When we have a cold snap the global warming types say "it's just weather" and so when we have a warm month here and there I believe I can rightfully say that "it's just weather".
To all those people that say we need to "save the climate" I must ask, which climate would that be? Where I sit right now in the USA was at one time covered in tropical plants. At some other point in history it was under several hundred feet of water. At another point it was under a mile or so of ice. But let's not talk such extremes, then. At the time Little House on the Prairie was written the winters here were -40C. Is that what we want? I remember last winter, we had -50C wind chills, and yet that didn't seem to make the news.
Let's assume for a minute that global warming is happening, that people are causing it, and this global warming will be bad for people. Okay then, let's do something about it. Let's do something that will make a real and actual reduction in our carbon output. Let's build nuclear power plants, like one new gigawatt scale plant somewhere in the world every month. Maybe we should build one every week.
You think we can't do that? I think we can. We've got the ability to build a lot of things more difficult than a nuclear power plant. I'm not claiming we need to be haphazard about it, take your time in getting the design right, make sure it is safe and properly inspected. Just do it at a rate that actually makes a difference.
Oh, I'm sure someone will ask what we are to do about the radioactive waste? We can bury it, reprocess it, or even dump it in the ocean. Whatever we do it's got to be better than oceans rising, famines, mega-storms, or whatever else global warming might bring. We're talking about saving the world, we can't worry about a few tons of radioactive waste every year, no?
To those that think we should change out our light bulbs for LEDs, take the bus or bike to work, use low flow toilets, turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater, drive electric cars, eat locally grown foods, and so on... I say I'd rather have the global warming.
We can choose living it up in a nuclear powered world, or suffer. If you think we have any other choice I say... bite me.
Of course nuclear material is dangerous to handle, any heavy metal would. So, I suggest wearing gloves, hard hat, goggles, and steel toed boots when handling it in any significant quantity. Oh, a filter mask might be a good idea too.
A spent fuel rod fresh from the reactor core is very radioactive, just seconds of exposure can kill you dead. After it's cooled down for a couple years in a pool it can be safely moved to a vault to cool down for a few decades or centuries. Alternatively that two or four year old spent fuel rod can be processed for it's valuable medium lived isotopes. Whether the medium lived stuff is removed by processing or a few decades in a vault the stuff that remains is not much more radioactive than the dirt it came from. So handle it with the gloves, goggles, and mask as it's processed further to separate out what could be used as nuclear fuel, medical isotopes, industrial isotopes, and inert elements. What started as one ton of waste can probably be processed down to something that can fit in a beer can.
That beer can of radioactive waste could probably be best disposed of by neutron bombardment. That means you put it back in a nuclear reactor.
If we do this smartly we can do away with many of the hazards, harvest some very valuable elements, and not have to bury anything for more than a few years, 300 years at most.
Now explain the difference between: 1g of such a material on your fridge
I'd probably buy some of that phosphorescent paint, find an appropriately sized jar, and try to make a night light out of it.
1kg of such a material below your bed
That might be a problem for me.
1ton of such a material in your garage
That would suck, I'd have to park my truck on the driveway.
10tons of such a material in a container in front of your house
The steel container would block any alpha or beta radiation so that does not concern me. The gamma and neutron radiation would largely be blocked by the mass of the rest of the material between me and the emitting particle. Depending on the composition of the stuff in the container it is quite likely the radiation I'd be exposed to in my house would go DOWN.
The deadly dose of "low radioactive" uranium in your body is in the milli gram ranges. As uranium likes to react with nearly everything it is mandatory to not let even the slightest amount of it into the environment.
Did I even suggest that someone eat the stuff? I'm quite sure I didn't. I thought I was quite clear that this stuff should be handled like any other heavy metal, gloves, goggles, mask, hard hat, and steel toed boots.
Metallic uranium is known to be pyrophoric if heated, impacted, or perhaps when it's feelings are hurt. No one uses metallic uranium for anything except projectiles for military ammunition, and even then it's often coated and/or alloyed with something to reduce handling hazards. Solid uranium fuel is a ceramic, a durable oxide much like clay or industrial abrasives, and is about as likely to react with something as clay would. Liquid uranium fuel is only liquid when it's heated to insane temperatures. When cooled to room temperature it's a salt, often stored in steel containers to make it easy to move and protect handlers from the alpha radiation it emits. Uranium salts are even more inert. Someone might get a uranium oxide to burn with a halogen like fluorine but the salt won't because it is the product of being reacted with a halogen.
You can read up the same problem regarding Plutonium yourself.
Plutonium is probably a lower hazard since it is not taken up in the body like uranium, I'd still suggest you don't eat it. It is also an alpha emitter, a short distance of air will protect people from the radiation, so wear gloves if you have to handle it. It's not pyrophoric like uranium so it can be safely stored and handled as a metal. It is considerably more radioactive than uranium so it can be warm to the touch, but don't touch it, wear gloves. Even though plutonium in any isotope is considerably more radioactive than uranium that still is not saying much, uranium is basically inert so plutonium is still not much of a radiation hazard. Since most every isotope is either fissile or generates considerable heat it would not be advisable to stack it up in steel containers by the ton. So safety tip, don't pile it up, it can go "boom".
Again, handle it like any other heavy metal with the additional precaution of not piling it up too much.
Both Cesium and Strontium isotopes found in spent nuclear fuel have half lives of about 30 years or less. In 100 years you'd have 1/10th of what you started with. In another 100 years you'd have another 1/10th, and so on. In 1000 years it would be close to 1/10,000,000,000 of what you started with.
There is no need to store this stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. Storing it for a couple hundred should be sufficient to allow the worst of the radiation to have gone away.
I think that anyone that claims we need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years is trying to sell something. In this case it's likely these people want to sell a cement that they can claim is durable enough to out last the pyramids at Giza. Of course no one alive today will have grandchildren around to verify that claim.
Doing it right requires regulations that allow for it. As it is now so many nations are scared witless over anything "nukular" that anything outside of how things are done now just do not have a means to get licensed. I'd have to convince the powers that be that heating up radioactive elements beyond their boiling point is actually a good thing. This process would be done in a sealed vessel held under a slight vacuum so none of the radioactive elements get released to the atmosphere. Once the waste is a molten syrup, and the lighter stuff are gasses, then some really interesting chemistry can be done to separate all the stuff out and make it useful again.
The way we do things in the USA is completely insane. Anything that contains thorium, an inert and barely radioactive element, is treated like weapons grade plutonium in the regulations. This is because at some point in the past someone theorized it is possible to build a nuclear weapon from it. Even though this has since been proven false the processing of thorium is nearly forbidden. On the other hand, in China, thorium is readily mined and tossed unto open air piles. They can do that safely because, unlike plutonium, it will not fission if piled up. It is so dense it will not blow away, it is insoluble in water, it will not burn, essentially it is an inert rock.
How the USA and most other nations regulate other radioactive materials is similar. I hear that Canada and India have some moderately sane regulations and therefore we see companies working through the regulations there to make some of this processing happen. Even though it might happen there in a decade or so the first processing plants will be small and will be only allowed to do a fraction of the separation processes that they'd like. They would still not be able to process nuclear waste down to nearly nothing if allowed to separate out more elements. What they could do though is make a serious dent in the piles of waste they have now.
Some things that you might want to look into to see what I'm talking about: pyro-processing, molten salt reactors, especially the denatured molten salt reactor from Terrestrial Energy, and waste annihilating molten salt reactors from Transatomic Power, liquid fluoride thorium reactors, and I'm probably missing a few good search terms.
No, I do get it. The only reason nuclear reprocessing, or nuclear ANYTHING really, is expensive is because of nonsensical rules governing the handling of anything deemed "nuclear".
