I would point out that leaving earth's gravity well, while a significant source of required energy, is not the only one. To reach Mars in a reasonable time frame (say approx. 180 days; that is, 6 months), you need to accellerate the mass of the entire vessel and contents up to a fairly high speed (I don't know enough about orbital mechanics and calculating trajectories and things to figure out the path, or the speed, but I'm pretty sure it's a pretty high speed).
Even with no gravity, accelerating a mass to a high speed takes a lot of energy. The classical physics equation would be E_k (kinetic energy) = 1/2mv^2. I don't think the speeds are high enough to need to bother with the more complicated relativity equations?
Then, you need to expend nearly the same amount of energy as you near mars to match velocity/orbits with mars so you don't enter it's atmosphere and gravity well going too fast.
So, a space elevator only partially reduces the energy requirements. Space elevator would be much more useful for things like putting new satellites in orbit. And dropping rocks on your enemies *grin*.
If there's any justice in this world, people trying to steal copper cables, pipes, etc will end up electrocuting themselves sooner or later when they hit a live power main.
As for the summary author's choice of words, as I posted elsewhere, it seems pretty clear to me that they were trying to make the write up a bit humorous and light-hearted. It seems there's rather a lack of a funny bone among some of/.'s readers today, though.
Personally, reading the summary, I thought the person who wrote it was attempting to be a bit humorous about it. ..I mean, immediately after using the words "catastrophic consequences", he says, "Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours."
If that's not being facetious, I don't know what is.
The key is to get as many people as possible chanting the incantations in a short time, that way Cthulu is popping from place to place so fast (every 1/4 second or so) he doesn't have time to do anything bad.
I call it it Cthulu-pong. Sort of a denial of service attack if you will.
The hydrogen explosions are why I don't think the operators were extra lucky. It appears to me from the fact that there were hydro explosions in 3 or 4 of the reactor buildings, that it is very likely that when this type of reactor loses cooling, you get a hydrogen explosion. It also looks like the hydrogen explosions did pretty bad damage to one of the reactors at least. So, this looks like it's probably a good example of getting as bad as it probably will.
I am not a lawyer, but I think I have a decent basic understanding of copyright law.
If you sell your car to someone, can you tell them what they can and can't do with *their* car? If you sell your house, or your computer, or any other thing (well, sometimes in the sales contract you can dictate some things, c.f. Homeowners' Associations, but if it's not in the contract, you can't retroactively make demands of the new owner - it's too late, the ownership has transferred).
Ownership carries with it the right to determine what's done with something. That's true for cars, computers, and just as true for copyrights.
However. . . if the original owner gave a license (which it sounds like they did) to some people to distribute the game, and if that license did not specify any circumstances for termination (e.g. an expiration date, or a clause say "we can terminate this license at any time through written notice), etc), then the license obligation does still carry over to future owners of the copyright - they have to honor the license.
So, if Origin Systems sent, say, an email to someone, saying they could distribute the program for free to other users, as long as it was not for commercial purposes, and the email did not specify any circumstances under which the license would terminate, those users would still have that license.
On the other hand, unless a license specifically says it is transferrable, it does not transfer. So, let's say Origin gives a license to "Alice", to re-distribute the game. Alice then, under the rights granted by the license, gives a copy to "Bob". Bob cannot legally re-distribute another copy to other people - the license does not transfer, unless explicitly stated by the copyright owner.
I suspect in this EA case that people who were not the original parties which were granted licenses, are re-distributing without a license. In that case, EA is within its rights to tell them to cease and desist.
What are you talking about? No one cares about your character name, unless it also happens to be the name of an NPC character in the game, or in someone else's book, movie, tv show, or game, etc which you ripped off.
There's nothing in the linked article about character names, so I don't even understand why you bothered posting this?
Well, you're right to a point. . . it ends up depending on whether fusion is substantially cheaper or not.
For example, if Polywell works (which I cannot claim I know if it will or not), it is believed a polywell reactor might cost something like $100-$200 Million to build a power plant which is equivalent in output to a $6 Billion+ light water reactor.
I've heard thorium is supposed to be similarly cheap though, (in the ballpark of $200M, that is), though, so Thorium might have a possibility to take away the impetus for fusion research if it really is that cheap, for a few thousand years.
>Actually, 6 reactors with fuel, and 5 have been operating at that time.
