Sadly, since a skyhook is not attached to the earth, it misses one of the key advantages of a space elevator: the earth itself supplying the necessary angular momentum. For an elevator, only potential energy must be supplied, and that rapidly gets cheaper the further up you go. Past geo-synchronous orbit it is entirely free, but velocity still increases linearly with height. (Keep in mind that the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity; paying for that energy directly is very expensive.)
With a skyhook, not only must you pay for the initial velocity, you can't arbitrarily choose the final delta-v, so there is still a considerable amount of energy that needs to be supplied, compounded with the extra fuel that must be carried to do so. Not to mention the continual input of energy to overcome atmospheric drag and maintain height. (If the up/down traffic isn't balanced, this is even more expensive, so you also need to consider the cost of moving that mass through space in the first place.) It would probably still be an improvement, but it would be complicated and could never hope to match the exceptionally low costs made possible by an elevator.
In terms of practicality, it may not require such exotic materials, but it would be that much more costly to orbit (and impart angular momentum to) such an enormous mass.
Pebble bed reactors are not as ideal as claimed, and Germany gave up on the program considering the array of problems. Perhaps some may have solutions, but fundamentally, it is still a solid fueled reactor with the associated problems. Solid fueled reactors can not efficiently burn up the fuel due to structural damage, resulting in long-lived actinides, fission products, and unburned fuel to be disposed of, with no possibility of recycling or access to the valuable fission products. (Such as medical isotopes.) So, the safety comes at the expense of inefficient fuel use and a magnified waste stream, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.
What you really want is a Liquide Fluoride Thorium Reactor. It burns very nearly 100% of the fuel, producing very few actinides in the process. The actinides are the main concern with nuclear waste; without them, most of the fission products will have decayed to safe levels in a few hundred years. (In fact, most of them within 10 years..) Online fuel reprocessing ensures that there is no excess nuclear fuel or waste in the reactor. Coupled with a thermal spectrum reactor, this ensures that the very minimum of radioactive material is required for operation, and only a small fraction of that in conventional reactors of a comparable power output.
Of course, a LFTR is also walk away safe, requires no fuel fabrication, no further mining (is a byproduct of rare earth mining), can burn existing spent nuclear fuel and weapons materials, is scalable over a large range of sizes, can be sited anywhere, and can be mass produced at a cost cheaper than coal. There is a wealth of information available at Energy from Thorium.
Japan's transport ministry has ordered the construction of infrastructure for magnetically levitated trains, putting the country's project for next-generation high-speed rail service fully on track.
The ministry on Friday ordered the Central Japan Railway Company, or JR Tokai, to build maglev train tracks between Tokyo and Nagoya.
Maglev trains boast a maximum operating speed of 500 kilometers per hour, and could travel the 340 kilometers between the 2 cities in just 40 minutes.
The ministry told JR Tokai to build the tracks on an almost straight route, using underground tunnels to pass beneath a mountain range.
The firm plans to start an environmental assessment this year and begin construction in 3 years.
Maglev trains are to start operating between Tokyo and Nagoya in 2027 and between Tokyo and Osaka in 2045.
The project is expected to cost 9 trillion yen, or nearly 113 billion dollars. Friday, May 27, 2011 17:04 +0900 (JST)
The first leg is specified at 340km, and the total appears to be roughly 500km. At nearly 9 trillion yen, that would be 18*10^9 yen/km, or about 350 million dollars a mile. That looks ridiculously expensive, though a significant part of that may be drilling through mountain ranges. Often the maglev components themselves are insignificant compared to the necessary ground work, or securing rights of way.
Still, I'm curious how much of that cost could be avoided by opting for an Inductrack based system instead. Inductrack is an elegant passive magnetic levitation system, which is vastly cheaper than conventional systems due to its profound simplicity. It also seems likely that they chose a nearly straight path, exactly because of the excessive track cost. If that is the case, the path flexibility afforded by using a cheaper technology, may have allowed for significantly less ground work and a more attractively priced system.
In a country like the US with large flat expanses, Inductrack would make for an excellent intercity transit network. The costs are very reasonable, even when compared with conventional high-speed rail.
You conveniently exclude the nuclear testing in Nevada, which is claimed to have released 20 times the amount of radioactive Iodine over Chernobyl. The problem isn't so much the Iodine, as the fact that no one was told, and so preventative measures were not taken. That is not the case now, unless you are proposing some sort of worldwide conspiracy to cover it all up this time.
