That is interesting that people are distracted from just knowing the phone is nearby. I can only relate to an extent. I'm rarely without my phone since I bought my first one but I believe I'm not terribly distracted by it's presence. I mean that I want to make sure it's kept safe and secure, it's a valuable item, but I'm not thinking that I need to touch it constantly.
I remember putting my phone in my carry-on bag while flying, so I didn't have the bulky item in my pocket while folded up into a little ball while seated on the plane. When my parents came to pick me up at the airport I mentioned that I wanted to get my phone from my bag before I put the bags in the trunk. Dad made a comment about how I should have the phone surgically implanted in my ass if I thought it was that important to have it on me for the drive home. That was probably 20 years ago. I thought the comment was a bit over the top, even for my dad, but he seemed to notice people were getting too attached to their phones even then. This was an early "web connected" phone, it could run a basic web browser and not much else. I mostly wanted it in my pocket since it became my timepiece. I regularly used a pocket watch up until I realized that the phone was more accurate on keeping time and almost always in my pocket, therefore the watch became redundant and I put it in a box.
That made me think, do kids wear wristwatches any more? Game watches were a thing, at least for a while. Those were highly addictive and distracting but I don't recall anyone making a big deal out of them. I had a calculator watch for a while, came in handy too. Those have to be worthless now. I haven't worn a wristwatch since I got out of the Army over a decade ago, I always had something electronic in my pocket to keep time since.
I remember years ago I worked at a place that didn't allow cameras on the property. Cameras in phones were just getting popular at the time. My phone was getting old and unreliable and so I went shopping for a phone without a camera. The guy at the store seemed very confused at this request. We looked through their catalog of phones and I was able to find something suitable, which I bought.
While we were looking for a phone without a camera the sales droid suggested I buy a nicer phone and just punch out the camera lens to render the camera inoperable, so I could find a nicer phone and yet still comply with my employer's demands. I thought the guy was insane to suggest such a thing. How would my employer know the camera was truly inoperable unless there was obvious damage to the phone? In which case I'd have a brand new phone that was intentionally broken. How would I explain this if I ever needed a repair later? "No, I want the phone fixed BUT NOT THE CAMERA IN IT!" How would I know that no other damage was done, and if I did then we are back to fixing the phone but still leaving obvious damage to the camera function.
Weeks after I got my camera-less phone they lifted the ban on phones with cameras. Too many people complained and the company gave in. They just said that getting caught taking a photo on the premises could be grounds for dismissal. That was of course impossible to enforce. They could certainly walk someone out the door for taking pictures of something and posting it on the internet but that's closing the barn door after the horses left.
I later went back to university and had one instructor say during the first class period that anyone using an electronic device during class would be marked as absent that day. That's not just a ban on devices for quizzes and tests but during class discussion. That was the first and last time I saw that happen as every class since would have nearly every student with a laptop or electronic tablet for taking notes, or whatever. Of course some people were just goofing off, like one guy I saw that was watching a soccer game in the middle of class. It's not like people didn't goof off in class before electronics, I remember doing crossword puzzles during lectures.
I remember when pagers were a thing and schools wanted to ban those. They gave up on banning pagers a long time ago too, and not just because they fell out of use. Parents that were able to afford a two-way pager for their kids can have a lot of influence on the schools.
Everything old is new again. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
And I suppose you have no idea how a mouse is working.
You suppose incorrectly.
There is no 'special support' needed for an 'old mouse' or 'old track ball'.
That's the problem. A serial mouse has been a very very rare device for decades and yet Windows 10 will still search for them on bootup. If it finds something chattering away on the port, such as a GPS unit, the OS assumes it's a mouse or trackball, will install the driver for such a device, and therefore messing with the proper function of this not-a-mouse device. I verified that Windows 10 still supports serial mice and people have been complaining about Windows assuming something is a mouse (or mouse-like) device and have been looking for ways to disable this for years.
If you ever had used a decent operation system, like any Unix, Linux, MacOs and cared to make a "> cat/dev/mouse" you would know that.
I did know that. I have never needed to use a serial mouse because they've been obsolete since the PS/2 port came out in 1987 and was widely adopted less than 10 years later. Maybe serial mice were relatively common in the days of Windows 98 but they are all but extinct now. I bought a serial mouse just for grins and giggles 20 years ago because I happened across a serial mouse driver for MacOS and thought it would be fun to play with and have a three button mouse. (A multi-button mouse for Mac was a rare and expensive thing back then, but a serial mouse with three buttons could be had for less than $10. I suspect you knew that already.) Any "decent" OS will support USB mice and therefore not have a need to support something so rare today as a serial mouse. I suppose a "decent" OS might be expected to support a serial pointing device for someone that wants one, but this should be handled better than how Windows does. The serial mouse support in Windows appears to have become more troublesome than useful 15 years ago, and yet it remains.
Yes, if you find a serial to PS/2 adapter your mouse will still work... or serial to USB.
Yes it will, I don't know why anyone would want to though. Any "decent" OS will support a USB mouse and there are all kinds of USB mice, trackballs, and other pointing devices that a serial device should be a special case, and the person should be expected to have to install a driver for it themselves. If someone is buying a serial to USB adapter today to plug in a serial mouse then they are an idiot. They would be a double idiot for using a PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter, to plug in the mouse. A triple idiot would have a USB to PS/2 adapter, PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter. I suppose that might be fun to experiment with, or somehow necessary for someone using a real odd operating system, but no one should even want to use a serial mouse any more. It would be cheaper and easier to just buy a new mouse instead of trying to force into service a mouse that must be 30 years old now.
A "decent" OS would be able to tell the difference between a serial GPS receiver and serial mouse on the port. Since Windows 10 can't do that then therefore Windows 10 is not a "decent" OS.
The 68K to PowerPC transition was particularly interesting, because the emulation was integrated to the OS at a very low level, allowing the mixing and matching of 68k and PPC code: almost the entire operating system was running emulated at first, with it gradually being ported over as time went on.
I remember that and it was an interesting time. One thing I was tasked with was upgrading a file and print server, a then mildly old 68040 based system. I was given a new PowerPC upgrade card for this server and I had to get it running again. After the upgrade the server ran slower than before. That was because the PowerPC had to emulate almost everything. We eventually took the upgrade card out and just bought a new server.
You touched on the software changes but I'll point out more. There was the early System 6 and prior days which were a mix of 16 and 32 bit code. System 7 was a long lived operating system which was 32 bit pretty much all the way through. MacOS 8 was the transition to PowerPC and lots of changes to the UI. MacOS 9 shed itself of most of what remained from the early days of the Macintosh. MacOSX was a whole new beast and really more of a family or operating systems itself. Mac OSX up to 10.4 had support for "Classic" applications and early PowerPC processors. 10.5 to 10.8 supported 32 and 64 bit processors. 10.8 to now is 64 bit only.
Each architecture transition was, at least in my opinion, handled quite well. I do remember in college a friend of mine swearing up and down on how he could not take the hard drive from his Dad's old Mac (with a 68030 processor) and put it in his Dad's new Mac (with PowerPC) and just boot it up. He did this with Windows computers all the time, he said, without problems so why should Apple have to be so different? Well there might be some understanding of a need to support old systems for a time but there is a point of absurdity, isn't there? I seem to recall trying to see if a 25 year old trackball would still work on Windows 10 through the serial port, and it did. Perhaps I don't recall correctly and it was Windows 7 or 8. Point is that a mouse from the days of Windows 3.1 is still supported on a "modern" OS. That's nice, I suppose, but is that necessary?