Ok, so I went back and checked on this, because I couldn't remember for sure. According to World Nuclear News there were 3 reactors in operation at the time the quake and tsunami hit.
"Uhm, no. It could have been worse, and it might get worse."
You seem to be very challenged with understanding the words "probably" and "likely".
Just because something theoretically could get worse, I still stand by my assertion that watching what happened in Japan, this looks like it's PROBABLY representative of the worst that is LIKELY to happen. Unless you can point out some way in which the reactor operators in Japan were extraordinarily lucky, I think it's a reasonable statement that what happened is likely to be close to what happens with similar reactor designs if similar circumstances occur.
Do you figure we've been extraordinarly lucky for the past 50 years that, before Fukushima, the only large release of fuel material from a nuclear plant was Chernobyl, that we've gone 25 years since Chernobyl and now we have Fukushima, which while it has released enough materials to be a concern, doesn't appear to have released anywhere near the levels that Chernobyl did?
I don't think luck can really run that long. I think that history shows that the nuclear industry has done a lot of things right that strongly limits the likelyhood of a scenario which you describe in which $2000 Billion of damage can occur.
I also think that a lot of the problem is that people are more afraid of radiation than they should be. Radiation presents some risks, some hazards, but in terms of dangers, low levels of radioactive exposure is the least obnoxious form of risk you can be exposed to - there's a substantially large chance it'll do nothing at all to you bad, and a small risk it might cause a cancer.
Fusion may be really close. Or, it might be a hundred or two hundred years away.
There's a fusion reactor concept called a polywell (sometimes called a wiffle ball, because the devices looks a bit like a wiffle ball), which the Navy has been testing for the past couple years.
If that concept works out, we might have a working net-power fusion plant in as soon as 5 years. Or it could be 200 or 300 years away. Who knows.
"Obviously, nobody wants to live near *any* nuclear plant."
I do. I look at nuclear plants, and I rationally acknowledge there is a small risk of an incident. If an incident happens, there is a small risk (that's a small risk multiplied by a small risk for a pretty small risk overall) the plant might might leak radiocative materials in the environment.
If the plant leaks radioactive material into the environment, there's a good chance I'll have to be evacuated from that area, and go live somewhere else, and if that happens, I and my family might have a small increased risk of cancer (no guarantee - the risks are small enough unless there is a massive, massive release, that I and my family will probably be fine; additionally, we all have a pretty large chance - I think 25% is the figure I've seen - of getting cancer *anyhow*, without any nuclear accidents).
I might have to permanently move to a different location. Because the risks are fairly low, I think I can live with a very small risk that I might need to move, or have a slightly elevated risk of getting a cancer I might get *anyhow*, in exchange for the numerous benefits of nuclear power.
At the same time, I'm all for trying to learn from our experience, and design new reactors which have features which make them *probably* safer.
"And you need 100%, because one accident would extremely costly and dangerous, unlike other facilities."
There is a flaw in your statement. The word "would" should be "could" - "because one accident could be extremely costly and dangerous". People opposed to nuclear power seem to view the world in a way that every nuclear plant, if it has an accident, has a high probability of become a major, expensive, dangerous mess. From everything I've seen, including *especially* Fukushima, the chances of a real 'worst case scenario' at a nuclear plant seems real, but small.
Fukushima had 4(?) operating reactors. I believe that we can look at this situation,probabilistically, that each of those reactors *individually* had a theoretical chance to become a major, major problem. 4 roles of the dice, if you will. Unless my info is outdated now (which it could be), I believe Reactor 3 was the most badly damaged, and most of the radioactive material is still contained within Reactor 3 (that is, I read there's been quite a bit of iodine released, and perhaps a small amount of Cesium, but no plutonium or other really nasty, heavy elements).
It looks to me like Fukushima is probably representative of the worst that is likely to happen, with old reactors, and that doesn't appear to have caused many human deaths, and does not look like it's likely to cause a lot of human deaths (it'll take 20-30 years, and medical studies, to really determine the answer, but right now it doesn't look like it's going to kill many people).
I think that opponents of nuclear power create a bit of a paradox by opposing *new* nuclear power plants:
By opposing the construction of new nuclear power plants, whose designs benefit from decades of experience gained with older designs, knowledge about their failure modes, ways to improve cooling with passive cooling systems, etc, you effectively act to keep older, less safe nuclear power plants in operation longer.
