They have already been built long ago, and all of the fundamental concepts have been proven. What is left is the engineering and development left to make a commercial grade reactor. For a small fraction of what we are spending to turn our excess plutonium into MOX fuel which none of our reactors are equipped to use, molten salt reactors could solve the plutonium and spent fuel issues once and for all, at far less cost.
The corrosion problems used as an excuse to shut down the program, already had known solutions even at the time. Yes, it requires special materials and controlling the chemistry, but that is a solvable engineering problem. High pressure water in conventional reactors is also highly corrosive and requires similar care, but these are simple engineering contraints that have solutions.
As far as beryllium toxicity and core freezing, what is the problem? Lots of things are toxic, some of which you will probably find under your sink. Toxic chemicals are used throughout industry, even in renewables; why pick on LFTR? This reactor runs at atmospheric pressure and has no adverse reactions with air or water, so there is no driving force to release any toxic or radioactive elements into the environment, even in the event of a major disaster. Freezing of the salts might cause plant damage, but there is no safety risk--if anything, it is a feature. All of the nasties are dissolved in the salts and end up frozen in place.
Why is it so hard to accept that politics often prevents good ideas from ever reaching the marketplace? Anyone who takes the time to learn about molten salt reactors will understand how they are potentially the sliver bullet we are looking for. Aside from a miraculous breakthrough in fusion, there are no other technologies that even offer the potential, so it is folly not to pursue the one that shows such promise.
Subsidizing the deployment of "clean" energy technologies which are not economically viable is a waste of both time and money, at a time when humanity can afford neither. No amount of subsidies are going to make a dent in the global energy landscape; the requirements are simply too vast to be satisfied by expensive and diffuse energy sources like wind and solar in a timely manner.
Nuclear, in the form of molten salt reactors, is the only proven technology which has even a of hope of meeting the economic and scalability requirements.
Radiation damage isn't cumulative. If it were, you would see greater incidences of cancer in areas with higher naturally occurring background radiation, or in workers with greater exposure. Unless you overwhelm your body's repair mechanisms, the damage is essentially harmless and repair is a natural part of everyday life. Low levels of radiation are much less dangerous than ordinary carcinogens and particulate that we are dumping into our environment by the billions of tons every year.
Granted, this so-called dark lightning may exceed safe levels over short periods of time. Then again, if you are struck by lightning, you will also probably exceed a maximum safe number of electrons transiting through your body. This would appear to be an extremely rare, if not entirely imaginary problem. To my knowledge, there have't been any planefuls of people who have died of acute radiation exposure.
Have a look at the proposed architectural changes. It looks like they plan to make some rather sweeping changes, as well as moving the portability code to a different layer of the architecture. At some time, a project diverges enough that only a fork makes sense. It is nearly impossible to maintain a shared source base when making such fundamental architectural changes. It is a waste of time and the resulting mess only makes development increasingly difficult for both parties.
At least that is my understanding of the situation. My first reaction was also not positive, but I acknowledge that it might be necessary and desirable given the desired direction and constrains imposed by maintaining WebKit compatibility.
It is bad enough that flash is worming its way into hard drives, but memory? True non-volatile memory like MRAM would be interesting, but I don't want unreliable and short-lived garbage like flash soldered together with other components. All this does is ensure that devices will be destined for the landfill that much earlier, but of course that is a "feature". There ought to be laws enacted to prohibit non-replaceable consumables, wether batteries, flash memory, or whatever else.
While on the subject of memory features, ECC should be first on the list.
The suposed problem you are referring to (ZFS reliability on cheap USB hardware which ignores cache flushes) was in fact well known, and easily fixed. It just took a long time, as no one sane would run ZFS on USB hardware to start with. All Apple proved was that their engineers had a very shallow understanding of ZFS.
ECC memory is only marginally slower. Considering error rates and modern memory sizes, it is far past time that it became a standard feature. The extra cost would be totally insignificant if were standard, and not used as an excuse to gouge people on Xeons.
Dare I say that one could "improve" on the so-called hangup, and make it arbitrarily more obnoxious if so desired. Hell, in place of the end call button, present a menu of your favored obnoxious call termination options.