As others have mentioned, the Mercury in the oceans is of much greater concern, and not being able to eat fish worldwide. Pollution from coal is vastly more damaging, and most of that has no half life. Consider that Mercury is only a small part of what coal is putting straight into our environment, and have a look at the rest. An interesting fact, is that we could extract almost 15 times the chemical energy of coal, if we burned the included Uranium and Thorium in reactors instead of dumping it into the environment.
Copyright holders (and more typically mere owners) are the parasites, expecting to paid indefinitely for the same work. Google does the minimum necessary to respect copyright, and expecting anything more is unreasonable. If you wanted money in exchange for your own photos, you should have sold them. Copyrights, like patents and other forms of intellectual monopoly, are detrimental to society, and we would all be better off if they ceased to exist.
If you are at least making an effort, I am sympathetic to the difficulty of adjusting to a new business model. Clearly, some organizations are not though, and I, along with many others, will cheer on their demise.
Conventional nuclear is more expensive than coal, but where the evidence that it is not economical? Furthermore, this comparison is far less favorable if you include carbon capture and sequestration. Let us re-compare once the externalities from burning fossil fuels are included: global warming, ocean acidification, massive pollution (including groundwater), environmental devastation from mining, lost life, and frequent wars. Now, how does it look?
Even so, nuclear could be cheaper than coal with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, on both capital and operating costs. Nearly every last drawback of conventional nuclear is directly attributable to water-cooled solid-fuel Uranium reactors, and indeed this was a poor choice. They are still safer than the alternatives, but I agree that they should be phased out and replaced with modern reactors.
There is no "waste" problem though, it is merely a policy problem in the US. Almost all of the ~35T of "waste" per GWe*year can be recycled, and only tiny fraction can be considered actual waste. For a LFTR, which burns up the material entirely, there is only ~1T of fission products per GWe*year. In 10 years though, 83% of those have decayed to stable elements, a number of which have significant value. Some of the radioactive products also have significant value as medical isotopes, and for other uses. So, at most 0.17T of radioactive byproducts from each GWe*year need to be stored for ~300 years.
That's what the spring is for. An electromagnetic "shock absorber" dampens oscillations by collecting the energy as electricity. It is essentially a linear motor run as a generator.
You are comparing Bill Gates' accomplishments to the science behind splitting the atom, really? Nuclear energy was one of the crowning achievements of the last century, and that it failed to live up to its promise is a tragedy caused by politics, nothing more. In perspective, it is still the safest and cleanest source of energy we have, and that doesn't even consider all of the deaths due to wars motivated by oil.
It might surprise you to know that the inventor of those "exploding nuclear reactors" was actually opposed to their being used for commercial power production. Dr. Alvin Weinberg was pursuing a far better alternative, which could not explode, could not melt down, burned the nuclear fuel completely, and produced very little (and short-lived) waste. It also didn't produce Plutonium for the weapons program, which was likely the deciding factor. Unfortunately, questioning the safety and direction of the nuclear program lost him his job as director of ORNL, and here we are today, left to wonder, "what if?"
It isn't too late though; the idea is sound, and indeed they did operate a liquid floride reactor for five years without incident. All we need is public awareness of this tragically wasted opportunity, so we can pick up where they left off, and fulfill the promise of nuclear. Unlimited safe, cheap, and clean power--along with an end of the use of fossil fuels and associated pollution and conflict.
Thanks, my mistake. I looked over the datasheet and product brochure and it made no mention of this. Since they were touting it prior to launch, it seems strange that it is no longer a marketing point. Hopefully the feature won't disappear, as has happened with certain other products after launch.
It is too dangerous to let it sit around indefinitely . We have produced large quantities of it, and it isn't just going to go away. Most of it isn't even dangerous; the scale of the problem is purely do to the fact that we refuse to recycle it. (and to be fair, the the method of recycling to use spent fuel in conventional reactors is very unattractive.) The safest place for that material is in a modern nuclear reactor, which eats the existing "waste", and produces extremely little actual waste. Modern fuel cycles are able to readily recycle spent fuel and weapons, and produce none of the long term waste.
Perhaps you could expand on how you "recycle" uranium and plutonium in such a way that reduces its radioactivity? All you can do is increase the rate at which it decays, which is a dangerous (and depending on how fast you increase the rate, highly destructive) process.