So, would you rather be living near a newer, safer plant, or an older, slightly less safe (but still, mostly safe - it took a massive earthquake and tsunami to take out those old Mk 1's in Fukushima) plant?
That said, I certainly think we should (and I'm positive we will) do extensive investigation and analysis of the problems at Fukushima Daiichi, find what lessons can be learned from that, and apply those lessons to both existing, and new reactors.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
On the issue of using fuel from dismantled weapons, we've already been doing that for 10 or 20 years - that was part of one of the START treaties. My understanding is that for the past 10 years or so, most of the USA's reactors have been using fuel from destroyed weapons.
I totally agree, btw - that's a great way to generate peaceful civilian energy - by reducing weapons stockpiles around the world.
I decided to try to start learning about nuclear power a little over a year ago, driven mostly by concerns about waste disposal, and safety.
One of the things I've learned is that current reactor designs only use a tiny, tiny percent of fuel potential of the Uranium - basically, about 1 percent.
So, one option is that we keep using the current fuel cycle for another 150-200 years, then when Uranium gets scarce, we start using breeder reactors, which 'unlock' the fuel potential of the remaining 99% of the Uranium which remains in our 'spent fuel' and 'depleted uranium' tailings.
With breeder reactor technology, after extracting 1% of the energy for about 250 years (we've already been using reactors for over 50 years, so the clock has already started), we should be able to get something like 99 * 250 years times more energy (assuming energy consumption levels remain about the same; that's a dubious assumption, but provides at least a good starting point; it also assumes the breeders can consume the full 99% of remaining U-238, which might not, in practice, actually be true - there might be some 'losses' in the process, but we should at least be able to extract a large percentage of what remains).
So, that might be something like 20,000 more years worth of power from that Uranium.
Then there's Thorium. Thorium is a metal which is 4 or 5 times more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium is. Right now, Thorium is a mostly useless 'waste' product from mining operations extracting other rare-earth elements (like Neodymium which is used for very strong permanent magnets in high-tech equipment, including those little earbud speakers for your phone/mp3 player, some designs of electric wind turbines, hard drives [I think], or anything which needs very strong magnets).
Thorium would most likely be used in a type of reactor called a LFTR (most folks pronounce that as "lifter"), which is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. A LFTR very efficiently burns the Thorium, extracting virtually 100% of the available energy, so we should have something on the order of 100,000's of years of energy supply using Thorium.
In the end though, we'll probably be using fusion power long before those eventualities. It's hard to say for sure, but I would think that at most, we'll only be using fission reactors for another 100-200 years anyhow.
We already have fuel taxes. As far as I know, we've had fuel taxes in the U.S. for like 60 years or longer. The point of this idea was that, if you have a plugin hybrid, the government is afraid you might use almost no fuel, and pay almost no taxes. As I mentioned in another post, however, I think the polticians are putting the cart before the horse here - there's so few EVs and hybrids on the road right now, the lost tax revenue is negligible. Seems to me we should just wait, and revisit the issue if/when there's enough of those vehicles on the road to actually be worth worrying about.
There's also the issue that, at least it seems to me, there's not enough hybrids and EVs on the road to be worth worrying about them yet. Let's revisit this issue in 20 years, if by then enough percentage of vehicles have become less-gas or gas-less to really make a damn bit of difference.
Right now, people buying these new technology cars are paying a premium up-front in the purchase price. Give them a tax break for a bit, instead of choking this tech in its infancy with additional new taxes. Or, since most people buying these cars are getting some sort of tax credit or other subsidy, just reduce the subsidy by the amount you would expect to get in 'mileage taxes'.
The point of subsidies/credits is to encourage adoption of the new technology - that is, to create an incentive. But, when people who are mostly rational see that you're adding a new tax on such vehicles, they'll realize the incentive is just smoke and mirrors, and the incentive is gone. They'll just go back to buying the cheaper ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles.
That is correct, but since you could *could* connect to the Internet with Winsock, you could connect to the Internet. For a short while I had Trumpet Winsock on my parents' 386 running Win 3.1, with Netscape Navigator 2.something for Browser, Qualcomm Eudora for email, and some graphical ftp client, don't remember the name, and a telnet client for connecting to various BBS's and other servers.
It mostly worked out, don't get me wrong, but to say that standards were better in the 90's than they are today, to the point where everything worked great on every computer, is stretching things just a little bit.