I've been looking real hard for my PS/2 to nine pin adapter to verify I can still use this old trackball on Windows 10, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, the point is that things change and this means people need to change with it. Apple did transitions like this before and did them well with supporting old hardware and software for a long time, and I expect this to continue. I just don't expect my ADB keyboard to plug in or be able to run WarCraft.
Going Intel doubled Mac sales, going back to non-Intel may cut it in half.
I saw nothing in the article that stated explicitly that the new processors would be incompatible with Intel. It's quite possible they want to have better control of the Intel compatible processors they use. This kind of a shift is not taken lightly, and has likely been considered for a long time.
The current 64 bit architecture used by Apple, and shows in chips made by Intel, was developed by AMD. If Apple wants to make their own "Intel compatible" processor then they could enter a licensing agreement with AMD to do so. Intel might not be happy about this but I don't know what they'd do about it. Maybe they'd offer to fabricate these Apple designed chips under license from Apple?
What I got from the article was that Apple has been using portions of the iOS in their desktops for some elements of running the system and wants to share more code between the two. That could mean a lot of things besides abandoning the Intel architecture. It might mean designing a CPU with asymmetric processing. They might put an ARM core and three x86-64 cores on a die for desktops and laptops, That means not having to put a separate ARM processor in the computers like they do now. If they want to have some x86 fun on the iOS devices then maybe a chip with a two ARM cores and a x86 core on it.
Is it feasible or even desirable to have cores with different instruction sets on them in the same device? It must be because it sounds like Apple does this already, only the cores are in separate packages. If they believe the future is in having ARM running alongside x86 then they might just want to put those cores in the same package. To make that happen might mean having to design their own processors.
I've seen things like this proposed before. I seem to recall someone at least planning to build a laptop had a tablet mode where the tablet used a low power processor and tablet based OS for most tasks in that mode. If there were things that required more processing power, or was opened up to become a laptop, then the higher power processors was "woken up" so it could run a standard desktop OS.
Perhaps Apple wants a processor that is in every way compatible with what Intel offers but they just want a few "tweaks" so they can stay ahead of the performance curve. Apple is already in all kinds of technology licensing agreements so to pick and choose from, and to put them on a chip that they'd put in their own computers might not be that big of a burden for them. They might even be able to get in a deal to sell them to other computer makers, most likely after it's "old news" so as to not compete with their own products.
We proudly award North Korea the winner of the Earth Hour Challenge. They've shown great efforts in caring for the environment for not just sending the entire nation into darkness for an hour (except Dear Leader's palace grounds) but by doing so for the entirety of Earth Day!... and the year. For much of the last century really.
Next year we'll take applications for the nation that has shown the lowest carbon footprint growth for the last 50 years. This will be to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day coming in 2020. We know who is in the front running, don't you? Let's see who else can revert their nation into the stone age by then. We hear that North Korea is already making plans for their victory by building rockets for a massive fireworks display that no doubt will send shockwaves around the world!
Come on America! We can't let North Korea show us how things are done! We need to lower our carbon footprint too. USA! USA! USA!
Polonium could very well be generated as a decay product of something heavier, as opposed to just starting out as one of the original ingredients of the waste. In fact, if you read the link, it's currently generated now from the decay (beta) of Bi-210.
Bi-210 has a half life of 5 days, there's none of that left to decay either. If you look at the four main decay chains polonium appears on them but only in isotopes that last for fractions of a second or perhaps days. It's all gone by now.
The isotope that people are all concerned about, polonium-210, has a half life of 138 days. That's about 3 half lives per year, meaning about 1/8 of it remains from the year before. After 30 years that's 80 half lives. It's all gone by now.
There is no polonium on this site, not enough that anyone would have to be concerned with anyway.
Leslie Dewan and Transatomic has had to walk back their claims after being challenged quite publicly by competing nuclear engineers. It became quite obvious when challenged by people that know what they are talking about that the math doesn't add up. This forced Transatomic to become nothing more than another variation on the molten salt reactor (MSR) theme. In direct competition are MSR variants like LFTR, MCFR, MSW, TMSR-LF, and DMSR/IMSR. There are also solid fuel competitors like PHWR, TMSR-SF, MSCR, and FHR.
I have to wonder if Transatomic can be trusted because of their rather over the top claims from the beginning. It seems that they are more honest and realistic in their claims lately but can even this be trusted now?
Companies like Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Power, and ThorCon, seem to be dominating in North America because they've been at this longer, have experienced leadership, and technology that is evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary). They all compete in some ways and complement each other in other ways. Now that Transatomic offers reactors that have been shown to not be the waste-burners as originally demonstrated they now have to discover or create a market among the competition in North America.
I have to wonder how much of Transatomic's fame is because Leslie Dewan is a graduate of MIT and looks good in high heels, tight pants, and lipstick. I'm sure she's a very intelligent woman, and she claims to be something of a "tomboy", but it seems she likes the cameras and the cameras like her.
And tends to lodge in the bone marrow, leading to leukemia. And my guess is that "30 years" is an estimate which is assuming a minimal exposure. At one point, IIRC, what they recommended was "if that gets in an open wound, go for immediate high amputation".
No, amputation as treatment of exposure was never the protocol.
They'd fish out the particles big enough to see and could recover without doing permanent damage to tissue. If it was too small to see then it was not considered a health hazard. The long term effects on health are difficult to measure given that the few people that have died since their exposure were heavy smokers (lung cancer did them in) and victims of motor vehicle accidents (can't blame that on the plutonium).
Acute radiation exposure is known to produce organ failure and death in a matter of hours or days. Chronic exposure is expected to produce a risk of cancers in bone, marrow, thyroid, and other sensitive organs. There is no evidence of this in the people with known exposure. Dogs injected with plutonium have died relatively quickly but that's an unusual and quite deliberate form of exposure, not something likely as an accident. Inhaling plutonium would likely raise the risk of health problems if those particles remained in the lungs. The lungs will naturally clear out particles that are inhaled and gets dumped into the digestive tract, where it is expelled out the "tailpipe". Any plutonium in the blood is filtered out by the urinary tract.
Plutonium may get incorporated into the bones but it has a half life of thousands of years, which for someone that might expect a lifespan measured in decades means that there would have to be a lot of plutonium before the decay emissions exceed that of naturally occurring potassium and such. I'm sure someone could look up a "banana equivalent dose" to get an idea of the hazard.
As a heavy metal is it about 4 times as dangerous as mercury.
Then don't eat it. Airborne particle detectors not picking up the plutonium that isn't airborne is not a "failure" in the detectors. Getting upset about that is nonsensical.
not sure about Polonium
Then look it up. Polonium-210 has a half life of less than 140 days, and this waste processing site was created for the disposal of World War II and Cold War era nuclear waste. The polonium is all gone by now. http://www.newworldencyclopedi...
we could again make a google / link war
To do that you'd have to actually link to something.
That's why we need an edit button on Slashdot, because I'm an idiot for mixing my units. Instead of Tylenol compare the toxicity of plutonium with that of iron, nicotine, or lead.
People are unlikely to eat pure iron but it's in every multivitamin, and people will cook with steel pots and pans. We are surrounded by iron substances, and yet people don't throw fits over it's toxicity. Don't eat it and if you are handling in a way that it might produce small particles then wear a mask.
