It's really hard to say, I think - the radiation exposure it possibly a risk factor.
It's not radiation exposure so much as the absorption of radionuclides from the reactors. From the amount of seawater used to cool the plant plutonium chloride is extremely likely to have been created.
But how long does it take from exposure to detection of cancer is a detail I'm not sure about.
Is 4 1/2 years enough time after the radiation exposure for cancer to develop and be detected?
From what I've learned about Chernobyl, I was expecting six years. I really hope it is unrelated because for it to be this early it is concerning about how much and how energetic the elements released were. Only TEPCO can tell us.
According to established radiation science and statistics,
Citation please. Specifically which statistics and which science are you referring to?
it is highly unlikely that this cancer is from exposure at Fukushima
Really. You're suggesting a man working at a site containing three exploded Nuclear Reactors in some form of melt down is *unlikely* to have contracted cancer from being exposed to the variety of radionuclides absorbed there. That is truly a breathtaking leap of faith considering you don't know what work he did there and how long he did it for. Instead, you're saying we should be looking at his personal life for a *more likely cause* like smoking cigarettes. Now there is a potent warning against the dangers of cigarettes.
Perhaps we shouldn't rule out the possibility of exposure to highly soluble plutonium chloride created when sea water was pumped into the reactor cores to cool them. Coincidentally it is an iron analogue that would probably circulate in the blood as a highly energetic alpha emitter were you to absorb enough of it.
Lets all hope he can get top notch treatment and beat it, and same for the many other Leukemia sufferers that don't get the headlines or the compensation.
Well there is something we can agree on. These people risked being exposed to the highly energetic elements ejected when those three reactors exploded and worked there for days and months after the disaster. No one really knows how much material was there and because of their work we are all indebted to them for the situation not becoming any worse. I hope every single one of them and their families are looked after for the rest of their lives.
TEPCO executives may have been assholes, however the TEPCO workers are real life heros.
I suspect the bulk of the respondents simply have no idea and no experience with how to actually enjoy an automobile.
At just over 300hp my 2 seater Z car restoration, with suspension tuned to my body weight is exactly what you are talking about. I'm building another one now - great fun, much more fun than a phone on the twisty back roads. No traction on the phone, it just slides, the car however handles like a go-kart.;)
Well it is, as long as you can be allowed to upgrade/replace aging reactors and not blocked by environmentalists and anti-nuke protesters from building a safer replacement.
In the US then 2005 energy act prevents those people and local councils from interfering with the placement of nuclear facilities.
It is the radio-isotopes ejected from the exploding reactors that are the threat to people, as opposed to the radiation. Radioactive *isotopes* analogue other elements when presented to a metabolism in the food chain. Take plutonium for example, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, is a high energy alpha emitter and is extremely toxic.
Oppenheimer's work found that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body and Leukemia is a consequence of absorbing plutonium chloride. Whether you believe this was related or not to Fukushima depends on if you think this man absorbed a microgram or two of 239 pu from cleaning up a recently exploded nuclear reactor.
Some radioactive isotopes analogue appear to be nutrients to living metabolisms, so they bio-accumulate in the food chain. They cannot be detected with the senses like (taste, touch etc) no matter how toxic to life processes they are.
Once a radio-isotope is inside the body, the body identifies it as a nutrient and uses it as such. If it is deposited in the bones, in the case of a calcium analogue like strontium 90 as an example, it will continue to emit radiation creating a condition for cancer to incubate (typically 6 years). An iron analogue, like plutonium 239, will most likely end up where all the other iron in the body goes.
When the subject dies and is buried or cremated those radionuclides are released back into the environment where it is available to be ingested again. This is the nature of radioactive isotopes and the primary reason containment of Nuclear industry radio isotope effluent is so important.
Looking to the patterns of absorption, six years after Chernobyl the W.H.O were recording the incidents of thyroid cancer in children increasing in thousands per month before their funding to continue recording the data was pulled by the IAEA, who maintain interdiction powers over the WHO publishing about matters involving the Nuclear Industry and health reporting.
So it is reasonable to expect 2017 as the *start* of seeing the direct effects of people who have been exposed to radioisotopes either in the air (through fallout) or the water table as directly from the accident, hopefully there will be very few. That these cases are happening in 2015 suggests that the people working at the reactor suffered much more exposure than we were led to believe by TEPCO.
It kind of boggles my mind why Microsoft bothered to make PowerShell so unique and so incompatible with a well-known Unix shell like Bash.
PowerShell isn't always totally awful, but where the heck is stuff like less, tail, head, etc? IIRC the last time I went looking for it, PowerShell's version of tail and grep are totally retarded and difficult next to the relative simplicity of $foo | tail -n 10 or something.
