"methane is a more potent ghg, but only really sticks around in the upper atm for 25 to 125 years before it breaks down to co2+h2o. co2 sticks around until the next epoch of mass vegetation. cumulatively (if you integrate it wrt dt), co2 is still much worse, and methane is just delayed co2."
So, I'm confused. If it's going to become CO2 anyhow, isn't it better to turn it into CO2 quickly, than to allow it to have the *greater* Greenhouse effect for 75 years, then have the same effect for the next several hundred years?
I mean, of course, it's better for it to not get released *at all* in the first place, but. . . if it's going to be released naturally anyhow, and we can't stop it (which isn't guaranteed to be the case, but might be), wouldn't it be better to capture/mine it, maybe gain some benefit from it burning, perhaps reduce the amount of shale gas which would otherwise be burnt (and which is much less likely to be released, if we don't intentionally release it by fracking).
"Yes, it is being pirated. We estimate 2 pirated copies for every one sold. But why should we care, our revenue from this product is great!"
Or you can look at it that, to some extent, the paying customers are subsidizing the people who don't pay (I know that's not an exactly true statement, because in general, the copyright business model is that additional customers == increased profit, not decreased cost to all customers; but, I do think in some cases, if companies/artists thought they honestly would get a massive number of sales (millions of copies sold instead of maybe hundreds of thousands) at, say $5/copy instead of $20/copy, they might go for it.
The problem is though, that piracy means that while you might get some additional sales by lowering the price, you'll still not get sales that come close to being representative of your actual user-base.
Going back to the borland example, they were charging, what, probably $50 or $100 per license for Turbo Pascal? If they weren't getting pirated 2-to-1, they could have dropped their price by 30 or 40% and still made *more money*, which would be a win for basically everyone.
But the point is, that the waste that's generated is not the *long-term* 100,000 year problem that everyone goes on and on about. It's a much, much shorter term, manageable problem. (As far as I know that's also true of the equipment which also gets contaminated in a nuclear facility, that it doesn't remain radioactive long-term? Please correct me if I'm wrong).
Also, more to the point, is that we could potentially stop mining any "new" uranium for 500-1000 years, so our tonnage of nuclear waste would level off. Someone (I think you but don't remember who, now), earlier in the thread, said that breeder reactors create more waste, because of the breeding, but that get's down to a matter of interpretation - how are you defining "waste".
Most people just look at the total tonnage of fuel mixture - so, if I have a tonne of waste, which is 95% U-238, and 5% mixture of fission products and actinides created by neutron capture, people say that's a "tonne of waste". If I take it, cycle it through an S-PRISM, and change the makeup to 93% U-238, 7% fission products and actinides, I still have "1 tonne" of waste, so I haven't created more waste, I've just changed the composition of the waste.
Now, if GE-H can get permission to build the ARC (Advanced Recycling Center), they can seperate out the fission products, possibly sell some of them as industrial or medical isotopes, and vitrify the rest. Now we have maybe 950kg of fuel mix, and maybe 50kg of true "waste" which we can vitrify, seal the glass in durable casks, and bury for 300 years in a suitable repository, and we've effectively solved the waste problem (after the 300 years, maybe we pull the stuff out of the repo, seperate it from the glass, re-use the glass, and bury the by-then almost non-radioactive waste products in an old uranium mine or something.
Personally, I think the Obama administration knows that Iran wouldn't return the drone, but they are going through the *formality* of requesting it back before taking. . . interventionary action, let's call it.
I mean, they have to at least give peace a chance, but I'm pretty sure they're not going to just let Iran have continuing access to that drone. If Iran had actually agreed to return it, then we could have done this the easy way. . .
In math, you might not always be interested in testing that someone can calculate the right answer. Maybe you actually are interested in seeing if someone can spot that the other answers are all order-of-magnitude wrong.
An occasional question like that, which you *can* short-circuit (although, some students may still calculate it if they haven't learned basic algebraic rules, and approximation, well enough), is actually a good thing, in my book.
I think kids *should* learn to be able to learn how to do things quickly using approximation and order-of-magnitude analysis.
Even bothering to fully calculate out the "correct" answer is "doing it wrong" with a multiple choice test if there's no other answers which are remotely close to being right.
I just simplified the answer to being approximately 40 * 3 = 120, and knew the answer would be larger-than 120, but only slightly, and picked the only answer that was remotely close to that, which meant the problem took me about 2 seconds. With multiple choice, you can often save time by getting a "closest too" approximation and picking that. . . of course, if they put multiple answers that are close to the approximation, you have to calculate it, but on a lot of those questions, the wrong answers were off by orders of magnitude, and you can immediately dismiss them as obviously wrong.