Unless you are aware of a method by which you can remove excess nucleons from an atom without an accompanying release of radiation. I'm sure the Nobel committee would be eager to hear from you.
You can not alter the decay rate, that is physically impossible. We created all of the Plutonium on earth, and there are exactly two ways to get rid of it--one, is to wait a long time, the other is to fission it. Fission results in a bunch of smaller elements, many of which are useful, and most which have very short half lives. Ideally, we would use it to create power in the process of destroying it.
Furthermore, that "radiation" you refer to is called energy. No Nobel prize would await someone who invented a process to destroy a vast and immensely valuable energy resource.
As far as widespread release of Plutonium into our environment is concerned, consider this:
The most important effects of plutonium toxicity by far are those due to nuclear bombs exploded in the atmosphere. Only about 20% of the plutonium in a bomb is consumed, while the rest is vaporized and floats around in the Earth's atmosphere as a fine dust. Over 10,000 pounds of plutonium has been released in that fashion by bomb tests to date, enough to cause about 4,000 deaths worldwide. Note that the quantity already dispersed by bomb tests is more than 10 million times larger than the annual releases allowed by EPA regulations from an all breeder reactor electric power industry.
Plutonium is not good for you, but the sky has yet to fall, and seems unlikely to in the future.
You make a very good point. As announced, Thunderbolt is less flexible than many had originally envisioned it would be, and upon further reflection, perhaps the abstraction is at the wrong level. However, this may have unexpected benefits for Intel.
For example, when attaching a disk, ideally one would want to virtualize the SATA protocol itself, with one or more virtual SATA controllers on the host. This has the advantages that there would be a common well implemented virtual controller driver, and the disk manufacturers would need a minimal amount of glue logic to support the disk interface.
However that doesn't appear to be an option with the present design; each disk manufacturer will have to implement an SATA controller as well. Trustworthy manufacturers will likely provide good controllers, but it will still add to the cost and introduce the need for many incompatible drivers. (It will also require that the controller itself be hot-pluggable, and I'm not sure that drivers generally support that properly.) There will likely be a convenient way to avoid this though; buy a combination Intel SATA controller with Thunderbolt interface.
Devices that were native PCIe to start with will probably be fine, as will devices where the manufacturer supplies the bridge, assuming that they aren't garbage to start with. External bridges may fall into the same trap that USB did. Some devices just don't make sense, like a SAS controller and attached array. A small hot-plug SATA enclosure and controller might be a nice fit though.
Speed aside, Thunderbolt has the potential to work properly, as it will support native SATA. Most USB 2.0 bridge chips ignore critical commands, and put your data at risk. Will 3.0 be better?
Thunderbolt can also be daisy chained, and unlike with USB, the actual speed is not a small fraction of the theoretical speed. Therefore, a number of devices can be attached, without introducing a bottleneck or requiring a hub.
External hard drives would also be well served by ZFS, though earlier versions didn't deal well with (very commonly) broken USB bridges. One of the primary Apple engineers was convinced that there was no solution, and I wonder if this isn't part of the reason that Apple gave up on ZFS.
Of course, the fix was obvious to anyone familiar with the fundamentals of ZFS--it just wasn't a high priority. Sun did not ship such badly broken hardware, and most people running ZFS know better than to use it. Only on the mac are you really stuck using USB as a disk interface.
Nice "fact sheet" by people who are clearly not experts in the field and obviously have an anti-nuclear agenda. Most importantly though, it is anything but objective; it is highly selective of the "facts", full of half truths and strawmen, and has a clear intent to deceive the reader. While I have little desire to sift through their drivel, I fully expect that they have similar "fact sheets" for many other competing energy sources. What we could use is a real fact sheet for fossil fuels, and especially coal...
Just to start with, anything with a half life of 200,000 years is so stable, that it is only technically "radioactive", and poses no health risk whatsoever, beyond possible issues of toxicity. Any residual radiation remaining after a few hundred years is below the background level; the only reason to point out things like this is to incite fear and induce hysteria.
Otherwise, while some hypothetical straw man reactor in once-through mode might suffer from some imaginary reprocessing problems, real designs such as the Molten Salt Reactor are conveniently ignored. There is no solid fuel to start with, no separation necessary, and the "reprocessing" is basically just removing the reaction products, and can be done online.
