I'll put my "The Inner Light" up against your "Darmok" any day of the week.
Remember me! That was one of the most imaginative episodes of Star Trek IMHO.
Especially when Doctor Crusher asked the computer to show the schematics of the Enterprise and complained of a design flaw, it was to big to fit in the Universe. Brilliant!
This is just my opinion but Linux just feels like it is eternally playing catch-up, and by the time they're 60% of the way there Windows will have jumped forward to an entirely new era. Linux gets better every single month but it's never been on par in terms of the holistic computing experience
I don't think Linux distributions are a different era, they're a completely new paradigm and Linux is a different 'holistic computing experience' from Windows or Macintosh. I've used Linux at home for at least 10 years as my primary machine and while I use Windows at work I *insist* on a linux machine to ensure productivity.
Workspaces for me are a killer application and I simply can't go back now and I feel lobotomised when I use windows. With windows, I never feel like I can extract all of the power of the machine to use on my application, primarily music production, for which Linux has allowed me to heavily customise for performance. Yes I tried it under windows and frankly with the money I saved on *not* buying the mac/protools combo I invested heavily in microphones. I want all the cpu time I paid for.
So while my Fedora 10 install annoys me cause it can't play flash or wmv's it records 16 channels of hi resolution audio all day and mixes and masters music in a way that's simply not available on a Mac. When I want to play flash or wmv's I (dual) boot to Ubuntu where the eye candy is pleasing and, when I run wine, it happily runs my instance of ERwin and most of the games I'm interested in. If I need other software within a few clicks I've installed Eclipse (maybe not as friendly but seems much more powerful than VS), MySQL, Umbrello, OpenOffice and a bunch of other software without a single license key. Old hardware, media server, older hardware Asterisk box.
Perhaps, one day, when propriety software vendors key on to how easy it is for a user to search for and install software for Linux they may offer a similar facility to licence and pay for their software to install under Linux distribution. Until then I'll just be satisfied with the limitations of the free software and donate some of the money I've saved to those projects so they can enhance it.
If I want to upgrade an Ubuntu install? I Upgrade, restore users home directory, done. Environment maintained, missing a program? add/remove, done. With my new builds I offer users an Ubuntu install first and install their applications, so if they don't like it, then they can shell money out for windows. I think this time around there has been 2 or 3 releases of Fedora and Ubuntu since Vista was released so because fixes are soon and improvement is often, satisfaction remains. I don't understand how you can make the comparison if, as you say, 'you've stuck with windows'. Every time I've fixed a windows box is why *I've* stuck with Linux and none of my Ubuntu users have seen a command line, let alone used one.
So, you're probably right, Windows probably is a familiar 'holistic' experience that comforts windows users, but I don't think it's a paradigm the average user enjoys any more, I don't. As the 'release soon, release often' matures Linux's 'holistic' experience it's paradigm get's better sooner and get's better often. Comparing Linux's 'holistic' experience with windows or mac is just not relevant anymore. I compare it's 'holistic experience' to that Linux distribution's last release. Freedom means more than 'freeware'
So, in 20 years, you do not think that things have improved?
If you are talking about production reactor designs then, due to the long development cycle for reactors, actually they have gotten worse for reactor safety to make reactors more affordable. In particular, the AP-1000. EPR is a better design, but that is not approved for implementation.
To save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts back on concrete and steel, a lot. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power
below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
The criticism is that design improvements should be implemented, not ignored, and that the best design features of previous generation
reactors (i.e. like the enhanced containment building at TMI to resist aircraft collision) should be incorporated instead of reduced, if we are to build new reactors.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the tear down and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free
to bio-concentrate in the food chain.
The NRC chartered a Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) 25 years ago for design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The panel recommended 30 design enhancements such as relocating and hardening the control room, alternate containment, making the site an underground facility, automated emergency control systems, emergency core cooling facility and so on, I don't expect Russian designs to be much better.