Wonder how many children and adults ever learn to recognize obviously wrong answers and exclude them from consideration to speed up taking multiple choice tests?
Just wanted to add a hopefully useful note: at least in theory, we don't have to store the "95%" (although in practice, that might be what current plans call for, as it might be simpler/cheaper to do that).
Reactor Grade Enriched Uranium fuel is about 95% U-238, and 5% U-235. U-238 is non-radioactive. After running the fuel through a reactor, most of the 5% of U-235 will be fissioned, and if I understand correctly, most of those fission products are highly radioactive (but only for about 300 years). During its time in the reactor, some of the U-238 will capture neutrons and be converted into isotopes of Plutonium. The Plutonium is radioactive, and if not burned in a fast reactor, will need to be disposed of as "waste". It seems like the figure I've heard for how much plutonium is generated in a light water reactor is somewhere around 3% of the original fuel? Not sure, but it was pretty low.
So, in theory, somewhere around 90 percent or so of the "waste" is non-radioactive U-238, which could at least potentially be separated from the rest of the waste, and separately disposed of as non-radioactive tailings (could be, for example, maybe buried back in the mines it was extracted from).
So, if only 5% of the fuel is actually fuel, how is it that this PRISM reactor can extract 100% energy, theoretically speaking? Above I mentioned that a low percentage of U-238 captures neutrons and becomes plutonium, which is both radioactive and fissile.
In a Fast Reactor (such as the PRISM), eventually you can convert almost all of the U-238 to plutonium (a little bit at a time, so you never have a large inventory of Pu at once), then fission the plutonium.
I think one really important point, which distinguishes between nuclear "efficiency" and efficiency of solar/wind, is that when nuclear plants inefficiently consume nuclear fuel, all the unused energy is still there for capture and use later with almost no penalty.
One could argue the same is true for solar and wind, in that the sun keeps shining, the wind keeps blowing, so it doesn't really matter that it's not efficient.
So, in the end, what it comes down to is cost/kWh. That's really the only metric that's meaningful. The problem is, that especially for solar, and somewhat for wind, the very low efficiency translates to a high cost/kWh generated.
This is somewhat true for nuclear as well - right now it's more expensive than it could or should be. But nuclear gets by, because the amount of energy in each tonne of fuel is so enormous, and steam turbines are efficient "enough", that the economics for "expensive" nuclear are still competitive with other energy sources.
Nuclear also has a lot of potential to come down in price. Most of the cost of nuclear power, from what I've found in trying to research the subject, comes not from fuel, but from the actual generation infrastructure (which is not so different from the situation with solar and wind power).
But, the difference between nuclear and solar/wind with regards to financial competitiveness, is that a large part of the cost of nuclear power is very high regulatory costs, very low economies of scale (few nuclear plants are built per year, and in the U.S., we're only now starting to build new plants after a 30 year period in which no new plants were started), and high loan/financing costs.
Solar and Wind are starting to have economies of scale kick in, and the prices have been dropping to a point where, I won't say the price can't drop more, but we probably can't expect a lot of additional price decreases.
Nuclear is so "overpriced" right now, there is a lot of room for the cost of building nuclear plants to come down - *without sacrificing safety*.
Additionally, newer designs being developed right now should be cheaper to build because they are designed to be simpler, standardized, and in some cases, manufactured in factories (search for "Small Modular Reactor").
The GE-H S-PRISM discussed in this article is one such small modular reactor concept. The idea is that if they can build smaller nuclear plants, then utilities can buy "less" at a time, thereby saving money on loan/financing costs, and not taking the risk of buying such a big plant that they can't sell all the power they produce. Additionally, the smaller, factory made reactors should be able to be produced a bit cheaper using the normal tools and techniques of the industrial revolution which made many other manufactured good substantially cheaper than comparable goods which are 'hand-made'.
You should really read up on the "Integral Fast Reactor" - the S-PRISM this article is about is evolved from the technology developed in the IFR project.
The main potential safety weakness of an IFR is the possibility of sodium leaks leading to a sodium fire (I'm not sure how they manage this risk; it certainly seems like a potentially nasty problem, but I'm sure they've taken some sort of measures to try to prevent that from happening; I hope they are effective).
But, Sodium fires aside, the type of problems you had an Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima-Daiichi simply cannot happen in an IFR-style reactor. You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl; you can't get a meltdown; you don't have to worry about steam pressure overwhelming the containment (because water is not used as the coolant, so hence no steam), and you can't get a hydrogen explosion (again, no water in the reactor).