Better act quick though; this brilliant innovation is just the thing patents are made for!
Loan guarantees are not subsidies, and nuclear is guaranteed to generate cheap and clean power over the long term. Other energy sources (including fossil fossil fuels and renewables) do require huge subsidies, but nuclear is not among them.
LFTRs are nothing like conventional nuclear plants. There have been five studies over the years that place the median cost around $2/W installed, allowing it to undercut even coal. This isn't magic or wishful thinking, it is the logical result of a radically different design. Molten salt reactors are passively safe, run and at atmospheric pressure, and are not cooled by water. Hence, they do not require the enormous concrete containment domes, 9-inch thick pressure vessels, or highly redundant engineered safety systems.
Fluoride salts are among the most chemically stable substances on earth. There is nothing to explode, nothing to react violently with air or water. Indeed, nothing to propel radioactivity into the environment should things go south. Even if you physically rupture the reactor, the salt will just drain, cool, and solidify. Afterwards, the mess is totally solid--you can go pick up the pieces of salt, and stick them back in a reactor.
The decommissioning mess was created by politicians, and should have been avoided. Unfortunately, they abruptly cancelled the program with no provision for cleaning up the salts. This would have been a straightforward and inexpensive proposition if they were not left to sit for decades.
It is easy to spout such nonsense out of ignorance, but there is a wealth of research that shows that the concept is perfectly sound. Moreover, they ran a test reactor for about five years and discovered no issues that were not easily solved. The only thing that remains is a solid engineering and development effort, and a government that will allow it to happen. Technology doesn't develop itself, and nuclear is no exception.
Private investors are already funding nuclear development--though mostly outside of the US. The primary barrier to development of this technology is the suffocating regulatory environment. The nuclear regulatory commission is profoundly anti-nuclear, and they make their money by dragging out reviews for a decade while billing by the hour. They also have no provision for licensing and development of newer and better technologies, so we are stuck with reactors that are a relic of times long past.
You do realize that nuclear has by far the smallest environmental footprint of any available generating technology? Germany is finding enough space for new lignite mines, and vast arrays of solar panels and windmills. Storing a bit of spent fuel requires virtually no space by comparison. Furthermore, nearly all of the energy content still remains in spent fuel and is accessible with the right reactors. (read: the long lived waste could be destroyed in modern reactors while generating power, and virtually no more would be produced.)
It is totally asinine to dismiss all of nuclear based on the shortcomings of 50 year old reactors. Molten salt reactors like LFTR look absolutely nothing like conventional nuclear, and the fluid fuel enables unprecedented levels of safety, efficiency, and cost. If the Germans truly value the environment, they would apply their efforts toward advancing this technology, instead of chasing the fantasy of renewables.
The fundamental truth is that, until we have a reliable source of energy that is even cheaper than coal, coal will continue to be burned throughout the world, and addressing environmental concerns is hopeless. So, even if Germany's costly pursuit of renewables "succeeds", it will be meaningless on a global scale.
Consistently bad policy, and it is costing them both economically and environmentally. They are ramping coal generating capacity to fill the gap, and largely dumping the hard part of the renewable problem on neighboring countries. Until Germany is self-sufficient, it is highly disingenuous to tout them as an example of the success of renewables. At the very least, one should also consider the tremendous cost of electricity from these sources, and the Danes have the honor of paying the highest household electricity prices in the world, with the Germans not far behind.
Also noteworthy is that €1.5 billion of German nuclear profits have been siphoned off to subsidize renewables. Gutting a profitable, clean, and carbon-free source of energy to prop up one which has no hope to stand on its own is insane.
That's wonderful toy but still a toy. If you read the history of its decommissioning, you'll find it was no easy task. Not insurmountable problems but not trivial either.
The reason that the decommissioning was such a mess, is that it was delayed for decades. It was known at the time that this would cause problems down the line, yet those responsible for canceling the project decided to let it sit rather than processing the salts--something which was proposed and would have been trivial at the time.
The earliest you could hope to see thorium reactors would be the mid-2020s if everything went well.