There seems to be a particular psychological disorder, which people apparently get more vulnerable to the older they get, called "Nostalgia". I think it's closely related to "Dementia". Might even just be a type of dementia.
Nostalgia causes people to forget the truth about the past and remember it in a far better light than it actually happened. For example, from the article:
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Did that guy ever USE a version of IE before version 7, or the old Netscape Navigator browsers?
I remember all the time, trying to visit websites, getting messages that the website was designed for some other browser, and either not being able to access the content on the site at all, or having it render terribly glitchy. As a sometimes Linux user, I noticed a lot of problems accessing some websites with the browsers available for Linux (Netscape, Mosaic, etc).
Standards compatibility has come a long, long way since then. I would argue that we have better standards, and better implementations of those standards now than we ever did before. IE9 has greatly improved Microsoft's standards compliance, by most accounts. iPhone/Android/Blackberry/misc cell phones do a pretty decent job rendering most websites - something which could not be said of the early cell phone browsers.
T-Mobile had, what I thought was, a very innovative feature of their network. They supported a technology called UMA (which T-Mobile marketted under various names; I think most recently as "Unlimited Hotspot Calling").
The idea was that phones that supported it, could make calls over a Wifi broadband internet connection - it used the same basic digital protocols as the regular GSM network, I believe, but just routed the data over Wifi when available, instead of over the cellular network. If you left the wifi hotspot, it would try to seamlessly transition back to the cellular network.
They sold this as a $10/mo "add-on", where the calls initiated on Wifi were not billed against your monthly limits.
This was brilliant, I thought, for a number of reasons, and T-Mobile was the ONLY carrier which had the technology deployed in the U.S.
Unfortunately, their marketing dept. had no idea what to do with it. They made, I think, 2 critical mistakes:
1) They shouldn't have made it a $10/mo add-on. They should have used it as a way to lure new customers from other carriers. Make it free. Tell people they can talk all they want, whenever they want, over Wifi, plus offer competitively priced plans for the cellular service, and try to steal customers away from other networks.
2) The major problem with this feature, for T-Mobile, was that only like 10% of their phones supported it in its 'heyday', and once 3G smartphones came out, T-Mobile did NOT require their phone makers to support the Wifi calling feature - basically, after the G1 was released, almost no new phones supported the Wifi calling (including the G1). It's useless to have a feature that your network supports, but none of your phones do.
If I was the CEO of T-MO USA I would have *required* all new phones to support Wifi calling, or I wouldn't sell them from my stores.
I don't know if the Wifi calling would have saved T-Mo, probably not. It's not really a *killer* feature, but it was a nice idea - when you are at home, or at a friend or family members home who has Wifi, you get guaranteed good coverage, even if they don't live in a T-Mo coverage area (or when you are travelling on business, etc - basically, anywhere you could find a Wifi hotspot to connect to, you had "great coverage", and Wifi is everywhere, just about).
I just mention this because, in addition to the things the parent mentioned, this was another one of those places where T-Mo management just failed to execute on one of their strengths. Any time you have a feature nobody else does, even if it's not a killer feature, you still try to market it - leverage your uniqueness in the market.
I never said there aren't any levels of exposure which can increase cancer rates. The open question is, is there a 'floor' to the exposure, a limit below which, a small increase does not increase cancer rates.
It might seem academic, but there are a number of people who insist that the smallest doses will kill *someone* if a large enough population is exposed to those tiny exposures.
I don't know who's right, but at the end of the day, since nature constantly exposes us to small, and variable (depending on local geology, buildings, elevation above sea level, etc), amounts of radiation, the way I see it is that small increases in exposure don't change my chances of getting cancer much at all, so I'm not going to worry at all about small exposures - only moderately large exposures.
Are you assuming the Linear-No-Threshold hypothesis. I've seen several sources, which were themselves reffering to a number of different studies, which strongly suggest the LNT hypothesis is probably wrong.
We use LNT for public policy because it hasn't definitively been disproved, and people want to use the most 'conservative' assumptions in such cases, but the point is, there's good reasons to believe it's quite possibly wrong.
Well, since the control servers which were siezed sent the commands to the zombies which caused them to commit unlawful acts, I think suborned is probably appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
I would point out that leaving earth's gravity well, while a significant source of required energy, is not the only one. To reach Mars in a reasonable time frame (say approx. 180 days; that is, 6 months), you need to accellerate the mass of the entire vessel and contents up to a fairly high speed (I don't know enough about orbital mechanics and calculating trajectories and things to figure out the path, or the speed, but I'm pretty sure it's a pretty high speed).
