"The first time they made aluminum that way, they got super rich as they sold just under the amount it was going for. .."
I was thinking about this once, in the context of thinking about the Polywell Reactor. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a proposed type of fusion reactor, whose proponents think it might possibly be able to produce very cheap electric power. Nobody really knows if that'll pan out or not, but I got to thinking about this:
*IF* it did work out (not saying it will), and you could produce power with it a cost of say, 1 cent per kWh of electricity (or even less; not saying you will be able to, but just for the sake of argument), then whoever brings online the very first Polywell stands to make enormous profits - if you figure an average market price of about 10 cents per kWh for electricity, all the owners/operators have to do is sell for 1 or 2 cents below the average price, and they'll likely sell the electricity (they don't even necessarily have to be the cheapest in the market, just cheap enough to undercut some of the more expensive providers).
So, I was trying to puzzle out if this was a market failure, or a market success. I mean, my first thought was that it was somewhat unjust to sell the power at more than say, a 10 or 20 percent profit (after all, every company must make a profit to survive, but doesn't need to make 800-1000% profit.
But, I kept thinking about it, and I decided that such levels of profitability would do 2 things: First, it would allow that company to have the funds to start building a lot more of the new technology, which long-term would have a lot of benefits for society as a whole - in the case of a clean, nearly 100% safe power source which produces no long-lived waste problems, it would solve the energy crisis for the world, so those huge profits would mean that the superior technology can quickly replace the old, incumbent technologies, instead of fighting an uphill battle for a century or two. That is to say, if the technology was forced to limit itself to small profit margins, then larger companies could overcome the technological superiority of the new power company's polywell reactor by using marketing tactics that would forstall the growth of the new tech, based on the sheer size of the installed base and revenues of the old companies.
Secondly, very large profit margins would cause other companies to sit up and take notice, and cause them to decide to dump their old technologies sooner that they otherwise might, to license/buy the new technology of their own. What this means is that huge profit margins due to a new technology which dramatically reduces the costs of production of some commodity, will only be a temporary situation - the market *will* gradually (but perhaps fairly quickly - e.g. if the polywell reactor worked that well and produced power that cheaply, you could maybe start to see power prices come down 5 percent per year for like 20 years in a row, until prices reached a new equilibrium based upon the real costs of production).
Short term large profit margins reward the inventors and investors who designed, then implemented the new technology. Longer-term, the prices will come down and everyone will benefit.
I wonder if they could find/modify a basically harmless virus to "seek out" cancer cells, to act as 'markers', then use this drug to selectively destroy the cancer cells (having been infected by the cancer-seeking virus), while leaving non-cancer cells alone?
I was hoping for some sort of new "Cave Johnson" quotes. I think we should have a contest for who can come up with the Best CJ commentary on this situation.
I would think the best stewardship is to try to ensure it's put to the best possible uses (and recycled, if possible)?
I mean, I believe REEs are important for things like medical equipment, and I believe some chemical processes used to create pharmaceutical drugs, which help increase people's health.
Would it be better stewardship to NOT USE the resource at all, or to use it for something important like medicine?
Wasn't the transformation into a joke pretty much complete when they payed to plaster their name all over Iron Man 2, even though there was no real apparent reason why Oracle would ever be mentioned in an Iron Man film (unless maybe in one of the lab/tech sequences . . . I could see Tony Stark having an Oracle Database server in his lab)?
Why couldn't the string just be a pointer to a block of memory (just like a current string pointer), where the very first sizeof(size_t) bytes of the block contains the length of the string, and where the string data starts at location strPtr + sizeof(size_t)?
In that case, you would only copy the strlen value into a register when you actually needed to use the value (e.g. when you are testing to see if you're at the end of the string)? In some scenarios, if you are testing (or changing) that value often, you might keep it in a register; but, you don't *have* to keep it in the register/stack when you aren't interested in it?