Same with lead, it's in our car batteries. Don't go licking the terminals to test if it has a good charge, use a meter for that.
Caffeine poisoning is a thing. Not quite as toxic as iron or lead but slamming a few energy drinks can make a healthy person keel over.
Remember that the 22 milligram lethal dose for plutonium is for direct injection into the bloodstream, not how much is eaten. I'll see pictures of these workers on these sites and they are always wearing face masks and goggles. They'd have to be violating safety protocol to get anything close to a lethal dose of plutonium.
Don't equate the failure of a plant processing nuclear weapons waste with a plant that is processing nuclear power waste. Anyone that can think should be justifiably suspicious of people that need to use the failure of a military weapon producing plant to prevent contamination to argue against civilian nuclear power.
Nuclear power is in fact very safe. I'll see opinion articles mention the deaths caused by mining uranium and such as a case against nuclear power but make no mention of how many deaths there are from wind and solar power. This is lying by omission. If people want to make the case against nuclear power then they need to make an honest assessment of how dangerous the alternatives would be by comparison.
Go ahead, show me how dangerous nuclear power is compared to wind, solar, natural gas, or whatever else you believe should replace it. I already know the numbers. I saw them here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
We should be moving to nuclear power based on lives saved alone. It's ability to compete on price with solar is another reason to use it. My source: https://www.lazard.com/perspec...
But the monitors did not detect airborne contamination in December, possibly because some of the particles that spread were too heavy to stay aloft.
They are calling it a "failure" of the airborne particle detectors to detect particles that were not in the air. If the particles are not in the air then people aren't going to breathe them in. It might collect on the soles of their boots but if they are licking the soles of their boots then they need to be checked for mental issues first, then radiation contamination second.
It sounds like there were failures in managing the spread of radioactive material but this mention of a "failure" of airborne particle detectors is not one of them.
Radiation is everywhere and if we are going to regulate its spread then we need to have sane regulations. If Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant then it would be shutdown for exceeding the annual acceptable dose of radiation for employees. https://io9.gizmodo.com/grand-...
We need to take another look at our regulation of radioactive material. If it is as dangerous as the law says it is then we need to close off Grand Central Station and declare it a superfund site. If Grand Central Station is in fact safe to inhabit then so should any other place with an equivalent level of radioactivity.
The toxicity of plutonium is in dispute; nuclear industry advocates point to the low chemical toxicity of plutonium and ability of a worker to hold a kilogram brick of the material without protection; if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose for intravenous injection in an adult human weighing 70 kilograms is calculated to be approximately 22 milligrams (based on extrapolation from tests on dogs).
The toxic dose of acetaminophen is highly variable. In adults, single doses above 10 grams or 140 mg/kg have a reasonable likelihood of causing toxicity. In adults, single doses of more than 25 grams have a high risk of lethality.
For plutonium to be lethal someone would have to have 22 milligrams of plutonium injected into their bloodstream. Eating an equivalent dose of Tylenol would be just as lethal.
Plutonium should be handled with care but let's be honest about just how lethal it might be.
Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.
Sounds easy at first but impossible in practice.
Imagine an applicant fresh from college. The resume collection system removes the name and gender of the applicant and replaces it with a numeric identifier. Instead of "Jennifer Jones" it puts, "Applicant 79876". There are still schools that accept only men or women, if the applicant attended one of these schools then how can that be hidden? Is any mention of the name of the school removed? The college that people attended is important as some schools have a reputation for higher standards than others. Only removing the names of single sex schools would raise a flag as well.
Hiring managers like to see people that had activities outside of academics, and applicants know this. If someone took up softball or volleyball then the probability is quite high the applicant is female, versus more male dominated sports like baseball or hockey. This isn't absolute but a well known trend.
What of a club like Society of Women Engineers? If an applicant chooses to put that on their resume then would it be acceptable to remove it before a hiring manager can see it? The society does accept men as members but we all know that this is dominated by women. Same goes for societies based on race like Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.
I agree. The reason we saw organizations like SWE and SHPE develop was to counteract discrimination. They advocated for fair treatment in society. If white and Asian males see themselves being denied work because of their sex and/or race then would not organizations develop to advocate for fair treatment? What we've seen are these groups that historically called for fair treatment are now asking for special treatment. It's as if "reverse discrimination" is not also a form of discrimination. Trump didn't win the election so much as Clinton lost. She ran on being a woman and that "it's time" for a woman as President. That might get a person a lot of points in an election, which is how I think Obama was able to win, but the person still has to have enough other qualifications to be considered worthy. Clinton was a mediocre senator and a terrible Secretary of State. Trump called for "making American great again", which has broad appeal. Clinton talked of how she'd fight for women and minorities but white men vote too.
Clinton did win the Latino vote, Black vote, and women, but white men voted too. When you go and campaign on how white men are keeping you down in a nation that is 74% white and 49% male then you should not be surprised that you lose. It's actually amazing she got as many votes as she did. Oh, and it doesn't help to run a campaign on getting a majority of the popular vote in an election that chooses the winner based on state allocation of electors. Trump and his campaign knew this and so campaigned on getting electors, so he won.
Guns were designed to kill, cars were designed to carry people safely. Cars are registered. Drivers are licensed. Yet cars kill far more people every year than guns.
Then there is this:
"they want to get uuuuur guuuunns"
You just went into a rant mocking people that think someone might want to take their guns away and then explain in detail on how you want to do exactly that. You can claim that you did not in fact say you want to take my guns, only that I'd need a permit, have all my guns tracked electronically, and strict enforcement. Well, what happens to the guns I have that do not have electronic tracking? My guess is you would have them taken from me.
You know: coal is made from dead trees that died a few million years ago... where exactly should the radioactivity come from?
It came from the dirt that the plants grew in. Uranium, thorium, and other radioactive elements are everywhere and the plants will incorporate these elements into their structure as nutrients taken up from the soil. When the plants die and turn to coal that radioactive material is still there.
you mean dispatch able, not reliable.
No, I meant reliable. As in we can rely on the nuclear power to be available when we need it. Perhaps a specific reactor will have to go down for refuel and maintenance but on the whole a fleet of reactors will be able to provide 90% of their rated capacity regardless of the wind, sun, or rain.
Nuclear power is not considered dispatchable because nuclear reactors are very expensive to run and only make money if they are making energy. Reducing the power output of a nuclear reactor is a very long and expensive process in normal operation and is therefore only done as a last resort. Reducing power output quickly from a nuclear reactor is also possible but could result in it being off line for days, and therefore not making money for days.
Why do you repeat this nonsense every of your posts?
Because no one has provided anything that tells me otherwise. I'm not just going to take the word from some random anonymous internet poster that I'm wrong. If you don't believe me then look it up yourself and show me that I'm wrong.
Perhaps I'm misinformed, it's been over a a decade since I followed things closely, but my understanding is that while purpose-built plutonium-breeding reactors certainly have an edge, so long as you're actually producing appreciable quantities of plutonium at all it's a substantial danger, especially if it's primarily the isotopes you're interested in so that simple chemical separation is possible. That becomes an even worse problem if you're already engaging in any sort of waste reprocessing - then the dangerous part is already done.