This is why it is called 'Powers Hell' because of the brain fuck you get from using it. It has a long way to go before it reaches the elegance of shell. The object paradigm and perlishness is interesting.
They could have just made it a near-bash clone, along with a non-retarded shell window that supported putty or ConEmu-style terminal features and it would be SO MUCH better.
My question is whether it was just part of the "we're microsoft" culture of pretending that nothing else exists or whether it was some deliberately conspiratorial move to force an investment of time and effort on the part of Windows admins to keep them in the fold versus learning a skill that could be portable to Unix shells.
I've been spending a lot of time in the PS space lately to see if I can apply decades of shell programming to PS and found that I can easily. If MS are expecting this goal then they have failed because it took me an afternoon writing regular expressions to convert PS into shell scripts that ran. There are things to like and hate about PS however I think it is a good move on MS's part along with ssh.
It really is just proof that the *IX paradigm was the correct one all along and now many MS enthusiasts will start to understand why it is the right way - even if the PS offering is still messy and rough. Coupled with ssh I can administer MS boxes with ruthless efficiency that has been impossible in the MS space up until now.
PU-239 is not waste, and should not be stored and allowed to decay naturally. PU-239 is one of three (U-233, U-235 being the other two) 'drivers' that can be used to sustain nuclear reactors in a LFTR thorium based reactor.
I never said it was and even if you use a thorium based reactor with 239 pu as an neutron source you still need a place to store pu-239.
It's insane to allow this valuable material to be simply stored, as if it's completely useless.
We need to switch nuclear power from the uranium based fuel cycle over to thorium, preferably using LFTR tech to get the job done.
I would suggest that IFR technology is more appropriate in this role as it burns and existing transuranics instead of creating a new radio-isotope product. Using Thorium means you have two problems instead of one. Can you show me the entire fuel cycle for thorium?
With imagination and planning you would realize that by building and siting a fuel containment facility you would also have a suitable site for reprocessing and reactor facilities. That way you could *choose* which reactor technology you can deploy.
At the same time, these new reactors are not only safer (they can't melt down) but can also rid us of the legacy of high level 'nuclear waste' from the uranium cycle, by using that very same 'waste' as FUEL, and at the same time converting it down to much safer low-level radioactive 'waste'
Well that is an untested assumption as you can only understand what the basis design issues are by actually running one. So far IFR is the only one that has actually been constructed, run and tested in such a failure mode (can't melt down) with the operational goal of burning up transuranics. Thorium reactors is a completely new and untested technology.
Thorium reactors create a new waste stream of 208 Thallium, It's a gamma emitter, not a alpha emitter like 239 pu - so it's pretty nasty stuff.
It has lots of halflives (more than the 20 or so) and many, many daughter products. Now I'm not sure if the mechanism is spontaneous fission that does this (like DU) but because it is a gamma emitter it would be a lot harder to deal with than plutonium. I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with the properties of the metal being more like aluminum than like lead.
Don't take that as a criticism of Thorium reactor technology though, it's got good anti-proliferation characteristics however I think if you are going to advocate the technology you really have to have a salient and realistic look at the whole fuel cycle and how you manage it especially if you want to avoid the mistakes of the old technology.
Even if you implement Thorium reactors you still need a place to store and process fuel, more so if you intend to burn 239 pu. Additionally I am yet to see a reference to the radio isotope burn up rate of a Thorium reactor that would allow assessment of its capacity to transmute transuranic elements from the traditional fuel cycle.
One of the most major criticisms of Yucca Mountain was that the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility could not be applied to Yucca's geology. The reason to choose a specific geology (in addition to being seisemically stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to control the the amount of time ground water took to travel through the facility carrying radioactive isotopes, eventually, into the water table. If the amount of time it takes exceeds the decay rate of the longest lived radio-isotopes then the facility was providing defense in depth.
In addition, as a site like that would be containing pu-239, whose half life is around 25000 years, after considering the daughter products you need a geology capable of containing it for 500,000 years, which is what the original specification called for.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology (pdf) revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. The reason is Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash.
Curiously, getting this right should be the one thing pro and anti nuclear folk should be able to agree on, if only for their own reasons. For Nuclear power to continue operating such a storage facility is essential so that new reactors can be deployed and materials removed from reactor sites. For people against Nuclear power such a facility would improve the safety of the industry as a whole by providing a place to store the materials permanently where there ingress into the environment can be controlled.
The DOE have got to build a facility somewhere. The right location has to be chosen because of all the rail and other infrastructure required to move the spent fuel has to be funded and built. This should not be a difficult thing for America to achieve by applying a scientific approach to selecting the site and building it instead of the politics used to select Yucca Mountain.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
I think you are right the people I speak to in Silicon Valley are really tiresomely clueless and they don't listen so you just do what they ask, show them how to solve a problem from time to time and just let them take credit for it. I think that they are working so hard there that they don't have time to think. I suspect that all the 90+ hour work weeks really erode their social skills. The whole old vs young doesn't make much sense because everyone has or will be young or old.
