Funny you should bring up Steam in this discussion, since Steam is a blatant attempt, at least in part, to forever destroy the secondary game sales market. You can't transfer games from one account to another, and if you try to sell the account, and Valve catches you, they just ban the account forever and NO ONE ever plays those copies of the game again.
There was a story awhile back about Valve catching someone, and banning their account, which had something like $2000 worth of games on it.Flush. Watch it swirl down the drain.
The thing that always bugged me about AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, was that they were closed "networks" which divided the Internet. That is, you start with the Internet where, by default, everyone can reach everyone. I could send an email to anyone at any service provider/company/university/etc.
Then AOL comes along with AIM, and creates a proprietary system totally controlled by them, requiring me to register an AOL "screenname", instead of just using the standard username@host.tld identification system. They didn't at all try to work with MSN, Yahoo!, etc to make it so that anyone could talk to anyone.
So, we end up with like 6 different closed systems, and to talk to all your friends, you end up needing 6 different user "identities", one for each network. Sure, things like GAIM/Pidgin, and other multi-network chat clients made it possible to log into all the different networks simultaneously, but it was all ridiculously stupid.
SMS, despite the fact that it was stupidly expensive, at least had the advantage that it was based on an open standard, which allowed anyone on any carrier to send a message to anyone on any other carrier in the world.
I was happy when AIM, and the rest, basically died (I think I maybe used it one time each year in the last 5 years).
I still think online instant messaging can be useful (occasionally use Skype for that purpose, which also suffers from the same problem), but I'd really like to see the emergence of a system where all IM users can communicate (text, voice, video, and file transfer) to any other user on any service provider.
I may be wrong, but my understanding is that the version(s) of Mono that target iOS don't produce CIL (which is the.Net bytecode) binaries which then get executed on the Mono runtime like you would do for any other platform.
I think, basically, it acts like a cross-compiler that creates an iOS native executable from.Net source code (on the compiling machine, it might still create the CIL binary, but then take the bytecode, and the bytecode for all libraries referenced, and compile that into an iOS native binary.
If that's the case, that's not that radical an idea.
"So how many have died as a direct effect of the radiation from Fukushima? Zero? That's right, zero! Geez, horrible, isn't it?"
Nice strawman. Nobody is worried about people who haven't died *yet* - they are worried that if people return to the evac zone, they may start to experience higher rates of cancers among the population, and someone may die next year, or a few years from now, or 10-20 years from now.
Can you show that is not a possible outcome?.
I don't know if that's a real threat or not, but apparently the Japanese government thinks it could be.
We're talking about Pakistan here. There is CIA presence in Pakistan, of course, as recent international diplomatic crises have demonstrated, but I think the CIA might be somewhat limited in their ability to operate in Pakistan
Instaling keyloggers on EVERY machine? That would have to imply you're logging EVERYONE's passwords *before* emails are sent, because you can't know that an Osama email has just been sent until it's been sent. I definitely don't think the CIA has that kind of power/reach in Pakistan, and that would be a major breech of basic human rights.
How long does it take to hit a send button, pop the thumb drive out of the PC and hit the road? I seriously doubt these guys ever really visited the same Internet cafe twice (assuming Osama had several trusted couriers, you could send different people to the same cafe on different occasions, just don't send the same guy to the same place twice.
How many Internet Cafes are there in Pakistan? I'd guess many - thousands, perhaps? You can't easily keep all of them under human surveillance all the time. You might be able to have cameras in all of them, except I don't think most Pakistani cafe owners are going to say, "Oh - the U.S. CIA wants to put in cameras in my Pakistani cafe to spy on my customers? No problem, I'm sure they won't mind. .."
I'm not a foreign affairs expert, but I do get the idea, watching the news, that while Pakistan is nominally an ally of the U.S., that there is a significant but powerful minority in the government who may have been working, over the last few years, against the interests of Pakistani democracy and the U.S. - we're talking about a nation where pro-democracy leaders pretty routinely get assassinated, who's Intelligence Service, the ISI, has historically (and quite probably, currently) has actual links to terrorist organizations - basically sponsors them.