Even with no gravity, accelerating a mass to a high speed takes a lot of energy. The classical physics equation would be E_k (kinetic energy) = 1/2mv^2. I don't think the speeds are high enough to need to bother with the more complicated relativity equations?
Then, you need to expend nearly the same amount of energy as you near mars to match velocity/orbits with mars so you don't enter it's atmosphere and gravity well going too fast.
So, a space elevator only partially reduces the energy requirements. Space elevator would be much more useful for things like putting new satellites in orbit. And dropping rocks on your enemies *grin*.
If there's any justice in this world, people trying to steal copper cables, pipes, etc will end up electrocuting themselves sooner or later when they hit a live power main.
As for the summary author's choice of words, as I posted elsewhere, it seems pretty clear to me that they were trying to make the write up a bit humorous and light-hearted. It seems there's rather a lack of a funny bone among some of /.'s readers today, though.
Personally, reading the summary, I thought the person who wrote it was attempting to be a bit humorous about it. . .I mean, immediately after using the words "catastrophic consequences", he says, "Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours."
If that's not being facetious, I don't know what is.
The key is to get as many people as possible chanting the incantations in a short time, that way Cthulu is popping from place to place so fast (every 1/4 second or so) he doesn't have time to do anything bad.
I call it it Cthulu-pong. Sort of a denial of service attack if you will.
The hydrogen explosions are why I don't think the operators were extra lucky. It appears to me from the fact that there were hydro explosions in 3 or 4 of the reactor buildings, that it is very likely that when this type of reactor loses cooling, you get a hydrogen explosion. It also looks like the hydrogen explosions did pretty bad damage to one of the reactors at least. So, this looks like it's probably a good example of getting as bad as it probably will.
I am not a lawyer, but I think I have a decent basic understanding of copyright law.
If you sell your car to someone, can you tell them what they can and can't do with *their* car? If you sell your house, or your computer, or any other thing (well, sometimes in the sales contract you can dictate some things, c.f. Homeowners' Associations, but if it's not in the contract, you can't retroactively make demands of the new owner - it's too late, the ownership has transferred).
Ownership carries with it the right to determine what's done with something. That's true for cars, computers, and just as true for copyrights.
However. . . if the original owner gave a license (which it sounds like they did) to some people to distribute the game, and if that license did not specify any circumstances for termination (e.g. an expiration date, or a clause say "we can terminate this license at any time through written notice), etc), then the license obligation does still carry over to future owners of the copyright - they have to honor the license.
So, if Origin Systems sent, say, an email to someone, saying they could distribute the program for free to other users, as long as it was not for commercial purposes, and the email did not specify any circumstances under which the license would terminate, those users would still have that license.
On the other hand, unless a license specifically says it is transferrable, it does not transfer. So, let's say Origin gives a license to "Alice", to re-distribute the game. Alice then, under the rights granted by the license, gives a copy to "Bob". Bob cannot legally re-distribute another copy to other people - the license does not transfer, unless explicitly stated by the copyright owner.
I suspect in this EA case that people who were not the original parties which were granted licenses, are re-distributing without a license. In that case, EA is within its rights to tell them to cease and desist.
What are you talking about? No one cares about your character name, unless it also happens to be the name of an NPC character in the game, or in someone else's book, movie, tv show, or game, etc which you ripped off.
There's nothing in the linked article about character names, so I don't even understand why you bothered posting this?
Well, you're right to a point. . . it ends up depending on whether fusion is substantially cheaper or not.
For example, if Polywell works (which I cannot claim I know if it will or not), it is believed a polywell reactor might cost something like $100-$200 Million to build a power plant which is equivalent in output to a $6 Billion+ light water reactor.
I've heard thorium is supposed to be similarly cheap though, (in the ballpark of $200M, that is), though, so Thorium might have a possibility to take away the impetus for fusion research if it really is that cheap, for a few thousand years.
>Actually, 6 reactors with fuel, and 5 have been operating at that time.
Ok, so I went back and checked on this, because I couldn't remember for sure. According to World Nuclear News there were 3 reactors in operation at the time the quake and tsunami hit.
"Uhm, no. It could have been worse, and it might get worse."
You seem to be very challenged with understanding the words "probably" and "likely".
