Something which doesn't often get discussed, but which I learned about a couple years ago - a number of knowledgeable people have said that what really killed nuclear power in the United States was the Shoreham Power Plant.
This was a nuclear power plant built in Long Island, New York, for about $6 Bn. The plant passed certifications and inspections and was all ready to go into commercial operation. However, because of politics, the plant was never able to get the go ahead from the State of New York to operate. The governor, Mario Kuomo, basically vetoed an *already built* power plant.
As long as the laws are such that investors can't get reasonable assurance *before* they spend all the money to build the plant, that they will be definitely allowed to operate as long as the plant meets relevant technical standards, the *politics* of the situation make the plants not viable.
Without such political uncertainty, nuclear plants are, generally, good investements, economically. A nuclear plant (depending on how much power it produces), should produce more than enough power to pay for itself in the course of 60 years, if it's allowed to operate.
Honestly, I think it's time to re-evaluate the usefullness and legitimacy of the "Precautionary Principle". Over and over it's being invoke to deprive people of a known, verifiable *benefit*, in the name of unknown, unverified "dangers" - essentially "We know WiFi/whatever provides a benefit; but *someone* has made the unfounded, not supported by the evidence claim that there might be some risk of health problems, so let's deny people the known benefits in order to avoid unknown risks.
As far as WiFi - it's not like it's brand new and untested. It's been around for over 10 years now. Wouldn't we have seen (or be starting to see) any problems by now?
I don't live in Georgia, but I have a fundamental problem with so called Work-In-Progress funding, where rates increase to pay for construction.
That problem, essentially, is that you are forcing people to pay higher rates now, with the promise of lower rates, maybe, in the future, to justify the higher rates, but. . .
Those new nuclear reactors will probably take at least 10 years to come on line, if not longer. So, for the next 10 years, you are forcing ratepayers to pay for a power plant they are getting no benefit from. By the time that plant is online, some percentage of the local population will have died or moved. They will pay for the plant, but never receive the benefits of it. Some other percentage will die or move in the first few years of operation, meaning they never get enough benefit to justify the higher rates they had to pay.
It may even be true that ultimately, it leads to lower rates for customers of Georgia Power, but those customers will not all be the customers paying for that benefit today.
In other words, you are forcing people to invest in someone else's ownership of a valuable power plant. Although, in the end, when you are dealing with local monopolies, I suppose that's always true anyhow. Still, seems unfair to the folks who have to pay higher rates right now but will never get a discount.
A moment's more reflection, and not only does the tech sound useful for every phone - sounds useful for any device with a microphone - video cameras, sound boards, computers, public address systems, teleconferencing systems, voice control systems in cars, voice control systems for customer support call-center use, etc.
It sounds like one of those rare instances of a technology which has almost universal applications.
"'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear."
Perhaps it's because Audience doesn't want to be bought? Even without Siri, it sounds like that tech would be useful in EVERY SINGLE PHONE - would make conversations a bit easier in noisy locations.
Audience probably figures that by broadly licensing the tech to every phone company in the world, they'll make MORE MONEY that Apple would be willing to offer them. At least, they might be betting on it.
I have no idea if this ever came to bear or not, but I remember recently, I was reading up about "Bills of Attainder", and one of the things about British Law, apparently, was that if someone was "attainted" because of a criminal prosecution, they could in some cases be forced to forfeit all property/wealth, and so their family would be effectively "dis-inherited".
I don't know if anyone ever had forfeiture because of those particular laws, but I should think that *if* anyone was subject to that, that it would be appropriate *today* to posthumously pardon those people and give reparations to the families (it might not be possible to give lands back, as they presumably long since been given/sold to someone else, but they could at least compensate those people for the seized assets).
Yeah, in the Castle Bravo test, they got a *lot* more energy out - the bomb was 2.5 times more powerful than it was *designed* to be - and at 6 megatons, it was no small bomb to begin with. If that's not "Net Power", I don't know what is.
"And I am sure that it is possible to explode a small enough amount of the stuff to not produce noticeable seismic evidence."
I generally agree with your post - you can do non-explosive nuclear testing. However, I'm not so sure about the bit quoted above.