I'm in Australia and I haven't encountered this here and I hope I don't because if it is true then IT is doomed, who would want to invest all that time studying for a career that isn't going to last anyway.
If this is a continuing trend then I think we are looking forward to a long stagnant period in IT. Older people have more experience and younger people have more energy so if IT misses out on that collaboration for a few years then we are going to go through a period of 'more of the same' until the 'ah-ha' moment.
It's taken me years just to accumulate the knowledge of all the things I need to know to do the interesting stuff I've wanted to do and the critical mass of knowledge to be really innovative with technology.
It's kind of like saying that you can't play the game anymore because you have learned how to play it.
You do realize that this is basically what asking for a citation means, right? You can't just say 'go find it yourself'. If you write a scientific paper, you'd cite the paper and page you got the information from.
Aside for having provided citations and evidence to support my claims, that is not what I am talking about. Specifically, what I mean is, sometimes you have to do your own research and capture the supporting evidence, for example uncovering what the semantics of reactor operations are, not just how it works, but what it needs to do to work. I have done my own research and what you said was not congruent with what I already knew about reactor operations and why they *have* to perform venting.
You make an assertions, you might be asked to back it up. I'm actually fine with backing my assertions up, at least when I have time.
I think I have backed up my assertions with quality evidence from authoratative sources. As I said, you should only make an assertion if you can back them up and/. is repleat with social proof when it comes to nuclear power. I don't buy into all that groupthink because I think it hides facts about nuclear power and I'm looking for fact from quality sources. I think you would agree that it is complicated enough without all of the politics and emotion that just confuses the issue.
which implies that they were just opening reactor vents every two weeks, allowing the gasses to go directly to the atmosphere,
My statement was a simple statement of fact, I can't really control the assumptions that you make about them.
Reactors not venting: Conceded. However, I'll maintain that under normal operation, said venting doesn't appear to be on a '2 week schedule', and is very much a processed release, where the gasses are contained and absorbed until the radioactivity has time to die down.
Yes, that is also my understanding and there are likely variations depending on the reactor in question. What we have to keep in mind is that with over 400 reactors around the world, this happens roughly everyday.
Industry wide, Nuclear power is really sloppy about its effluents and deserves all it gets, and more, for not handling these materials with the respect they deserve. Having a discussion about *what* is being released and the scale of unauthorized releases is for another conversation.
Proving a negative is hard. Also, you were the one saying they vent, which is why I placed the onus on you. Proving a positive is also easier than proving a negative.
Providing the GDC should have been enough because when you read it you discover it is the applicant (the manufacturer of the reactor) requesting the rules from the NRC in response to a design criteria of the reactor be made so that they can operate legally. I've found the Nuclear Industry is very complex and you really need to amass a lot of background information to discuss it in a way that makes sense./. seems to view nuclear power with rose colored glasses and all to often people make statements based on either how they believe it works or their 'idealized' notions of how it should work. Neither are connected to fact. I tend to stick with talking about what I know and validating *before* I post. Besides I find it fascinating, it's been 15+ years so my library on this subject is pretty big now.
Consider also that it is difficult to point to information (outside of the GDC) that tells you that it is standard operation to release nuclear effluents, you don't expect a news report everytime they do something they are authorized to do because it would be a bit redundant. Maybe we should have it on the news, like a weather report.
You got this far, which is more than most, which indicates you have enough critical thinking skills to challenge your own assumptions and change your mind. I think we have reached parity in this part of the discussion and I commend you for being open minded enough to evaluate the facts for what they are.
These are our tax dollars being wasted to spy on us instead of building roads, hospitals and essential services. This is coming to other 5 eyes lands, so do we still believe that we are free or is it just a dressed up police state where we nervously ignore what is going on in the hope of one day being rich and above all of the concerns of the populous we all occupy.
As for the radioactivity, yes, it's highly radioactive, but properly processed the waste is in said highly radioactive state for a substantially shorter period of time. Basically, it'll reach background levels in a period shorter than human civilization, not longer.
Citations please, there are a whole lot of assumptions there that are already inconsistent with what I know so far. 208 Thallium has some very unusual properties in it's decay cycle that I am still learning about so if you have actual fact that goes beyond a wiki page (a peer reveiwed work would be great). 208 Th decays to its first daughter in about 5 minutes, so it's "hotter'n'hell" before it decays to a stable daughter.
The biggest issue here is it is an entirely new spent fuel product so it's a whole new process to handle it when we haven't dealt with 239 pu properly yet.