All of these AND the EPR enhancements were judged by the industry themselves (Westinghouse, et al) to be feasible, none have been implemented.
I was obsessed with the NS Savannah recently because she is such a beautiful ship - I love ships and this cargo ship looks like a yacht. Whilst I am not a fan of the Nuclear Industry in it's current form her reactor appeared to be reasonably well constructed and whilst designed to cruise at 21 knots, she outperformed her design spec by steadily cruising at 24 knots - pretty fast for a cargo ship. Check page 16 of the MARAD documentation (warning - pdf).
NS Savannah's crew dispute was because the executive officers traditionally got paid more than the engineering crew on board the ship, this dispute, high running costs, low oil costs all contributed to her eventual demise.
An interest group (with mailing list) is looking for photos and artefacts whist she was in operation.
IFR is interesting but it suffers from some pretty serious shortcomings. 70000 kgs of Radioactive Sodium Coolant==Not Good. The Forty year life makes this especially serious as ingress of air/moisture into the system could make for a pretty serious explosion. The theoretical passive safety feature of IFR's are appealing, but breeders are a fickle beast with finer margins of safety, and less time to react to problems. An accident at a Fast reactor with sodium coolant would be more serious than TMI or Chernobyl, with deadlier isotopes.
With a geologically stable site and better materials technology we can think about how we can extract the energy from that plutonium and convert it to fissile ash (so the time frames are more manageable) perhaps using an extremely over-engineered version of IFR. End uranium mining and contain the enrichment facility in the same place as the containment and reactor facility, probably inside a mountain. Indeed a design worth developing but far far, far from being a commercial reality without overcoming the significant engineering and material science's issues.
If you can't run programs designed for Windows XP and earlier natively on Windows 7 and the use of the XP emulator mode required to run those programs, is Microsoft moving away from the native backwards compatible philosophy they have maintained for Windows(?) so far.
That's what it looks like or am I missing something, I didn't bother with Vista and I haven't tried Windows 7.
Darn it all, now my insurance paperwork's disappeared.
Well, good that you don't need to use it, just looking at it.
Falls short by what standard?
Don't forget that the AP-1000 is substantially SMALLER than the EPR design.
By the Nuclear industries own standards. The document I referred you to includes 30 design enhancements such as relocating and hardening the control room, alternate containment, making the site an underground facility, automated emergency control systems, emergency core cooling facility and so on.
All of these AND the EPR enhancements were judged by the industry themselves (Westinghouse, et al) to be feasible.
AP-1000 is smaller because it doesn't separate the buildings into redundant components so that emergencies can be mitigated by these separated systems. If you reduce the safety systems you have available to fall back on in the case of an emergency then the only way the design is better is it costs less. Modern passenger jet aircraft have multiple redundant safety systems on board so there is fall back if a system fails. To call a modern reactor design better it has to have the additional safety features designed from lessons learned by the many thousands of accidents that the Nuclear industry has had, not take away existing safety features to make the reactor cheaper to build.
Any Yankee Rowe doesn't seem like a good example, little economy of scale for it's small size, Compare that to the costs to clean up a long running coal plant to those 'greenfield' standards.
From my research I understand that there is a linear increase in costs as the core size increases but as Yankee Rowe is the only place it has been attempted we don't actually know yet in practice. That Yankee Rowe still contains spent fuel it's is fair to say that no nuclear facility site has successfully made 'greenfeild'.
Each additional reactor piles more on the power companies and less on the government.
It also increases the odds that an accident will occur and moves the liability into the future. That's effectively a hidden inter-generational tax, it's magnifies the costs to our children.
Is it really that relevant to a ground based commercial power nuclear plant? Besides, given the USA's track record over my lifespan, does it really NEED huge changes? Oh, and 'too cheap to meter' was always a wild idea.
Unfortunately 'too cheap to meter' was how we we sold nuclear power. Now the message has changed to 'less greenhouse gasses' or 'safer more modern design' and we know that is a stretch of the truth.