The only isotope of plutonium that is valuable for weapons is Pu-239. All the other isotopes are either non-fissile or have such a short half life that they are problematic to handle. To make Pu-239 means putting U-238 in a reactor with something fissile, typically U-235, and letting it "cook" in the reactor for days to a few months. While the U-238 is being bombarded with neutrons it will capture some of them and become Pu-239. This newly produced Pu-239 that's in the reactor is now also exposed to that neutron bath and it can capture neutrons to become Pu-240, which is bad for making bombs, or it will fission, which is good for making energy. At the same time the U-235 that is in there is soaking up neutrons and undergoing fission but not every capture of a neutron results in fission, sometimes it also makes plutonium, an isotope lighter than Pu-239. If left in long enough there is enough Pu-239 eaten up by fission or captured a neutron to become Pu-240 that it is worthless for making a weapon.
This time left in the reactor is important for making weapons and so dual use designs, like at Chernobyl, have an open top design that allows the removal of fuel while operating. A reactor designed for only making power will have a sealed reactor core where the fuel cannot be removed while operating. It may be possible to use a civil reactor to produce weapon grade material but it would have to be shutdown and cooled off every 90 days or so to swap out the fuel. This kind of operation will be obvious to those watching for weaponizing civil reactors and cannot be done secretly.
The spent fuel from a civil power reactor, because fuel change cycles are years apart, will have only about 50% of the plutonium being Pu-239, the rest is mostly Pu-240. Separating this into weapon grade material by centrifuges would be prohibitively expensive and also obvious to anyone watching for weapons making activity. Fuel reprocessing does not involve the isotopic separation of the plutonium, only the chemical separation from the unused fuel and fission products. As this plutonium is of such low grade it will have to be mixed with fresh fuel, like uranium or thorium, to be used again in a reactor.
Waste reprocessing is not inherently creating weapon grade material. There must also be the act of isotopic separation and/or reactor operation with short fuel cycles. Isotopic separation and short fuel cycles are often visible by observation from space by noticing heat generation and such.
Meanwhile, any reactor that depends on choice of fuel to limit proliferation potential is already a lost cause - changing the fuel is comparatively easy, at least assuming you're talking about a flexible-fuel reactor rather than one specifically designed for your "safe" fuel.
The use of limiting fuel choice is done all the time to prevent the production of weapon grade material. Any uranium that is enriched beyond 20% U-235 is considered evidence of weapon production. Treaties limit the production and trade of such material. The use of thorium as a fuel further limits the threat of producing weapon grade material since in a reactor that produces all kinds of other isotopes that mess with the production of weapon grade material. Thorium has already been tested as a fuel but we'll need more testing and reactors designed to use it as a fuel to make the most of it.
Assuming one has a "flex-fuel" reactor that can burn thorium,
Not only that but assuming the call goes through then who isn't going to hang up once the call goes through and there's 10 seconds of silence because of the round trip delay from the distance.
I'll listen to phone interviews on podcasts and getting people to have a conversation with even the minimal delay from a coast to coast call can be frustrating. There's a reason the astronauts that went to the moon had those end of transmission beeps, keep saying "over", and so on. This is a verbal protocol to deal with the delay. I suspect that they also used a single channel for up link and down link which required this protocol. I assume a phone would not be limited like this, which could actually make this worse.
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, extremely toxic and complex.
As is every energy source we know of that's worth using. Nuclear power is already the safest energy source we have and we know how to make it even safer.
You think solar power isn't dangerous and toxic? People do get injured and killed installing the collectors. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. They are toxic too. Have you seen what goes into making those solar PV cells? Those are some nasty chemicals.
Hydro dams have been known to fail too. When they do it tends to create a lot of damage. Windmills are dangerous as well. Any building project has it's risks of death and injury. My college roommate was studying architecture and he told me about a lecture he had on how to compute the number of people that will be killed in a building project. We know these risks and we still build things, because leaving people homeless is a greater risk to life than building places for them to live in.
As dangerous as nuclear power might be we do get a lot of energy from it. More than enough to make it safer than anything else based on the deaths per energy produced. People understand that making something absolutely safe is impossible. Which is why they don't make anything absolutely safe. They do the best they can to the point that the costs of managing a failure is below that of the costs to prevent the failure.
There is a cost to using alternatives to nuclear power, as is there a cost to doing without that energy. As it is right now nuclear power is the best option we got.
Cost over runs during construction are killing many plants before they become operational.
Tell me, what is driving up these costs? I know what it is, a bunch of idiots that don't understand how a nuclear reactor works protesting it's construction and bogging them down with legal costs as they keep suing them over imagined safety violations.
Another thing that these protestors complain about is the reactors attracting terrorists. There was one terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor as it was bombed. Who did the bombing? The very same people that complained of it attracting terrorists. I guess they couldn't find an actual terrorist to bomb the place so they had to become the terrorists.
We did have places to store the waste until the Democrats shut them down.
the companies made money, the executives made money-- and today's public gets to pay for it all.
Except that's a lie. All US reactors are required to pay into a fund for decommissioning. Sure the electricity users are paying the bill but the energy produced is so much cheaper than the alternatives that everyone still comes out ahead.
What's the risk of a nuclear meltdown (say currently about 1% (449 reactors-- 5 of them have had severe problems.) (but keep in mind that there have been 52 smaller accidents at nuclear plants).
Then build a reactor that cannot melt down. We know how to do that but the people that think nuclear power technology is stuck in 1975 will still protest the building of a new plant. Japan figured this out. They tried to shut down all their nuclear power plants but then electricity prices shot up and air quality went down. They decided the risks of another meltdown was worth restarting most of their nuclear power plants. The ones they didn't restart were so old and small that they should have been shut down a long time ago anyway. The reactors at Fukushima were scheduled to be retired until the tsunami hit, then they were forced to move up their schedule. Those reactors were older than those at Chernobyl. Had they not stopped building new reactors because of the NIMBY types then they would have had them shut down earlier because of known issues.
The solution to bad nuclear power plants is not keeping them from being built, as that just forces people to keep them running. If we keep building them then the costs of new ones go down, as there would be more competition for reducing prices and improving safety. As of right now we only retire a nuclear power plant as a last resort because that reactor is very valuable and that land cannot be used for much once the reactor is gone. Do you know what an old reactor site is good for? Building a new reactor. To do that though idiots like you need to get out of the way so we can see these old reactors shut down so newer and safer ones can replace them.
The biggest problem is that the more efficient reactor designs are generally also considerably more conductive to producing and harvesting plutonium and other useful weapons-grade materials.
That is provably false. What makes plutonium valuable for creating weapons is the ability to make it with sufficient purity for a weapon in reactors designed for this purpose. There are reactor designs that prevent this from occurring. Part of what made Chernobyl such a dangerous reactor was that it was based on a "dual use" design, one that allowed it to be used for both generating electricity and for producing weapon grade material. These features to allow this had to be put in as part of the original design. To prevent this just don't have those features in the design.
Another way to address this possibility of producing weapon grade material is in the choice of fuel. One possible fuel choice is to mix some thorium in the fuel and there will be enough "bad" plutonium isotopes produced as a fission byproduct to make it worthless for making weapons. Thorium would also add to the energy content of the fuel and potentially reduce it's costs to produce. Thorium would also make uranium worthless for weapons since the byproduct of U-234 would destroy it's value for weapons but still keep it valuable as a fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
That is interesting that people are distracted from just knowing the phone is nearby. I can only relate to an extent. I'm rarely without my phone since I bought my first one but I believe I'm not terribly distracted by it's presence. I mean that I want to make sure it's kept safe and secure, it's a valuable item, but I'm not thinking that I need to touch it constantly.