I'm fine with going with IFR, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'loose energy' (lose energy) for mining and processing Thorium
Apologies, tiredness. yes, lose energy. IFR is inherrently more efficient that Thorium because the energy expenditure to mine and process the fuel has been done. A loose;) calculation is 1.3-2.6 Tw hour advantage over the Thorium fuel cycle per Gw reactor installed if the reactor is disposed of in-situ.
Thorium is currently a byproduct of rare earth mining and refining; currently they're avoiding some of the richest Thorium ore because there's no demand for thorium, thus it's expensive to handle the ore.
More so when it is radioactive. It is also energetically expensive.
Start up a few thorium reactors such that there's a commercial demand for the metal, and it'll get mined along with the other stuff.
Don't get me wrong here but neither technology has a chance. Right now the oil and coal companies own the game and it's apolitical. Clinton killed IFR, and Bush demolished it. Forget your Th reactor for a moment. IFR was a game changer and that is why it was not just killed but obliterated. Why? because it produced hydrogen and electricity, i.e it would have been able to replace oil and maintain existing vehicle fleet with a different fuel, and coal because well electricity.
Featuring a fully enclosed waste management and fuel cycle, built in facilities for producing medical isotopes.
Using DU and weapons grade Pu as fuel with a 20% burn-up rate also makes it an anti-proliferation device, winding back our M.A.D world. Acutally makes the plutonium economy make sense as it drives scarcity, as opposed to abundence with a breeder - which is only good for making weapons.
Most nuclear supporters get fixated with the reactor technology, as opposed to the fuel or what the waste products are. Ask yourself if you know what the disposal stragegy is for the thorium fuel cycle's spent fuel? how does reprocessing work? can it burn pu and DU (possibly)? p>
IFR's is built in, especially if you site it within the waste facilities - because then you also dispose of the reactor without additional energetic inputs. Prototyped, tested, operation and retired without an accident. A rarity for the nuclear industry.
America already has designed the replacement energetic technology for the prototype A/BWR reactors, coal and, oil, whilst designing a technology to export peace around the world by dis-arming it from nuclear weapons. But big oil and coal killed that idea because they really need all that money to keep flowing.
My study on American law to try to understand the funding model for Nuclear led me to conclude that oil companies are using the subsidy model for Nuclear to plunder billions of dollars from the taxpayer in a repeat of the scenario that led to the great depression. Now you might say to me 'well Mr Kaos yada yada new deal blah Roosevelt etc' to which I would encourage you to check out what PUCHA is and
You do realize that nuclear reactors don't release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions?
My original response was NRC guidelines permit the venting of radioactive effluents into the environment every two weeks Firethorn. Which I have supported with references to the GDC and CFR.
These points are slightly divergent however, I think you would agree that I have supported my point regarding the authorized frequency of ventings.
You expanded to Major releases are on the order of once a decade or more and citation that plants routinely vent radioactive materials into the environment outside of emergency circumstances
You have to read the GDC to understand why the regulations are in place. They exist for a reason and sometimes you have to go and research things yourself to gain the knowledge. For example, you might download EPA data and query it to find out something about the Nuclear Industries CFC emissions. The data is available, it just isn't packaged and you have to be prepared to do the work yourself.
When you look at how a Nuclear reactor works you discover that an operating reactor needs to do venting at that frequency because the reactor generates gasses and radio-isotopes that poison the reaction. They collect the gasses in tank, allow these gaseous radio-isotopes to stabilize and then release them because they only have a finite amount of storage space which is what determines the frequency of their releases.
I'm not talking about major or emergency ventings, I'm talking about standard operational ventings under normal operating conditions. The regulations exist to allow them to do these ventings because they *need* to do these ventings for the reactor to continue to function.
I have provided you with the highest quality citation, the actual design criteria for a Nuclear Reactor. Since this is not enough I suggest you read this patent Method for treating gaseous effluents emitted from a nuclear reactor so that you understand why nuclear reactors do release radioactivity under normal operating conditions.
You say your knowledge is different, so can you supply citations to support your claim as I have supported mine? Have you questioned your own reasoning to ask yourself 'What fact is this statement based on?' and challenged your assumptions? I'll evaluate what you have to say however, like yourself, what I do depends on the qualities of the citations and you are yet to provide any quality knowledge that supports your statement and is directly contrary to how I know a Nuclear Reactor works.
The next part is There is no evidence that the AP-1000 series improves on that. What evidence or citations can you provide that the venting volme and frequency of the AP1000 considering it is the same fundamental technology? I'm sure there is however what citations/evidence can you provide that an AP1000 does not release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions?
Besides all that, you're missing the point I think - I'm not talking about retrofitting improvements, I'm talking about incorporating improvements into the design of NEW plants.