You might get a hydrogen explosion if, somehow, water started mixing with the sodium, as sodium and water will combine to form sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas, but if they can keep water out of the reactor, then no hydrogen explosions.
So far as I know, there have only been a few sodium fires amongst all the world's sodium cooled reactors over the last 60 years - the most famous one was in Japan back in the late 90's or early 00's, and while that scared the public, it wasn't actually a disaster - just a relatively minor industrial accident in the end. I've never heard of a sodium fire at a nuclear plant becoming a major problem, so I don't think the risk of sodium fires is actually a big, unmanageable 'ticking time bomb', but again, I'm no expert.
Still, I think the technology looks *very* interesting. Let's face it, we have a nuclear waste problem, and either IFR or another type of fast reactor (such as a molten salt fast reactor) are basically the only way to solve that problem. Let's stop fighting the solution to the nuclear waste problem. It truly is the only realistic solution - burn off that 100,000 year "plutonium problem".
I think the point is, while it might not be *typical* for both parents to be home in the afternoon and napping, it's not completely unusual either. There are plenty of people who have to work 3rd shift (not just factory workers, but also people like doctors, nurses, EMT, police, fire, utility workers (the power plant's gotta run all the time; power lines might need repaired at 2am), etc), and in such households, it woudn't be strange for whoever is the primary caregiver to put the kids down for a nap while the "breadwinner" is sleeping so that they can go to work rested at 6 or 8 or 10pm. If the kids and the spouse are napping, why not take the opportunity to get a little rest yourself?
"But maybe it should be in your yard instead of mine,"
Yeah, except you live three blocks down from me, and even though I *really, really* want a nuclear plant in my back yard, you and your pals do everything you can to make sure it will never happen.
Here's an idea for people who don't want a nuclear facility in their backyard: MOVE. It's easier for the NIMBY's to change backyards, than to find any site in the U.S. where there's not a single NIMBY already present. Nuclear plants gotta be built somewhere. If one's going in your backyard and you don't like it, shut up and move.
"I was there in the immediate aftermath and people had to cut down energy usage, but the country coped."
Yes. For awhile. Do you think that Japan can really survive, and feed it's current population, if they have to dramatically reduce power consumption basically forever?
Well, you say, Wind and Solar. Ok, so Japan is a relatively small and densely populated island nation. Their ability to build wind and solar on-shore is very limited. So, that means offshore. Building things off-shore is very, very expensive, which means the power produced by off-shore wind (or solar; although I don't think I've ever heard of an off-shore solar project, but I suppose it would be perfectly possible with enough money) would be very expensive power.
Japan, in order to feed and provide for itself, from what I've heard, depends pretty heavily on industrial exports to make money which they can then trade for food and resources/materials. If your power is more expensive than most other nations, how will you be able to produce goods for export at a price that most other nations are willing to pay?
For example, according to Wikipedia's page on Cost of Electricity By Source, on-shore wind is the only form of renewable energy which is projected to be cost competitive with coal, gas, or nuclear.
At twice as much cost as "too expensive" (at least, that's what a lot of anti-nuke pro-renewables advocates try to say) nuclear, off-shore wind really seems like a non-starter for Japan.
There's one other factor which I'm pretty sure is not even reflected in the above figures. . . In order to get more than 20% of your power from renewables, you MUST, MUST implement large-scale energy storage solutions. There's some companies working on ideas on how to do this (compressed gas, flywheels, and molten salts are three interesting looking approaches). I have no idea what it'll cost to implement massive amounts of energy storage, but I'm sure it can't be cheap.
It'll be interesting to see. I'd love to be wrong - I'd love for Japan, and the rest of the world to be able to generate sufficient supplies of power, at competitive/affordable prices, from renewable power. I just don't see how you make that happen.
One possibility which, I dunno why, but for some reason, often isn't discussed is "Enhanced Geothermal Power". Perhaps Japan can implement EGP on a large scale - although, since they are already one of the most tectonically active places on earth, they probably don't want to risk triggering *more* earthquakes by trying to do EGP, or at least it might be politically unpopular because of fear, even if it isn't a real threat.
This, mostly, doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I'm waiting for it to happen. . .
Essentially, the problem is that when another company is being payed hourly to develop a product for you, mostly they care about selling you hours, not selling you good software.
So, as long as the Indian companies are working at selling hours instead of copies of software, they perhaps don't have much incentive to really get it right. But, once some Indian companies realize they can just make the software and publish it themselves, selling directly to customers, then the incentives change - the customers won't buy bad software, so they'll need to make sure they develop the programs to a certain level of quality (perhaps they can get away with *lower* quality, as long as it's "good enough" and is cheaper than the competition).