If the rules were such that we treated these materials based on the real and actual hazards they pose then we'd see more nuclear power plants. That's because we'd be shutting down all the coal plants based on how much radioactive material they spread to the environment alone.
The expense lies solely with government regulation. I'm not saying we need to do away with the regulation, I say the regulations need to make sense.
Radiation is like burning a candle. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. The isotopes with half the half life is twice as radioactive. Something with a half life of 100,000 years is not something that will kill you, unless you forge it into a knife and stab yourself with it.
Just put the stuff in a vault for 100 years or so and then take it out. At that point the real danger will be from it being made of a mix of heavy metals. So wear gloves, goggles, and steel toed boots when you move it. The process it like you would any other material containing heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead. Fashion the waste material into new fuel elements and common industrial stuff like re-bar and sewage pipe.
Idiots. This is a problem we should have solved already. This should not be that complicated.
In other words we only need to watch the stuff for 100 years or so before it is no more radioactive than common dirt?
The waste is comprised of a mix of elements, that is true. What most people won't tell you is that more than half of that mass is not really radioactive, it's just really hard to separate from the radioactive stuff. A large part of the mix are elements with a half life much like Sr-90, 30 years or so. If we give it a century to "cool" then it's about 1/10th as radioactive as when we put it in.
Let's say, out of an abundance of caution, we store it for 300 years. That's ten half lives. At that point it's 1/1000th as radioactive as it was when we put it away. We can build a vault that can last 300 years without putting much thought into it. Put that vault in place that we think will be around in 300 years and already has good security, like a bank, military base, museum, library, airport, whatever. Then after the time is up we can open it back up, take the stuff out, and put the next batch of stuff back in and seal it back up for another 300 years. What comes out will be, without any processing really, be valuable reactor fuel. With some processing it can be made into a lot of valuable things, including the reactor fuel.
If it takes 100,000 years for something to decay then it is no more radioactive than the concrete in my driveway.
Us humans separate radioactive elements into "short", "medium", and "long" lived isotopes. We separate them like that because compared to our life span these isotopes are short, medium, or long. The short lived stuff is gone in less than a couple months. These isotopes are effectively gone even before the spent fuel leaves the nuclear power plant. Fuel rods taken from the reactor core is placed in a cooling pool for at least two years so that all of these isotopes decay away. When they come out the radiation is so strong that even seconds of exposure means death. After they come out of that pool it's just the long and medium lived products that remain. The most dangerous of them are elements like cesium and selenium which can collect in bones and irradiate people for the rest of their natural life, however shortened that might be.
The long lived isotopes have half lives on the order of thousands of years or more. Elements with half lives this long is not any real radiation hazard since a person is more likely to die of old age before it decays. These elements should still be handled with care since they are still likely to pose hazards like heavy metal poisoning but that basically means don't eat it, breath in the dust, or handle it with bare skin.
We don't need to bury radioactive anything for more than perhaps 300 years, and we know how to do that. We've built plenty of structures that can last that long. After 300 years all the short and medium lived products are gone, only the long lived stuff remains. At that point the waste can be handled much like we'd handle anything containing lead, mercury, or arsenic. That means rubber suits, gloves, goggles, and masks. Then we can reprocess this material to separate out what are valuable metals, fissile reactor fuel, and other elements for medical and industrial uses.
I can remember reading as a kid about how scientists were trying to develop a "language" to communicate to future civilizations where we've stored our dangerous radioactive wastes. That way we don't contaminate future generations with all that nasty radioactive waste us evil people in the here and now are producing. Then I learned some real science from people that actually knew what they were talking about and learned that we don't need to store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years. If we store it for just a couple hundred years we can make it safe
We already do something like this now. Forestry people with watch over a forest for forty years so that we can harvest that for wood. People will build and maintain structures that they intend to make last for centuries. Libraries and museums will keep valuable items from history for as long as we can imagine. Keeping an eye on radioactive material, for the purpose of mining it again for it's valuable elements in a century or three, seems like a trivial problem really.
First, the 200,000 cubic meters of high-level waste already exists and is the product of the British nuclear weapons program, and possibly some of the high-level waste already created by fuel reprocessing. This stuff is a radiological and chemical witches brew that cannot be easily treated in any way. Some means of reducing this stuff to a stable state for long term storage is essential.
That may be true but we have ways to reduce the mass of what needs to be stored if we use some preprocessing to separate out some of the valuable materials.
Second,...Building a world-wide industrial deployment of breeder reactors is an exercise orders of magnitude more costly than waste disposal problems.
Breeder reactors may be an expensive and difficult task but we can make energy from the "waste" that it burns. It is quite possible that by investing billions of dollars/euros/rupees in this we could get a net gain on our investment. Basically we can make money from burning this waste.
Third, breeder reactors do not make fission products go away. These must still be disposed of once the actinides are burned.
Many of those fission products are very valuable. Either because they are very useful radioactive isotopes or rare minerals. Much of the rest is not in fact radioactive, a fission produces two nuclei, with only one of them radioactive. If we just separate the non-radioactive elements from the radioactive elements then we'd cut the mass needed for storage in half. Then by separating the useful isotopes from the less than useful isotopes we could cut the mass needed to store by more than half again. With smart processing we could turn 10 tons of waste we'd have to bury into 4 tons. I think that alone is worth something.
Fourth, fuel reprocessing systems currently operating produce larger volumes of high-level waste in physical terms than they take in. This must be converted to some form that be stored long term (see point one, above).
If that is the case then you are doing it wrong.
Fifth, spent fuel from power reactors does not contain "98% of their fissile material".... We can obtain U-238 far more cheaply and easily, if we need it, by simply converting the millions of tons of depleted uranium currently in storage into breeding fuel element.
U-238 is only one of the many elements that can be obtained by properly processing spent fuel and other radioactive wastes. There are many other valuable elements in this radioactive wastes and if we process it out we reduce the mass of waste we need to store considerably and we can make money doing it.
Sixth, reprocessing is very expensive.... The value of mixed oxide fuel on the market is less than zero. Utilities must be paid a subsidy to take it for free.
Again, that is because you are doing it wrong. People are experimenting with a pyro-processing system that can melt down this waste and with some very creative chemistry they can separate out all the valuable stuff from the not so valuable stuff. Basically it's heated until melting, what becomes gasses at those temperatures is collected and separated by masses and chemical properties. Gasses like iodine can be made into medicines, noble gasses collected for welding, and so forth. Noble metals tend to just sink to the bottom and can be sold for jewelery or coinage. Zirconium, hafnium, beryllium, and many other non-radioactive elements can be separated out and reused in nuclear facilities because of their unique properties when exposed to radiation.
Reprocessing is expensive partly because we haven't figured out all the chemistry yet. It's also expensive partly because government regulations throughout the world make it expensive. The first country that creates sane regulations on the processing of nuclear
I'd think that NOx would be produced in any internal combustion engine, I don't think that an engine running on hydrogen would be immune.
Even if the problems of storing hydrogen are solved there is still a logistics issue in having machines that can burn it. If the technology is used solely to store energy for "burning' it again in the same device then compatibility with other devices is irrelevant. I just think that a device that can take water and electricity and store it as jet fuel would be an order of magnitude more valuable than one that can store it as hydrogen, or any other form really.
Part of the usefulness is in how efficiently it can store the energy. Some of that energy will be lost as heat. In some cases that heat can be used but then the same can be said for a diesel generator. If this fuel cell can compete on efficiency with lead-acid storage, seawater to jet fuel, or what not, then this might make sense to use widely. I'm sure reliability also comes in to the equation. Lead-acid batteries and diesel engines are known to be able to take abuse, fuel cells have a history of being fragile.