Which brings us back to the point I originally made that the AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design for NEW plants.
That's certainly part of it. Doesn't mean that the containment dome isn't still strong as all heck. They've also reduced the amount of pipping and valves needed, and otherwise simplified and made the systems more robust.
None of which were put in place for the reason you originally stated Modern, actual modern nuclear plants would be far safer. or change the fact that By some ironic quirk TMI *is* one of the safest designs because it was designed to be resistan
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TEPCO has proven that you cannot trust any of their claims.
Indeed, it would seem to be the one reliable thing that have done.
It's really hard to say, I think - the radiation exposure it possibly a risk factor.
It's not radiation exposure so much as the absorption of radionuclides from the reactors. From the amount of seawater used to cool the plant plutonium chloride is extremely likely to have been created.
But how long does it take from exposure to detection of cancer is a detail I'm not sure about.
Is 4 1/2 years enough time after the radiation exposure for cancer to develop and be detected?
From what I've learned about Chernobyl, I was expecting six years. I really hope it is unrelated because for it to be this early it is concerning about how much and how energetic the elements released were. Only TEPCO can tell us.
Citation please. Specifically which statistics and which science are you referring to?
Really. You're suggesting a man working at a site containing three exploded Nuclear Reactors in some form of melt down is *unlikely* to have contracted cancer from being exposed to the variety of radionuclides absorbed there. That is truly a breathtaking leap of faith considering you don't know what work he did there and how long he did it for. Instead, you're saying we should be looking at his personal life for a *more likely cause* like smoking cigarettes. Now there is a potent warning against the dangers of cigarettes.
Perhaps we shouldn't rule out the possibility of exposure to highly soluble plutonium chloride created when sea water was pumped into the reactor cores to cool them. Coincidentally it is an iron analogue that would probably circulate in the blood as a highly energetic alpha emitter were you to absorb enough of it.
Well there is something we can agree on. These people risked being exposed to the highly energetic elements ejected when those three reactors exploded and worked there for days and months after the disaster. No one really knows how much material was there and because of their work we are all indebted to them for the situation not becoming any worse. I hope every single one of them and their families are looked after for the rest of their lives.
TEPCO executives may have been assholes, however the TEPCO workers are real life heros.
Why is it such a surprise that they won't give up the thing that helps take it away.
I suspect the bulk of the respondents simply have no idea and no experience with how to actually enjoy an automobile.
At just over 300hp my 2 seater Z car restoration, with suspension tuned to my body weight is exactly what you are talking about. I'm building another one now - great fun, much more fun than a phone on the twisty back roads. No traction on the phone, it just slides, the car however handles like a go-kart. ;)
Well it is, as long as you can be allowed to upgrade/replace aging reactors and not blocked by environmentalists and anti-nuke protesters from building a safer replacement.
In the US then 2005 energy act prevents those people and local councils from interfering with the placement of nuclear facilities.
It is the radio-isotopes ejected from the exploding reactors that are the threat to people, as opposed to the radiation. Radioactive *isotopes* analogue other elements when presented to a metabolism in the food chain. Take plutonium for example, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, is a high energy alpha emitter and is extremely toxic.
Oppenheimer's work found that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body and Leukemia is a consequence of absorbing plutonium chloride. Whether you believe this was related or not to Fukushima depends on if you think this man absorbed a microgram or two of 239 pu from cleaning up a recently exploded nuclear reactor.
Some radioactive isotopes analogue appear to be nutrients to living metabolisms, so they bio-accumulate in the food chain. They cannot be detected with the senses like (taste, touch etc) no matter how toxic to life processes they are.
Once a radio-isotope is inside the body, the body identifies it as a nutrient and uses it as such. If it is deposited in the bones, in the case of a calcium analogue like strontium 90 as an example, it will continue to emit radiation creating a condition for cancer to incubate (typically 6 years). An iron analogue, like plutonium 239, will most likely end up where all the other iron in the body goes.
When the subject dies and is buried or cremated those radionuclides are released back into the environment where it is available to be ingested again. This is the nature of radioactive isotopes and the primary reason containment of Nuclear industry radio isotope effluent is so important.
Looking to the patterns of absorption, six years after Chernobyl the W.H.O were recording the incidents of thyroid cancer in children increasing in thousands per month before their funding to continue recording the data was pulled by the IAEA, who maintain interdiction powers over the WHO publishing about matters involving the Nuclear Industry and health reporting.
So it is reasonable to expect 2017 as the *start* of seeing the direct effects of people who have been exposed to radioisotopes either in the air (through fallout) or the water table as directly from the accident, hopefully there will be very few. That these cases are happening in 2015 suggests that the people working at the reactor suffered much more exposure than we were led to believe by TEPCO.