The amount of real waste from such reactors is so small, and the timeframes so short, that it is ludicrous to even begin talking about geologic storage. For a comparison of the waste and mining requirements, see this presentation. In terms of raw environmental devastation and heath effects, it would also be nice to see a comparison with coal.
The dangers from Sodium and Fluorine are minimal today, and will be almost nonexistent in the future. The primary cause for concern is interaction with water, especially with the high pressure steam loops. However, this should be eliminated soon enough by Brayton cycle turbines using Supercritical CO2. Not only will they be 50% more efficient, but 30x smaller, and correspondingly cheaper. It may even allow the Sodium cooled reactors to eliminate the extra sodium loop, which was the main source of added cost.
For a PWR, the pressure vessel and containment have to be enormous to deal with the intense pressures, which also add significant cost. Refueling and fuel manufacture are also not cheap or easy. It is a lot easier when the contents are at atmospheric pressure in an IFR or MSR type reactor, and the fuel cycles are vastly more attractive as well.
Though desirable, Thorium isn't even necessary; most any modern reactor design is passively safe. Read up on the Molten Salt Reactor for one example: the reactors run at atmospheric pressure, with no active cooling necessary. The reaction naturally stops if it gets too hot, and you can literally walk away at any time. As an added benefit, they can consume other reactors waste as fuel, obviating any further mining for the next century, and the waste they produce is much smaller it quantity and far shorter lived.
The anti-nuclear comments on that site are truly depressing, as are the ignorant responses to your own post. Coal has, and continues to kill far more people than Nuclear, both from mining, as well as respiratory diseases and cancer. Coal is not clean by any measure; it has put an immense amount of radioactivity and heavy metals into our environment--far more than nuclear.
I keep hearing this bullshit over and over, as if peopel just cut and paste it from some random website. Thorium is a rubbish choice for several reasons:
Using a rare isotope of Uranium in a thermal reactor while wasting 99% of the energy, and leaving behind a huge mess was the rubbish choice. Those reactors were born from the manufacture of fissile material for bombs, and while that was an unfortunate reality, it should have been nothing more than a stepping stone. For energy production though, they were a dead end, and we have had ample chance to pursue breeder reactors ever since. Or rather, they were under consideration from nearly the start, but we chose the dead end route of the PWR instead. Why is that?
Do you still consider Thorium a rubbish choice? You have merely given reasons why it may have been impractical in the very beginning, not that it was undesirable. It should have been the goal, and there is no good excuse for its neglect in the half century since. At the very least we should have pursued breeder reactors.
The advantages of the Thorium fuel cycle are manyfold, and as you mention it allows for a thermal breeder. Really, that is exactly what we want; a passively safe breeder reactor with plentiful fuel, which can burn our existing waste, and has little and short-lived waste of its own. Running at atmospheric pressure is far preferable, and the high temperatures allow for efficient electrical conversion, or hydrogen production.
Sort of tangential, but Sandia has made tremendous progress on thermal-electric conversion efficiency. Using supercritical carbon dioxide in the Brayton cycle, efficiency is 40-50% better than with the conventional steam cycle. As an added bonus, the system is thirty(!) times smaller, and will be correspondingly cheaper. The technology is applicable to existing coal, natural gas, nuclear, and even solar thermal plants.
It may come as a surprise, but right now, someone else owns your entire platform. The BIOS/EFI do not merely boot the system, they also provide run time services in the form of System Management Mode.
That's right, your system is running black box code at runtime. The TPM already lives there, and if you are "lucky", the future malware will be limited to DRM which can't be circumvented, or systems that only run signed code. The implications for security are staggering, and considering that modern systems even have access to your network from this code, the opportunity for abuse is truly frightening. (How trivial would it be for your government--or the manufacturers in China--to install backdoors, remote key logging facilities, or root kits and such?)
Support Coreboot, so that we may retain control of our own systems. Many thanks to its authors for their persistence, and AMD for their generous contributions. For further information, there was also an interesting google talk a while back.
How much of the money being spent on health care is actually used for that purpose? The insurance industry as it exists insulates the health care industry from market forces, and enables them to charge extortionate rates. Most of the money is being funneled away into the pockets of the rich and large pharma, rather than actually providing health care.