I might just be ignorant, but so far, it doesn't seem like theirs been any big self-publishing software companies developing in India (and China, and other developing nations that are starting to build tech companies), but I don't see why it couldn't happen, and that worries me far more than "outsourcing".
I feel that the U.S. and Europe are far too complacent and far too smug about being "intellectually superior", and figuring we can keep our economy alive, despite losing manufacturing and lots of other jobs, by having a "knowledge economy", as if the rest of the world for some reason can't develop their own tech sectors that can out-compete ours. I mean, we already know that most of the rest of the world does better in school than U.S. students, so how is that going to work?
Not easy to interface third party DVRs, computers, etc to cable boxes/cable systems. Cable card seems a broken and dead standard. Wouldn't be a problem except encryption means you can't just hook any potential HD TV equipment you might have to the cable and expect it to be able to receive all channels.
Still based around a temporal "broadcast" paradigm of "you watch it when we air it or you have to record it yourself for later viewing". Why not make all TV on-demand (except for, perhaps, special news coverage in an emergency, live speeches, etc (and even those could be made available on-demand afterwords). There has been some progress towards on-demand TV by cable operators, but still doesn't cover all programming.
I have to pay for channels I never watch and don't want. Please un-bundle tv channels. I'd like to take it a step further and have reasonable prices for individual shows/series. I mean, maybe I want to watch one series from HBO or Showtime or AMC or whoever, but don't care about the rest of their programming. Why can't I pay for access to just that series, and to be able to watch past seasons, etc?
High-Def-Copy-Protection (HDCP). Seriously, I hate DRM. I'm not trying to rip off the TV companies. I just want to be able to watch HD movies and TV shows which I've legally payed for and acquired access to, on my circa 2006 computer monitor, from my computer, without having to buy a *different* monitor, just because my "old" monitor doesn't support HDCP.
It's not clear whether the passwords are plaintext, un-salted hashes, or salted hashes. plaintext and un-salted would be pretty bad. If the passwords have a long random salt, they would resist rainbow-table attacks, I think?
"so they hire some $40 per month security company to secure their servers. There must be 1000's of those servers out there ripe for raping."
If each customer is paying $40 per month, and their are thousands of customers, wouldn't that be a $40,000+ per month security company? For that kind of cash, they should be competent. When I buy into a company like that, I figure I'm supposed to be getting more than $40/mo worth of security expertise, because I'm *sharing* the costs with thousands of other customers.
Sadly, however, you're probably right that many hosting companies don't really have sufficient expertise to know how to secure their customers' servers for them. But, it's not because they aren't being paid enough, it's because they aren't spending the money on the right things.
The people of California have no say over who can hang out in the International Waters off their coast. They might not like it, but without declaring war and attacking the ship, violating the Law of the Sea in the process, it doesn't matter, AT ALL what some eco-numbnuts in California think about this.
Seriously, the solution seems obvious. Telecommute some days (if you're allowed to), but make an appearance at least once a week, have lunch and/or meetings with with people (especially your boss) to keep you in the loop, and keep you and your work visible to them.
All what? Nuclear waste? Probably not a terribly bad idea, in reality, but good luck with convincing the public. Unfortunately, after the water pollution problems of the 60's and 70's, the public is (understandably) wary of dumping any waste products into water supplies.
Whether it's technically a feasible way to deal with nuclear waste and whether it really would create any problems, the public will largely assume it will create a problem, and blame every ill they happen to have thereafter on it.
If someone's been shot, I think a doctor can sew them up and give them a blood transfusion and antibiotics, etc, without believing in evolution. It's also possible to believe in micro-evolution (small changes within a species - e.g. a bacteria developing drug resistance), without believing that evolution is responsible for the origin of species.
Also, it really doesn't seem like it would matter what you believe regarding the origin of species for most "conventional" medicine, but it might be more important if you are a "research" doctor researching new diseases and possible treatments. For a family practitioner, surgeon, etc, it doesn't seem like it would matter that much.
As for the example of, "the patient is succumbing to an infection not because of resistant bacteria but because God wants him to die?", I think it's a pretty big leap to assume that someone who believes that God created life would just assume God wants you to die if a bacteria is drug resistant. I'm not saying it would *never* happen, but I just don't think the sort of people who are drawn to study and practice medicine, regardless of their views on origin of species, would in general ever tend towards such a view. You might get one doctor somewhere that develops such a view, but I suspect it would be an anomaly, not the norm.
. ..they expect. That is all that school is about. It's not that you have to agree with 100% of what you're taught. It's that you have to show that you've learned it, understand it, and can regurgitate what they want.