It kind of boggles my mind why Microsoft bothered to make PowerShell so unique and so incompatible with a well-known Unix shell like Bash.
PowerShell isn't always totally awful, but where the heck is stuff like less, tail, head, etc? IIRC the last time I went looking for it, PowerShell's version of tail and grep are totally retarded and difficult next to the relative simplicity of $foo | tail -n 10 or something.
This is why it is called 'Powers Hell' because of the brain fuck you get from using it. It has a long way to go before it reaches the elegance of shell. The object paradigm and perlishness is interesting.
They could have just made it a near-bash clone, along with a non-retarded shell window that supported putty or ConEmu-style terminal features and it would be SO MUCH better.
My question is whether it was just part of the "we're microsoft" culture of pretending that nothing else exists or whether it was some deliberately conspiratorial move to force an investment of time and effort on the part of Windows admins to keep them in the fold versus learning a skill that could be portable to Unix shells.
I've been spending a lot of time in the PS space lately to see if I can apply decades of shell programming to PS and found that I can easily. If MS are expecting this goal then they have failed because it took me an afternoon writing regular expressions to convert PS into shell scripts that ran. There are things to like and hate about PS however I think it is a good move on MS's part along with ssh.
It really is just proof that the *IX paradigm was the correct one all along and now many MS enthusiasts will start to understand why it is the right way - even if the PS offering is still messy and rough. Coupled with ssh I can administer MS boxes with ruthless efficiency that has been impossible in the MS space up until now.
And this looks like another reason that it does.
PU-239 is not waste, and should not be stored and allowed to decay naturally. PU-239 is one of three (U-233, U-235 being the other two) 'drivers' that can be used to sustain nuclear reactors in a LFTR thorium based reactor.
I never said it was and even if you use a thorium based reactor with 239 pu as an neutron source you still need a place to store pu-239.
It's insane to allow this valuable material to be simply stored, as if it's completely useless.
We need to switch nuclear power from the uranium based fuel cycle over to thorium, preferably using LFTR tech to get the job done.
I would suggest that IFR technology is more appropriate in this role as it burns and existing transuranics instead of creating a new radio-isotope product. Using Thorium means you have two problems instead of one. Can you show me the entire fuel cycle for thorium?
With imagination and planning you would realize that by building and siting a fuel containment facility you would also have a suitable site for reprocessing and reactor facilities. That way you could *choose* which reactor technology you can deploy.
At the same time, these new reactors are not only safer (they can't melt down) but can also rid us of the legacy of high level 'nuclear waste' from the uranium cycle, by using that very same 'waste' as FUEL, and at the same time converting it down to much safer low-level radioactive 'waste'
Well that is an untested assumption as you can only understand what the basis design issues are by actually running one. So far IFR is the only one that has actually been constructed, run and tested in such a failure mode (can't melt down) with the operational goal of burning up transuranics. Thorium reactors is a completely new and untested technology.
Thorium reactors create a new waste stream of 208 Thallium, It's a gamma emitter, not a alpha emitter like 239 pu - so it's pretty nasty stuff.
It has lots of halflives (more than the 20 or so) and many, many daughter products. Now I'm not sure if the mechanism is spontaneous fission that does this (like DU) but because it is a gamma emitter it would be a lot harder to deal with than plutonium. I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with the properties of the metal being more like aluminum than like lead.
Don't take that as a criticism of Thorium reactor technology though, it's got good anti-proliferation characteristics however I think if you are going to advocate the technology you really have to have a salient and realistic look at the whole fuel cycle and how you manage it especially if you want to avoid the mistakes of the old technology.
Even if you implement Thorium reactors you still need a place to store and process fuel, more so if you intend to burn 239 pu. Additionally I am yet to see a reference to the radio isotope burn up rate of a Thorium reactor that would allow assessment of its capacity to transmute transuranic elements from the traditional fuel cycle.
hahahahahahaaha!!! Nice one!
One of the most major criticisms of Yucca Mountain was that the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility could not be applied to Yucca's geology. The reason to choose a specific geology (in addition to being seisemically stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to control the the amount of time ground water took to travel through the facility carrying radioactive isotopes, eventually, into the water table. If the amount of time it takes exceeds the decay rate of the longest lived radio-isotopes then the facility was providing defense in depth.
In addition, as a site like that would be containing pu-239, whose half life is around 25000 years, after considering the daughter products you need a geology capable of containing it for 500,000 years, which is what the original specification called for.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology (pdf) revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. The reason is Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash.
Feild studies have established that crystaline rocks like granite and bentonite clays can acheive this control. So far Finland is on track to be the first with an active facility with a Swedish facility also in the works.