I think the evidence that changes are required are in the increasing trend of LER's to the NRC. Accidents are happening all the time, they just aren't in the news, so the perception of safety remains. It's structured so you have to pursue the information to find what is actually happening.
Tough to just shut down a plant providing 35% of a state's electricity, but in the context that we've built the replacement first, acceptable.... I know I've mentioned in this thread that any extensive building of new nuclear plants would be to shut down older, inefficient, more dangerous plants, whether coal or nuclear, with safer modern plants.
There are serious design flaws within the AP-1000, but these issues aside, how can we even consider new reactor plants without at least a geologically stable granite containment facility and an infrastructure plan to contain plutonium spent fuel and other radioactive products. At best the *entire* nuclear industry requires a bottom up re-design to redress the issues that have manifest over it's first generation before any serious deployment of nuclear power plants can occur.
The workers that did this should be held strictly accountable for any pain and suffering by the family through their negligence and the CHP must be made to enforce that on the rest of them.
That and not cite her case in road safety courses any more. The Net changes everything, that department has to lift it's game.
In fact its the very speech that repulses us most that we must defend because that's where freedom of speech is most easily chipped away.
If freedom is a right for all then you have to accept the few risks that come with free society. If freedom is a privilege for a few then all must risk tyranny. A society is judged by how it treats the worst among us as much as the worst among us are judged by society.
Most of all, you have no right to wrong someone as much as two wrongs don't make a right.
It's well known that Nickel Ass Cage can save us from any plot as long as he has ingested enough vallium so. he. can. say. his lines. All you need is good looking female supporting actor yelling 'save the children' and we will be saved.
Found it. A little research though, says that the plant that released it is liable irregardless of fault.
Thank you, and that is what is worded into your insurance policy?
the AP 1000 will be considered 'production', and be able to enjoy the subsequent engineering cost savings.
Unfortunately the AP-1000's design still falls short. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions. It's planning, and being prepared for, problems.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the teardown and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free to bio-concentrate in the food chain.
Finally, The Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison)
design recommendations are specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
I'm simply saying that calling increasing numbers of incidents at OLD plants a problem is unfair to NEW plants.
Granted, all I'm pointing out is that the design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC. It's not best of breed, it's the whelp of the pack, the solid engineering improvements have not be put into the design.
ASP? I'm unfamiliar with this abbreviation other than for active server pages...
Accident Sequence Precursors. Take Davis-Besse, they ignored the frequency of the replacement water filters was out of spec. It signaled that something is going wrong in the reactor. Water cools reactor core, water rusts steel, reactor head is steel, rust goes in water, water goes through filter, filter catches rust, management says it's ok, reactor head gets hole [reactor goes *boom*] - 'Accident Sequence Precursor' (forgive my abbreviations I am tired and have the flu)
ASP goes to far and it becomes a LER (Licencee Event Report)
They were also criminal - 3 people are up on felony criminal charges if the wiki is right.
The operating procedures should be able to cope. If the U.S Navy can operate Reactors in subs safely, why can't commercial reactor licensees.
I have had a influenza with those symptoms for the last few days, I don't like it. feels like a fizzy drink is being held under my nose *all the time*, I'm in Australia though - lots of people have it, surely it's not the same one here already.
If it is I can tell you it sucks, major headache, hard to sleep:-(
Corporations used to be a gift from the community with a limited scope for accomplishing a very specific goal. Now-a-days pirates wear suits and as captains of industry navigate their vessels in search of more plunder [arrrrrr].
It's sickening that Monty Pythons humorous vision is so accurate.
After the hearing, AudienceScience removed a client testimonial relating to AT&T from its website, so 'all the appropriate parties [have] consistent messaging,' its CEO said.