In the end, most medical doctor's can be perfectly competent at practicing medicine even if they don't believe in evolution. So, just pass the class, move on, and go help people who need medical treatment.
This is something I think most conservative Christian students learned long ago (though you do still see the occasional protest from the religious-right students) - they cannot make you believe, they can only make you give them the answer they want.
Slashdot Mirror
"methane is a more potent ghg, but only really sticks around in the upper atm for 25 to 125 years before it breaks down to co2+h2o. co2 sticks around until the next epoch of mass vegetation.
cumulatively (if you integrate it wrt dt), co2 is still much worse, and methane is just delayed co2."
So, I'm confused. If it's going to become CO2 anyhow, isn't it better to turn it into CO2 quickly, than to allow it to have the *greater* Greenhouse effect for 75 years, then have the same effect for the next several hundred years?
I mean, of course, it's better for it to not get released *at all* in the first place, but. . . if it's going to be released naturally anyhow, and we can't stop it (which isn't guaranteed to be the case, but might be), wouldn't it be better to capture/mine it, maybe gain some benefit from it burning, perhaps reduce the amount of shale gas which would otherwise be burnt (and which is much less likely to be released, if we don't intentionally release it by fracking).
"Yes, it is being pirated. We estimate 2 pirated copies for every one sold. But why should we care, our revenue from this product is great!"
Or you can look at it that, to some extent, the paying customers are subsidizing the people who don't pay (I know that's not an exactly true statement, because in general, the copyright business model is that additional customers == increased profit, not decreased cost to all customers; but, I do think in some cases, if companies/artists thought they honestly would get a massive number of sales (millions of copies sold instead of maybe hundreds of thousands) at, say $5/copy instead of $20/copy, they might go for it.
The problem is though, that piracy means that while you might get some additional sales by lowering the price, you'll still not get sales that come close to being representative of your actual user-base.
Going back to the borland example, they were charging, what, probably $50 or $100 per license for Turbo Pascal? If they weren't getting pirated 2-to-1, they could have dropped their price by 30 or 40% and still made *more money*, which would be a win for basically everyone.
But the point is, that the waste that's generated is not the *long-term* 100,000 year problem that everyone goes on and on about. It's a much, much shorter term, manageable problem. (As far as I know that's also true of the equipment which also gets contaminated in a nuclear facility, that it doesn't remain radioactive long-term? Please correct me if I'm wrong).
Also, more to the point, is that we could potentially stop mining any "new" uranium for 500-1000 years, so our tonnage of nuclear waste would level off. Someone (I think you but don't remember who, now), earlier in the thread, said that breeder reactors create more waste, because of the breeding, but that get's down to a matter of interpretation - how are you defining "waste".
Most people just look at the total tonnage of fuel mixture - so, if I have a tonne of waste, which is 95% U-238, and 5% mixture of fission products and actinides created by neutron capture, people say that's a "tonne of waste". If I take it, cycle it through an S-PRISM, and change the makeup to 93% U-238, 7% fission products and actinides, I still have "1 tonne" of waste, so I haven't created more waste, I've just changed the composition of the waste.
Now, if GE-H can get permission to build the ARC (Advanced Recycling Center), they can seperate out the fission products, possibly sell some of them as industrial or medical isotopes, and vitrify the rest. Now we have maybe 950kg of fuel mix, and maybe 50kg of true "waste" which we can vitrify, seal the glass in durable casks, and bury for 300 years in a suitable repository, and we've effectively solved the waste problem (after the 300 years, maybe we pull the stuff out of the repo, seperate it from the glass, re-use the glass, and bury the by-then almost non-radioactive waste products in an old uranium mine or something.
Personally, I think the Obama administration knows that Iran wouldn't return the drone, but they are going through the *formality* of requesting it back before taking. . . interventionary action, let's call it.
I mean, they have to at least give peace a chance, but I'm pretty sure they're not going to just let Iran have continuing access to that drone. If Iran had actually agreed to return it, then we could have done this the easy way. . .
In math, you might not always be interested in testing that someone can calculate the right answer. Maybe you actually are interested in seeing if someone can spot that the other answers are all order-of-magnitude wrong.
An occasional question like that, which you *can* short-circuit (although, some students may still calculate it if they haven't learned basic algebraic rules, and approximation, well enough), is actually a good thing, in my book.
I think kids *should* learn to be able to learn how to do things quickly using approximation and order-of-magnitude analysis.
Even bothering to fully calculate out the "correct" answer is "doing it wrong" with a multiple choice test if there's no other answers which are remotely close to being right.