Just because something theoretically could get worse, I still stand by my assertion that watching what happened in Japan, this looks like it's PROBABLY representative of the worst that is LIKELY to happen. Unless you can point out some way in which the reactor operators in Japan were extraordinarily lucky, I think it's a reasonable statement that what happened is likely to be close to what happens with similar reactor designs if similar circumstances occur.
Do you figure we've been extraordinarly lucky for the past 50 years that, before Fukushima, the only large release of fuel material from a nuclear plant was Chernobyl, that we've gone 25 years since Chernobyl and now we have Fukushima, which while it has released enough materials to be a concern, doesn't appear to have released anywhere near the levels that Chernobyl did?
I don't think luck can really run that long. I think that history shows that the nuclear industry has done a lot of things right that strongly limits the likelyhood of a scenario which you describe in which $2000 Billion of damage can occur.
I also think that a lot of the problem is that people are more afraid of radiation than they should be. Radiation presents some risks, some hazards, but in terms of dangers, low levels of radioactive exposure is the least obnoxious form of risk you can be exposed to - there's a substantially large chance it'll do nothing at all to you bad, and a small risk it might cause a cancer.
But, people freak out anyhow.
Fusion may be really close. Or, it might be a hundred or two hundred years away.
There's a fusion reactor concept called a polywell (sometimes called a wiffle ball, because the devices looks a bit like a wiffle ball), which the Navy has been testing for the past couple years.
If that concept works out, we might have a working net-power fusion plant in as soon as 5 years. Or it could be 200 or 300 years away. Who knows.
"Maybe they want the current plants decommissioned in addition to not wanting new power plants."
I'm sure that's probably true. The point is, that's not happening. Opposing new plants keeps old plants active longer, I think.
"Obviously, nobody wants to live near *any* nuclear plant."
I do. I look at nuclear plants, and I rationally acknowledge there is a small risk of an incident. If an incident happens, there is a small risk (that's a small risk multiplied by a small risk for a pretty small risk overall) the plant might might leak radiocative materials in the environment.
If the plant leaks radioactive material into the environment, there's a good chance I'll have to be evacuated from that area, and go live somewhere else, and if that happens, I and my family might have a small increased risk of cancer (no guarantee - the risks are small enough unless there is a massive, massive release, that I and my family will probably be fine; additionally, we all have a pretty large chance - I think 25% is the figure I've seen - of getting cancer *anyhow*, without any nuclear accidents).
I might have to permanently move to a different location. Because the risks are fairly low, I think I can live with a very small risk that I might need to move, or have a slightly elevated risk of getting a cancer I might get *anyhow*, in exchange for the numerous benefits of nuclear power.
At the same time, I'm all for trying to learn from our experience, and design new reactors which have features which make them *probably* safer.
"And you need 100%, because one accident would extremely costly and dangerous, unlike other facilities."
There is a flaw in your statement. The word "would" should be "could" - "because one accident could be extremely costly and dangerous". People opposed to nuclear power seem to view the world in a way that every nuclear plant, if it has an accident, has a high probability of become a major, expensive, dangerous mess. From everything I've seen, including *especially* Fukushima, the chances of a real 'worst case scenario' at a nuclear plant seems real, but small.
Fukushima had 4(?) operating reactors. I believe that we can look at this situation,probabilistically, that each of those reactors *individually* had a theoretical chance to become a major, major problem. 4 roles of the dice, if you will. Unless my info is outdated now (which it could be), I believe Reactor 3 was the most badly damaged, and most of the radioactive material is still contained within Reactor 3 (that is, I read there's been quite a bit of iodine released, and perhaps a small amount of Cesium, but no plutonium or other really nasty, heavy elements).
It looks to me like Fukushima is probably representative of the worst that is likely to happen, with old reactors, and that doesn't appear to have caused many human deaths, and does not look like it's likely to cause a lot of human deaths (it'll take 20-30 years, and medical studies, to really determine the answer, but right now it doesn't look like it's going to kill many people).
I think that opponents of nuclear power create a bit of a paradox by opposing *new* nuclear power plants:
By opposing the construction of new nuclear power plants, whose designs benefit from decades of experience gained with older designs, knowledge about their failure modes, ways to improve cooling with passive cooling systems, etc, you effectively act to keep older, less safe nuclear power plants in operation longer.