As I recall compressing and storing hydrogen is a very expensive process. One problem is that hydrogen likes to destroy most metals. Any piping, compressor, or container must be made of expensive metals or lined with glass or something.
I recall reading several articles over the years about the Navy working on a process to turn hydrogen and CO2 into hydrocarbon based fuels. The hydrogen would be from cracking water. The CO2 that is dissolved in the water would be extracted for the process. If this fuel cell technology can improve on the process of producing hydrogen from water then the seawater to jet fuel process could be more viable.
I might be mistaken but hydrocarbon liquids can store hydrogen in a much smaller space than any compressed gas. I recall that not even liquid hydrogen can not beat fuel oil on hydrogen per volume. If this is true then it would seem that storing the hydrogen as a fuel oil might be more viable than compressing into heavy and expensive tanks. There's a few bonuses for storing the hydrogen as a hydrocarbon, even if it means cracking the hydrogen off again to run the fuel cell to produce electricity. A liquid hydrocarbon can fuel cooking stoves, trucks, battle tanks, helicopters, and even generators. Hydrogen can only really be used in a fuel cell.
It's interesting that this can store energy as a hydrogen gas but how does this compare in cost, weight, and volume to more traditional systems like lead-acid batteries? The military might have needs that make this viable for them but in a non-military environment this does not seem practical at all. The government is willing to spend a lot of money to save on things like time, space, and weight, but they have their limits. Unless they can make a case for civil uses I doubt this will go far in the military.
"For places where water is in short supply like California, why isn't every power plant being built near the sea, where they can use seawater for cooling? It'll have to be a two-stage cooling circuit with a heat exchanger to prevent corrosion from affecting power generation systems. But that's already what's used in nuclear plants so there's no new engineering which needs to be developed there. Do this and 1/3rd the energy from burning coal, oil, or nuclear can go into generating electricity. The remaining 2/3rds of the energy can go into desalinating seawater. "
The reason I heard this doesn't happen is because the waste heat is not at a high enough temperature to make desalination affordable. The resulting water is not boiling hot like what is needed for evaporative cooling, just merely lukewarm.
What might change this is the use of high temperature nuclear reactors like liquid fluoride thorium reactors, or LFTR. A LFTR can reach temperatures where the final output is hot enough to boil water. One might add an additional turbine stage to turn this energy to electricity but at that point the percentage of energy retrieved is so small that it would likely not be profitable, making clean water would make more economic sense. Other uses for this heat could be heating for buildings or a number of industrial uses.
Water cooled power plants like coal, natural gas, and solid fuel nuclear reach temperatures of about 300C. LFTR could get to 600C or 800C which makes desalination off that waste heat possible. The primary turbines would not be steam like a coal plant but open loop air or a closed loop gas.
There are other benefits to LFTR besides making water desalination and electricity production relatively easy and profitable. A primary benefit is that it cannot melt down like a solid fuel reactor, it is very safe. LFTR can also produce a lot of other beneficial byproducts like medical radioisotopes, without the undesirable byproducts like weapon grade plutonium. It will make plutonium but of a quality that is nearly useless for weapons but very valuable for energy.
In the USA there is (or at least was) a cap on how much a person could contribute to a political campaign. If there is a law that all transactions must have the option of payment in cash then what happens to the caps on political contributions? I suppose there could also be a law that any payment to a political entity must have record keeping to prevent... what would you even call this? Is it "abusive" contributions?
Personally, I do not believe there should be a cap on political contributions. I suppose it is possible on some level that a political entity might abuse this and theoretically "buy" an election. What I fear more than bought elections is a candidate or lobbying effort being silenced because of some accusation of record keeping abuses. The abuse of a government entity regulating how I, or anyone else, might choose to spend my money on supporting a policy or candidate frightens me more than some billionaire buying up all the billboards, TV ads, and radio time.
Let people speak freely, and that means giving money to any lobby effort or political campaign they choose. Paying in cash is certainly one way to make that easier. If I walk into John Jackson's campaign offices with a grocery bag of cash to fight the campaign of Jack Johnson then no campaign contribution limits should allow the government to arrest me for doing that.
On a deaths per joule comparison nuclear power wins over them all by a large margin. Do you think that people don't fall from windmills and rooftop solar panels? People die.
Also, people in Fukushima got more radiation by flying from the area than if they stayed. Chernobyl was barely a first generation reactor, it didn't have modern safety features like a containment dome. The answer to this problem is not to stop building nuclear power plants but to build more so that we can afford to decommission power plants like those at Fukushima.
Japan shut down all their nuclear power plants for a while but were forced to restart them. This is because without nuclear power they had to resort to dirty, unsafe, and expensive coal. Wind, solar, and tidal power would cost us more in money and lives then even building more Chernobyl type power plants.
Thankfully we don't have to build another Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island to keep the lights on. We can build fourth generation nuclear power, reactors that are safer, cheaper, and more reliable than even the already very safe, cheap, and reliable first and second generation reactors that caused us so much panic.
At a minimum we should at least have some government funded research in nuclear power like we have government funded research in wind, solar, and tidal. We have much to learn on nuclear power, and claiming we cannot harness that power safely is like claiming we should not invest in Tesla motors because the Model T and Pinto were unsafe. A modern nuclear reactor would not be built like those at Fukushima.
We can build much better nuclear power plants but we've held ourselves back because of failures of completely unrelated designs. Failures that, BTW, involved very little cost in lives and cleanup when compared to the alternatives.
A possible counter argument is that this person that is black listed from the private sector because of a past with the FBI could then find work with NOAA predicting hurricanes, DARPA working on lots of stuff, NASA doing astronomy and physics, or a number of public universities doing just about anything.
Blacklisting someone because of a past with the FBI might be a dick move but perhaps we could let them redeem themselves by doing something beneficial for society for a few years before we drop them from the list.
The federal marshals work for the judicial branch. Their mandate is to search for escaped prisoners and such, people that have already been convicted of a crime. The FBI is tasked with the enforcement of federal laws, which has some overlap with escaped prisoners and such but the federal marshals don't have much overlap with what the FBI does.
The FBI not having arrest powers is an interesting idea. Let the FBI investigate but once it comes time to arrest then let the local sheriff perform the arrest. This works on areas within a state boundary but falls apart in federal districts, territories, and so forth. These areas could have a local equivalent of a sheriff for the purpose of enacting arrests but then they'd be employees of the FBI in every way but name.
If you want to talk about pruning federal law enforcement powers then I propose doing away with the DEA and BATFE. These are enforcement agencies that have powers that overlap completely with the FBI, so roll them into the FBI and do away with the separate agencies. An FBI that is busy with tracking down child molesters, kidnappers, murderers, arsonists, and what not might not then bother with handing guns to drug dealers like the DEA and BATFE has done.
Let's assume that the claim is true, we've studied the problem sufficiently to the point that we understand the problem and therefore our need for people to work on climate models and so forth is diminished. Let's also assume that while we can do away with some climate studies we cannot end it completely since we will need to monitor progress and guide policy.
So, what should we do? It seems that many of the people in positions of power talk a lot about doing an "all of the above" approach. This means doing anything and everything that can possibly reduce our carbon output. We've seen PSAs telling us to turn off the lights in rooms we aren't using and to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. We've seen government subsidies for solar panels, windmills, corn ethanol, and electric cars. What's missing here? IMHO, we've got government support for every tactic to fight global warming except the one that has the best chance to reduce our carbon output with the least cost and smallest impact on our daily lives.
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim. It also doesn't help that they'll chide me for driving my light truck while they fly in jet planes all over the world. They have a meeting of the world powers on how to combat our carbon output, flying all these people there to meet, and all they've agreed to do is meet again in five years to talk about it some more.