I just simplified the answer to being approximately 40 * 3 = 120, and knew the answer would be larger-than 120, but only slightly, and picked the only answer that was remotely close to that, which meant the problem took me about 2 seconds. With multiple choice, you can often save time by getting a "closest too" approximation and picking that. . . of course, if they put multiple answers that are close to the approximation, you have to calculate it, but on a lot of those questions, the wrong answers were off by orders of magnitude, and you can immediately dismiss them as obviously wrong.
Wonder how many children and adults ever learn to recognize obviously wrong answers and exclude them from consideration to speed up taking multiple choice tests?
Just wanted to add a hopefully useful note: at least in theory, we don't have to store the "95%" (although in practice, that might be what current plans call for, as it might be simpler/cheaper to do that).
Reactor Grade Enriched Uranium fuel is about 95% U-238, and 5% U-235. U-238 is non-radioactive. After running the fuel through a reactor, most of the 5% of U-235 will be fissioned, and if I understand correctly, most of those fission products are highly radioactive (but only for about 300 years). During its time in the reactor, some of the U-238 will capture neutrons and be converted into isotopes of Plutonium. The Plutonium is radioactive, and if not burned in a fast reactor, will need to be disposed of as "waste". It seems like the figure I've heard for how much plutonium is generated in a light water reactor is somewhere around 3% of the original fuel? Not sure, but it was pretty low.
So, in theory, somewhere around 90 percent or so of the "waste" is non-radioactive U-238, which could at least potentially be separated from the rest of the waste, and separately disposed of as non-radioactive tailings (could be, for example, maybe buried back in the mines it was extracted from).
So, if only 5% of the fuel is actually fuel, how is it that this PRISM reactor can extract 100% energy, theoretically speaking? Above I mentioned that a low percentage of U-238 captures neutrons and becomes plutonium, which is both radioactive and fissile.
In a Fast Reactor (such as the PRISM), eventually you can convert almost all of the U-238 to plutonium (a little bit at a time, so you never have a large inventory of Pu at once), then fission the plutonium.
I think one really important point, which distinguishes between nuclear "efficiency" and efficiency of solar/wind, is that when nuclear plants inefficiently consume nuclear fuel, all the unused energy is still there for capture and use later with almost no penalty.
One could argue the same is true for solar and wind, in that the sun keeps shining, the wind keeps blowing, so it doesn't really matter that it's not efficient.
So, in the end, what it comes down to is cost/kWh. That's really the only metric that's meaningful. The problem is, that especially for solar, and somewhat for wind, the very low efficiency translates to a high cost/kWh generated.
This is somewhat true for nuclear as well - right now it's more expensive than it could or should be. But nuclear gets by, because the amount of energy in each tonne of fuel is so enormous, and steam turbines are efficient "enough", that the economics for "expensive" nuclear are still competitive with other energy sources.
Nuclear also has a lot of potential to come down in price. Most of the cost of nuclear power, from what I've found in trying to research the subject, comes not from fuel, but from the actual generation infrastructure (which is not so different from the situation with solar and wind power).
But, the difference between nuclear and solar/wind with regards to financial competitiveness, is that a large part of the cost of nuclear power is very high regulatory costs, very low economies of scale (few nuclear plants are built per year, and in the U.S., we're only now starting to build new plants after a 30 year period in which no new plants were started), and high loan/financing costs.
Solar and Wind are starting to have economies of scale kick in, and the prices have been dropping to a point where, I won't say the price can't drop more, but we probably can't expect a lot of additional price decreases.
Nuclear is so "overpriced" right now, there is a lot of room for the cost of building nuclear plants to come down - *without sacrificing safety*.
Additionally, newer designs being developed right now should be cheaper to build because they are designed to be simpler, standardized, and in some cases, manufactured in factories (search for "Small Modular Reactor").
The GE-H S-PRISM discussed in this article is one such small modular reactor concept. The idea is that if they can build smaller nuclear plants, then utilities can buy "less" at a time, thereby saving money on loan/financing costs, and not taking the risk of buying such a big plant that they can't sell all the power they produce. Additionally, the smaller, factory made reactors should be able to be produced a bit cheaper using the normal tools and techniques of the industrial revolution which made many other manufactured good substantially cheaper than comparable goods which are 'hand-made'.
You should really read up on the "Integral Fast Reactor" - the S-PRISM this article is about is evolved from the technology developed in the IFR project.
The main potential safety weakness of an IFR is the possibility of sodium leaks leading to a sodium fire (I'm not sure how they manage this risk; it certainly seems like a potentially nasty problem, but I'm sure they've taken some sort of measures to try to prevent that from happening; I hope they are effective).