Rather than legislating mandatory insurance, we need to focus on addressing the cost of health care directly. Likewise with all of the other monopolies or near monopolies plaguing our economy; they only serve to concentrate wealth for a select few at the expense of everyone else. We desperately need to restore competition in our markets in order to increase the efficiency and productivity of our economy.
Our current course is completely unsustainable, and will utterly wreck our nation if not corrected. Cutting basic health and science programs is bad enough, but cutting energy research is pure insanity. Basic infrastructure included, these things are at the very foundation of our future, and they are being left to rot.
In a zero sum world where resources are finite, you cannot win without someone else losing.
This misconception is part of the reason that humanity is still stuck in the dark ages. We are so far from exhausting any resources, that it is completely irrelevant at this point. The only problem is that our resources are being put to exceedingly poor use, and those in power are doing their best to keep it that way.
Basically, nearly all resource problems can be solved with more energy, and there is plenty of that available, should we choose to tap nuclear or develop fusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, since a skyhook is not attached to the earth, it misses one of the key advantages of a space elevator: the earth itself supplying the necessary angular momentum. For an elevator, only potential energy must be supplied, and that rapidly gets cheaper the further up you go. Past geo-synchronous orbit it is entirely free, but velocity still increases linearly with height. (Keep in mind that the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity; paying for that energy directly is very expensive.)
With a skyhook, not only must you pay for the initial velocity, you can't arbitrarily choose the final delta-v, so there is still a considerable amount of energy that needs to be supplied, compounded with the extra fuel that must be carried to do so. Not to mention the continual input of energy to overcome atmospheric drag and maintain height. (If the up/down traffic isn't balanced, this is even more expensive, so you also need to consider the cost of moving that mass through space in the first place.) It would probably still be an improvement, but it would be complicated and could never hope to match the exceptionally low costs made possible by an elevator.
In terms of practicality, it may not require such exotic materials, but it would be that much more costly to orbit (and impart angular momentum to) such an enormous mass.
Pebble bed reactors are not as ideal as claimed, and Germany gave up on the program considering the array of problems. Perhaps some may have solutions, but fundamentally, it is still a solid fueled reactor with the associated problems. Solid fueled reactors can not efficiently burn up the fuel due to structural damage, resulting in long-lived actinides, fission products, and unburned fuel to be disposed of, with no possibility of recycling or access to the valuable fission products. (Such as medical isotopes.) So, the safety comes at the expense of inefficient fuel use and a magnified waste stream, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.
What you really want is a Liquide Fluoride Thorium Reactor. It burns very nearly 100% of the fuel, producing very few actinides in the process. The actinides are the main concern with nuclear waste; without them, most of the fission products will have decayed to safe levels in a few hundred years. (In fact, most of them within 10 years..) Online fuel reprocessing ensures that there is no excess nuclear fuel or waste in the reactor. Coupled with a thermal spectrum reactor, this ensures that the very minimum of radioactive material is required for operation, and only a small fraction of that in conventional reactors of a comparable power output.
Of course, a LFTR is also walk away safe, requires no fuel fabrication, no further mining (is a byproduct of rare earth mining), can burn existing spent nuclear fuel and weapons materials, is scalable over a large range of sizes, can be sited anywhere, and can be mass produced at a cost cheaper than coal. There is a wealth of information available at Energy from Thorium.
From Maglev project gets go-ahead:
The first leg is specified at 340km, and the total appears to be roughly 500km. At nearly 9 trillion yen, that would be 18*10^9 yen/km, or about 350 million dollars a mile. That looks ridiculously expensive, though a significant part of that may be drilling through mountain ranges. Often the maglev components themselves are insignificant compared to the necessary ground work, or securing rights of way.
Still, I'm curious how much of that cost could be avoided by opting for an Inductrack based system instead. Inductrack is an elegant passive magnetic levitation system, which is vastly cheaper than conventional systems due to its profound simplicity. It also seems likely that they chose a nearly straight path, exactly because of the excessive track cost. If that is the case, the path flexibility afforded by using a cheaper technology, may have allowed for significantly less ground work and a more attractively priced system.
In a country like the US with large flat expanses, Inductrack would make for an excellent intercity transit network. The costs are very reasonable, even when compared with conventional high-speed rail.
You conveniently exclude the nuclear testing in Nevada, which is claimed to have released 20 times the amount of radioactive Iodine over Chernobyl. The problem isn't so much the Iodine, as the fact that no one was told, and so preventative measures were not taken. That is not the case now, unless you are proposing some sort of worldwide conspiracy to cover it all up this time.