So, would you rather be living near a newer, safer plant, or an older, slightly less safe (but still, mostly safe - it took a massive earthquake and tsunami to take out those old Mk 1's in Fukushima) plant?
That said, I certainly think we should (and I'm positive we will) do extensive investigation and analysis of the problems at Fukushima Daiichi, find what lessons can be learned from that, and apply those lessons to both existing, and new reactors.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
On the issue of using fuel from dismantled weapons, we've already been doing that for 10 or 20 years - that was part of one of the START treaties. My understanding is that for the past 10 years or so, most of the USA's reactors have been using fuel from destroyed weapons.
I totally agree, btw - that's a great way to generate peaceful civilian energy - by reducing weapons stockpiles around the world.
Here's one article.
Also, Megatons to MegaWatts.
I forgot to include a link I was intending to, in my previous post.
If you would like more information about Thorium reactors, check out:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com.
I decided to try to start learning about nuclear power a little over a year ago, driven mostly by concerns about waste disposal, and safety.
One of the things I've learned is that current reactor designs only use a tiny, tiny percent of fuel potential of the Uranium - basically, about 1 percent.
So, one option is that we keep using the current fuel cycle for another 150-200 years, then when Uranium gets scarce, we start using breeder reactors, which 'unlock' the fuel potential of the remaining 99% of the Uranium which remains in our 'spent fuel' and 'depleted uranium' tailings.
With breeder reactor technology, after extracting 1% of the energy for about 250 years (we've already been using reactors for over 50 years, so the clock has already started), we should be able to get something like 99 * 250 years times more energy (assuming energy consumption levels remain about the same; that's a dubious assumption, but provides at least a good starting point; it also assumes the breeders can consume the full 99% of remaining U-238, which might not, in practice, actually be true - there might be some 'losses' in the process, but we should at least be able to extract a large percentage of what remains).
So, that might be something like 20,000 more years worth of power from that Uranium.
Then there's Thorium. Thorium is a metal which is 4 or 5 times more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium is. Right now, Thorium is a mostly useless 'waste' product from mining operations extracting other rare-earth elements (like Neodymium which is used for very strong permanent magnets in high-tech equipment, including those little earbud speakers for your phone/mp3 player, some designs of electric wind turbines, hard drives [I think], or anything which needs very strong magnets).
Thorium would most likely be used in a type of reactor called a LFTR (most folks pronounce that as "lifter"), which is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. A LFTR very efficiently burns the Thorium, extracting virtually 100% of the available energy, so we should have something on the order of 100,000's of years of energy supply using Thorium.
In the end though, we'll probably be using fusion power long before those eventualities. It's hard to say for sure, but I would think that at most, we'll only be using fission reactors for another 100-200 years anyhow.
We already have fuel taxes. As far as I know, we've had fuel taxes in the U.S. for like 60 years or longer. The point of this idea was that, if you have a plugin hybrid, the government is afraid you might use almost no fuel, and pay almost no taxes. As I mentioned in another post, however, I think the polticians are putting the cart before the horse here - there's so few EVs and hybrids on the road right now, the lost tax revenue is negligible. Seems to me we should just wait, and revisit the issue if/when there's enough of those vehicles on the road to actually be worth worrying about.
There's also the issue that, at least it seems to me, there's not enough hybrids and EVs on the road to be worth worrying about them yet. Let's revisit this issue in 20 years, if by then enough percentage of vehicles have become less-gas or gas-less to really make a damn bit of difference.
Right now, people buying these new technology cars are paying a premium up-front in the purchase price. Give them a tax break for a bit, instead of choking this tech in its infancy with additional new taxes. Or, since most people buying these cars are getting some sort of tax credit or other subsidy, just reduce the subsidy by the amount you would expect to get in 'mileage taxes'.
The point of subsidies/credits is to encourage adoption of the new technology - that is, to create an incentive. But, when people who are mostly rational see that you're adding a new tax on such vehicles, they'll realize the incentive is just smoke and mirrors, and the incentive is gone. They'll just go back to buying the cheaper ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles.
Sweet - let's warn Haiti, Chile, China, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan!
That is correct, but since you could *could* connect to the Internet with Winsock, you could connect to the Internet. For a short while I had Trumpet Winsock on my parents' 386 running Win 3.1, with Netscape Navigator 2.something for Browser, Qualcomm Eudora for email, and some graphical ftp client, don't remember the name, and a telnet client for connecting to various BBS's and other servers.