I thought global warming was the greatest threat this nation, and this planet, has ever faced. Yet these people don't seem to be acting like it is.
I'm not convinced that global warming is a problem based only on the actions of the people with the ability to have the greatest effect on the carbon our modern society produces. If these people were convinced on the problem we faced then we'd see them talking about nuclear power. If they cannot bring themselves to bring up nuclear power as part of the "all the above" strategy to fight global warming then I can only conclude that they fear losing votes more than they fear the end of civilization. A true believer would not be concerned about the next election, they'd be concerned about the next century.
The US Navy has been working on a process that derives hydrogen and CO2 from seawater as feedstock for synthesis of hydrocarbons. Methanol is nice but hydrocarbons are better. We know how to store, transport, and efficiently burn hydrocarbons. We don't know as much about methanol.
Also, it sounds like the seawater to jet fuel process is in its final stages of development, needing only enough funding to prove its viability. This air to methanol process sounds like its purely theoretical now.
I meant "expensive" in a relative sense. Other items that would need similar precision to function, like a clock or socket wrench, do not have as many moving parts and therefore can be obtained with what someone might consider pocket change. It is a tool that requires a relatively high level of precision to function as intended but since it is made in such high quantity the price is quite low.
A $100,000 machine that can print out a $30 socket set or wall clock is not very impressive. If that same machine can print out a Model 1911 pistol that can fetch easily $1000 on the open market then you will get people's attention. If that device can print out a shiny new M1911 in a week then it will pay for itself in a few years. If it can print one out in a day then it can pay for itself in months.
The term "assault rifle" is a military designation for a type of small arm. An assault rifle is a rifle chambered in a cartridge with a range and/or power less than a "battle rifle" but greater than a typical handgun. Such weapons typically have a selector switch that enables semi-auto or three round burst functions. Some early weapons of this type were capable of switching between full-auto and semi-auto but this is rare today. Some common cartridges for such weapons are 5.56 NATO,.30 Carbine, and 7.62x39mm.
For clarity a "battle rifle" is a relatively large caliber rifle, typically about.30 caliber, with semi-auto capability. A "machine gun" is both a military designation and a BATFE legal designation with slightly different meanings. In the military a machine gun is a weapon capable of firing battle rifle cartridges in fully automatic mode. Military machine guns may have a burst or semi-auto feature but this is rare. As defined by the BATFE a machine gun is any firearm capable of firing more than one cartridge by a single action of a trigger. To the BATFE a worn out double barrel shotgun that fires both barrels with one trigger pull is a "machine gun", as is any military designated "assault rifle" due to the three round burst feature. To the BATFE the caliber of the weapon is not part of the machine gun definition, any cartridge will do.
The term "assault weapon" (as opposed to assault RIFLE) is a nearly meaningless term. It's definition varies from state to state and from time to time. All it really means is "what we want to ban today". The weapon used at Sandy Hook did not meet the definition of "assault weapon" in Connecticut law even though it may have met that definition if it were in California. Some common features to the definition to an "assault weapon" are some rather silly features like bayonet lugs (because drive by stabbings is a problem I guess) or threaded barrel ends (used to attach safety devices like report suppressors and flash hiders but the powers that be focus on the ability to attach a grenade launcher).
To add further silliness to all of this is the term "personal defense weapon". This is a term that also has several meanings depending on who you ask. In the military a PDW would be something like a P90, a weapon that fires pistol caliber cartridges in three round burst or semi-auto and comes standard with a 50 round magazine. To the Department of Homeland Security a commonly used PDW is the M4 Carbine. To the military the M4 Carbine is an assault rifle. To the BATFE the M4 Carbine is a "machine gun" if capable of three round burst, or a "short barreled rifle" if semi-auto only. Of course most every state in the USA would classify this as an "assault weapon".
Interesting isn't it? The same weapon, in this case the M4 Carbine, gets different designations not based solely on who is holding it at the time. In the hands of a Marine it's an "assault rifle". In the hands of a DHS agent it's a "personal defense weapon". In the hands of the people that pay their salary with taxes it can be a "machine gun", "assault weapon", "short barreled rifle", or (my favorite) an "offensive weapon".
What is an "offensive weapon"? Hell if I know. Best I can tell is that it is something that some politicians decided offended their sensibilities at some point in the past, therefore they banned their possession by anyone not earning a government paycheck. The term "offensive weapon" has just about the same meaning as "assault weapon". I expect that given time the term "assault weapon" will be discredited enough that the term "offensive weapon" will regain popularity with the powers that be that wish to disarm us.
It's no different then the reasoning on why the President said we should go to the moon. We did it because it was hard. Making a handgun is not hard, many people do it. Making a handgun by 3D printing is hard, and is as suitable of a test of the technology as building any of a number of items.
Perhaps you would like to expand on why you think this reasoning is "fucking retarded"? Perhaps you could also propose a more suitable item to manufacture as a test of 3D printing technology?
Apparently so since much of the desire to ban these weapons was the result of gang warfare during Prohibition.
Funny that, history repeating itself. Alcohol prohibition resulted in violence not seen before it's implementation. Now today people don't shoot each other over alcohol because it is available at nearly every convenience store with nothing more than proving you are an adult and have the ability to pay for it.
Perhaps we would not have "drug addled scum burning down your cities" if these drugs were not banned. Just a thought. It appears that there are at least some people that agree with me given that a number of states in the USA have legalized marijuana with no real threats to society to show for it.
Also, how does banning possession of a handgun supposed to prevent "drug addled scum" from setting the city on fire? I do know that even drug addled scum have a nearly instinctual fear of getting shot if they threaten to burn down someone's home or business. It would seem to follow that by removing the handguns, and therefore diminish the homeowner's ability to defend their home, would embolden the scum to burn the world down.
Gun control is not crime control. You control crime by controlling the criminals.
I've read a lot of posts of people exclaiming 3D printed handguns a waste of time, or an effort to expand one's "manhood" by building weapons. I've read an article on 3D printed handguns before where the creator was asked why they chose to print a handgun of all things. In this case it was a 3D printed Model 1911, printed using a number of direct printing metal techniques but the answer to this question stuck with me and I believe answers the question quite well.
The creator of this 3D printed handgun explained the choice of printing a handgun this way. People understand what a handgun does and what it is used for. People understand that a handgun is a device with many intricate parts placed under considerable wear, pressures, and so forth. Whatever a handgun is made from must be durable. A handgun built with poor tolerances is not likely to function. A handgun is an expensive machine, not something one can typically purchase on a whim. It is also something that can be manufactured within the size limits of their machines.
Someone could 3D print a clock, for example, to show how a useful item can be built with amazing precision with a 3D printer. To show how a 3D printer can make something that is durable could mean printing a carpenter hammer, or anvil. Perhaps building an adjustable wrench, socket set, or any of a number of tools that need to hold up to extreme stresses and tight tolerances would show the capabilities of a 3D printer. Those are also rather mundane and perhaps a number of people that do not use tools regularly will not understand the difficulty in building such a tool with a 3D printer. These are also tools that do not have much value since people can buy these items relatively cheaply most anywhere.
People choose to 3D print a handgun because it is hard to do. Someone successful in this has then demonstrated their ability to build any of a number of more common and mundane items we use every day. It also doesn't hurt that 3D printed handguns makes politicians nervous and gets clicks on the internet.
Go print a clock and see how many clicks you get on your website, then print an anvil and do the same. Now print a handgun and hope that you've got enough bandwidth to handle the load.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, it's just weather.