There are lots of types of records which *should* be public. But, I think most folks agree that not *everything* should be public. Health records shouldn't be public (or, in the case of government health insurance programs, like Medicare/Medicaid, records of doctors bills with detailed information about what types of tests, medicines, and procedures the doctor billed for, which would allow someone to more or less reconstruct a patient's health history), tax records (at least while the individual is still alive, since those records will usually have enough personal information to be used by would-be identity thieves), etc.
The citizenry must do business with the government, but they should be able to expect a certain level of privacy.
When it comes to something like arrest records, the problem becomes that the police can arrest someone on pretty much any grounds. That doesn't mean the person will be convicted, or has committed any actual crime.
The problem with making arrest records for those who have NOT been convicted, at least, a 'public record', is that it allows the police to punish people without a proper trial.
For anyone who was either convicted or plead guilty, then yes, I think those records should be public, because in that case it's documenting an actual conviction for a crime, but anyone who is not convicted should not have those records made public.
Or at least, maybe he could convince them that he's so radioactive that close bodily contact could render someone sterile and impotent (yeah, radiation doesn't usually cause impotence, but there's no reason to disabuse the other convicts of that notion *grin*).
Real Estate prices have everything to do with mass fear among the populace, and prove nothing about the actual risks or hazards of living in the area. Real Estate is about A) Perceptions, and B) Economy (e.g. can anyone *afford* to buy a house, even if they want to).
Your argument doesn't actually address the science in the report. It's just a statement of your lack of belief in the ability of any expert, ever, to make a correct determination based upon science. So, experts sometimes make mistakes, but that doesn't mean the NRC has made a mistake in this case. It doesn't mean the people running the radiation monitoring in Japan *actually* did make any mistakes.
As for that article you linked to, it appears to me to be a very, very poor example of journalism, that takes one small fact - TEPCO said that an emergency venting happened one day, but it actually happened the previous day, and makes a big deal out of that. It also declares about the venting, "It is an event that has a huge impact on the environment outside a nuclear power plant." However, it provides no source or basis for that claim. How do they know it will have a huge impact on the environment outside the plant? Wouldn't it be important to know just what type of radioactive material was in the steam which was vented, how much of it, etc? Wouldn't you need to know how much that radioactive material dispersed, and how long its half-life is?
I'm sorry if I don't believe every poorly backed up alarmist hit-piece in the media that claims that every little thing that happens at a nuclear plant is a terrible, terrible disaster that is being covered up by the government and industry.
I can't buy your house as I don't live in Japan and have no plans at all to move to Japan, but I will say this - I would be comfortable living within 10 miles of a nuclear plant, and would even be comfortable going to live in an area like the area around Fukushima which has only been (in most parts - IIRC there is one small area where the contamination, for some reason, ended up being much more concentrated than most of the other areas), lightly contaminated by a relatively small quantity of radioactive materials.
"So, it'll never replace other systems, but it could be useful for government work (search and rescue, park rangers, and of course the military) or people who live way, way outside civilization and can't get satellite systems."
I wonder about potential mesh-networking applications? Somewhat highspeed wireless backbone, anyone?
I know that licensed Ham radio operators can already take WiFi, adjust the frequency it operates on to be inside amateur portion of 2.4 Ghz, connect it to external, directional antennas, and boost the power. So, even with 'conventional' WiFi, hams can get some distance.
Still, I wonder if this new spec would be even more robust for long distance (> 20 miles) wireless links ?
Yeah. Slashdot article submitters sometimes put the most useless things in their summaries. Range is much more useful to me than area, because what I really want to know is how *far away* one node can be from another.
I suppose if you are someone thinking about building a WiFi access network/ISP (along the lines of a cellular network), then area might give you a good idea of just how many customers you can squeeze into the range of a tower.
I'd be happy to have some of it. I wouldn't try to put it in a 100,000 year geological repository.
What we need are interim repositories that can safely store the waste for a few hundred years. Then, we need to start building reactors based on the "Integral Fast Reactor" design, and maybe some Liquid Chloride Fast Reactors - two types of fast reactor which can burn up the long lived waste products in spent nuclear fuel.