It mostly worked out, don't get me wrong, but to say that standards were better in the 90's than they are today, to the point where everything worked great on every computer, is stretching things just a little bit.
There seems to be a particular psychological disorder, which people apparently get more vulnerable to the older they get, called "Nostalgia". I think it's closely related to "Dementia". Might even just be a type of dementia.
Nostalgia causes people to forget the truth about the past and remember it in a far better light than it actually happened. For example, from the article:
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Did that guy ever USE a version of IE before version 7, or the old Netscape Navigator browsers?
I remember all the time, trying to visit websites, getting messages that the website was designed for some other browser, and either not being able to access the content on the site at all, or having it render terribly glitchy. As a sometimes Linux user, I noticed a lot of problems accessing some websites with the browsers available for Linux (Netscape, Mosaic, etc).
Standards compatibility has come a long, long way since then. I would argue that we have better standards, and better implementations of those standards now than we ever did before. IE9 has greatly improved Microsoft's standards compliance, by most accounts. iPhone/Android/Blackberry/misc cell phones do a pretty decent job rendering most websites - something which could not be said of the early cell phone browsers.
T-Mobile had, what I thought was, a very innovative feature of their network. They supported a technology called UMA (which T-Mobile marketted under various names; I think most recently as "Unlimited Hotspot Calling").
The idea was that phones that supported it, could make calls over a Wifi broadband internet connection - it used the same basic digital protocols as the regular GSM network, I believe, but just routed the data over Wifi when available, instead of over the cellular network. If you left the wifi hotspot, it would try to seamlessly transition back to the cellular network.
They sold this as a $10/mo "add-on", where the calls initiated on Wifi were not billed against your monthly limits.
This was brilliant, I thought, for a number of reasons, and T-Mobile was the ONLY carrier which had the technology deployed in the U.S.
Unfortunately, their marketing dept. had no idea what to do with it. They made, I think, 2 critical mistakes:
1) They shouldn't have made it a $10/mo add-on. They should have used it as a way to lure new customers from other carriers. Make it free. Tell people they can talk all they want, whenever they want, over Wifi, plus offer competitively priced plans for the cellular service, and try to steal customers away from other networks.
2) The major problem with this feature, for T-Mobile, was that only like 10% of their phones supported it in its 'heyday', and once 3G smartphones came out, T-Mobile did NOT require their phone makers to support the Wifi calling feature - basically, after the G1 was released, almost no new phones supported the Wifi calling (including the G1). It's useless to have a feature that your network supports, but none of your phones do.
If I was the CEO of T-MO USA I would have *required* all new phones to support Wifi calling, or I wouldn't sell them from my stores.
I don't know if the Wifi calling would have saved T-Mo, probably not. It's not really a *killer* feature, but it was a nice idea - when you are at home, or at a friend or family members home who has Wifi, you get guaranteed good coverage, even if they don't live in a T-Mo coverage area (or when you are travelling on business, etc - basically, anywhere you could find a Wifi hotspot to connect to, you had "great coverage", and Wifi is everywhere, just about).
I just mention this because, in addition to the things the parent mentioned, this was another one of those places where T-Mo management just failed to execute on one of their strengths. Any time you have a feature nobody else does, even if it's not a killer feature, you still try to market it - leverage your uniqueness in the market.
I never said there aren't any levels of exposure which can increase cancer rates. The open question is, is there a 'floor' to the exposure, a limit below which, a small increase does not increase cancer rates.
It might seem academic, but there are a number of people who insist that the smallest doses will kill *someone* if a large enough population is exposed to those tiny exposures.
I don't know who's right, but at the end of the day, since nature constantly exposes us to small, and variable (depending on local geology, buildings, elevation above sea level, etc), amounts of radiation, the way I see it is that small increases in exposure don't change my chances of getting cancer much at all, so I'm not going to worry at all about small exposures - only moderately large exposures.
YMMV.
Are you assuming the Linear-No-Threshold hypothesis. I've seen several sources, which were themselves reffering to a number of different studies, which strongly suggest the LNT hypothesis is probably wrong.
We use LNT for public policy because it hasn't definitively been disproved, and people want to use the most 'conservative' assumptions in such cases, but the point is, there's good reasons to believe it's quite possibly wrong.
Well, since the control servers which were siezed sent the commands to the zombies which caused them to commit unlawful acts, I think suborned is probably appropriate.