When we have a cold snap the global warming types say "it's just weather" and so when we have a warm month here and there I believe I can rightfully say that "it's just weather".
To all those people that say we need to "save the climate" I must ask, which climate would that be? Where I sit right now in the USA was at one time covered in tropical plants. At some other point in history it was under several hundred feet of water. At another point it was under a mile or so of ice. But let's not talk such extremes, then. At the time Little House on the Prairie was written the winters here were -40C. Is that what we want? I remember last winter, we had -50C wind chills, and yet that didn't seem to make the news.
Let's assume for a minute that global warming is happening, that people are causing it, and this global warming will be bad for people. Okay then, let's do something about it. Let's do something that will make a real and actual reduction in our carbon output. Let's build nuclear power plants, like one new gigawatt scale plant somewhere in the world every month. Maybe we should build one every week.
You think we can't do that? I think we can. We've got the ability to build a lot of things more difficult than a nuclear power plant. I'm not claiming we need to be haphazard about it, take your time in getting the design right, make sure it is safe and properly inspected. Just do it at a rate that actually makes a difference.
Oh, I'm sure someone will ask what we are to do about the radioactive waste? We can bury it, reprocess it, or even dump it in the ocean. Whatever we do it's got to be better than oceans rising, famines, mega-storms, or whatever else global warming might bring. We're talking about saving the world, we can't worry about a few tons of radioactive waste every year, no?
To those that think we should change out our light bulbs for LEDs, take the bus or bike to work, use low flow toilets, turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater, drive electric cars, eat locally grown foods, and so on... I say I'd rather have the global warming.
We can choose living it up in a nuclear powered world, or suffer. If you think we have any other choice I say... bite me.
Of course nuclear material is dangerous to handle, any heavy metal would. So, I suggest wearing gloves, hard hat, goggles, and steel toed boots when handling it in any significant quantity. Oh, a filter mask might be a good idea too.
A spent fuel rod fresh from the reactor core is very radioactive, just seconds of exposure can kill you dead. After it's cooled down for a couple years in a pool it can be safely moved to a vault to cool down for a few decades or centuries. Alternatively that two or four year old spent fuel rod can be processed for it's valuable medium lived isotopes. Whether the medium lived stuff is removed by processing or a few decades in a vault the stuff that remains is not much more radioactive than the dirt it came from. So handle it with the gloves, goggles, and mask as it's processed further to separate out what could be used as nuclear fuel, medical isotopes, industrial isotopes, and inert elements. What started as one ton of waste can probably be processed down to something that can fit in a beer can.
That beer can of radioactive waste could probably be best disposed of by neutron bombardment. That means you put it back in a nuclear reactor.
If we do this smartly we can do away with many of the hazards, harvest some very valuable elements, and not have to bury anything for more than a few years, 300 years at most.
Now explain the difference between:
1g of such a material on your fridge
I'd probably buy some of that phosphorescent paint, find an appropriately sized jar, and try to make a night light out of it.
1kg of such a material below your bed
That might be a problem for me.
1ton of such a material in your garage
That would suck, I'd have to park my truck on the driveway.
10tons of such a material in a container in front of your house
The steel container would block any alpha or beta radiation so that does not concern me. The gamma and neutron radiation would largely be blocked by the mass of the rest of the material between me and the emitting particle. Depending on the composition of the stuff in the container it is quite likely the radiation I'd be exposed to in my house would go DOWN.
The deadly dose of "low radioactive" uranium in your body is in the milli gram ranges. As uranium likes to react with nearly everything it is mandatory to not let even the slightest amount of it into the environment.
Did I even suggest that someone eat the stuff? I'm quite sure I didn't. I thought I was quite clear that this stuff should be handled like any other heavy metal, gloves, goggles, mask, hard hat, and steel toed boots.
Metallic uranium is known to be pyrophoric if heated, impacted, or perhaps when it's feelings are hurt. No one uses metallic uranium for anything except projectiles for military ammunition, and even then it's often coated and/or alloyed with something to reduce handling hazards. Solid uranium fuel is a ceramic, a durable oxide much like clay or industrial abrasives, and is about as likely to react with something as clay would. Liquid uranium fuel is only liquid when it's heated to insane temperatures. When cooled to room temperature it's a salt, often stored in steel containers to make it easy to move and protect handlers from the alpha radiation it emits. Uranium salts are even more inert. Someone might get a uranium oxide to burn with a halogen like fluorine but the salt won't because it is the product of being reacted with a halogen.
You can read up the same problem regarding Plutonium yourself.
Plutonium is probably a lower hazard since it is not taken up in the body like uranium, I'd still suggest you don't eat it. It is also an alpha emitter, a short distance of air will protect people from the radiation, so wear gloves if you have to handle it. It's not pyrophoric like uranium so it can be safely stored and handled as a metal. It is considerably more radioactive than uranium so it can be warm to the touch, but don't touch it, wear gloves. Even though plutonium in any isotope is considerably more radioactive than uranium that still is not saying much, uranium is basically inert so plutonium is still not much of a radiation hazard. Since most every isotope is either fissile or generates considerable heat it would not be advisable to stack it up in steel containers by the ton. So safety tip, don't pile it up, it can go "boom".
Again, handle it like any other heavy metal with the additional precaution of not piling it up too much.
Both Cesium and Strontium isotopes found in spent nuclear fuel have half lives of about 30 years or less. In 100 years you'd have 1/10th of what you started with. In another 100 years you'd have another 1/10th, and so on. In 1000 years it would be close to 1/10,000,000,000 of what you started with.
There is no need to store this stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. Storing it for a couple hundred should be sufficient to allow the worst of the radiation to have gone away.
I think that anyone that claims we need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years is trying to sell something. In this case it's likely these people want to sell a cement that they can claim is durable enough to out last the pyramids at Giza. Of course no one alive today will have grandchildren around to verify that claim.
Doing it right requires regulations that allow for it. As it is now so many nations are scared witless over anything "nukular" that anything outside of how things are done now just do not have a means to get licensed. I'd have to convince the powers that be that heating up radioactive elements beyond their boiling point is actually a good thing. This process would be done in a sealed vessel held under a slight vacuum so none of the radioactive elements get released to the atmosphere. Once the waste is a molten syrup, and the lighter stuff are gasses, then some really interesting chemistry can be done to separate all the stuff out and make it useful again.
The way we do things in the USA is completely insane. Anything that contains thorium, an inert and barely radioactive element, is treated like weapons grade plutonium in the regulations. This is because at some point in the past someone theorized it is possible to build a nuclear weapon from it. Even though this has since been proven false the processing of thorium is nearly forbidden. On the other hand, in China, thorium is readily mined and tossed unto open air piles. They can do that safely because, unlike plutonium, it will not fission if piled up. It is so dense it will not blow away, it is insoluble in water, it will not burn, essentially it is an inert rock.
How the USA and most other nations regulate other radioactive materials is similar. I hear that Canada and India have some moderately sane regulations and therefore we see companies working through the regulations there to make some of this processing happen. Even though it might happen there in a decade or so the first processing plants will be small and will be only allowed to do a fraction of the separation processes that they'd like. They would still not be able to process nuclear waste down to nearly nothing if allowed to separate out more elements. What they could do though is make a serious dent in the piles of waste they have now.
Some things that you might want to look into to see what I'm talking about: pyro-processing, molten salt reactors, especially the denatured molten salt reactor from Terrestrial Energy, and waste annihilating molten salt reactors from Transatomic Power, liquid fluoride thorium reactors, and I'm probably missing a few good search terms.
No, I do get it. The only reason nuclear reprocessing, or nuclear ANYTHING really, is expensive is because of nonsensical rules governing the handling of anything deemed "nuclear".