I remember putting my phone in my carry-on bag while flying, so I didn't have the bulky item in my pocket while folded up into a little ball while seated on the plane. When my parents came to pick me up at the airport I mentioned that I wanted to get my phone from my bag before I put the bags in the trunk. Dad made a comment about how I should have the phone surgically implanted in my ass if I thought it was that important to have it on me for the drive home. That was probably 20 years ago. I thought the comment was a bit over the top, even for my dad, but he seemed to notice people were getting too attached to their phones even then. This was an early "web connected" phone, it could run a basic web browser and not much else. I mostly wanted it in my pocket since it became my timepiece. I regularly used a pocket watch up until I realized that the phone was more accurate on keeping time and almost always in my pocket, therefore the watch became redundant and I put it in a box.
That made me think, do kids wear wristwatches any more? Game watches were a thing, at least for a while. Those were highly addictive and distracting but I don't recall anyone making a big deal out of them. I had a calculator watch for a while, came in handy too. Those have to be worthless now. I haven't worn a wristwatch since I got out of the Army over a decade ago, I always had something electronic in my pocket to keep time since.
I remember years ago I worked at a place that didn't allow cameras on the property. Cameras in phones were just getting popular at the time. My phone was getting old and unreliable and so I went shopping for a phone without a camera. The guy at the store seemed very confused at this request. We looked through their catalog of phones and I was able to find something suitable, which I bought.
While we were looking for a phone without a camera the sales droid suggested I buy a nicer phone and just punch out the camera lens to render the camera inoperable, so I could find a nicer phone and yet still comply with my employer's demands. I thought the guy was insane to suggest such a thing. How would my employer know the camera was truly inoperable unless there was obvious damage to the phone? In which case I'd have a brand new phone that was intentionally broken. How would I explain this if I ever needed a repair later? "No, I want the phone fixed BUT NOT THE CAMERA IN IT!" How would I know that no other damage was done, and if I did then we are back to fixing the phone but still leaving obvious damage to the camera function.
Weeks after I got my camera-less phone they lifted the ban on phones with cameras. Too many people complained and the company gave in. They just said that getting caught taking a photo on the premises could be grounds for dismissal. That was of course impossible to enforce. They could certainly walk someone out the door for taking pictures of something and posting it on the internet but that's closing the barn door after the horses left.
I later went back to university and had one instructor say during the first class period that anyone using an electronic device during class would be marked as absent that day. That's not just a ban on devices for quizzes and tests but during class discussion. That was the first and last time I saw that happen as every class since would have nearly every student with a laptop or electronic tablet for taking notes, or whatever. Of course some people were just goofing off, like one guy I saw that was watching a soccer game in the middle of class. It's not like people didn't goof off in class before electronics, I remember doing crossword puzzles during lectures.
I remember when pagers were a thing and schools wanted to ban those. They gave up on banning pagers a long time ago too, and not just because they fell out of use. Parents that were able to afford a two-way pager for their kids can have a lot of influence on the schools.
Everything old is new again. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
And I suppose you have no idea how a mouse is working.
You suppose incorrectly.
There is no 'special support' needed for an 'old mouse' or 'old track ball'.
That's the problem. A serial mouse has been a very very rare device for decades and yet Windows 10 will still search for them on bootup. If it finds something chattering away on the port, such as a GPS unit, the OS assumes it's a mouse or trackball, will install the driver for such a device, and therefore messing with the proper function of this not-a-mouse device. I verified that Windows 10 still supports serial mice and people have been complaining about Windows assuming something is a mouse (or mouse-like) device and have been looking for ways to disable this for years.
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...
People have been complaining about Windows still supporting serial mice since Windows XP and Windows 2000, more than 15 years now.
http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...
If you ever had used a decent operation system, like any Unix, Linux, MacOs and cared to make a "> cat /dev/mouse" you would know that.
I did know that. I have never needed to use a serial mouse because they've been obsolete since the PS/2 port came out in 1987 and was widely adopted less than 10 years later. Maybe serial mice were relatively common in the days of Windows 98 but they are all but extinct now. I bought a serial mouse just for grins and giggles 20 years ago because I happened across a serial mouse driver for MacOS and thought it would be fun to play with and have a three button mouse. (A multi-button mouse for Mac was a rare and expensive thing back then, but a serial mouse with three buttons could be had for less than $10. I suspect you knew that already.) Any "decent" OS will support USB mice and therefore not have a need to support something so rare today as a serial mouse. I suppose a "decent" OS might be expected to support a serial pointing device for someone that wants one, but this should be handled better than how Windows does. The serial mouse support in Windows appears to have become more troublesome than useful 15 years ago, and yet it remains.
Yes, if you find a serial to PS/2 adapter your mouse will still work ... or serial to USB.
Yes it will, I don't know why anyone would want to though. Any "decent" OS will support a USB mouse and there are all kinds of USB mice, trackballs, and other pointing devices that a serial device should be a special case, and the person should be expected to have to install a driver for it themselves. If someone is buying a serial to USB adapter today to plug in a serial mouse then they are an idiot. They would be a double idiot for using a PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter, to plug in the mouse. A triple idiot would have a USB to PS/2 adapter, PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter. I suppose that might be fun to experiment with, or somehow necessary for someone using a real odd operating system, but no one should even want to use a serial mouse any more. It would be cheaper and easier to just buy a new mouse instead of trying to force into service a mouse that must be 30 years old now.
A "decent" OS would be able to tell the difference between a serial GPS receiver and serial mouse on the port. Since Windows 10 can't do that then therefore Windows 10 is not a "decent" OS.
The 68K to PowerPC transition was particularly interesting, because the emulation was integrated to the OS at a very low level, allowing the mixing and matching of 68k and PPC code: almost the entire operating system was running emulated at first, with it gradually being ported over as time went on.
I remember that and it was an interesting time. One thing I was tasked with was upgrading a file and print server, a then mildly old 68040 based system. I was given a new PowerPC upgrade card for this server and I had to get it running again. After the upgrade the server ran slower than before. That was because the PowerPC had to emulate almost everything. We eventually took the upgrade card out and just bought a new server.
You touched on the software changes but I'll point out more. There was the early System 6 and prior days which were a mix of 16 and 32 bit code. System 7 was a long lived operating system which was 32 bit pretty much all the way through. MacOS 8 was the transition to PowerPC and lots of changes to the UI. MacOS 9 shed itself of most of what remained from the early days of the Macintosh. MacOSX was a whole new beast and really more of a family or operating systems itself. Mac OSX up to 10.4 had support for "Classic" applications and early PowerPC processors. 10.5 to 10.8 supported 32 and 64 bit processors. 10.8 to now is 64 bit only.
Each architecture transition was, at least in my opinion, handled quite well. I do remember in college a friend of mine swearing up and down on how he could not take the hard drive from his Dad's old Mac (with a 68030 processor) and put it in his Dad's new Mac (with PowerPC) and just boot it up. He did this with Windows computers all the time, he said, without problems so why should Apple have to be so different? Well there might be some understanding of a need to support old systems for a time but there is a point of absurdity, isn't there? I seem to recall trying to see if a 25 year old trackball would still work on Windows 10 through the serial port, and it did. Perhaps I don't recall correctly and it was Windows 7 or 8. Point is that a mouse from the days of Windows 3.1 is still supported on a "modern" OS. That's nice, I suppose, but is that necessary?