That's a long time to wait for the power of radioactive unicorn farts - we need to act NOW ( actually 10 yrs ago but water under the bridge and all that )
Let's hope it doesn't get pushed back any further, because we have no replacement. We do need to act now, but we need to act responsibly, not pour money into non-solutions like wind and solar. (They have their niches, but are far from a comprehensive energy solution.) As much as people would like to simply wish it or legislate it into existence NOW, the physics/economics simply don't work, no matter how we try to force it with subsidies.
The enemy is coal, and to a lesser extent the other fossil fuels. The only way to displace coal on any significant scale is with a technology that provides cheaper energy--and several studies have shown that molten salt thorium reactors have the potential to do so. See Thorium: energy cheaper than coal.
People in the developed world are willing to sacrifice and accept that renewables will be more expensive, but there are billions more people in places like China and India who are desperately trying to raise their standard of living, and they simply can't afford it. Realistically speaking, neither can we, but the costs of renewables are well hidden and people don't appreciate just how untenable the proposition really is.
Conventional nuclear and natural gas could provide an interim solution, but as long as people continue to embrace the delusion that renewables are going to magically fix the problem, we are merely postponing an inevitable catastrophe.
I'm all for R&D into MSRs / LFTRs / Thorium / Fusion, etc but let's STOP promoting the THEORETICAL capabilities of reactors that have NOT yet been BUILT & TESTED!!!
It is not merely theoretical, it is a fundamental result of the physics involved, in addition to being well demonstrated.
That one toy reactor that was built at Oak Ridge does NOT count; it only establishes that the tech is feasible. For the record, it never produced electricity and never actually ran on thorium.
Generating electricity is totally irrelevant to the operation of a reactor--heat is heat. The reactor was most certainly tested with U-233 derived from thorium. Though a thorium blanket was not present in the reactor itself, thorium breeding has been demonstrated separately, and the process is so straightforward that no one could honestly suggest that it wouldn't work when combined. What is the purpose of your pedantry here?
The 7.4 MW test reactor ran successfully for ~20000 hours, and proved that the design is feasible and fundamentally sound. It is rather impertinent to classify it as a toy.
Exponential growth is not sustainable, at any level. Even at relatively "low" growth, an exponential will still hit the limits of physical impossibility before long. This is basic math that few people really appreciate.
Or we are using nuclear as originally intended. It was never expected that we would still be fissioning the extremely rare U-235 isotope at this point. U-238 and Thorium are much more abundant, and will meet our energy needs far into the future, perhaps even outlasting the sun itself.
There are supposedly mirasol products available, but it looks like they are limited to the Chinese market at this point. Hopefully they will gain wider traction, as I would love a decent Android based tablet with a high-quality reflective display. Add an active digitizer and it would be about perfect.
It is really annoying how manufacturers have pigeonholed tablets as media consumption devices.
without trackpads. My notebook keyboard has an aspect ratio of ~22:9; so we are almost there. Just think: with a bit more "progress" we could put the trackpad to the side of the keyboard! How awesome would that be?
Yucca Mountain was an expensive non-solution for a problem that only exists because we choose not to solve it. Modern reactors have a very different waste profile, as well as the capability to safely consume spent fuel from existing reactors while producing energy. Spent fuel is not something that should be buried, but rather is a vast energy resource that should be tapped. We need a change in policy in order to allow this, and people need to educate themselves and get behind it.
The Nuclear Waste Fund currently has about $25B intended for dealing with the "waste". If even a small fraction of this were spent developing modern reactors like the LFTR, not only would we solve the waste problem in short order, but we would also be well on our way to replacing fossil fuels entirety. More information about the possibilities enabled by this technology can be found at Energy from Thorium.
Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? The short answer, is "hell no"; while there is a very small part of spent fuel which could actually be considered waste, the vast bulk of it is a goldmine of energy and a source of other highly valuable fission products.
It is totally silly to talk of "waste treatment" or "destruction"--this is just another way of doing fission. It is equally silly to talk about destroying enormously vast reserves of energy, just because our antiquated reactors are terribly inefficient and make a mess of the partially burned fuel. It does not have to be that way, and modern molten salt reactors like LFTR burn the fuel so completely that there is barely any waste left at all.