If the rules were such that we treated these materials based on the real and actual hazards they pose then we'd see more nuclear power plants. That's because we'd be shutting down all the coal plants based on how much radioactive material they spread to the environment alone.
The expense lies solely with government regulation. I'm not saying we need to do away with the regulation, I say the regulations need to make sense.
Radiation is like burning a candle. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. The isotopes with half the half life is twice as radioactive. Something with a half life of 100,000 years is not something that will kill you, unless you forge it into a knife and stab yourself with it.
Just put the stuff in a vault for 100 years or so and then take it out. At that point the real danger will be from it being made of a mix of heavy metals. So wear gloves, goggles, and steel toed boots when you move it. The process it like you would any other material containing heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead. Fashion the waste material into new fuel elements and common industrial stuff like re-bar and sewage pipe.
Idiots. This is a problem we should have solved already. This should not be that complicated.
In other words we only need to watch the stuff for 100 years or so before it is no more radioactive than common dirt?
The waste is comprised of a mix of elements, that is true. What most people won't tell you is that more than half of that mass is not really radioactive, it's just really hard to separate from the radioactive stuff. A large part of the mix are elements with a half life much like Sr-90, 30 years or so. If we give it a century to "cool" then it's about 1/10th as radioactive as when we put it in.
Let's say, out of an abundance of caution, we store it for 300 years. That's ten half lives. At that point it's 1/1000th as radioactive as it was when we put it away. We can build a vault that can last 300 years without putting much thought into it. Put that vault in place that we think will be around in 300 years and already has good security, like a bank, military base, museum, library, airport, whatever. Then after the time is up we can open it back up, take the stuff out, and put the next batch of stuff back in and seal it back up for another 300 years. What comes out will be, without any processing really, be valuable reactor fuel. With some processing it can be made into a lot of valuable things, including the reactor fuel.
If it takes 100,000 years for something to decay then it is no more radioactive than the concrete in my driveway.
Us humans separate radioactive elements into "short", "medium", and "long" lived isotopes. We separate them like that because compared to our life span these isotopes are short, medium, or long. The short lived stuff is gone in less than a couple months. These isotopes are effectively gone even before the spent fuel leaves the nuclear power plant. Fuel rods taken from the reactor core is placed in a cooling pool for at least two years so that all of these isotopes decay away. When they come out the radiation is so strong that even seconds of exposure means death. After they come out of that pool it's just the long and medium lived products that remain. The most dangerous of them are elements like cesium and selenium which can collect in bones and irradiate people for the rest of their natural life, however shortened that might be.
The long lived isotopes have half lives on the order of thousands of years or more. Elements with half lives this long is not any real radiation hazard since a person is more likely to die of old age before it decays. These elements should still be handled with care since they are still likely to pose hazards like heavy metal poisoning but that basically means don't eat it, breath in the dust, or handle it with bare skin.
We don't need to bury radioactive anything for more than perhaps 300 years, and we know how to do that. We've built plenty of structures that can last that long. After 300 years all the short and medium lived products are gone, only the long lived stuff remains. At that point the waste can be handled much like we'd handle anything containing lead, mercury, or arsenic. That means rubber suits, gloves, goggles, and masks. Then we can reprocess this material to separate out what are valuable metals, fissile reactor fuel, and other elements for medical and industrial uses.
I can remember reading as a kid about how scientists were trying to develop a "language" to communicate to future civilizations where we've stored our dangerous radioactive wastes. That way we don't contaminate future generations with all that nasty radioactive waste us evil people in the here and now are producing. Then I learned some real science from people that actually knew what they were talking about and learned that we don't need to store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years. If we store it for just a couple hundred years we can make it safe
We already do something like this now. Forestry people with watch over a forest for forty years so that we can harvest that for wood. People will build and maintain structures that they intend to make last for centuries. Libraries and museums will keep valuable items from history for as long as we can imagine. Keeping an eye on radioactive material, for the purpose of mining it again for it's valuable elements in a century or three, seems like a trivial problem really.
Let's take this point by point.
First, the 200,000 cubic meters of high-level waste already exists and is the product of the British nuclear weapons program, and possibly some of the high-level waste already created by fuel reprocessing. This stuff is a radiological and chemical witches brew that cannot be easily treated in any way. Some means of reducing this stuff to a stable state for long term storage is essential.
That may be true but we have ways to reduce the mass of what needs to be stored if we use some preprocessing to separate out some of the valuable materials.
Second,...Building a world-wide industrial deployment of breeder reactors is an exercise orders of magnitude more costly than waste disposal problems.
Breeder reactors may be an expensive and difficult task but we can make energy from the "waste" that it burns. It is quite possible that by investing billions of dollars/euros/rupees in this we could get a net gain on our investment. Basically we can make money from burning this waste.
Third, breeder reactors do not make fission products go away. These must still be disposed of once the actinides are burned.
Many of those fission products are very valuable. Either because they are very useful radioactive isotopes or rare minerals. Much of the rest is not in fact radioactive, a fission produces two nuclei, with only one of them radioactive. If we just separate the non-radioactive elements from the radioactive elements then we'd cut the mass needed for storage in half. Then by separating the useful isotopes from the less than useful isotopes we could cut the mass needed to store by more than half again. With smart processing we could turn 10 tons of waste we'd have to bury into 4 tons. I think that alone is worth something.
Fourth, fuel reprocessing systems currently operating produce larger volumes of high-level waste in physical terms than they take in. This must be converted to some form that be stored long term (see point one, above).
If that is the case then you are doing it wrong.
Fifth, spent fuel from power reactors does not contain "98% of their fissile material". ...
We can obtain U-238 far more cheaply and easily, if we need it, by simply converting the millions of tons of depleted uranium currently in storage into breeding fuel element.
U-238 is only one of the many elements that can be obtained by properly processing spent fuel and other radioactive wastes. There are many other valuable elements in this radioactive wastes and if we process it out we reduce the mass of waste we need to store considerably and we can make money doing it.
Sixth, reprocessing is very expensive. ...
The value of mixed oxide fuel on the market is less than zero. Utilities must be paid a subsidy to take it for free.
Again, that is because you are doing it wrong. People are experimenting with a pyro-processing system that can melt down this waste and with some very creative chemistry they can separate out all the valuable stuff from the not so valuable stuff. Basically it's heated until melting, what becomes gasses at those temperatures is collected and separated by masses and chemical properties. Gasses like iodine can be made into medicines, noble gasses collected for welding, and so forth. Noble metals tend to just sink to the bottom and can be sold for jewelery or coinage. Zirconium, hafnium, beryllium, and many other non-radioactive elements can be separated out and reused in nuclear facilities because of their unique properties when exposed to radiation.
Reprocessing is expensive partly because we haven't figured out all the chemistry yet. It's also expensive partly because government regulations throughout the world make it expensive. The first country that creates sane regulations on the processing of nuclear
Wow. Could you at least wait for the body to reach room temperature before insulting the man?
I'd think that NOx would be produced in any internal combustion engine, I don't think that an engine running on hydrogen would be immune.
Even if the problems of storing hydrogen are solved there is still a logistics issue in having machines that can burn it. If the technology is used solely to store energy for "burning' it again in the same device then compatibility with other devices is irrelevant. I just think that a device that can take water and electricity and store it as jet fuel would be an order of magnitude more valuable than one that can store it as hydrogen, or any other form really.
Part of the usefulness is in how efficiently it can store the energy. Some of that energy will be lost as heat. In some cases that heat can be used but then the same can be said for a diesel generator. If this fuel cell can compete on efficiency with lead-acid storage, seawater to jet fuel, or what not, then this might make sense to use widely. I'm sure reliability also comes in to the equation. Lead-acid batteries and diesel engines are known to be able to take abuse, fuel cells have a history of being fragile.