One important thing to keep in mind about Republicans is that they aren't completely anti-science, and the Dems are not completely pro-science.
While the Republican party, on the one hand, tends to deny climate change, on the other hand, embraces one of the science/technology approaches which has the greatest potential to help reduce and control climate change: nuclear power.
Also, at least where it makes economic sense, I think you'd find that most Republicans embrace efficiency - to a point. Perhaps not to as great a point as some efficiency advocates would want, but nuclear and efficiency combined could help dramatically reduce America's carbon footprint.
On the other side of the aisle, while Obama has, at least in his speeches, been pro-nuclear, there is a very significant portion of the Democratic party which has and continues to be very strongly anti-nuclear. It's my observation (and I've seen others make a similar observation) that while there is some basis for people to legitimately be worried about the risks of nuclear power, that some of the staunchest anti-nuclear advocates use a lot of similar rhetoric and junk science to fight against nuclear power as the climate change denialists.
Now, keep in mind here, I'm not trying to start a pro/anti-nuclear flamewar here - just giving an example that, even though sometimes Republicans seem anti-science, and Dems seem pro-science, the issue is more nuanced than that. On specific issues, both parties can be anti-science and pro-science, as it suits their pre-determined platforms.
Which is why a scientific STUDY published in an established *peer-reviewed* journal is worth more than a hundred documentaries.
You're right that "documentaries" are often carefully crafted propagandist BS. Which is why I watched Gasland with a very skeptical eye. The problem with Gasland is it is *mostly* a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotes don't prove anything in a meaningful way, although they do raise awareness that perhaps there *might* be a problem and the issue should be further studied by academics and scientists.
This *study* provides a more damming assessment of the problems.
The other point is, and this is well-established fact - the Gas Drillers get an exemption to the clean air and water acts? If they're not polluting, why do they need an exemption? If they're not polluting, why do they actively oppose repealing that exemption?
SGU showed some promise in the early episodes, but really failed to ever deliver on those promises. Pretty much the same story with Caprica. The writers of both shows had premises which seemed like good foundations to build interesting shows on, but ended up coming up with horrible plotlines and characters which ranged from awful to merely boring.
SciFi implied that the station focused on showing Science Fiction content. They abandoned that premise, so calling the network SciFi was false advertising. SyFy, on the other hand, as a word with no meaning, suits a network with no focus.
It started to carry a negative connotation when some people started using junk science to raise false alarms. Look at Helen Caldicott telling everyone that Chernobyl resulted in millions of deaths, and that Fukushima will result in millions of cancers.
She repeatedly appeals to a single source - a Greenpeace "Report" which they somehow managed to get the NYAS to publish without any peer review, which specifically states that it does not use standard scientific analysis methods because those methods don't give the results the report author wants to find.
She ignores all the other science which has been done to determine the results of Chernobyl, decrying it all as a massive "cover up" and "fraud". There's only one report in the world, apparently, which tells "the truth". These people cherry pick their sources to get the alarming results they want to find.
Does that "data" even exist? Did anyone sample the smoke, or take some sort of optical spectrometry measurements or some other methods of data collection?
Perhaps it was, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that in the midst of a crisis, that when an unexpected explosion happens, that anyone has the equipment on hand or the time/opportunity to take such measurements?
Most of the newer reactor designs actually use the energy of decay heat to drive some physics that move the heat out of the reactor (mostly by creating convection loops to move coolant up to some heat exchange surfaces which dump the thermal energy into the local air), without requiring any external power, so you're not far off in the idea that the best source of energy to cool a hot reactor is the energy of the hot reactor.
As I mentioned in one of my previous replies, I do remember seeing news reports which specifically mentioned the use of boronated seawater. However, it's possible that the boronation effort didn't start right away. I think you're right that during the timeframe that they were dropping it from choppers, they probably weren't bothering to boronate it.
Which raises the question, if you are going to put unboronated water on a melted reactor, do you risk results that would be *worse* than just leaving it to melt, since the water is a reactor?