Isn't it strange that people are still surprised that their computers are fast? Computers have gotten ridiculously fast compared during the last 20 years, and still they seem slow to many of us. Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
Funny you should say that. I was fixing a computer for a friend today, she writes children's books. From pressing the power switch, bios ram, os boot and gui in less than 35 seconds. The machine a 386, 16386Kb of memory with windows 3.1, I had to remember how to use it all over again, it was *weird*, no start button, no menus.
But to answer your question I think the answer is complexity. Whether we know it or not, behind the scenes, our machines have got complex. Oh they look pretty and all, but this machine took me back, it was very specific for what she wanted to do, Word Processor and a printer. Internet, nah, usb, forget it, cdrom - your kidding aren't you (a 1989 compaq - btw). Still my friend had managed to wear all the letters off the tops of the keyboard.
Since the floppy died she is having trouble backing up, so it's time it went to the great toxic landfill in the rubbish dump.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember me! That was one of the most imaginative episodes of Star Trek IMHO.
Especially when Doctor Crusher asked the computer to show the schematics of the Enterprise and complained of a design flaw, it was to big to fit in the Universe. Brilliant!
Comparing Kirk and Picard is like comparing a Cowboy to a Sensei.
Where you get every other Linux distribution, at a newsagent or book store where they sell Linux 'How-to' magazines for $10 with the dvd.
That's right, nerds have the engineering skillz to build what geek's have the imagination to design. In nature everything is balanced.
Wouldn't it be because the photons were being red or blue shifted until they became radiation?
it's only impossible *outside* the bubble of space time, inside the bubble it's possible.
I don't think Linux distributions are a different era, they're a completely new paradigm and Linux is a different 'holistic computing experience' from Windows or Macintosh. I've used Linux at home for at least 10 years as my primary machine and while I use Windows at work I *insist* on a linux machine to ensure productivity.
Workspaces for me are a killer application and I simply can't go back now and I feel lobotomised when I use windows. With windows, I never feel like I can extract all of the power of the machine to use on my application, primarily music production, for which Linux has allowed me to heavily customise for performance. Yes I tried it under windows and frankly with the money I saved on *not* buying the mac/protools combo I invested heavily in microphones. I want all the cpu time I paid for.
So while my Fedora 10 install annoys me cause it can't play flash or wmv's it records 16 channels of hi resolution audio all day and mixes and masters music in a way that's simply not available on a Mac. When I want to play flash or wmv's I (dual) boot to Ubuntu where the eye candy is pleasing and, when I run wine, it happily runs my instance of ERwin and most of the games I'm interested in. If I need other software within a few clicks I've installed Eclipse (maybe not as friendly but seems much more powerful than VS), MySQL, Umbrello, OpenOffice and a bunch of other software without a single license key. Old hardware, media server, older hardware Asterisk box.
Perhaps, one day, when propriety software vendors key on to how easy it is for a user to search for and install software for Linux they may offer a similar facility to licence and pay for their software to install under Linux distribution. Until then I'll just be satisfied with the limitations of the free software and donate some of the money I've saved to those projects so they can enhance it.
If I want to upgrade an Ubuntu install? I Upgrade, restore users home directory, done. Environment maintained, missing a program? add/remove, done. With my new builds I offer users an Ubuntu install first and install their applications, so if they don't like it, then they can shell money out for windows. I think this time around there has been 2 or 3 releases of Fedora and Ubuntu since Vista was released so because fixes are soon and improvement is often, satisfaction remains. I don't understand how you can make the comparison if, as you say, 'you've stuck with windows'. Every time I've fixed a windows box is why *I've* stuck with Linux and none of my Ubuntu users have seen a command line, let alone used one.
So, you're probably right, Windows probably is a familiar 'holistic' experience that comforts windows users, but I don't think it's a paradigm the average user enjoys any more, I don't. As the 'release soon, release often' matures Linux's 'holistic' experience it's paradigm get's better sooner and get's better often. Comparing Linux's 'holistic' experience with windows or mac is just not relevant anymore. I compare it's 'holistic experience' to that Linux distribution's last release. Freedom means more than 'freeware'
200 cute goats and Goatse.cx? What sort of joke could you make from that?