Curiously, getting this right should be the one thing pro and anti nuclear folk should be able to agree on, if only for their own reasons. For Nuclear power to continue operating such a storage facility is essential so that new reactors can be deployed and materials removed from reactor sites. For people against Nuclear power such a facility would improve the safety of the industry as a whole by providing a place to store the materials permanently where there ingress into the environment can be controlled.
The DOE have got to build a facility somewhere. The right location has to be chosen because of all the rail and other infrastructure required to move the spent fuel has to be funded and built. This should not be a difficult thing for America to achieve by applying a scientific approach to selecting the site and building it instead of the politics used to select Yucca Mountain.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
I think you are right the people I speak to in Silicon Valley are really tiresomely clueless and they don't listen so you just do what they ask, show them how to solve a problem from time to time and just let them take credit for it. I think that they are working so hard there that they don't have time to think. I suspect that all the 90+ hour work weeks really erode their social skills. The whole old vs young doesn't make much sense because everyone has or will be young or old.
I'm in Australia and I haven't encountered this here and I hope I don't because if it is true then IT is doomed, who would want to invest all that time studying for a career that isn't going to last anyway.
If this is a continuing trend then I think we are looking forward to a long stagnant period in IT. Older people have more experience and younger people have more energy so if IT misses out on that collaboration for a few years then we are going to go through a period of 'more of the same' until the 'ah-ha' moment.
It's taken me years just to accumulate the knowledge of all the things I need to know to do the interesting stuff I've wanted to do and the critical mass of knowledge to be really innovative with technology.
It's kind of like saying that you can't play the game anymore because you have learned how to play it.
i am 30 and what is this
Something you will, inevitabley face very soon.
Aside for having provided citations and evidence to support my claims, that is not what I am talking about. Specifically, what I mean is, sometimes you have to do your own research and capture the supporting evidence, for example uncovering what the semantics of reactor operations are, not just how it works, but what it needs to do to work. I have done my own research and what you said was not congruent with what I already knew about reactor operations and why they *have* to perform venting.
I think I have backed up my assertions with quality evidence from authoratative sources. As I said, you should only make an assertion if you can back them up and /. is repleat with social proof when it comes to nuclear power. I don't buy into all that groupthink because I think it hides facts about nuclear power and I'm looking for fact from quality sources. I think you would agree that it is complicated enough without all of the politics and emotion that just confuses the issue.
My statement was a simple statement of fact, I can't really control the assumptions that you make about them.
Yes, that is also my understanding and there are likely variations depending on the reactor in question. What we have to keep in mind is that with over 400 reactors around the world, this happens roughly everyday.
Industry wide, Nuclear power is really sloppy about its effluents and deserves all it gets, and more, for not handling these materials with the respect they deserve. Having a discussion about *what* is being released and the scale of unauthorized releases is for another conversation.
Providing the GDC should have been enough because when you read it you discover it is the applicant (the manufacturer of the reactor) requesting the rules from the NRC in response to a design criteria of the reactor be made so that they can operate legally. I've found the Nuclear Industry is very complex and you really need to amass a lot of background information to discuss it in a way that makes sense. /. seems to view nuclear power with rose colored glasses and all to often people make statements based on either how they believe it works or their 'idealized' notions of how it should work. Neither are connected to fact. I tend to stick with talking about what I know and validating *before* I post. Besides I find it fascinating, it's been 15+ years so my library on this subject is pretty big now.
Consider also that it is difficult to point to information (outside of the GDC) that tells you that it is standard operation to release nuclear effluents, you don't expect a news report everytime they do something they are authorized to do because it would be a bit redundant. Maybe we should have it on the news, like a weather report.
You got this far, which is more than most, which indicates you have enough critical thinking skills to challenge your own assumptions and change your mind. I think we have reached parity in this part of the discussion and I commend you for being open minded enough to evaluate the facts for what they are.
There is an emergency blackmail list being compiled now to undermine any possible defensive legislation being presented to the house.
These are our tax dollars being wasted to spy on us instead of building roads, hospitals and essential services. This is coming to other 5 eyes lands, so do we still believe that we are free or is it just a dressed up police state where we nervously ignore what is going on in the hope of one day being rich and above all of the concerns of the populous we all occupy.
Citations please, there are a whole lot of assumptions there that are already inconsistent with what I know so far. 208 Thallium has some very unusual properties in it's decay cycle that I am still learning about so if you have actual fact that goes beyond a wiki page (a peer reveiwed work would be great). 208 Th decays to its first daughter in about 5 minutes, so it's "hotter'n'hell" before it decays to a stable daughter.
The biggest issue here is it is an entirely new spent fuel product so it's a whole new process to handle it when we haven't dealt with 239 pu properly yet.