As I recall compressing and storing hydrogen is a very expensive process. One problem is that hydrogen likes to destroy most metals. Any piping, compressor, or container must be made of expensive metals or lined with glass or something.
I recall reading several articles over the years about the Navy working on a process to turn hydrogen and CO2 into hydrocarbon based fuels. The hydrogen would be from cracking water. The CO2 that is dissolved in the water would be extracted for the process. If this fuel cell technology can improve on the process of producing hydrogen from water then the seawater to jet fuel process could be more viable.
I might be mistaken but hydrocarbon liquids can store hydrogen in a much smaller space than any compressed gas. I recall that not even liquid hydrogen can not beat fuel oil on hydrogen per volume. If this is true then it would seem that storing the hydrogen as a fuel oil might be more viable than compressing into heavy and expensive tanks. There's a few bonuses for storing the hydrogen as a hydrocarbon, even if it means cracking the hydrogen off again to run the fuel cell to produce electricity. A liquid hydrocarbon can fuel cooking stoves, trucks, battle tanks, helicopters, and even generators. Hydrogen can only really be used in a fuel cell.
It's interesting that this can store energy as a hydrogen gas but how does this compare in cost, weight, and volume to more traditional systems like lead-acid batteries? The military might have needs that make this viable for them but in a non-military environment this does not seem practical at all. The government is willing to spend a lot of money to save on things like time, space, and weight, but they have their limits. Unless they can make a case for civil uses I doubt this will go far in the military.
"For places where water is in short supply like California, why isn't every power plant being built near the sea, where they can use seawater for cooling? It'll have to be a two-stage cooling circuit with a heat exchanger to prevent corrosion from affecting power generation systems. But that's already what's used in nuclear plants so there's no new engineering which needs to be developed there. Do this and 1/3rd the energy from burning coal, oil, or nuclear can go into generating electricity. The remaining 2/3rds of the energy can go into desalinating seawater. "
The reason I heard this doesn't happen is because the waste heat is not at a high enough temperature to make desalination affordable. The resulting water is not boiling hot like what is needed for evaporative cooling, just merely lukewarm.
What might change this is the use of high temperature nuclear reactors like liquid fluoride thorium reactors, or LFTR. A LFTR can reach temperatures where the final output is hot enough to boil water. One might add an additional turbine stage to turn this energy to electricity but at that point the percentage of energy retrieved is so small that it would likely not be profitable, making clean water would make more economic sense. Other uses for this heat could be heating for buildings or a number of industrial uses.
Water cooled power plants like coal, natural gas, and solid fuel nuclear reach temperatures of about 300C. LFTR could get to 600C or 800C which makes desalination off that waste heat possible. The primary turbines would not be steam like a coal plant but open loop air or a closed loop gas.
There are other benefits to LFTR besides making water desalination and electricity production relatively easy and profitable. A primary benefit is that it cannot melt down like a solid fuel reactor, it is very safe. LFTR can also produce a lot of other beneficial byproducts like medical radioisotopes, without the undesirable byproducts like weapon grade plutonium. It will make plutonium but of a quality that is nearly useless for weapons but very valuable for energy.
In the USA there is (or at least was) a cap on how much a person could contribute to a political campaign. If there is a law that all transactions must have the option of payment in cash then what happens to the caps on political contributions? I suppose there could also be a law that any payment to a political entity must have record keeping to prevent... what would you even call this? Is it "abusive" contributions?
Personally, I do not believe there should be a cap on political contributions. I suppose it is possible on some level that a political entity might abuse this and theoretically "buy" an election. What I fear more than bought elections is a candidate or lobbying effort being silenced because of some accusation of record keeping abuses. The abuse of a government entity regulating how I, or anyone else, might choose to spend my money on supporting a policy or candidate frightens me more than some billionaire buying up all the billboards, TV ads, and radio time.
Let people speak freely, and that means giving money to any lobby effort or political campaign they choose. Paying in cash is certainly one way to make that easier. If I walk into John Jackson's campaign offices with a grocery bag of cash to fight the campaign of Jack Johnson then no campaign contribution limits should allow the government to arrest me for doing that.
On a deaths per joule comparison nuclear power wins over them all by a large margin. Do you think that people don't fall from windmills and rooftop solar panels? People die.
Also, people in Fukushima got more radiation by flying from the area than if they stayed. Chernobyl was barely a first generation reactor, it didn't have modern safety features like a containment dome. The answer to this problem is not to stop building nuclear power plants but to build more so that we can afford to decommission power plants like those at Fukushima.
Japan shut down all their nuclear power plants for a while but were forced to restart them. This is because without nuclear power they had to resort to dirty, unsafe, and expensive coal. Wind, solar, and tidal power would cost us more in money and lives then even building more Chernobyl type power plants.
Thankfully we don't have to build another Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island to keep the lights on. We can build fourth generation nuclear power, reactors that are safer, cheaper, and more reliable than even the already very safe, cheap, and reliable first and second generation reactors that caused us so much panic.
At a minimum we should at least have some government funded research in nuclear power like we have government funded research in wind, solar, and tidal. We have much to learn on nuclear power, and claiming we cannot harness that power safely is like claiming we should not invest in Tesla motors because the Model T and Pinto were unsafe. A modern nuclear reactor would not be built like those at Fukushima.
We can build much better nuclear power plants but we've held ourselves back because of failures of completely unrelated designs. Failures that, BTW, involved very little cost in lives and cleanup when compared to the alternatives.
A possible counter argument is that this person that is black listed from the private sector because of a past with the FBI could then find work with NOAA predicting hurricanes, DARPA working on lots of stuff, NASA doing astronomy and physics, or a number of public universities doing just about anything.
Blacklisting someone because of a past with the FBI might be a dick move but perhaps we could let them redeem themselves by doing something beneficial for society for a few years before we drop them from the list.
The federal marshals work for the judicial branch. Their mandate is to search for escaped prisoners and such, people that have already been convicted of a crime. The FBI is tasked with the enforcement of federal laws, which has some overlap with escaped prisoners and such but the federal marshals don't have much overlap with what the FBI does.
The FBI not having arrest powers is an interesting idea. Let the FBI investigate but once it comes time to arrest then let the local sheriff perform the arrest. This works on areas within a state boundary but falls apart in federal districts, territories, and so forth. These areas could have a local equivalent of a sheriff for the purpose of enacting arrests but then they'd be employees of the FBI in every way but name.
If you want to talk about pruning federal law enforcement powers then I propose doing away with the DEA and BATFE. These are enforcement agencies that have powers that overlap completely with the FBI, so roll them into the FBI and do away with the separate agencies. An FBI that is busy with tracking down child molesters, kidnappers, murderers, arsonists, and what not might not then bother with handing guns to drug dealers like the DEA and BATFE has done.
Let's assume that the claim is true, we've studied the problem sufficiently to the point that we understand the problem and therefore our need for people to work on climate models and so forth is diminished. Let's also assume that while we can do away with some climate studies we cannot end it completely since we will need to monitor progress and guide policy.
So, what should we do? It seems that many of the people in positions of power talk a lot about doing an "all of the above" approach. This means doing anything and everything that can possibly reduce our carbon output. We've seen PSAs telling us to turn off the lights in rooms we aren't using and to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. We've seen government subsidies for solar panels, windmills, corn ethanol, and electric cars. What's missing here? IMHO, we've got government support for every tactic to fight global warming except the one that has the best chance to reduce our carbon output with the least cost and smallest impact on our daily lives.