I've been looking real hard for my PS/2 to nine pin adapter to verify I can still use this old trackball on Windows 10, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, the point is that things change and this means people need to change with it. Apple did transitions like this before and did them well with supporting old hardware and software for a long time, and I expect this to continue. I just don't expect my ADB keyboard to plug in or be able to run WarCraft.
Going Intel doubled Mac sales, going back to non-Intel may cut it in half.
I saw nothing in the article that stated explicitly that the new processors would be incompatible with Intel. It's quite possible they want to have better control of the Intel compatible processors they use. This kind of a shift is not taken lightly, and has likely been considered for a long time.
The current 64 bit architecture used by Apple, and shows in chips made by Intel, was developed by AMD. If Apple wants to make their own "Intel compatible" processor then they could enter a licensing agreement with AMD to do so. Intel might not be happy about this but I don't know what they'd do about it. Maybe they'd offer to fabricate these Apple designed chips under license from Apple?
What I got from the article was that Apple has been using portions of the iOS in their desktops for some elements of running the system and wants to share more code between the two. That could mean a lot of things besides abandoning the Intel architecture. It might mean designing a CPU with asymmetric processing. They might put an ARM core and three x86-64 cores on a die for desktops and laptops, That means not having to put a separate ARM processor in the computers like they do now. If they want to have some x86 fun on the iOS devices then maybe a chip with a two ARM cores and a x86 core on it.
Is it feasible or even desirable to have cores with different instruction sets on them in the same device? It must be because it sounds like Apple does this already, only the cores are in separate packages. If they believe the future is in having ARM running alongside x86 then they might just want to put those cores in the same package. To make that happen might mean having to design their own processors.
I've seen things like this proposed before. I seem to recall someone at least planning to build a laptop had a tablet mode where the tablet used a low power processor and tablet based OS for most tasks in that mode. If there were things that required more processing power, or was opened up to become a laptop, then the higher power processors was "woken up" so it could run a standard desktop OS.
Perhaps Apple wants a processor that is in every way compatible with what Intel offers but they just want a few "tweaks" so they can stay ahead of the performance curve. Apple is already in all kinds of technology licensing agreements so to pick and choose from, and to put them on a chip that they'd put in their own computers might not be that big of a burden for them. They might even be able to get in a deal to sell them to other computer makers, most likely after it's "old news" so as to not compete with their own products.
NORTH KOREA!
We proudly award North Korea the winner of the Earth Hour Challenge. They've shown great efforts in caring for the environment for not just sending the entire nation into darkness for an hour (except Dear Leader's palace grounds) but by doing so for the entirety of Earth Day! ... and the year. For much of the last century really.
Next year we'll take applications for the nation that has shown the lowest carbon footprint growth for the last 50 years. This will be to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day coming in 2020. We know who is in the front running, don't you? Let's see who else can revert their nation into the stone age by then. We hear that North Korea is already making plans for their victory by building rockets for a massive fireworks display that no doubt will send shockwaves around the world!
Come on America! We can't let North Korea show us how things are done! We need to lower our carbon footprint too. USA! USA! USA!
Polonium could very well be generated as a decay product of something heavier, as opposed to just starting out as one of the original ingredients of the waste. In fact, if you read the link, it's currently generated now from the decay (beta) of Bi-210.
Bi-210 has a half life of 5 days, there's none of that left to decay either. If you look at the four main decay chains polonium appears on them but only in isotopes that last for fractions of a second or perhaps days. It's all gone by now.
The isotope that people are all concerned about, polonium-210, has a half life of 138 days. That's about 3 half lives per year, meaning about 1/8 of it remains from the year before. After 30 years that's 80 half lives. It's all gone by now.
There is no polonium on this site, not enough that anyone would have to be concerned with anyway.
You're a liar blindseer.
No, you can't read.
The direct injection I mentioned was that of experiments performed on dogs, not the accident at Los Alamos.
Leslie Dewan and Transatomic has had to walk back their claims after being challenged quite publicly by competing nuclear engineers. It became quite obvious when challenged by people that know what they are talking about that the math doesn't add up. This forced Transatomic to become nothing more than another variation on the molten salt reactor (MSR) theme. In direct competition are MSR variants like LFTR, MCFR, MSW, TMSR-LF, and DMSR/IMSR. There are also solid fuel competitors like PHWR, TMSR-SF, MSCR, and FHR.
I have to wonder if Transatomic can be trusted because of their rather over the top claims from the beginning. It seems that they are more honest and realistic in their claims lately but can even this be trusted now?
Companies like Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Power, and ThorCon, seem to be dominating in North America because they've been at this longer, have experienced leadership, and technology that is evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary). They all compete in some ways and complement each other in other ways. Now that Transatomic offers reactors that have been shown to not be the waste-burners as originally demonstrated they now have to discover or create a market among the competition in North America.
I have to wonder how much of Transatomic's fame is because Leslie Dewan is a graduate of MIT and looks good in high heels, tight pants, and lipstick. I'm sure she's a very intelligent woman, and she claims to be something of a "tomboy", but it seems she likes the cameras and the cameras like her.
And tends to lodge in the bone marrow, leading to leukemia. And my guess is that "30 years" is an estimate which is assuming a minimal exposure. At one point, IIRC, what they recommended was "if that gets in an open wound, go for immediate high amputation".
No, amputation as treatment of exposure was never the protocol.
https://warisboring.com/the-sc...
They'd fish out the particles big enough to see and could recover without doing permanent damage to tissue. If it was too small to see then it was not considered a health hazard. The long term effects on health are difficult to measure given that the few people that have died since their exposure were heavy smokers (lung cancer did them in) and victims of motor vehicle accidents (can't blame that on the plutonium).
Acute radiation exposure is known to produce organ failure and death in a matter of hours or days. Chronic exposure is expected to produce a risk of cancers in bone, marrow, thyroid, and other sensitive organs. There is no evidence of this in the people with known exposure. Dogs injected with plutonium have died relatively quickly but that's an unusual and quite deliberate form of exposure, not something likely as an accident. Inhaling plutonium would likely raise the risk of health problems if those particles remained in the lungs. The lungs will naturally clear out particles that are inhaled and gets dumped into the digestive tract, where it is expelled out the "tailpipe". Any plutonium in the blood is filtered out by the urinary tract.
Plutonium may get incorporated into the bones but it has a half life of thousands of years, which for someone that might expect a lifespan measured in decades means that there would have to be a lot of plutonium before the decay emissions exceed that of naturally occurring potassium and such. I'm sure someone could look up a "banana equivalent dose" to get an idea of the hazard.
As a heavy metal is it about 4 times as dangerous as mercury.
Then don't eat it. Airborne particle detectors not picking up the plutonium that isn't airborne is not a "failure" in the detectors. Getting upset about that is nonsensical.
not sure about Polonium
Then look it up. Polonium-210 has a half life of less than 140 days, and this waste processing site was created for the disposal of World War II and Cold War era nuclear waste. The polonium is all gone by now.
http://www.newworldencyclopedi...
we could again make a google / link war
To do that you'd have to actually link to something.
That's why we need an edit button on Slashdot, because I'm an idiot for mixing my units. Instead of Tylenol compare the toxicity of plutonium with that of iron, nicotine, or lead.
People are unlikely to eat pure iron but it's in every multivitamin, and people will cook with steel pots and pans. We are surrounded by iron substances, and yet people don't throw fits over it's toxicity. Don't eat it and if you are handling in a way that it might produce small particles then wear a mask.
Same with lead, it's in our car batteries. Don't go licking the terminals to test if it has a good charge, use a meter for that.