We need to take another look at spent fuel. Aside from burying it, which merely delays the problem, the only way to rid ourselves of it is by fissioning it. There are many ways of doing so, but the best would be to harness the energy contained within in safe and inexpensive LFTRs. Such reactors are capable of providing not only for our electrical needs, but also the production of liquid fuels, as well as process heat for water desalination, foundries, fertilizer, concrete, and more.
Certainly, fissile material like U235 and Pu239 should be disposed of, but it should be done so in a manner which maximizes its value, and fast reactors or other waste eaters are terrible in this respect. LFTRs require much less fissile material to start up, and if we were to use the fissile in this way, we could ramp up their production very quickly, and eliminate it just the same. Only this way would be safer, simpler, more efficient, and vastly cheaper.
This is really totally out to lunch. Seek out some analysis from actual CPU designers on the topic. What I read generally pegs the x86 CISC overhead at maybe 10%, not several times.
The end result may come within 10% for optimized code, but at what expense? As a user, you may not appreciate the extra burden placed on hardware and software engineers alike, but it has significant consequences on the rate and cost of development, for everyone involved. Look at x86, as contrasted with the rapid progress on a clean architecture like the Alpha, and this point becomes abundantly clear. With ARM as well, Intel has had to expend massive resources, and even with their advanced process technology, they are having great difficulty competing with much smaller firms.
Where would we be today, if the Alpha hadn't been euthanized by incompetent management at Compaq, or ARM and other RISC competitors could compete on an even process with Intel? Thankfully, as time goes by, x86 compatibility is decreasingly important. Open source linux, bsd, and mobile development are largely processor agnostic, and are free to use better architectures.
You appeal to CPU designers, but how many of them wouldn't rather be working on anything but an x86 design? That feeling is also shared by most assembly and systems programmers, I promise you. Any opportunity to remove a convoluted and unnecessary layer of abstraction from a system is a good thing, and should be welcomed.
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They have already been built long ago, and all of the fundamental concepts have been proven. What is left is the engineering and development left to make a commercial grade reactor. For a small fraction of what we are spending to turn our excess plutonium into MOX fuel which none of our reactors are equipped to use, molten salt reactors could solve the plutonium and spent fuel issues once and for all, at far less cost.
The corrosion problems used as an excuse to shut down the program, already had known solutions even at the time. Yes, it requires special materials and controlling the chemistry, but that is a solvable engineering problem. High pressure water in conventional reactors is also highly corrosive and requires similar care, but these are simple engineering contraints that have solutions.
As far as beryllium toxicity and core freezing, what is the problem? Lots of things are toxic, some of which you will probably find under your sink. Toxic chemicals are used throughout industry, even in renewables; why pick on LFTR? This reactor runs at atmospheric pressure and has no adverse reactions with air or water, so there is no driving force to release any toxic or radioactive elements into the environment, even in the event of a major disaster. Freezing of the salts might cause plant damage, but there is no safety risk--if anything, it is a feature. All of the nasties are dissolved in the salts and end up frozen in place.
Why is it so hard to accept that politics often prevents good ideas from ever reaching the marketplace? Anyone who takes the time to learn about molten salt reactors will understand how they are potentially the sliver bullet we are looking for. Aside from a miraculous breakthrough in fusion, there are no other technologies that even offer the potential, so it is folly not to pursue the one that shows such promise.
Subsidizing the deployment of "clean" energy technologies which are not economically viable is a waste of both time and money, at a time when humanity can afford neither. No amount of subsidies are going to make a dent in the global energy landscape; the requirements are simply too vast to be satisfied by expensive and diffuse energy sources like wind and solar in a timely manner.
Nuclear, in the form of molten salt reactors, is the only proven technology which has even a of hope of meeting the economic and scalability requirements.
Radiation damage isn't cumulative. If it were, you would see greater incidences of cancer in areas with higher naturally occurring background radiation, or in workers with greater exposure. Unless you overwhelm your body's repair mechanisms, the damage is essentially harmless and repair is a natural part of everyday life. Low levels of radiation are much less dangerous than ordinary carcinogens and particulate that we are dumping into our environment by the billions of tons every year.