So, we need 'phase 1' interim storage, where we store the spent nuclear fuel for about a hundred years (because it will take us that long to burn all the 'waste' we've already generated), and 'phase 2' where the final waste products are stored for about 300 years. After 300 years, that 'final waste' is essentially non-radioactive, and could safely just be buried or put back in old uranium mines (it would be, if I understand correctly, less radioactive than when it was first dug out of the ground) or some other suitable burial site.
The thing is, our current nuclear waste represents a resource worth many Billions, probably Trillions of dollars. In addition to more energy you could extract by burning off the wastes, you can also 'mine' the waste for various elements/isotopes which are created as byproducts of the fission reaction and decay chains, and are very valuable for industrial and medical purposes.
"WIthout about 10 million dead babies and misformed born babies in twe lost worldwide"
If anyone is spreading propaganda, it's you and people like you, who keep spreading these lies. That is absolute B.S. The science does NOT show 10 million dead babies from radiation sickness or cancer, and does not show that nuclear power plants have caused misformed babies.
". But hey, if you want to cut your nuclear fuel supplies in 1/180."
TFTFY.
I suppose what you say is probably correct for MOX reprocessing.
For every unit mass of enriched uranium fuel we create, we set aside about 8 units of "depleted uranium". For each unit mass of enriched uranium fuel, only something on the order of about 5 percent actually gets fissioned.
In a fast breeder reactor, you could eventually (it takes multiple rounds of reprocessing and fissioning in the reactor) burn up close to 100% of the uranium and plutonium (a fast breeder will transmute the non-fissile U-238 into PU 239, 240, and 241 which can then be fissioned), plus you can take the "depleted uranium", which as I said above, represents about 8 times the mass of the enriched uranium, and transmute all that into PU in the fast breeder reactor as well.
So, currently, we use 5 percent of 1/9 of the fuel, or
0.5556 percent of the fuel supply. 1/0.005556 ~= 180
That would be symbolic. I agree that senators and representatives *should* make that symbolic gesture and cut their pay. After all, it's Congress's fault (at least in part) that we're about to enter bankruptcy, so they should share the pain.
However, the actual savings from cutting Congressional pay might add up to what, a few millions of dollars? Our debt is 14 trillion. It's a nice *start*, but that's the extent of it.
From the summary: "reduce fuel consumption by 40% and carbon emissions by 50%."
How can reducing fuel consumption decrease carbon emissions by a *greater* fraction than the reduction of the fuel consumed?
I could see the carbon emission being reduced by *less than* the fuel consumption reduction (if, e.g. fuel consumption accounts for less than 100% of total carbon emissions), but I can see no way, mathematically, that the reduction in carbon could be *greater* than the reduction in fuel? That suggests that 100% of fuel consumption accounts for *greater than 100%* (which is, of course, mathematically impossible) of carbon emissions?
"Consider how expensive it is to decommission a nuclear plant or the cost of things going terribly wrong."
I would just point out that nuclear power plants are required to set aside funds right from the beginning, taken out of the plant's revenues from ratepayers, for decommissioning costs. So, that's already counted in the per-kWh you pay for nuclear electricity.
The issue of disaster related expenses is, I think, probably valid to point out as a subsidy, but so far it's a subsidy we haven't had to pay, and if we can make safer nuclear plants (e.g. LFTRs), we might not ever have to pay. Or, we might have to pay a lot. It's hard to quantify to what level the nuclear industry is subsidized vis-a-vis disaster coverage, but I guess it's fair to point out that it is there.
Slashdot Mirror
"The first time they made aluminum that way, they got super rich as they sold just under the amount it was going for. . ."