Are there moderator rods? I was under the impression that Boiling Water Reactors just used the coolant water as the moderator, not rods?
I think the poster who said the emergency seawater coolant wasn't boronated probably has the answer. I had been (perhaps wrongly) under the impression that boron was being added to the seawater before injection specifically to keep the seawater from acting as a moderator.
If that was not the case, then there would have been moderator present, and if there were any holes/channels in the melted fuel mass where the seawater could penetrate, it could then start acting as a moderator, leading to re-criticality.
I think another poster, perhaps, has a good explanation, btw - I thought the seawater they injected was boronated from the very start, but that may have been the result of either reading inaccurate media reports, or perhaps just confusion on my part as they apparently *did* boronate the water later, but perhaps not right from the start.
So, it seems the answer to my question may be as simple as, they injected "moderator" (in the form of non-boronated water) into the reactor, creating the conditions necessary for re-criticality. In other words, my model wasn't wrong, so much as my data (that G.I.G.O. thing I mentioned above - Garbage In, Garbage Out).
I'm not arguing anything. I asked a question. If (and that still hasn't been conclusively proven, but there is evidence to indicate a good possibility) that re-criticality occured, then the natural next question becomes *how* did this happen? How is my model flawed? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I never, ever said in my post that the data is wrong, nor even implied that. I simply asked how this happened without a moderator. So, please climb down off that horse and join the rest of us.
IIRC, the reactors were 1000MW *electrical* output. Because of thermal efficiencies of steam generators of around 35%, I believe that means the thermal output of each reactor would have been about 1000/.35 ~= 2800 MW thermal energy.
So, instead of 7% of 1000MW = 70MW, I think you're looking at 7% of 2800 = 196MW.
That's a LOT of heat to get rid of, even if it is a small percentage of the 2800MW full output.
My understanding is that LEU (low-enriched uranium) cannot achieve criticality without a moderator to slow down the neutrons?
Can anyone with a nuclear physics/engineering background give any explanation of how you can get a chain reaction without moderator?
Ok, they were cooling the reactor with water, and water is a moderator, but the water was also boronated, which should cancel the moderation property of water, shouldn't it?
True, but how much have you been paid by the college classes *you've* taken? I've never taken a college class that paid me 13 thousand dollars in a semester.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if she's HIV+, can you prove the HIV came from DSK? Does DSK even have HIV?
Funny you should bring up Steam in this discussion, since Steam is a blatant attempt, at least in part, to forever destroy the secondary game sales market. You can't transfer games from one account to another, and if you try to sell the account, and Valve catches you, they just ban the account forever and NO ONE ever plays those copies of the game again.
There was a story awhile back about Valve catching someone, and banning their account, which had something like $2000 worth of games on it.Flush. Watch it swirl down the drain.
The thing that always bugged me about AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, was that they were closed "networks" which divided the Internet. That is, you start with the Internet where, by default, everyone can reach everyone. I could send an email to anyone at any service provider/company/university/etc.
Then AOL comes along with AIM, and creates a proprietary system totally controlled by them, requiring me to register an AOL "screenname", instead of just using the standard username@host.tld identification system. They didn't at all try to work with MSN, Yahoo!, etc to make it so that anyone could talk to anyone.
So, we end up with like 6 different closed systems, and to talk to all your friends, you end up needing 6 different user "identities", one for each network. Sure, things like GAIM/Pidgin, and other multi-network chat clients made it possible to log into all the different networks simultaneously, but it was all ridiculously stupid.
SMS, despite the fact that it was stupidly expensive, at least had the advantage that it was based on an open standard, which allowed anyone on any carrier to send a message to anyone on any other carrier in the world.
I was happy when AIM, and the rest, basically died (I think I maybe used it one time each year in the last 5 years).
I still think online instant messaging can be useful (occasionally use Skype for that purpose, which also suffers from the same problem), but I'd really like to see the emergence of a system where all IM users can communicate (text, voice, video, and file transfer) to any other user on any service provider.
I may be wrong, but my understanding is that the version(s) of Mono that target iOS don't produce CIL (which is the .Net bytecode) binaries which then get executed on the Mono runtime like you would do for any other platform.