It's my understanding, though I may be wrong, that in order to get an explosion, at all, you need a minimum amount of plutonium or uranium, and that the minimum amount still produces a heck of a bang. Further, if N. Korea is experimenting with fusion boosted fission, that bang would be amplified quite a bit for even the smallest possible bomb, I think. Again, I'm not sure, but that's sort of my impression.
Ok, so I understand the mass-energy equivalence with regards to the fact that energy can be *turned into* mass, e.g. through nuclear reactions (Fission of light elements [lighter than iron] or fusion of heavy elements [heavier than iron]).
But, so far as I know, heat energy at "normal" levels doesn't drive fusion or fission? Does the mere increase in vibration and rotation of atoms cause those atoms to gain mass even without undergoing a nuclear reaction?
From what I understand (IANAA - I am not an astronomer), the reason Mars doesn't have any atmo is that it lacks a magnetic field. Lacking a magnetic field, the Solar Wind strips away the atmosphere.
Also, in order to have plants that can break down the rocks, you must first have enough atmosphere to support the plants.
The definition of hostile you are using is simply, "doesn't like us". That's not the usage I was making. In this case, hostile means "actively engaging in violent attacks against US forces, civilians, and/or property."
If Iran decided to attack a U.S. ship in international waters, then I'd say the President has both the authority and duty to order the military to take appropriate responses.
I have to wonder, if you're using a later spotting and a laser-guided bullet, and shooting for greater than a mile away, wouldn't the shot resemble something more like an artillery gun - wouldn't you have to point the gun like 40, 45 degrees in the air (to account for the drop from gravity which would occur over those sorts of distances, even with a high-velocity bullet), fire, and let its guidance bring it down in the right spot, as opposed to the "flatter" trajectory of a traditional rifle shot?
Executive Orders aren't laws. As the Executive, it's clear that he has a certain level of authority over the Executive Branch. Executive Orders simply are a mechanism by which the President exercises that Constitutionally granted authority over the Executive Branch.
As the Commander-In-Chief of all U.S. forces, the president is within his authority to order military action against hostile military forces. Doesn't matter that some U.S. citizen has joined those forces. War doesn't stop because there's a traitor in the enemy camp.
There's a clear distinction between a criminal who we should try to arrest if at all possible (and criminals do get killed by cops without a trial in similar circumstances, even on U.S. soil, where they are armed and resisting arrest), and enemy combatants who are engaged in armed conflict against our armed forces.
Because solar has some very hard problems that solar evangelists just don't want to come to grips with. I'm not saying solar doesn't have a role to play on the grid, but it absolutely cannot provide 100% of our power 100% of the time.
Nuclear energy is *stored energy* which can be released as needed. Solar energy is "energy in motion", if you will. We have some limited ability to store it - some people propose various ideas like using molten salt (very similar to what is used in a LFTR design) for storing energy for solar thermal plants (note, can only be used with solar *panels* if you build a seperate facility which pulls "excess" energy from the grid and uses it to heat salt), or flywheels, or some other schemes.
All of those storage schemes have one thing in common - they can only store enough energy for a few hours - they might carry you through the night, but if it's cloudy the next day, you're SOL unless you transport lots of power from somewhere else in the country over long distance transmission lines. This in turn, in order to hope to work, would require a lot of low-loss, expensive transmission lines, and also, building a lot of excess solar power capacity. We're talking about having most markets have, like 3-5 times the nominal power *consumption* in generation. That is, for every 1GW of power you want to have sustained, you need to build 3-5GW of generating capacity in most markets, so that there is enough excess power to move around on those long distance transmission lines.
I see people on slashdot and elsewhere all the time who wave this off as not a big, expensive problem, but it is. Our electricity would cost a fortune and crash our economy forever if we tried to go almost 100% solar ( with the balance made up by hydro, biomass, etc ).
If you're going to do renewables, Wind looks somewhat more practical than solar, but it suffers from some of the same problems the wind doesn't always blow. In fact, even the *best sites on earth* for wind usually only have the wind blowing strong enough over time, to provide around 30% capacity factor. (Sometimes the wind blows strong enough to generate 100% output, sometimes 50%, sometimes 5%, sometimes 0%; Capacity factor is the figure for average production, basically)
Seriously, anyone complaining that fusion research doesn't get any funding hasn't seen the budget for ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Last I checked it was around 15 Billion dollars. That also isn't the only fusion research going on - there's the National Ignition Facility for one, and I think a couple others too.
Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.
I propose a different science/engineering race with China:
The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.
LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.
Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.
But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.
Our "Fabulous Leaders" are just re-walking a well-worn path. Studies have been done on this scanning technology. But, some politician sees a chance for election-year populism by demanding *another study*. Which then leads people to say things like, "Isn't this something our fabulous leaders should of demanded before spending a crap load of money and deploying them all around the nation?"
Tom Brokaw was, "extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad. I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign."
Wait, did he seriously say that? I can't believe any journalist would say such a *ridiculous* thing. Journalism and Politics have been bedfellows for a thousand years. That's like somebody becoming a cop, then complaining that they don't want to arrest anyone.
When you become a television journalist, you lose control of your image, at least to the extent that people can play verbatim clips of your news reports to inform the public on candidates and issues in politics. I mean, I can see Tom Brokaw having control of his images for uses like putting his face on the cover of a book, or endorsing products, journalism schools, etc.
But, when excerpting a new report he gave on *the news*, he should have no control. This absolutely is fair use. If this isn't fair use, nothing is.
Guys, guys, I mean, obviously if this guy is the head of 38 Studios, he's overworked and just sleep deprived. That's way too many studios for one person to run. Cut him some slack!
This reminds me of the recent SNL sketch with Charles Barkley, "White People Problems". That is, problems which, in the bigger scheme of things, are pretty trivial.
Can we save some of our outrage for more pressing problems?
See, the thing is, if low dose radiation posed any significant threat, we'd *know about it*. The only reason we can't give a definitive answer about the health effects of low dose rad is that it's *so small* it's hard to pick out from the noise. If it were substantial, we'd surely know about it, because it would be easy to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Something which doesn't often get discussed, but which I learned about a couple years ago - a number of knowledgeable people have said that what really killed nuclear power in the United States was the Shoreham Power Plant.
This was a nuclear power plant built in Long Island, New York, for about $6 Bn. The plant passed certifications and inspections and was all ready to go into commercial operation. However, because of politics, the plant was never able to get the go ahead from the State of New York to operate. The governor, Mario Kuomo, basically vetoed an *already built* power plant.
As long as the laws are such that investors can't get reasonable assurance *before* they spend all the money to build the plant, that they will be definitely allowed to operate as long as the plant meets relevant technical standards, the *politics* of the situation make the plants not viable.
Without such political uncertainty, nuclear plants are, generally, good investements, economically. A nuclear plant (depending on how much power it produces), should produce more than enough power to pay for itself in the course of 60 years, if it's allowed to operate.
Honestly, I think it's time to re-evaluate the usefullness and legitimacy of the "Precautionary Principle". Over and over it's being invoke to deprive people of a known, verifiable *benefit*, in the name of unknown, unverified "dangers" - essentially "We know WiFi/whatever provides a benefit; but *someone* has made the unfounded, not supported by the evidence claim that there might be some risk of health problems, so let's deny people the known benefits in order to avoid unknown risks.
As far as WiFi - it's not like it's brand new and untested. It's been around for over 10 years now. Wouldn't we have seen (or be starting to see) any problems by now?
I don't live in Georgia, but I have a fundamental problem with so called Work-In-Progress funding, where rates increase to pay for construction.
That problem, essentially, is that you are forcing people to pay higher rates now, with the promise of lower rates, maybe, in the future, to justify the higher rates, but. . .
Those new nuclear reactors will probably take at least 10 years to come on line, if not longer. So, for the next 10 years, you are forcing ratepayers to pay for a power plant they are getting no benefit from. By the time that plant is online, some percentage of the local population will have died or moved. They will pay for the plant, but never receive the benefits of it. Some other percentage will die or move in the first few years of operation, meaning they never get enough benefit to justify the higher rates they had to pay.
It may even be true that ultimately, it leads to lower rates for customers of Georgia Power, but those customers will not all be the customers paying for that benefit today.
In other words, you are forcing people to invest in someone else's ownership of a valuable power plant. Although, in the end, when you are dealing with local monopolies, I suppose that's always true anyhow. Still, seems unfair to the folks who have to pay higher rates right now but will never get a discount.