Caffeine poisoning is a thing. Not quite as toxic as iron or lead but slamming a few energy drinks can make a healthy person keel over.
Remember that the 22 milligram lethal dose for plutonium is for direct injection into the bloodstream, not how much is eaten. I'll see pictures of these workers on these sites and they are always wearing face masks and goggles. They'd have to be violating safety protocol to get anything close to a lethal dose of plutonium.
Don't equate the failure of a plant processing nuclear weapons waste with a plant that is processing nuclear power waste. Anyone that can think should be justifiably suspicious of people that need to use the failure of a military weapon producing plant to prevent contamination to argue against civilian nuclear power.
Nuclear power is in fact very safe. I'll see opinion articles mention the deaths caused by mining uranium and such as a case against nuclear power but make no mention of how many deaths there are from wind and solar power. This is lying by omission. If people want to make the case against nuclear power then they need to make an honest assessment of how dangerous the alternatives would be by comparison.
Go ahead, show me how dangerous nuclear power is compared to wind, solar, natural gas, or whatever else you believe should replace it. I already know the numbers. I saw them here:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
We should be moving to nuclear power based on lives saved alone. It's ability to compete on price with solar is another reason to use it. My source:
https://www.lazard.com/perspec...
But the monitors did not detect airborne contamination in December, possibly because some of the particles that spread were too heavy to stay aloft.
They are calling it a "failure" of the airborne particle detectors to detect particles that were not in the air. If the particles are not in the air then people aren't going to breathe them in. It might collect on the soles of their boots but if they are licking the soles of their boots then they need to be checked for mental issues first, then radiation contamination second.
It sounds like there were failures in managing the spread of radioactive material but this mention of a "failure" of airborne particle detectors is not one of them.
Radiation is everywhere and if we are going to regulate its spread then we need to have sane regulations. If Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant then it would be shutdown for exceeding the annual acceptable dose of radiation for employees.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/grand-...
We need to take another look at our regulation of radioactive material. If it is as dangerous as the law says it is then we need to close off Grand Central Station and declare it a superfund site. If Grand Central Station is in fact safe to inhabit then so should any other place with an equivalent level of radioactivity.
What is the lethal dose of plutonium? I went to look it up. About 22 milligrams.
http://www.newworldencyclopedi...
The toxicity of plutonium is in dispute; nuclear industry advocates point to the low chemical toxicity of plutonium and ability of a worker to hold a kilogram brick of the material without protection; if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose for intravenous injection in an adult human weighing 70 kilograms is calculated to be approximately 22 milligrams (based on extrapolation from tests on dogs).
What substance is also lethal at that dose? Tylenol.
http://www.newworldencyclopedi...
The toxic dose of acetaminophen is highly variable. In adults, single doses above 10 grams or 140 mg/kg have a reasonable likelihood of causing toxicity. In adults, single doses of more than 25 grams have a high risk of lethality.
For plutonium to be lethal someone would have to have 22 milligrams of plutonium injected into their bloodstream. Eating an equivalent dose of Tylenol would be just as lethal.
Plutonium should be handled with care but let's be honest about just how lethal it might be.
Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.
Sounds easy at first but impossible in practice.
Imagine an applicant fresh from college. The resume collection system removes the name and gender of the applicant and replaces it with a numeric identifier. Instead of "Jennifer Jones" it puts, "Applicant 79876". There are still schools that accept only men or women, if the applicant attended one of these schools then how can that be hidden? Is any mention of the name of the school removed? The college that people attended is important as some schools have a reputation for higher standards than others. Only removing the names of single sex schools would raise a flag as well.
Hiring managers like to see people that had activities outside of academics, and applicants know this. If someone took up softball or volleyball then the probability is quite high the applicant is female, versus more male dominated sports like baseball or hockey. This isn't absolute but a well known trend.
What of a club like Society of Women Engineers? If an applicant chooses to put that on their resume then would it be acceptable to remove it before a hiring manager can see it? The society does accept men as members but we all know that this is dominated by women. Same goes for societies based on race like Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.
I agree. The reason we saw organizations like SWE and SHPE develop was to counteract discrimination. They advocated for fair treatment in society. If white and Asian males see themselves being denied work because of their sex and/or race then would not organizations develop to advocate for fair treatment? What we've seen are these groups that historically called for fair treatment are now asking for special treatment. It's as if "reverse discrimination" is not also a form of discrimination. Trump didn't win the election so much as Clinton lost. She ran on being a woman and that "it's time" for a woman as President. That might get a person a lot of points in an election, which is how I think Obama was able to win, but the person still has to have enough other qualifications to be considered worthy. Clinton was a mediocre senator and a terrible Secretary of State. Trump called for "making American great again", which has broad appeal. Clinton talked of how she'd fight for women and minorities but white men vote too.
Some data: http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
Clinton did win the Latino vote, Black vote, and women, but white men voted too. When you go and campaign on how white men are keeping you down in a nation that is 74% white and 49% male then you should not be surprised that you lose. It's actually amazing she got as many votes as she did. Oh, and it doesn't help to run a campaign on getting a majority of the popular vote in an election that chooses the winner based on state allocation of electors. Trump and his campaign knew this and so campaigned on getting electors, so he won.
Guns were designed to kill, cars were designed to carry people safely. Cars are registered. Drivers are licensed. Yet cars kill far more people every year than guns.
Then there is this:
"they want to get uuuuur guuuunns"
You just went into a rant mocking people that think someone might want to take their guns away and then explain in detail on how you want to do exactly that. You can claim that you did not in fact say you want to take my guns, only that I'd need a permit, have all my guns tracked electronically, and strict enforcement. Well, what happens to the guns I have that do not have electronic tracking? My guess is you would have them taken from me.
You know: coal is made from dead trees that died a few million years ago ... where exactly should the radioactivity come from?
It came from the dirt that the plants grew in. Uranium, thorium, and other radioactive elements are everywhere and the plants will incorporate these elements into their structure as nutrients taken up from the soil. When the plants die and turn to coal that radioactive material is still there.
you mean dispatch able, not reliable.
No, I meant reliable. As in we can rely on the nuclear power to be available when we need it. Perhaps a specific reactor will have to go down for refuel and maintenance but on the whole a fleet of reactors will be able to provide 90% of their rated capacity regardless of the wind, sun, or rain.
Nuclear power is not considered dispatchable because nuclear reactors are very expensive to run and only make money if they are making energy. Reducing the power output of a nuclear reactor is a very long and expensive process in normal operation and is therefore only done as a last resort. Reducing power output quickly from a nuclear reactor is also possible but could result in it being off line for days, and therefore not making money for days.
Why do you repeat this nonsense every of your posts?
Because no one has provided anything that tells me otherwise. I'm not just going to take the word from some random anonymous internet poster that I'm wrong. If you don't believe me then look it up yourself and show me that I'm wrong.
Perhaps I'm misinformed, it's been over a a decade since I followed things closely, but my understanding is that while purpose-built plutonium-breeding reactors certainly have an edge, so long as you're actually producing appreciable quantities of plutonium at all it's a substantial danger, especially if it's primarily the isotopes you're interested in so that simple chemical separation is possible. That becomes an even worse problem if you're already engaging in any sort of waste reprocessing - then the dangerous part is already done.