Granted, this so-called dark lightning may exceed safe levels over short periods of time. Then again, if you are struck by lightning, you will also probably exceed a maximum safe number of electrons transiting through your body. This would appear to be an extremely rare, if not entirely imaginary problem. To my knowledge, there have't been any planefuls of people who have died of acute radiation exposure.
Have a look at the proposed architectural changes. It looks like they plan to make some rather sweeping changes, as well as moving the portability code to a different layer of the architecture. At some time, a project diverges enough that only a fork makes sense. It is nearly impossible to maintain a shared source base when making such fundamental architectural changes. It is a waste of time and the resulting mess only makes development increasingly difficult for both parties.
At least that is my understanding of the situation. My first reaction was also not positive, but I acknowledge that it might be necessary and desirable given the desired direction and constrains imposed by maintaining WebKit compatibility.
It is bad enough that flash is worming its way into hard drives, but memory? True non-volatile memory like MRAM would be interesting, but I don't want unreliable and short-lived garbage like flash soldered together with other components. All this does is ensure that devices will be destined for the landfill that much earlier, but of course that is a "feature". There ought to be laws enacted to prohibit non-replaceable consumables, wether batteries, flash memory, or whatever else.
While on the subject of memory features, ECC should be first on the list.
The suposed problem you are referring to (ZFS reliability on cheap USB hardware which ignores cache flushes) was in fact well known, and easily fixed. It just took a long time, as no one sane would run ZFS on USB hardware to start with. All Apple proved was that their engineers had a very shallow understanding of ZFS.
ECC memory is only marginally slower. Considering error rates and modern memory sizes, it is far past time that it became a standard feature. The extra cost would be totally insignificant if were standard, and not used as an excuse to gouge people on Xeons.
Dare I say that one could "improve" on the so-called hangup, and make it arbitrarily more obnoxious if so desired. Hell, in place of the end call button, present a menu of your favored obnoxious call termination options.
Better act quick though; this brilliant innovation is just the thing patents are made for!
(posting to undo accidental Redundant mod.)
Loan guarantees are not subsidies, and nuclear is guaranteed to generate cheap and clean power over the long term. Other energy sources (including fossil fossil fuels and renewables) do require huge subsidies, but nuclear is not among them.
LFTRs are nothing like conventional nuclear plants. There have been five studies over the years that place the median cost around $2/W installed, allowing it to undercut even coal. This isn't magic or wishful thinking, it is the logical result of a radically different design. Molten salt reactors are passively safe, run and at atmospheric pressure, and are not cooled by water. Hence, they do not require the enormous concrete containment domes, 9-inch thick pressure vessels, or highly redundant engineered safety systems.
Fluoride salts are among the most chemically stable substances on earth. There is nothing to explode, nothing to react violently with air or water. Indeed, nothing to propel radioactivity into the environment should things go south. Even if you physically rupture the reactor, the salt will just drain, cool, and solidify. Afterwards, the mess is totally solid--you can go pick up the pieces of salt, and stick them back in a reactor.
The decommissioning mess was created by politicians, and should have been avoided. Unfortunately, they abruptly cancelled the program with no provision for cleaning up the salts. This would have been a straightforward and inexpensive proposition if they were not left to sit for decades.
It is easy to spout such nonsense out of ignorance, but there is a wealth of research that shows that the concept is perfectly sound. Moreover, they ran a test reactor for about five years and discovered no issues that were not easily solved. The only thing that remains is a solid engineering and development effort, and a government that will allow it to happen. Technology doesn't develop itself, and nuclear is no exception.
Private investors are already funding nuclear development--though mostly outside of the US. The primary barrier to development of this technology is the suffocating regulatory environment. The nuclear regulatory commission is profoundly anti-nuclear, and they make their money by dragging out reviews for a decade while billing by the hour. They also have no provision for licensing and development of newer and better technologies, so we are stuck with reactors that are a relic of times long past.
You do realize that nuclear has by far the smallest environmental footprint of any available generating technology? Germany is finding enough space for new lignite mines, and vast arrays of solar panels and windmills. Storing a bit of spent fuel requires virtually no space by comparison. Furthermore, nearly all of the energy content still remains in spent fuel and is accessible with the right reactors. (read: the long lived waste could be destroyed in modern reactors while generating power, and virtually no more would be produced.)