Apologies, tiredness. yes, lose energy. IFR is inherrently more efficient that Thorium because the energy expenditure to mine and process the fuel has been done. A loose ;) calculation is 1.3-2.6 Tw hour advantage over the Thorium fuel cycle per Gw reactor installed if the reactor is disposed of in-situ.
More so when it is radioactive. It is also energetically expensive.
Don't get me wrong here but neither technology has a chance. Right now the oil and coal companies own the game and it's apolitical. Clinton killed IFR, and Bush demolished it. Forget your Th reactor for a moment. IFR was a game changer and that is why it was not just killed but obliterated. Why? because it produced hydrogen and electricity, i.e it would have been able to replace oil and maintain existing vehicle fleet with a different fuel, and coal because well electricity.
Featuring a fully enclosed waste management and fuel cycle, built in facilities for producing medical isotopes.
Using DU and weapons grade Pu as fuel with a 20% burn-up rate also makes it an anti-proliferation device, winding back our M.A.D world. Acutally makes the plutonium economy make sense as it drives scarcity, as opposed to abundence with a breeder - which is only good for making weapons.
Most nuclear supporters get fixated with the reactor technology, as opposed to the fuel or what the waste products are. Ask yourself if you know what the disposal stragegy is for the thorium fuel cycle's spent fuel? how does reprocessing work? can it burn pu and DU (possibly)? p> IFR's is built in, especially if you site it within the waste facilities - because then you also dispose of the reactor without additional energetic inputs. Prototyped, tested, operation and retired without an accident. A rarity for the nuclear industry.
America already has designed the replacement energetic technology for the prototype A/BWR reactors, coal and, oil, whilst designing a technology to export peace around the world by dis-arming it from nuclear weapons. But big oil and coal killed that idea because they really need all that money to keep flowing.
My study on American law to try to understand the funding model for Nuclear led me to conclude that oil companies are using the subsidy model for Nuclear to plunder billions of dollars from the taxpayer in a repeat of the scenario that led to the great depression. Now you might say to me 'well Mr Kaos yada yada new deal blah Roosevelt etc' to which I would encourage you to check out what PUCHA is and
You do realize that nuclear reactors don't release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions?
My original response was NRC guidelines permit the venting of radioactive effluents into the environment every two weeks Firethorn. Which I have supported with references to the GDC and CFR.
These points are slightly divergent however, I think you would agree that I have supported my point regarding the authorized frequency of ventings.
You expanded to Major releases are on the order of once a decade or more and citation that plants routinely vent radioactive materials into the environment outside of emergency circumstances
You have to read the GDC to understand why the regulations are in place. They exist for a reason and sometimes you have to go and research things yourself to gain the knowledge. For example, you might download EPA data and query it to find out something about the Nuclear Industries CFC emissions. The data is available, it just isn't packaged and you have to be prepared to do the work yourself.
When you look at how a Nuclear reactor works you discover that an operating reactor needs to do venting at that frequency because the reactor generates gasses and radio-isotopes that poison the reaction. They collect the gasses in tank, allow these gaseous radio-isotopes to stabilize and then release them because they only have a finite amount of storage space which is what determines the frequency of their releases.
I'm not talking about major or emergency ventings, I'm talking about standard operational ventings under normal operating conditions. The regulations exist to allow them to do these ventings because they *need* to do these ventings for the reactor to continue to function.
I have provided you with the highest quality citation, the actual design criteria for a Nuclear Reactor. Since this is not enough I suggest you read this patent Method for treating gaseous effluents emitted from a nuclear reactor so that you understand why nuclear reactors do release radioactivity under normal operating conditions.
You say your knowledge is different, so can you supply citations to support your claim as I have supported mine? Have you questioned your own reasoning to ask yourself 'What fact is this statement based on?' and challenged your assumptions? I'll evaluate what you have to say however, like yourself, what I do depends on the qualities of the citations and you are yet to provide any quality knowledge that supports your statement and is directly contrary to how I know a Nuclear Reactor works.
The next part is There is no evidence that the AP-1000 series improves on that. What evidence or citations can you provide that the venting volme and frequency of the AP1000 considering it is the same fundamental technology? I'm sure there is however what citations/evidence can you provide that an AP1000 does not release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions?
Which brings us back to the point I originally made that the AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design for NEW plants.
None of which were put in place for the reason you originally stated Modern, actual modern nuclear plants would be far safer. or change the fact that By some ironic quirk TMI *is* one of the safest designs because it was designed to be resistan
Their people have always kicked in doors while normal people look at the locks and shrug and walk away.
Lock are only there to remind honest people that they aren't supposed to be in there.
Prescient film, underrated in my opinion.
Too many secrets.
It seems more like overt surveillance now.
My pseudonymity aches in agreement.
Nice - Mod parent funny, or perhaps ironic, sad maybe!