I was thinking about this once, in the context of thinking about the Polywell Reactor. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a proposed type of fusion reactor, whose proponents think it might possibly be able to produce very cheap electric power. Nobody really knows if that'll pan out or not, but I got to thinking about this:
*IF* it did work out (not saying it will), and you could produce power with it a cost of say, 1 cent per kWh of electricity (or even less; not saying you will be able to, but just for the sake of argument), then whoever brings online the very first Polywell stands to make enormous profits - if you figure an average market price of about 10 cents per kWh for electricity, all the owners/operators have to do is sell for 1 or 2 cents below the average price, and they'll likely sell the electricity (they don't even necessarily have to be the cheapest in the market, just cheap enough to undercut some of the more expensive providers).
So, I was trying to puzzle out if this was a market failure, or a market success. I mean, my first thought was that it was somewhat unjust to sell the power at more than say, a 10 or 20 percent profit (after all, every company must make a profit to survive, but doesn't need to make 800-1000% profit.
But, I kept thinking about it, and I decided that such levels of profitability would do 2 things: First, it would allow that company to have the funds to start building a lot more of the new technology, which long-term would have a lot of benefits for society as a whole - in the case of a clean, nearly 100% safe power source which produces no long-lived waste problems, it would solve the energy crisis for the world, so those huge profits would mean that the superior technology can quickly replace the old, incumbent technologies, instead of fighting an uphill battle for a century or two. That is to say, if the technology was forced to limit itself to small profit margins, then larger companies could overcome the technological superiority of the new power company's polywell reactor by using marketing tactics that would forstall the growth of the new tech, based on the sheer size of the installed base and revenues of the old companies.
Secondly, very large profit margins would cause other companies to sit up and take notice, and cause them to decide to dump their old technologies sooner that they otherwise might, to license/buy the new technology of their own. What this means is that huge profit margins due to a new technology which dramatically reduces the costs of production of some commodity, will only be a temporary situation - the market *will* gradually (but perhaps fairly quickly - e.g. if the polywell reactor worked that well and produced power that cheaply, you could maybe start to see power prices come down 5 percent per year for like 20 years in a row, until prices reached a new equilibrium based upon the real costs of production).
Short term large profit margins reward the inventors and investors who designed, then implemented the new technology. Longer-term, the prices will come down and everyone will benefit.
Well, with only one entry, it wasn't much of a contest, but nicely done, anyhow. =)
I wonder if they could find/modify a basically harmless virus to "seek out" cancer cells, to act as 'markers', then use this drug to selectively destroy the cancer cells (having been infected by the cancer-seeking virus), while leaving non-cancer cells alone?
I was hoping for some sort of new "Cave Johnson" quotes. I think we should have a contest for who can come up with the Best CJ commentary on this situation.
=)
Oh, I agree, but that is NOT what the poster I was replying to said. You're responding to something I didn't say.
He said the best stewardship was not consuming the resource at all. Buying it from China is still consuming.
Just because it's a foreign company doesn't mean they won't hire a lot of local employees.
Is it really so hard to make clickable links?
I would think the best stewardship is to try to ensure it's put to the best possible uses (and recycled, if possible)?
I mean, I believe REEs are important for things like medical equipment, and I believe some chemical processes used to create pharmaceutical drugs, which help increase people's health.
Would it be better stewardship to NOT USE the resource at all, or to use it for something important like medicine?
The point of online IQ tests, it seems to me, is to determine if you're smart enough not to waste your time on a stupid online IQ test.
"You gotta not play to win!"
Wasn't the transformation into a joke pretty much complete when they payed to plaster their name all over Iron Man 2, even though there was no real apparent reason why Oracle would ever be mentioned in an Iron Man film (unless maybe in one of the lab/tech sequences . . . I could see Tony Stark having an Oracle Database server in his lab)?
I see now that perpenso pointed out the same solution a few replies above this one. Disregard.
Why couldn't the string just be a pointer to a block of memory (just like a current string pointer), where the very first sizeof(size_t) bytes of the block contains the length of the string, and where the string data starts at location strPtr + sizeof(size_t)?
In that case, you would only copy the strlen value into a register when you actually needed to use the value (e.g. when you are testing to see if you're at the end of the string)? In some scenarios, if you are testing (or changing) that value often, you might keep it in a register; but, you don't *have* to keep it in the register/stack when you aren't interested in it?