It is totally asinine to dismiss all of nuclear based on the shortcomings of 50 year old reactors. Molten salt reactors like LFTR look absolutely nothing like conventional nuclear, and the fluid fuel enables unprecedented levels of safety, efficiency, and cost. If the Germans truly value the environment, they would apply their efforts toward advancing this technology, instead of chasing the fantasy of renewables.
The fundamental truth is that, until we have a reliable source of energy that is even cheaper than coal, coal will continue to be burned throughout the world, and addressing environmental concerns is hopeless. So, even if Germany's costly pursuit of renewables "succeeds", it will be meaningless on a global scale.
Consistently bad policy, and it is costing them both economically and environmentally. They are ramping coal generating capacity to fill the gap, and largely dumping the hard part of the renewable problem on neighboring countries. Until Germany is self-sufficient, it is highly disingenuous to tout them as an example of the success of renewables. At the very least, one should also consider the tremendous cost of electricity from these sources, and the Danes have the honor of paying the highest household electricity prices in the world, with the Germans not far behind.
Also noteworthy is that €1.5 billion of German nuclear profits have been siphoned off to subsidize renewables. Gutting a profitable, clean, and carbon-free source of energy to prop up one which has no hope to stand on its own is insane.
That's wonderful toy but still a toy.
If you read the history of its decommissioning, you'll find it was no easy task. Not insurmountable problems but not trivial either.
The reason that the decommissioning was such a mess, is that it was delayed for decades. It was known at the time that this would cause problems down the line, yet those responsible for canceling the project decided to let it sit rather than processing the salts--something which was proposed and would have been trivial at the time.
The earliest you could hope to see thorium reactors would be the mid-2020s if everything went well.
That's a long time to wait for the power of radioactive unicorn farts - we need to act NOW ( actually 10 yrs ago but water under the bridge and all that )
Let's hope it doesn't get pushed back any further, because we have no replacement. We do need to act now, but we need to act responsibly, not pour money into non-solutions like wind and solar. (They have their niches, but are far from a comprehensive energy solution.) As much as people would like to simply wish it or legislate it into existence NOW, the physics/economics simply don't work, no matter how we try to force it with subsidies.
The enemy is coal, and to a lesser extent the other fossil fuels. The only way to displace coal on any significant scale is with a technology that provides cheaper energy--and several studies have shown that molten salt thorium reactors have the potential to do so. See Thorium: energy cheaper than coal.
People in the developed world are willing to sacrifice and accept that renewables will be more expensive, but there are billions more people in places like China and India who are desperately trying to raise their standard of living, and they simply can't afford it. Realistically speaking, neither can we, but the costs of renewables are well hidden and people don't appreciate just how untenable the proposition really is.
Conventional nuclear and natural gas could provide an interim solution, but as long as people continue to embrace the delusion that renewables are going to magically fix the problem, we are merely postponing an inevitable catastrophe.
I'm all for R&D into MSRs / LFTRs / Thorium / Fusion, etc but let's STOP promoting the THEORETICAL capabilities of reactors that have NOT yet been BUILT & TESTED!!!
It is not merely theoretical, it is a fundamental result of the physics involved, in addition to being well demonstrated.
That one toy reactor that was built at Oak Ridge does NOT count; it only establishes that the tech is feasible.
For the record, it never produced electricity and never actually ran on thorium.
Generating electricity is totally irrelevant to the operation of a reactor--heat is heat. The reactor was most certainly tested with U-233 derived from thorium. Though a thorium blanket was not present in the reactor itself, thorium breeding has been demonstrated separately, and the process is so straightforward that no one could honestly suggest that it wouldn't work when combined. What is the purpose of your pedantry here?
The 7.4 MW test reactor ran successfully for ~20000 hours, and proved that the design is feasible and fundamentally sound. It is rather impertinent to classify it as a toy.
Exponential growth is not sustainable, at any level. Even at relatively "low" growth, an exponential will still hit the limits of physical impossibility before long. This is basic math that few people really appreciate.