As others have mentioned, the Mercury in the oceans is of much greater concern, and not being able to eat fish worldwide. Pollution from coal is vastly more damaging, and most of that has no half life. Consider that Mercury is only a small part of what coal is putting straight into our environment, and have a look at the rest. An interesting fact, is that we could extract almost 15 times the chemical energy of coal, if we burned the included Uranium and Thorium in reactors instead of dumping it into the environment.
Copyright holders (and more typically mere owners) are the parasites, expecting to paid indefinitely for the same work. Google does the minimum necessary to respect copyright, and expecting anything more is unreasonable. If you wanted money in exchange for your own photos, you should have sold them. Copyrights, like patents and other forms of intellectual monopoly, are detrimental to society, and we would all be better off if they ceased to exist.
If you are at least making an effort, I am sympathetic to the difficulty of adjusting to a new business model. Clearly, some organizations are not though, and I, along with many others, will cheer on their demise.
Conventional nuclear is more expensive than coal, but where the evidence that it is not economical? Furthermore, this comparison is far less favorable if you include carbon capture and sequestration. Let us re-compare once the externalities from burning fossil fuels are included: global warming, ocean acidification, massive pollution (including groundwater), environmental devastation from mining, lost life, and frequent wars. Now, how does it look?
Even so, nuclear could be cheaper than coal with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, on both capital and operating costs. Nearly every last drawback of conventional nuclear is directly attributable to water-cooled solid-fuel Uranium reactors, and indeed this was a poor choice. They are still safer than the alternatives, but I agree that they should be phased out and replaced with modern reactors.
There is no "waste" problem though, it is merely a policy problem in the US. Almost all of the ~35T of "waste" per GWe*year can be recycled, and only tiny fraction can be considered actual waste. For a LFTR, which burns up the material entirely, there is only ~1T of fission products per GWe*year. In 10 years though, 83% of those have decayed to stable elements, a number of which have significant value. Some of the radioactive products also have significant value as medical isotopes, and for other uses. So, at most 0.17T of radioactive byproducts from each GWe*year need to be stored for ~300 years.
That's what the spring is for. An electromagnetic "shock absorber" dampens oscillations by collecting the energy as electricity. It is essentially a linear motor run as a generator.
You are comparing Bill Gates' accomplishments to the science behind splitting the atom, really? Nuclear energy was one of the crowning achievements of the last century, and that it failed to live up to its promise is a tragedy caused by politics, nothing more. In perspective, it is still the safest and cleanest source of energy we have, and that doesn't even consider all of the deaths due to wars motivated by oil.
It might surprise you to know that the inventor of those "exploding nuclear reactors" was actually opposed to their being used for commercial power production. Dr. Alvin Weinberg was pursuing a far better alternative, which could not explode, could not melt down, burned the nuclear fuel completely, and produced very little (and short-lived) waste. It also didn't produce Plutonium for the weapons program, which was likely the deciding factor. Unfortunately, questioning the safety and direction of the nuclear program lost him his job as director of ORNL, and here we are today, left to wonder, "what if?"
It isn't too late though; the idea is sound, and indeed they did operate a liquid floride reactor for five years without incident. All we need is public awareness of this tragically wasted opportunity, so we can pick up where they left off, and fulfill the promise of nuclear. Unlimited safe, cheap, and clean power--along with an end of the use of fossil fuels and associated pollution and conflict.
Thanks, my mistake. I looked over the datasheet and product brochure and it made no mention of this. Since they were touting it prior to launch, it seems strange that it is no longer a marketing point. Hopefully the feature won't disappear, as has happened with certain other products after launch.
Looks like like Intel has scrapped the "power safe write cache" that was slated for the next generation of drives.
It's too dangerous to "use it for something".
It is too dangerous to let it sit around indefinitely . We have produced large quantities of it, and it isn't just going to go away. Most of it isn't even dangerous; the scale of the problem is purely do to the fact that we refuse to recycle it. (and to be fair, the the method of recycling to use spent fuel in conventional reactors is very unattractive.) The safest place for that material is in a modern nuclear reactor, which eats the existing "waste", and produces extremely little actual waste. Modern fuel cycles are able to readily recycle spent fuel and weapons, and produce none of the long term waste.