A moment's more reflection, and not only does the tech sound useful for every phone - sounds useful for any device with a microphone - video cameras, sound boards, computers, public address systems, teleconferencing systems, voice control systems in cars, voice control systems for customer support call-center use, etc.
It sounds like one of those rare instances of a technology which has almost universal applications.
"'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear."
Perhaps it's because Audience doesn't want to be bought? Even without Siri, it sounds like that tech would be useful in EVERY SINGLE PHONE - would make conversations a bit easier in noisy locations.
Audience probably figures that by broadly licensing the tech to every phone company in the world, they'll make MORE MONEY that Apple would be willing to offer them. At least, they might be betting on it.
I have no idea if this ever came to bear or not, but I remember recently, I was reading up about "Bills of Attainder", and one of the things about British Law, apparently, was that if someone was "attainted" because of a criminal prosecution, they could in some cases be forced to forfeit all property/wealth, and so their family would be effectively "dis-inherited".
I don't know if anyone ever had forfeiture because of those particular laws, but I should think that *if* anyone was subject to that, that it would be appropriate *today* to posthumously pardon those people and give reparations to the families (it might not be possible to give lands back, as they presumably long since been given/sold to someone else, but they could at least compensate those people for the seized assets).
I'm pretty sure you can find those at any tourist destination. . . Disneyworld, The Smithsonian, Paris. . .
. . . and some cats just drop a bomb on the floor a foot in front of the litter box. . .
Oh, yes, but we must definitely worry about the furrzzzle blartlebing schwizznuts.
Yeah, in the Castle Bravo test, they got a *lot* more energy out - the bomb was 2.5 times more powerful than it was *designed* to be - and at 6 megatons, it was no small bomb to begin with. If that's not "Net Power", I don't know what is.
"And I am sure that it is possible to explode a small enough amount of the stuff to not produce noticeable seismic evidence."
I generally agree with your post - you can do non-explosive nuclear testing. However, I'm not so sure about the bit quoted above.
It's my understanding, though I may be wrong, that in order to get an explosion, at all, you need a minimum amount of plutonium or uranium, and that the minimum amount still produces a heck of a bang. Further, if N. Korea is experimenting with fusion boosted fission, that bang would be amplified quite a bit for even the smallest possible bomb, I think. Again, I'm not sure, but that's sort of my impression.
Ok, so I understand the mass-energy equivalence with regards to the fact that energy can be *turned into* mass, e.g. through nuclear reactions (Fission of light elements [lighter than iron] or fusion of heavy elements [heavier than iron]).
But, so far as I know, heat energy at "normal" levels doesn't drive fusion or fission? Does the mere increase in vibration and rotation of atoms cause those atoms to gain mass even without undergoing a nuclear reaction?
From what I understand (IANAA - I am not an astronomer), the reason Mars doesn't have any atmo is that it lacks a magnetic field. Lacking a magnetic field, the Solar Wind strips away the atmosphere.
Also, in order to have plants that can break down the rocks, you must first have enough atmosphere to support the plants.
Wait, Peter Wards. . .
Shouldn't it be:
Tyler Perry Presents. . .
Tyler Perry's "Medea Hypothesis"
The definition of hostile you are using is simply, "doesn't like us". That's not the usage I was making. In this case, hostile means "actively engaging in violent attacks against US forces, civilians, and/or property."
If Iran decided to attack a U.S. ship in international waters, then I'd say the President has both the authority and duty to order the military to take appropriate responses.
I have to wonder, if you're using a later spotting and a laser-guided bullet, and shooting for greater than a mile away, wouldn't the shot resemble something more like an artillery gun - wouldn't you have to point the gun like 40, 45 degrees in the air (to account for the drop from gravity which would occur over those sorts of distances, even with a high-velocity bullet), fire, and let its guidance bring it down in the right spot, as opposed to the "flatter" trajectory of a traditional rifle shot?
Executive Orders aren't laws. As the Executive, it's clear that he has a certain level of authority over the Executive Branch. Executive Orders simply are a mechanism by which the President exercises that Constitutionally granted authority over the Executive Branch.