Or we are using nuclear as originally intended. It was never expected that we would still be fissioning the extremely rare U-235 isotope at this point. U-238 and Thorium are much more abundant, and will meet our energy needs far into the future, perhaps even outlasting the sun itself.
This may be true of conventional nuclear, but molten salt reactors like the LFTR are capable of load following, and work quite well for that purpose.
Why does it seem there is one set of rules for the little people and another set for big business?
Here you go: With Liberty and Justice for Some. Aside from the book, Glenn Greenwald has a lot of interesting insights at Salon, and now writes for The Guardian.
There are supposedly mirasol products available, but it looks like they are limited to the Chinese market at this point. Hopefully they will gain wider traction, as I would love a decent Android based tablet with a high-quality reflective display. Add an active digitizer and it would be about perfect.
It is really annoying how manufacturers have pigeonholed tablets as media consumption devices.
without trackpads. My notebook keyboard has an aspect ratio of ~22:9; so we are almost there. Just think: with a bit more "progress" we could put the trackpad to the side of the keyboard! How awesome would that be?
Yucca Mountain was an expensive non-solution for a problem that only exists because we choose not to solve it. Modern reactors have a very different waste profile, as well as the capability to safely consume spent fuel from existing reactors while producing energy. Spent fuel is not something that should be buried, but rather is a vast energy resource that should be tapped. We need a change in policy in order to allow this, and people need to educate themselves and get behind it.
The Nuclear Waste Fund currently has about $25B intended for dealing with the "waste". If even a small fraction of this were spent developing modern reactors like the LFTR, not only would we solve the waste problem in short order, but we would also be well on our way to replacing fossil fuels entirety. More information about the possibilities enabled by this technology can be found at Energy from Thorium.
Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? The short answer, is "hell no"; while there is a very small part of spent fuel which could actually be considered waste, the vast bulk of it is a goldmine of energy and a source of other highly valuable fission products.
It is totally silly to talk of "waste treatment" or "destruction"--this is just another way of doing fission. It is equally silly to talk about destroying enormously vast reserves of energy, just because our antiquated reactors are terribly inefficient and make a mess of the partially burned fuel. It does not have to be that way, and modern molten salt reactors like LFTR burn the fuel so completely that there is barely any waste left at all.
We need to take another look at spent fuel. Aside from burying it, which merely delays the problem, the only way to rid ourselves of it is by fissioning it. There are many ways of doing so, but the best would be to harness the energy contained within in safe and inexpensive LFTRs. Such reactors are capable of providing not only for our electrical needs, but also the production of liquid fuels, as well as process heat for water desalination, foundries, fertilizer, concrete, and more.
Certainly, fissile material like U235 and Pu239 should be disposed of, but it should be done so in a manner which maximizes its value, and fast reactors or other waste eaters are terrible in this respect. LFTRs require much less fissile material to start up, and if we were to use the fissile in this way, we could ramp up their production very quickly, and eliminate it just the same. Only this way would be safer, simpler, more efficient, and vastly cheaper.
This is really totally out to lunch. Seek out some analysis from actual CPU designers on the topic. What I read generally pegs the x86 CISC overhead at maybe 10%, not several times.
The end result may come within 10% for optimized code, but at what expense? As a user, you may not appreciate the extra burden placed on hardware and software engineers alike, but it has significant consequences on the rate and cost of development, for everyone involved. Look at x86, as contrasted with the rapid progress on a clean architecture like the Alpha, and this point becomes abundantly clear. With ARM as well, Intel has had to expend massive resources, and even with their advanced process technology, they are having great difficulty competing with much smaller firms.
Where would we be today, if the Alpha hadn't been euthanized by incompetent management at Compaq, or ARM and other RISC competitors could compete on an even process with Intel? Thankfully, as time goes by, x86 compatibility is decreasingly important. Open source linux, bsd, and mobile development are largely processor agnostic, and are free to use better architectures.
You appeal to CPU designers, but how many of them wouldn't rather be working on anything but an x86 design? That feeling is also shared by most assembly and systems programmers, I promise you. Any opportunity to remove a convoluted and unnecessary layer of abstraction from a system is a good thing, and should be welcomed.