I think, basically, it acts like a cross-compiler that creates an iOS native executable from .Net source code (on the compiling machine, it might still create the CIL binary, but then take the bytecode, and the bytecode for all libraries referenced, and compile that into an iOS native binary.
If that's the case, that's not that radical an idea.
"Also, the Titanic was a great ship that provided excellent transportation until halfway across the Atlantic."
But, we didn't stop sailing because of the Titanic.
"So how many have died as a direct effect of the radiation from Fukushima? Zero? That's right, zero! Geez, horrible, isn't it?"
Nice strawman. Nobody is worried about people who haven't died *yet* - they are worried that if people return to the evac zone, they may start to experience higher rates of cancers among the population, and someone may die next year, or a few years from now, or 10-20 years from now.
Can you show that is not a possible outcome?.
I don't know if that's a real threat or not, but apparently the Japanese government thinks it could be.
How long does it take to hit a send button, pop the thumb drive out of the PC and hit the road? I seriously doubt these guys ever really visited the same Internet cafe twice (assuming Osama had several trusted couriers, you could send different people to the same cafe on different occasions, just don't send the same guy to the same place twice.
One important thing to keep in mind about Republicans is that they aren't completely anti-science, and the Dems are not completely pro-science.
While the Republican party, on the one hand, tends to deny climate change, on the other hand, embraces one of the science/technology approaches which has the greatest potential to help reduce and control climate change: nuclear power.
Also, at least where it makes economic sense, I think you'd find that most Republicans embrace efficiency - to a point. Perhaps not to as great a point as some efficiency advocates would want, but nuclear and efficiency combined could help dramatically reduce America's carbon footprint.
On the other side of the aisle, while Obama has, at least in his speeches, been pro-nuclear, there is a very significant portion of the Democratic party which has and continues to be very strongly anti-nuclear. It's my observation (and I've seen others make a similar observation) that while there is some basis for people to legitimately be worried about the risks of nuclear power, that some of the staunchest anti-nuclear advocates use a lot of similar rhetoric and junk science to fight against nuclear power as the climate change denialists.
Now, keep in mind here, I'm not trying to start a pro/anti-nuclear flamewar here - just giving an example that, even though sometimes Republicans seem anti-science, and Dems seem pro-science, the issue is more nuanced than that. On specific issues, both parties can be anti-science and pro-science, as it suits their pre-determined platforms.
Which is why a scientific STUDY published in an established *peer-reviewed* journal is worth more than a hundred documentaries.
You're right that "documentaries" are often carefully crafted propagandist BS. Which is why I watched Gasland with a very skeptical eye. The problem with Gasland is it is *mostly* a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotes don't prove anything in a meaningful way, although they do raise awareness that perhaps there *might* be a problem and the issue should be further studied by academics and scientists.
This *study* provides a more damming assessment of the problems.
The other point is, and this is well-established fact - the Gas Drillers get an exemption to the clean air and water acts? If they're not polluting, why do they need an exemption? If they're not polluting, why do they actively oppose repealing that exemption?
Is that sarcasm?
SGU showed some promise in the early episodes, but really failed to ever deliver on those promises. Pretty much the same story with Caprica. The writers of both shows had premises which seemed like good foundations to build interesting shows on, but ended up coming up with horrible plotlines and characters which ranged from awful to merely boring.
SciFi implied that the station focused on showing Science Fiction content. They abandoned that premise, so calling the network SciFi was false advertising. SyFy, on the other hand, as a word with no meaning, suits a network with no focus.
They are the network that's not about anything.
I'm slightly confused about your statement. You're saying that it had cooled further, and was generating twice as much heat as what I calculated?
Are you totalling the heat from all the reactors? Or did you mean 400KW instead of MW?
It started to carry a negative connotation when some people started using junk science to raise false alarms. Look at Helen Caldicott telling everyone that Chernobyl resulted in millions of deaths, and that Fukushima will result in millions of cancers.