As the Commander-In-Chief of all U.S. forces, the president is within his authority to order military action against hostile military forces. Doesn't matter that some U.S. citizen has joined those forces. War doesn't stop because there's a traitor in the enemy camp.
There's a clear distinction between a criminal who we should try to arrest if at all possible (and criminals do get killed by cops without a trial in similar circumstances, even on U.S. soil, where they are armed and resisting arrest), and enemy combatants who are engaged in armed conflict against our armed forces.
Because solar has some very hard problems that solar evangelists just don't want to come to grips with. I'm not saying solar doesn't have a role to play on the grid, but it absolutely cannot provide 100% of our power 100% of the time.
Nuclear energy is *stored energy* which can be released as needed. Solar energy is "energy in motion", if you will. We have some limited ability to store it - some people propose various ideas like using molten salt (very similar to what is used in a LFTR design) for storing energy for solar thermal plants (note, can only be used with solar *panels* if you build a seperate facility which pulls "excess" energy from the grid and uses it to heat salt), or flywheels, or some other schemes.
All of those storage schemes have one thing in common - they can only store enough energy for a few hours - they might carry you through the night, but if it's cloudy the next day, you're SOL unless you transport lots of power from somewhere else in the country over long distance transmission lines. This in turn, in order to hope to work, would require a lot of low-loss, expensive transmission lines, and also, building a lot of excess solar power capacity. We're talking about having most markets have, like 3-5 times the nominal power *consumption* in generation. That is, for every 1GW of power you want to have sustained, you need to build 3-5GW of generating capacity in most markets, so that there is enough excess power to move around on those long distance transmission lines.
I see people on slashdot and elsewhere all the time who wave this off as not a big, expensive problem, but it is. Our electricity would cost a fortune and crash our economy forever if we tried to go almost 100% solar ( with the balance made up by hydro, biomass, etc ).
If you're going to do renewables, Wind looks somewhat more practical than solar, but it suffers from some of the same problems the wind doesn't always blow. In fact, even the *best sites on earth* for wind usually only have the wind blowing strong enough over time, to provide around 30% capacity factor. (Sometimes the wind blows strong enough to generate 100% output, sometimes 50%, sometimes 5%, sometimes 0%; Capacity factor is the figure for average production, basically)
Seriously, anyone complaining that fusion research doesn't get any funding hasn't seen the budget for ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Last I checked it was around 15 Billion dollars. That also isn't the only fusion research going on - there's the National Ignition Facility for one, and I think a couple others too.
Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.
I propose a different science/engineering race with China:
The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.
LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.
Or how about the closely related WAMSR - the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.
Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.
But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.
Our "Fabulous Leaders" are just re-walking a well-worn path. Studies have been done on this scanning technology. But, some politician sees a chance for election-year populism by demanding *another study*. Which then leads people to say things like, "Isn't this something our fabulous leaders should of demanded before spending a crap load of money and deploying them all around the nation?"
Tom Brokaw was, "extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad. I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign."
Wait, did he seriously say that? I can't believe any journalist would say such a *ridiculous* thing. Journalism and Politics have been bedfellows for a thousand years. That's like somebody becoming a cop, then complaining that they don't want to arrest anyone.
When you become a television journalist, you lose control of your image, at least to the extent that people can play verbatim clips of your news reports to inform the public on candidates and issues in politics. I mean, I can see Tom Brokaw having control of his images for uses like putting his face on the cover of a book, or endorsing products, journalism schools, etc.
But, when excerpting a new report he gave on *the news*, he should have no control. This absolutely is fair use. If this isn't fair use, nothing is.
Guys, guys, I mean, obviously if this guy is the head of 38 Studios, he's overworked and just sleep deprived. That's way too many studios for one person to run. Cut him some slack!
This reminds me of the recent SNL sketch with Charles Barkley, "White People Problems". That is, problems which, in the bigger scheme of things, are pretty trivial.
Can we save some of our outrage for more pressing problems?
See, the thing is, if low dose radiation posed any significant threat, we'd *know about it*. The only reason we can't give a definitive answer about the health effects of low dose rad is that it's *so small* it's hard to pick out from the noise. If it were substantial, we'd surely know about it, because it would be easy to see.