But, Sodium fires aside, the type of problems you had an Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima-Daiichi simply cannot happen in an IFR-style reactor. You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl; you can't get a meltdown; you don't have to worry about steam pressure overwhelming the containment (because water is not used as the coolant, so hence no steam), and you can't get a hydrogen explosion (again, no water in the reactor).
You might get a hydrogen explosion if, somehow, water started mixing with the sodium, as sodium and water will combine to form sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas, but if they can keep water out of the reactor, then no hydrogen explosions.
So far as I know, there have only been a few sodium fires amongst all the world's sodium cooled reactors over the last 60 years - the most famous one was in Japan back in the late 90's or early 00's, and while that scared the public, it wasn't actually a disaster - just a relatively minor industrial accident in the end. I've never heard of a sodium fire at a nuclear plant becoming a major problem, so I don't think the risk of sodium fires is actually a big, unmanageable 'ticking time bomb', but again, I'm no expert.
Still, I think the technology looks *very* interesting. Let's face it, we have a nuclear waste problem, and either IFR or another type of fast reactor (such as a molten salt fast reactor) are basically the only way to solve that problem. Let's stop fighting the solution to the nuclear waste problem. It truly is the only realistic solution - burn off that 100,000 year "plutonium problem".
I think the point is, while it might not be *typical* for both parents to be home in the afternoon and napping, it's not completely unusual either. There are plenty of people who have to work 3rd shift (not just factory workers, but also people like doctors, nurses, EMT, police, fire, utility workers (the power plant's gotta run all the time; power lines might need repaired at 2am), etc), and in such households, it woudn't be strange for whoever is the primary caregiver to put the kids down for a nap while the "breadwinner" is sleeping so that they can go to work rested at 6 or 8 or 10pm. If the kids and the spouse are napping, why not take the opportunity to get a little rest yourself?
No, no, not Ireland - that's in WV. Just to Dublin, in CA.
Since you've apparently never been explained the meaning of the word "nap", let me provide a link to the definition:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/nap
"But maybe it should be in your yard instead of mine,"
Yeah, except you live three blocks down from me, and even though I *really, really* want a nuclear plant in my back yard, you and your pals do everything you can to make sure it will never happen.
Here's an idea for people who don't want a nuclear facility in their backyard: MOVE. It's easier for the NIMBY's to change backyards, than to find any site in the U.S. where there's not a single NIMBY already present. Nuclear plants gotta be built somewhere. If one's going in your backyard and you don't like it, shut up and move.
"I was there in the immediate aftermath and people had to cut down energy usage, but the country coped."
Yes. For awhile. Do you think that Japan can really survive, and feed it's current population, if they have to dramatically reduce power consumption basically forever?
Well, you say, Wind and Solar. Ok, so Japan is a relatively small and densely populated island nation. Their ability to build wind and solar on-shore is very limited. So, that means offshore. Building things off-shore is very, very expensive, which means the power produced by off-shore wind (or solar; although I don't think I've ever heard of an off-shore solar project, but I suppose it would be perfectly possible with enough money) would be very expensive power.
Japan, in order to feed and provide for itself, from what I've heard, depends pretty heavily on industrial exports to make money which they can then trade for food and resources/materials. If your power is more expensive than most other nations, how will you be able to produce goods for export at a price that most other nations are willing to pay?
For example, according to Wikipedia's page on Cost of Electricity By Source, on-shore wind is the only form of renewable energy which is projected to be cost competitive with coal, gas, or nuclear.
A useful sampling of info from that page:
advanced nuclear: $113.9/mWh
On-shore wind: $97/mWh
Off-shore wind: $243.2/mWh
At twice as much cost as "too expensive" (at least, that's what a lot of anti-nuke pro-renewables advocates try to say) nuclear, off-shore wind really seems like a non-starter for Japan.
There's one other factor which I'm pretty sure is not even reflected in the above figures. . . In order to get more than 20% of your power from renewables, you MUST, MUST implement large-scale energy storage solutions. There's some companies working on ideas on how to do this (compressed gas, flywheels, and molten salts are three interesting looking approaches). I have no idea what it'll cost to implement massive amounts of energy storage, but I'm sure it can't be cheap.
It'll be interesting to see. I'd love to be wrong - I'd love for Japan, and the rest of the world to be able to generate sufficient supplies of power, at competitive/affordable prices, from renewable power. I just don't see how you make that happen.
One possibility which, I dunno why, but for some reason, often isn't discussed is "Enhanced Geothermal Power". Perhaps Japan can implement EGP on a large scale - although, since they are already one of the most tectonically active places on earth, they probably don't want to risk triggering *more* earthquakes by trying to do EGP, or at least it might be politically unpopular because of fear, even if it isn't a real threat.
