetic gamma emitter. It implies a short half life but I doubt it's th-208 or 209 I guess you'd have to understand the decay chain better. But China has a great record will dealing with environmental issues responsibly, so it should all be hunky dory!!
Of course, if German engineering can't make a Thorium based pebble bed reactor work properly then the Chinese at just the people with the right engineering skills to make it all happen...
Ah, so you've achieved progress in a non-US government, which was not all what was implied.
Try it on a congressmen, I assure you they are quite a different breed.
I don't care. "What exactly did you do and what exactly did it cause?" was your question to me so now you can tell me what you have attempted or actually achieved that justifies that presumption?
The EFF's findings are completely structural issues, and are *exactly* the scenarios I faced in my country except that you have more rights under your constitution than I do under mine and I keep going - what your excuse? The things that are *possible* under our constitution are completely impossible under yours. So don't take it personally, but it's that attitude that is a big motivator for apathetic behavior - if you choose to wallow there then just be silent. If you want to believe you are powerless in the "land of the free" then don't spend your energy de-motivating others who want to actually participate in democracy as you just assist manifesting that powerlessness. That's what vested interests want.
If you are going to attempt to use your cynicism to hide your apathy then the only conclusion left to draw is that it's you that's bullshitting me. Don't attempt to discount my achievements just because you are too much of a coward to stand up for your own rights in your own country.
I've done it and it works.
Bullshit. What exactly did you do and what exactly did it cause?
With a mail merge I lobbied;
both sides of the Parliament against a bill proposed (and expected to pass) to enact law to subject websites to the same ratings systems that movies and TV programs have to conform to. The bill did not pass. I received replies from many ministers and was invited to be an advisor for the house on Information Technology issues.
against a bill designed to outlaw network security tools and apply a maximum 15 years jail for those who possessed them. I received no replies as many others lobbied as well. The bill was defeated.
for modification to anti-terrorism laws against body cavity searches of minors, strict lianbility and other modifications to the wording of the bill (I read the entire bill and made notes). I realised that nothing was going to stop that bill from passing but that some of its affects could be mitigated by simple wording changes. I noted that most of the changes I proposed were carried.
So I call your claim of bullshit and I raise you a 'fuck off'. I'll also presume your cynicism has prevented you from doing anything. It's often used as an excuse by apathetic people.
There I said it, again.
Lobby. They have computers, they have word processors. 1 letter and a mail merge reaches a whole lot of politicians. I've done it and it works. They will ignore an email but a respectful single page letter gets a lot of attention. So apathy is a pretty good description.
Best regards
John Citizen
It's not that they're apathetic, it's that they just don't care...
My apologies to all the great engineers and people who risk their lives in this pursuit but I don't see any evidence that the engineering mindset that used to dictated the way NASA worked exists anymore. It seems that the management mindsets that refuse to understand the complexity of the operations involved are still alive and well at NASA.
The political shenanigans that pull NASA every which way but a proper technological solution demonstrate that a properly engineered space program is not the objective. Instead budget allocations, pork barreling and other ways to channel money has turned NASA into a waterlogged ball that only gets kicked to see what comes out of it.
I'm sure it doesn't mean the end but I fear this does not bode well for the future of manned space flight.
I remember Challenger, I'd just left school and was coming back from a holiday, I'd been on a plane when it happened.
It makes you wonder how effective it actually is in some cases. I hope it is able to continue its work against scientology.
Great! It will be a big sun-hot arrow pointing right back at us saying, "Here are some young pushovers!"
Indeed. At the very least we would have to be engaged in building our own planetary system, this would be the minimum level of space faring we are engaged with before a project like this is even feasible. I doubt it would happen any other way than being constructed in orbit. So we should most certainly be at some stage of space faring maturity ourselves, I sure the project designers only have their project goals as a consideration though.
I think though that just planning the project has value itself and demonstrates how far away from actual interstellar flight we are with existing state of the art, though I wonder what the next generation interstellar probe will be called, Icarus II?
All they need to do is to use the roof of a vehicle or a hand rail to get the device steady, I do the same thing when I'm using a camera. There exists some very simple techniques you can use with your hand to sight a target at a distance and how long does it take to have a laser pointed into your eyes to blind you even for a matter of seconds. It's not a matter of math, it's a simple technique used in rescue situations to get the attention of an aircraft.
I acknowledge media beat up etc etc, but before you call this bullshit and say these guys are pussies why don't you get someone to shine a laser across your eyes and let us all know how long you were blinded for. Personally, I don't want anyone to fuck with the pilots who are flying the aircraft I'm on and I fly out of that airport quite frequently. So please do the experiment, record how much harm it did and how long it took for your eyesight to recover. You're are man enough to have a laser pointed into your eyes, right?
Even if there never is a serious situation the inconvenience from the inevitable security clampdown from this is just as bad. I think that's serious enough.
Like any aircraft accident it will be a combination of factors that overload the pilots abilities to operate the aircraft safely, won't it. Perhaps a tired flight crew with some piece of faulty equipment gets distracted at a critical moment. Even if it just delayed the aircraft I certainly don't think it's a risk you would be prepared to take with the flight crew of your aircraft.
That argument doesn't work. Either you believe it or you don't. If you don't take the Genesis literally, you don't take the sin he died for literally either. You can't choose! Either you believe in I.D. or you're a poor christian, and Jesus died in vain.
very good, I was almost temted to mod you funny for that...