She repeatedly appeals to a single source - a Greenpeace "Report" which they somehow managed to get the NYAS to publish without any peer review, which specifically states that it does not use standard scientific analysis methods because those methods don't give the results the report author wants to find.
She ignores all the other science which has been done to determine the results of Chernobyl, decrying it all as a massive "cover up" and "fraud". There's only one report in the world, apparently, which tells "the truth". These people cherry pick their sources to get the alarming results they want to find.
See: Confirmation Bias
That is the sense that most people use when they pejoratively use the term 'alarmist' - someone who spreads FUD which is not based on sound science.
"However, that data has never been made public."
Does that "data" even exist? Did anyone sample the smoke, or take some sort of optical spectrometry measurements or some other methods of data collection?
Perhaps it was, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that in the midst of a crisis, that when an unexpected explosion happens, that anyone has the equipment on hand or the time/opportunity to take such measurements?
Most of the newer reactor designs actually use the energy of decay heat to drive some physics that move the heat out of the reactor (mostly by creating convection loops to move coolant up to some heat exchange surfaces which dump the thermal energy into the local air), without requiring any external power, so you're not far off in the idea that the best source of energy to cool a hot reactor is the energy of the hot reactor.
Err, the water is a moderator, not a reactor. Mental hiccup.
As I mentioned in one of my previous replies, I do remember seeing news reports which specifically mentioned the use of boronated seawater. However, it's possible that the boronation effort didn't start right away. I think you're right that during the timeframe that they were dropping it from choppers, they probably weren't bothering to boronate it.
Which raises the question, if you are going to put unboronated water on a melted reactor, do you risk results that would be *worse* than just leaving it to melt, since the water is a reactor?
Are there moderator rods? I was under the impression that Boiling Water Reactors just used the coolant water as the moderator, not rods?
I think the poster who said the emergency seawater coolant wasn't boronated probably has the answer. I had been (perhaps wrongly) under the impression that boron was being added to the seawater before injection specifically to keep the seawater from acting as a moderator.
If that was not the case, then there would have been moderator present, and if there were any holes/channels in the melted fuel mass where the seawater could penetrate, it could then start acting as a moderator, leading to re-criticality.
I think another poster, perhaps, has a good explanation, btw - I thought the seawater they injected was boronated from the very start, but that may have been the result of either reading inaccurate media reports, or perhaps just confusion on my part as they apparently *did* boronate the water later, but perhaps not right from the start.
So, it seems the answer to my question may be as simple as, they injected "moderator" (in the form of non-boronated water) into the reactor, creating the conditions necessary for re-criticality. In other words, my model wasn't wrong, so much as my data (that G.I.G.O. thing I mentioned above - Garbage In, Garbage Out).
I'm not arguing anything. I asked a question. If (and that still hasn't been conclusively proven, but there is evidence to indicate a good possibility) that re-criticality occured, then the natural next question becomes *how* did this happen? How is my model flawed? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I never, ever said in my post that the data is wrong, nor even implied that. I simply asked how this happened without a moderator. So, please climb down off that horse and join the rest of us.
"The decay heat, which is 7% of 1000 MW"
IIRC, the reactors were 1000MW *electrical* output. Because of thermal efficiencies of steam generators of around 35%, I believe that means the thermal output of each reactor would have been about 1000/.35 ~= 2800 MW thermal energy.
So, instead of 7% of 1000MW = 70MW, I think you're looking at 7% of 2800 = 196MW.
That's a LOT of heat to get rid of, even if it is a small percentage of the 2800MW full output.
I thought the news reports all said they boronated the seawater? Maybe I'm misremembering, but it seemed like that had been the case.
How, without a moderator?
My understanding is that LEU (low-enriched uranium) cannot achieve criticality without a moderator to slow down the neutrons?
Can anyone with a nuclear physics/engineering background give any explanation of how you can get a chain reaction without moderator?
Ok, they were cooling the reactor with water, and water is a moderator, but the water was also boronated, which should cancel the moderation property of water, shouldn't it?
True, but how much have you been paid by the college classes *you've* taken? I've never taken a college class that paid me 13 thousand dollars in a semester.
Fair enough.