Google thinks the goats are queuet.
Sun's ODF plugin for Office.
If you are talking about production reactor designs then, due to the long development cycle for reactors, actually they have gotten worse for reactor safety to make reactors more affordable. In particular, the AP-1000. EPR is a better design, but that is not approved for implementation.
To save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts back on concrete and steel, a lot. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
The criticism is that design improvements should be implemented, not ignored, and that the best design features of previous generation reactors (i.e. like the enhanced containment building at TMI to resist aircraft collision) should be incorporated instead of reduced, if we are to build new reactors.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the tear down and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free to bio-concentrate in the food chain.
The NRC chartered a Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) 25 years ago for design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The panel recommended 30 design enhancements such as relocating and hardening the control room, alternate containment, making the site an underground facility, automated emergency control systems, emergency core cooling facility and so on, I don't expect Russian designs to be much better.
All of these AND the EPR enhancements were judged by the industry themselves (Westinghouse, et al) to be feasible, none have been implemented.
Are we actually going to be able to use this oil before the effects of climate change become too severe?
I was obsessed with the NS Savannah recently because she is such a beautiful ship - I love ships and this cargo ship looks like a yacht. Whilst I am not a fan of the Nuclear Industry in it's current form her reactor appeared to be reasonably well constructed and whilst designed to cruise at 21 knots, she outperformed her design spec by steadily cruising at 24 knots - pretty fast for a cargo ship. Check page 16 of the MARAD documentation (warning - pdf).
There is significant historical information about her operation. Until 9/11 she was part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) but her reactor was permanently disabled due to concerns she could be used as quite a convenient weapon of terror. Sadly, her hybrid design condemned her to a short operational life (10 years) and she is now a ghost ship. There are plans to make her a museum ship whilst waiting for her decommissioned reactor to cool down for eventual disassembly, but no one seems interested in the project. Despite that the seafarers Union have been working to maintain the ship by improving her general appearance.
NS Savannah's crew dispute was because the executive officers traditionally got paid more than the engineering crew on board the ship, this dispute, high running costs, low oil costs all contributed to her eventual demise. An interest group (with mailing list) is looking for photos and artefacts whist she was in operation.
lots more photos, her community organisation, glory days, historical landmark program, service history and specifications, floorplan and schematics, current status, passenger lounge, reactor control room, dry docked , and finally a flickr photo stream and a rather excellent photo essay of the NS Savannah. A little bit of history for you to enjoy.
With a geologically stable site and better materials technology we can think about how we can extract the energy from that plutonium and convert it to fissile ash (so the time frames are more manageable) perhaps using an extremely over-engineered version of IFR. End uranium mining and contain the enrichment facility in the same place as the containment and reactor facility, probably inside a mountain. Indeed a design worth developing but far far, far from being a commercial reality without overcoming the significant engineering and material science's issues.
That's what it looks like or am I missing something, I didn't bother with Vista and I haven't tried Windows 7.
Well, good that you don't need to use it, just looking at it.
By the Nuclear industries own standards. The document I referred you to includes 30 design enhancements such as relocating and hardening the control room, alternate containment, making the site an underground facility, automated emergency control systems, emergency core cooling facility and so on.
All of these AND the EPR enhancements were judged by the industry themselves (Westinghouse, et al) to be feasible.
AP-1000 is smaller because it doesn't separate the buildings into redundant components so that emergencies can be mitigated by these separated systems. If you reduce the safety systems you have available to fall back on in the case of an emergency then the only way the design is better is it costs less. Modern passenger jet aircraft have multiple redundant safety systems on board so there is fall back if a system fails. To call a modern reactor design better it has to have the additional safety features designed from lessons learned by the many thousands of accidents that the Nuclear industry has had, not take away existing safety features to make the reactor cheaper to build.