The only isotope of plutonium that is valuable for weapons is Pu-239. All the other isotopes are either non-fissile or have such a short half life that they are problematic to handle. To make Pu-239 means putting U-238 in a reactor with something fissile, typically U-235, and letting it "cook" in the reactor for days to a few months. While the U-238 is being bombarded with neutrons it will capture some of them and become Pu-239. This newly produced Pu-239 that's in the reactor is now also exposed to that neutron bath and it can capture neutrons to become Pu-240, which is bad for making bombs, or it will fission, which is good for making energy. At the same time the U-235 that is in there is soaking up neutrons and undergoing fission but not every capture of a neutron results in fission, sometimes it also makes plutonium, an isotope lighter than Pu-239. If left in long enough there is enough Pu-239 eaten up by fission or captured a neutron to become Pu-240 that it is worthless for making a weapon.
This time left in the reactor is important for making weapons and so dual use designs, like at Chernobyl, have an open top design that allows the removal of fuel while operating. A reactor designed for only making power will have a sealed reactor core where the fuel cannot be removed while operating. It may be possible to use a civil reactor to produce weapon grade material but it would have to be shutdown and cooled off every 90 days or so to swap out the fuel. This kind of operation will be obvious to those watching for weaponizing civil reactors and cannot be done secretly.
The spent fuel from a civil power reactor, because fuel change cycles are years apart, will have only about 50% of the plutonium being Pu-239, the rest is mostly Pu-240. Separating this into weapon grade material by centrifuges would be prohibitively expensive and also obvious to anyone watching for weapons making activity. Fuel reprocessing does not involve the isotopic separation of the plutonium, only the chemical separation from the unused fuel and fission products. As this plutonium is of such low grade it will have to be mixed with fresh fuel, like uranium or thorium, to be used again in a reactor.
Waste reprocessing is not inherently creating weapon grade material. There must also be the act of isotopic separation and/or reactor operation with short fuel cycles. Isotopic separation and short fuel cycles are often visible by observation from space by noticing heat generation and such.
Meanwhile, any reactor that depends on choice of fuel to limit proliferation potential is already a lost cause - changing the fuel is comparatively easy, at least assuming you're talking about a flexible-fuel reactor rather than one specifically designed for your "safe" fuel.
The use of limiting fuel choice is done all the time to prevent the production of weapon grade material. Any uranium that is enriched beyond 20% U-235 is considered evidence of weapon production. Treaties limit the production and trade of such material. The use of thorium as a fuel further limits the threat of producing weapon grade material since in a reactor that produces all kinds of other isotopes that mess with the production of weapon grade material. Thorium has already been tested as a fuel but we'll need more testing and reactors designed to use it as a fuel to make the most of it.
Assuming one has a "flex-fuel" reactor that can burn thorium,
- Who you gonna call?
Not only that but assuming the call goes through then who isn't going to hang up once the call goes through and there's 10 seconds of silence because of the round trip delay from the distance.
I'll listen to phone interviews on podcasts and getting people to have a conversation with even the minimal delay from a coast to coast call can be frustrating. There's a reason the astronauts that went to the moon had those end of transmission beeps, keep saying "over", and so on. This is a verbal protocol to deal with the delay. I suspect that they also used a single channel for up link and down link which required this protocol. I assume a phone would not be limited like this, which could actually make this worse.
Oh, and "Ghostbusters!"
Why do this?
Probably the same reason we have an electric sports car on a collision course with Mars.
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, extremely toxic and complex.
As is every energy source we know of that's worth using. Nuclear power is already the safest energy source we have and we know how to make it even safer.
You think solar power isn't dangerous and toxic? People do get injured and killed installing the collectors. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. They are toxic too. Have you seen what goes into making those solar PV cells? Those are some nasty chemicals.
Hydro dams have been known to fail too. When they do it tends to create a lot of damage. Windmills are dangerous as well. Any building project has it's risks of death and injury. My college roommate was studying architecture and he told me about a lecture he had on how to compute the number of people that will be killed in a building project. We know these risks and we still build things, because leaving people homeless is a greater risk to life than building places for them to live in.
As dangerous as nuclear power might be we do get a lot of energy from it. More than enough to make it safer than anything else based on the deaths per energy produced. People understand that making something absolutely safe is impossible. Which is why they don't make anything absolutely safe. They do the best they can to the point that the costs of managing a failure is below that of the costs to prevent the failure.
There is a cost to using alternatives to nuclear power, as is there a cost to doing without that energy. As it is right now nuclear power is the best option we got.
Cost over runs during construction are killing many plants before they become operational.
Tell me, what is driving up these costs? I know what it is, a bunch of idiots that don't understand how a nuclear reactor works protesting it's construction and bogging them down with legal costs as they keep suing them over imagined safety violations.
Another thing that these protestors complain about is the reactors attracting terrorists. There was one terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor as it was bombed. Who did the bombing? The very same people that complained of it attracting terrorists. I guess they couldn't find an actual terrorist to bomb the place so they had to become the terrorists.
No place to store nuclear waste.
We did have places to store the waste until the Democrats shut them down.
the companies made money, the executives made money-- and today's public gets to pay for it all.
Except that's a lie. All US reactors are required to pay into a fund for decommissioning. Sure the electricity users are paying the bill but the energy produced is so much cheaper than the alternatives that everyone still comes out ahead.
What's the risk of a nuclear meltdown (say currently about 1% (449 reactors-- 5 of them have had severe problems.) (but keep in mind that there have been 52 smaller accidents at nuclear plants).
Then build a reactor that cannot melt down. We know how to do that but the people that think nuclear power technology is stuck in 1975 will still protest the building of a new plant. Japan figured this out. They tried to shut down all their nuclear power plants but then electricity prices shot up and air quality went down. They decided the risks of another meltdown was worth restarting most of their nuclear power plants. The ones they didn't restart were so old and small that they should have been shut down a long time ago anyway. The reactors at Fukushima were scheduled to be retired until the tsunami hit, then they were forced to move up their schedule. Those reactors were older than those at Chernobyl. Had they not stopped building new reactors because of the NIMBY types then they would have had them shut down earlier because of known issues.
The solution to bad nuclear power plants is not keeping them from being built, as that just forces people to keep them running. If we keep building them then the costs of new ones go down, as there would be more competition for reducing prices and improving safety. As of right now we only retire a nuclear power plant as a last resort because that reactor is very valuable and that land cannot be used for much once the reactor is gone. Do you know what an old reactor site is good for? Building a new reactor. To do that though idiots like you need to get out of the way so we can see these old reactors shut down so newer and safer ones can replace them.
The biggest problem is that the more efficient reactor designs are generally also considerably more conductive to producing and harvesting plutonium and other useful weapons-grade materials.
That is provably false. What makes plutonium valuable for creating weapons is the ability to make it with sufficient purity for a weapon in reactors designed for this purpose. There are reactor designs that prevent this from occurring. Part of what made Chernobyl such a dangerous reactor was that it was based on a "dual use" design, one that allowed it to be used for both generating electricity and for producing weapon grade material. These features to allow this had to be put in as part of the original design. To prevent this just don't have those features in the design.
Another way to address this possibility of producing weapon grade material is in the choice of fuel. One possible fuel choice is to mix some thorium in the fuel and there will be enough "bad" plutonium isotopes produced as a fission byproduct to make it worthless for making weapons. Thorium would also add to the energy content of the fuel and potentially reduce it's costs to produce. Thorium would also make uranium worthless for weapons since the byproduct of U-234 would destroy it's value for weapons but still keep it valuable as a fuel.