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim. It also doesn't help that they'll chide me for driving my light truck while they fly in jet planes all over the world. They have a meeting of the world powers on how to combat our carbon output, flying all these people there to meet, and all they've agreed to do is meet again in five years to talk about it some more.
I thought global warming was the greatest threat this nation, and this planet, has ever faced. Yet these people don't seem to be acting like it is.
I'm not convinced that global warming is a problem based only on the actions of the people with the ability to have the greatest effect on the carbon our modern society produces. If these people were convinced on the problem we faced then we'd see them talking about nuclear power. If they cannot bring themselves to bring up nuclear power as part of the "all the above" strategy to fight global warming then I can only conclude that they fear losing votes more than they fear the end of civilization. A true believer would not be concerned about the next election, they'd be concerned about the next century.
The US Navy has been working on a process that derives hydrogen and CO2 from seawater as feedstock for synthesis of hydrocarbons. Methanol is nice but hydrocarbons are better. We know how to store, transport, and efficiently burn hydrocarbons. We don't know as much about methanol.
Also, it sounds like the seawater to jet fuel process is in its final stages of development, needing only enough funding to prove its viability. This air to methanol process sounds like its purely theoretical now.
I meant "expensive" in a relative sense. Other items that would need similar precision to function, like a clock or socket wrench, do not have as many moving parts and therefore can be obtained with what someone might consider pocket change. It is a tool that requires a relatively high level of precision to function as intended but since it is made in such high quantity the price is quite low.
A $100,000 machine that can print out a $30 socket set or wall clock is not very impressive. If that same machine can print out a Model 1911 pistol that can fetch easily $1000 on the open market then you will get people's attention. If that device can print out a shiny new M1911 in a week then it will pay for itself in a few years. If it can print one out in a day then it can pay for itself in months.
The term "assault rifle" is a military designation for a type of small arm. An assault rifle is a rifle chambered in a cartridge with a range and/or power less than a "battle rifle" but greater than a typical handgun. Such weapons typically have a selector switch that enables semi-auto or three round burst functions. Some early weapons of this type were capable of switching between full-auto and semi-auto but this is rare today. Some common cartridges for such weapons are 5.56 NATO, .30 Carbine, and 7.62x39mm.
For clarity a "battle rifle" is a relatively large caliber rifle, typically about .30 caliber, with semi-auto capability. A "machine gun" is both a military designation and a BATFE legal designation with slightly different meanings. In the military a machine gun is a weapon capable of firing battle rifle cartridges in fully automatic mode. Military machine guns may have a burst or semi-auto feature but this is rare. As defined by the BATFE a machine gun is any firearm capable of firing more than one cartridge by a single action of a trigger. To the BATFE a worn out double barrel shotgun that fires both barrels with one trigger pull is a "machine gun", as is any military designated "assault rifle" due to the three round burst feature. To the BATFE the caliber of the weapon is not part of the machine gun definition, any cartridge will do.
The term "assault weapon" (as opposed to assault RIFLE) is a nearly meaningless term. It's definition varies from state to state and from time to time. All it really means is "what we want to ban today". The weapon used at Sandy Hook did not meet the definition of "assault weapon" in Connecticut law even though it may have met that definition if it were in California. Some common features to the definition to an "assault weapon" are some rather silly features like bayonet lugs (because drive by stabbings is a problem I guess) or threaded barrel ends (used to attach safety devices like report suppressors and flash hiders but the powers that be focus on the ability to attach a grenade launcher).
To add further silliness to all of this is the term "personal defense weapon". This is a term that also has several meanings depending on who you ask. In the military a PDW would be something like a P90, a weapon that fires pistol caliber cartridges in three round burst or semi-auto and comes standard with a 50 round magazine. To the Department of Homeland Security a commonly used PDW is the M4 Carbine. To the military the M4 Carbine is an assault rifle. To the BATFE the M4 Carbine is a "machine gun" if capable of three round burst, or a "short barreled rifle" if semi-auto only. Of course most every state in the USA would classify this as an "assault weapon".
Interesting isn't it? The same weapon, in this case the M4 Carbine, gets different designations not based solely on who is holding it at the time. In the hands of a Marine it's an "assault rifle". In the hands of a DHS agent it's a "personal defense weapon". In the hands of the people that pay their salary with taxes it can be a "machine gun", "assault weapon", "short barreled rifle", or (my favorite) an "offensive weapon".
What is an "offensive weapon"? Hell if I know. Best I can tell is that it is something that some politicians decided offended their sensibilities at some point in the past, therefore they banned their possession by anyone not earning a government paycheck. The term "offensive weapon" has just about the same meaning as "assault weapon". I expect that given time the term "assault weapon" will be discredited enough that the term "offensive weapon" will regain popularity with the powers that be that wish to disarm us.
That's some fucking retarded reasoning
It's no different then the reasoning on why the President said we should go to the moon. We did it because it was hard. Making a handgun is not hard, many people do it. Making a handgun by 3D printing is hard, and is as suitable of a test of the technology as building any of a number of items.
Perhaps you would like to expand on why you think this reasoning is "fucking retarded"? Perhaps you could also propose a more suitable item to manufacture as a test of 3D printing technology?
Apparently so since much of the desire to ban these weapons was the result of gang warfare during Prohibition.
Funny that, history repeating itself. Alcohol prohibition resulted in violence not seen before it's implementation. Now today people don't shoot each other over alcohol because it is available at nearly every convenience store with nothing more than proving you are an adult and have the ability to pay for it.
Perhaps we would not have "drug addled scum burning down your cities" if these drugs were not banned. Just a thought. It appears that there are at least some people that agree with me given that a number of states in the USA have legalized marijuana with no real threats to society to show for it.
Also, how does banning possession of a handgun supposed to prevent "drug addled scum" from setting the city on fire? I do know that even drug addled scum have a nearly instinctual fear of getting shot if they threaten to burn down someone's home or business. It would seem to follow that by removing the handguns, and therefore diminish the homeowner's ability to defend their home, would embolden the scum to burn the world down.
Gun control is not crime control. You control crime by controlling the criminals.
I've read a lot of posts of people exclaiming 3D printed handguns a waste of time, or an effort to expand one's "manhood" by building weapons. I've read an article on 3D printed handguns before where the creator was asked why they chose to print a handgun of all things. In this case it was a 3D printed Model 1911, printed using a number of direct printing metal techniques but the answer to this question stuck with me and I believe answers the question quite well.
The creator of this 3D printed handgun explained the choice of printing a handgun this way. People understand what a handgun does and what it is used for. People understand that a handgun is a device with many intricate parts placed under considerable wear, pressures, and so forth. Whatever a handgun is made from must be durable. A handgun built with poor tolerances is not likely to function. A handgun is an expensive machine, not something one can typically purchase on a whim. It is also something that can be manufactured within the size limits of their machines.
Someone could 3D print a clock, for example, to show how a useful item can be built with amazing precision with a 3D printer. To show how a 3D printer can make something that is durable could mean printing a carpenter hammer, or anvil. Perhaps building an adjustable wrench, socket set, or any of a number of tools that need to hold up to extreme stresses and tight tolerances would show the capabilities of a 3D printer. Those are also rather mundane and perhaps a number of people that do not use tools regularly will not understand the difficulty in building such a tool with a 3D printer. These are also tools that do not have much value since people can buy these items relatively cheaply most anywhere.
People choose to 3D print a handgun because it is hard to do. Someone successful in this has then demonstrated their ability to build any of a number of more common and mundane items we use every day. It also doesn't hurt that 3D printed handguns makes politicians nervous and gets clicks on the internet.
Go print a clock and see how many clicks you get on your website, then print an anvil and do the same. Now print a handgun and hope that you've got enough bandwidth to handle the load.