There are lots of types of records which *should* be public. But, I think most folks agree that not *everything* should be public. Health records shouldn't be public (or, in the case of government health insurance programs, like Medicare/Medicaid, records of doctors bills with detailed information about what types of tests, medicines, and procedures the doctor billed for, which would allow someone to more or less reconstruct a patient's health history), tax records (at least while the individual is still alive, since those records will usually have enough personal information to be used by would-be identity thieves), etc.
The citizenry must do business with the government, but they should be able to expect a certain level of privacy.
When it comes to something like arrest records, the problem becomes that the police can arrest someone on pretty much any grounds. That doesn't mean the person will be convicted, or has committed any actual crime.
The problem with making arrest records for those who have NOT been convicted, at least, a 'public record', is that it allows the police to punish people without a proper trial.
For anyone who was either convicted or plead guilty, then yes, I think those records should be public, because in that case it's documenting an actual conviction for a crime, but anyone who is not convicted should not have those records made public.
Or at least, maybe he could convince them that he's so radioactive that close bodily contact could render someone sterile and impotent (yeah, radiation doesn't usually cause impotence, but there's no reason to disabuse the other convicts of that notion *grin*).
Real Estate prices have everything to do with mass fear among the populace, and prove nothing about the actual risks or hazards of living in the area. Real Estate is about A) Perceptions, and B) Economy (e.g. can anyone *afford* to buy a house, even if they want to).
Your argument doesn't actually address the science in the report. It's just a statement of your lack of belief in the ability of any expert, ever, to make a correct determination based upon science. So, experts sometimes make mistakes, but that doesn't mean the NRC has made a mistake in this case. It doesn't mean the people running the radiation monitoring in Japan *actually* did make any mistakes.
As for that article you linked to, it appears to me to be a very, very poor example of journalism, that takes one small fact - TEPCO said that an emergency venting happened one day, but it actually happened the previous day, and makes a big deal out of that. It also declares about the venting, "It is an event that has a huge impact on the environment outside a nuclear power plant." However, it provides no source or basis for that claim. How do they know it will have a huge impact on the environment outside the plant? Wouldn't it be important to know just what type of radioactive material was in the steam which was vented, how much of it, etc? Wouldn't you need to know how much that radioactive material dispersed, and how long its half-life is?
I'm sorry if I don't believe every poorly backed up alarmist hit-piece in the media that claims that every little thing that happens at a nuclear plant is a terrible, terrible disaster that is being covered up by the government and industry.
I can't buy your house as I don't live in Japan and have no plans at all to move to Japan, but I will say this - I would be comfortable living within 10 miles of a nuclear plant, and would even be comfortable going to live in an area like the area around Fukushima which has only been (in most parts - IIRC there is one small area where the contamination, for some reason, ended up being much more concentrated than most of the other areas), lightly contaminated by a relatively small quantity of radioactive materials.
"So, it'll never replace other systems, but it could be useful for government work (search and rescue, park rangers, and of course the military) or people who live way, way outside civilization and can't get satellite systems."
I wonder about potential mesh-networking applications? Somewhat highspeed wireless backbone, anyone?
I know that licensed Ham radio operators can already take WiFi, adjust the frequency it operates on to be inside amateur portion of 2.4 Ghz, connect it to external, directional antennas, and boost the power. So, even with 'conventional' WiFi, hams can get some distance.
Still, I wonder if this new spec would be even more robust for long distance (> 20 miles) wireless links ?
Yeah. Slashdot article submitters sometimes put the most useless things in their summaries. Range is much more useful to me than area, because what I really want to know is how *far away* one node can be from another.
I suppose if you are someone thinking about building a WiFi access network/ISP (along the lines of a cellular network), then area might give you a good idea of just how many customers you can squeeze into the range of a tower.
I'd be happy to have some of it. I wouldn't try to put it in a 100,000 year geological repository.