This, mostly, doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I'm waiting for it to happen. . .
Essentially, the problem is that when another company is being payed hourly to develop a product for you, mostly they care about selling you hours, not selling you good software.
So, as long as the Indian companies are working at selling hours instead of copies of software, they perhaps don't have much incentive to really get it right. But, once some Indian companies realize they can just make the software and publish it themselves, selling directly to customers, then the incentives change - the customers won't buy bad software, so they'll need to make sure they develop the programs to a certain level of quality (perhaps they can get away with *lower* quality, as long as it's "good enough" and is cheaper than the competition).
I might just be ignorant, but so far, it doesn't seem like theirs been any big self-publishing software companies developing in India (and China, and other developing nations that are starting to build tech companies), but I don't see why it couldn't happen, and that worries me far more than "outsourcing".
I feel that the U.S. and Europe are far too complacent and far too smug about being "intellectually superior", and figuring we can keep our economy alive, despite losing manufacturing and lots of other jobs, by having a "knowledge economy", as if the rest of the world for some reason can't develop their own tech sectors that can out-compete ours. I mean, we already know that most of the rest of the world does better in school than U.S. students, so how is that going to work?
It's not clear whether the passwords are plaintext, un-salted hashes, or salted hashes. plaintext and un-salted would be pretty bad. If the passwords have a long random salt, they would resist rainbow-table attacks, I think?
"so they hire some $40 per month security company to secure their servers. There must be 1000's of those servers out there ripe for raping."
If each customer is paying $40 per month, and their are thousands of customers, wouldn't that be a $40,000+ per month security company? For that kind of cash, they should be competent. When I buy into a company like that, I figure I'm supposed to be getting more than $40/mo worth of security expertise, because I'm *sharing* the costs with thousands of other customers.
Sadly, however, you're probably right that many hosting companies don't really have sufficient expertise to know how to secure their customers' servers for them. But, it's not because they aren't being paid enough, it's because they aren't spending the money on the right things.
The people of California have no say over who can hang out in the International Waters off their coast. They might not like it, but without declaring war and attacking the ship, violating the Law of the Sea in the process, it doesn't matter, AT ALL what some eco-numbnuts in California think about this.
Seriously, the solution seems obvious. Telecommute some days (if you're allowed to), but make an appearance at least once a week, have lunch and/or meetings with with people (especially your boss) to keep you in the loop, and keep you and your work visible to them.
"We used to just set off fission and fusion bombs in the air and on the ground"
And under the sea. . .
All what? Nuclear waste? Probably not a terribly bad idea, in reality, but good luck with convincing the public. Unfortunately, after the water pollution problems of the 60's and 70's, the public is (understandably) wary of dumping any waste products into water supplies.
Whether it's technically a feasible way to deal with nuclear waste and whether it really would create any problems, the public will largely assume it will create a problem, and blame every ill they happen to have thereafter on it.
I wonder how many terrorists we can get to drown themselves trying to retrieve it?
I'm seriously not worried about terrorists retrieving it that far underwater.
If someone's been shot, I think a doctor can sew them up and give them a blood transfusion and antibiotics, etc, without believing in evolution. It's also possible to believe in micro-evolution (small changes within a species - e.g. a bacteria developing drug resistance), without believing that evolution is responsible for the origin of species.
Also, it really doesn't seem like it would matter what you believe regarding the origin of species for most "conventional" medicine, but it might be more important if you are a "research" doctor researching new diseases and possible treatments. For a family practitioner, surgeon, etc, it doesn't seem like it would matter that much.
As for the example of, "the patient is succumbing to an infection not because of resistant bacteria but because God wants him to die?", I think it's a pretty big leap to assume that someone who believes that God created life would just assume God wants you to die if a bacteria is drug resistant. I'm not saying it would *never* happen, but I just don't think the sort of people who are drawn to study and practice medicine, regardless of their views on origin of species, would in general ever tend towards such a view. You might get one doctor somewhere that develops such a view, but I suspect it would be an anomaly, not the norm.
. . .they expect. That is all that school is about. It's not that you have to agree with 100% of what you're taught. It's that you have to show that you've learned it, understand it, and can regurgitate what they want.
In the end, most medical doctor's can be perfectly competent at practicing medicine even if they don't believe in evolution. So, just pass the class, move on, and go help people who need medical treatment.
This is something I think most conservative Christian students learned long ago (though you do still see the occasional protest from the religious-right students) - they cannot make you believe, they can only make you give them the answer they want.