From my research I understand that there is a linear increase in costs as the core size increases but as Yankee Rowe is the only place it has been attempted we don't actually know yet in practice. That Yankee Rowe still contains spent fuel it's is fair to say that no nuclear facility site has successfully made 'greenfeild'.
It also increases the odds that an accident will occur and moves the liability into the future. That's effectively a hidden inter-generational tax, it's magnifies the costs to our children.
Unfortunately 'too cheap to meter' was how we we sold nuclear power. Now the message has changed to 'less greenhouse gasses' or 'safer more modern design' and we know that is a stretch of the truth.
I think the evidence that changes are required are in the increasing trend of LER's to the NRC. Accidents are happening all the time, they just aren't in the news, so the perception of safety remains. It's structured so you have to pursue the information to find what is actually happening.
There are serious design flaws within the AP-1000, but these issues aside, how can we even consider new reactor plants without at least a geologically stable granite containment facility and an infrastructure plan to contain plutonium spent fuel and other radioactive products. At best the *entire* nuclear industry requires a bottom up re-design to redress the issues that have manifest over it's first generation before any serious deployment of nuclear power plants can occur.
The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy
That and not cite her case in road safety courses any more. The Net changes everything, that department has to lift it's game.
If freedom is a right for all then you have to accept the few risks that come with free society. If freedom is a privilege for a few then all must risk tyranny. A society is judged by how it treats the worst among us as much as the worst among us are judged by society.
Most of all, you have no right to wrong someone as much as two wrongs don't make a right.
It's well known that Nickel Ass Cage can save us from any plot as long as he has ingested enough vallium so. he. can. say. his lines. All you need is good looking female supporting actor yelling 'save the children' and we will be saved.
Thank you, and that is what is worded into your insurance policy?
Unfortunately the AP-1000's design still falls short. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions. It's planning, and being prepared for, problems.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the teardown and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free to bio-concentrate in the food chain.
Finally, The Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) design recommendations are specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
Granted, all I'm pointing out is that the design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC. It's not best of breed, it's the whelp of the pack, the solid engineering improvements have not be put into the design.
Accident Sequence Precursors. Take Davis-Besse, they ignored the frequency of the replacement water filters was out of spec. It signaled that something is going wrong in the reactor. Water cools reactor core, water rusts steel, reactor head is steel, rust goes in water, water goes through filter, filter catches rust, management says it's ok, reactor head gets hole [reactor goes *boom*] - 'Accident Sequence Precursor' (forgive my abbreviations I am tired and have the flu)
ASP goes to far and it becomes a LER (Licencee Event Report)
The operating procedures should be able to cope. If the U.S Navy can operate Reactors in subs safely, why can't commercial reactor licensees.
Computer! Recognise Crewman Number Six, Terminate self destruct sequence, Access code ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE...
I have had a influenza with those symptoms for the last few days, I don't like it. feels like a fizzy drink is being held under my nose *all the time*, I'm in Australia though - lots of people have it, surely it's not the same one here already.
If it is I can tell you it sucks, major headache, hard to sleep :-(
It's sickening that Monty Pythons humorous vision is so accurate.
read 'So the lie becomes the truth'.
Funny you should say that. I was fixing a computer for a friend today, she writes children's books. From pressing the power switch, bios ram, os boot and gui in less than 35 seconds. The machine a 386, 16386Kb of memory with windows 3.1, I had to remember how to use it all over again, it was *weird*, no start button, no menus.
But to answer your question I think the answer is complexity. Whether we know it or not, behind the scenes, our machines have got complex. Oh they look pretty and all, but this machine took me back, it was very specific for what she wanted to do, Word Processor and a printer. Internet, nah, usb, forget it, cdrom - your kidding aren't you (a 1989 compaq - btw). Still my friend had managed to wear all the letters off the tops of the keyboard.
Since the floppy died she is having trouble backing up, so it's time it went to the great toxic landfill in the rubbish dump.