What we need are interim repositories that can safely store the waste for a few hundred years. Then, we need to start building reactors based on the "Integral Fast Reactor" design, and maybe some Liquid Chloride Fast Reactors - two types of fast reactor which can burn up the long lived waste products in spent nuclear fuel.
So, we need 'phase 1' interim storage, where we store the spent nuclear fuel for about a hundred years (because it will take us that long to burn all the 'waste' we've already generated), and 'phase 2' where the final waste products are stored for about 300 years. After 300 years, that 'final waste' is essentially non-radioactive, and could safely just be buried or put back in old uranium mines (it would be, if I understand correctly, less radioactive than when it was first dug out of the ground) or some other suitable burial site.
The thing is, our current nuclear waste represents a resource worth many Billions, probably Trillions of dollars. In addition to more energy you could extract by burning off the wastes, you can also 'mine' the waste for various elements/isotopes which are created as byproducts of the fission reaction and decay chains, and are very valuable for industrial and medical purposes.
"WIthout about 10 million dead babies and misformed born babies in twe lost worldwide"
If anyone is spreading propaganda, it's you and people like you, who keep spreading these lies. That is absolute B.S. The science does NOT show 10 million dead babies from radiation sickness or cancer, and does not show that nuclear power plants have caused misformed babies.
"Rhodium is more valuable than gold even at today's gold price."
Yeah, but if we start 'mining' our nuclear waste for Rhodium, we'll glut the market and it will become 'merely' as valuable as oil.
". But hey, if you want to cut your nuclear fuel supplies in 1/180."
TFTFY.
I suppose what you say is probably correct for MOX reprocessing.
For every unit mass of enriched uranium fuel we create, we set aside about 8 units of "depleted uranium". For each unit mass of enriched uranium fuel, only something on the order of about 5 percent actually gets fissioned.
In a fast breeder reactor, you could eventually (it takes multiple rounds of reprocessing and fissioning in the reactor) burn up close to 100% of the uranium and plutonium (a fast breeder will transmute the non-fissile U-238 into PU 239, 240, and 241 which can then be fissioned), plus you can take the "depleted uranium", which as I said above, represents about 8 times the mass of the enriched uranium, and transmute all that into PU in the fast breeder reactor as well.
So, currently, we use 5 percent of 1/9 of the fuel, or
0.5556 percent of the fuel supply. 1/0.005556 ~= 180
That would be symbolic. I agree that senators and representatives *should* make that symbolic gesture and cut their pay. After all, it's Congress's fault (at least in part) that we're about to enter bankruptcy, so they should share the pain.
However, the actual savings from cutting Congressional pay might add up to what, a few millions of dollars? Our debt is 14 trillion. It's a nice *start*, but that's the extent of it.
From the summary: "reduce fuel consumption by 40% and carbon emissions by 50%."
How can reducing fuel consumption decrease carbon emissions by a *greater* fraction than the reduction of the fuel consumed?
I could see the carbon emission being reduced by *less than* the fuel consumption reduction (if, e.g. fuel consumption accounts for less than 100% of total carbon emissions), but I can see no way, mathematically, that the reduction in carbon could be *greater* than the reduction in fuel? That suggests that 100% of fuel consumption accounts for *greater than 100%* (which is, of course, mathematically impossible) of carbon emissions?
"...has more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night."
Yeah, you should definitely always visit them on Monday - they're much cleaner then.
"Consider how expensive it is to decommission a nuclear plant or the cost of things going terribly wrong."
I would just point out that nuclear power plants are required to set aside funds right from the beginning, taken out of the plant's revenues from ratepayers, for decommissioning costs. So, that's already counted in the per-kWh you pay for nuclear electricity.
The issue of disaster related expenses is, I think, probably valid to point out as a subsidy, but so far it's a subsidy we haven't had to pay, and if we can make safer nuclear plants (e.g. LFTRs), we might not ever have to pay. Or, we might have to pay a lot. It's hard to quantify to what level the nuclear industry is subsidized vis-a-vis disaster coverage, but I guess it's fair to point out that it is there.