Perhaps you could expand on how you "recycle" uranium and plutonium in such a way that reduces its radioactivity? All you can do is increase the rate at which it decays, which is a dangerous (and depending on how fast you increase the rate, highly destructive) process.
Unless you are aware of a method by which you can remove excess nucleons from an atom without an accompanying release of radiation. I'm sure the Nobel committee would be eager to hear from you.
You can not alter the decay rate, that is physically impossible. We created all of the Plutonium on earth, and there are exactly two ways to get rid of it--one, is to wait a long time, the other is to fission it. Fission results in a bunch of smaller elements, many of which are useful, and most which have very short half lives. Ideally, we would use it to create power in the process of destroying it.
Furthermore, that "radiation" you refer to is called energy. No Nobel prize would await someone who invented a process to destroy a vast and immensely valuable energy resource.
Plutonium in perspective.
As far as widespread release of Plutonium into our environment is concerned, consider this:
The most important effects of plutonium toxicity by far are those due to nuclear bombs exploded in the atmosphere. Only about 20% of the plutonium in a bomb is consumed, while the rest is vaporized and floats around in the Earth's atmosphere as a fine dust. Over 10,000 pounds of plutonium has been released in that fashion by bomb tests to date, enough to cause about 4,000 deaths worldwide. Note that the quantity already dispersed by bomb tests is more than 10 million times larger than the annual releases allowed by EPA regulations from an all breeder reactor electric power industry.
Plutonium is not good for you, but the sky has yet to fall, and seems unlikely to in the future.
You make a very good point. As announced, Thunderbolt is less flexible than many had originally envisioned it would be, and upon further reflection, perhaps the abstraction is at the wrong level. However, this may have unexpected benefits for Intel.
For example, when attaching a disk, ideally one would want to virtualize the SATA protocol itself, with one or more virtual SATA controllers on the host. This has the advantages that there would be a common well implemented virtual controller driver, and the disk manufacturers would need a minimal amount of glue logic to support the disk interface.
However that doesn't appear to be an option with the present design; each disk manufacturer will have to implement an SATA controller as well. Trustworthy manufacturers will likely provide good controllers, but it will still add to the cost and introduce the need for many incompatible drivers. (It will also require that the controller itself be hot-pluggable, and I'm not sure that drivers generally support that properly.) There will likely be a convenient way to avoid this though; buy a combination Intel SATA controller with Thunderbolt interface.
Devices that were native PCIe to start with will probably be fine, as will devices where the manufacturer supplies the bridge, assuming that they aren't garbage to start with. External bridges may fall into the same trap that USB did. Some devices just don't make sense, like a SAS controller and attached array. A small hot-plug SATA enclosure and controller might be a nice fit though.
Speed aside, Thunderbolt has the potential to work properly, as it will support native SATA. Most USB 2.0 bridge chips ignore critical commands, and put your data at risk. Will 3.0 be better?
Thunderbolt can also be daisy chained, and unlike with USB, the actual speed is not a small fraction of the theoretical speed. Therefore, a number of devices can be attached, without introducing a bottleneck or requiring a hub.
External hard drives would also be well served by ZFS, though earlier versions didn't deal well with (very commonly) broken USB bridges. One of the primary Apple engineers was convinced that there was no solution, and I wonder if this isn't part of the reason that Apple gave up on ZFS.
Of course, the fix was obvious to anyone familiar with the fundamentals of ZFS--it just wasn't a high priority. Sun did not ship such badly broken hardware, and most people running ZFS know better than to use it. Only on the mac are you really stuck using USB as a disk interface.
A more thorough rebuttal of the so-called "fact sheet"...
Nice "fact sheet" by people who are clearly not experts in the field and obviously have an anti-nuclear agenda. Most importantly though, it is anything but objective; it is highly selective of the "facts", full of half truths and strawmen, and has a clear intent to deceive the reader. While I have little desire to sift through their drivel, I fully expect that they have similar "fact sheets" for many other competing energy sources. What we could use is a real fact sheet for fossil fuels, and especially coal...
Just to start with, anything with a half life of 200,000 years is so stable, that it is only technically "radioactive", and poses no health risk whatsoever, beyond possible issues of toxicity. Any residual radiation remaining after a few hundred years is below the background level; the only reason to point out things like this is to incite fear and induce hysteria.
Otherwise, while some hypothetical straw man reactor in once-through mode might suffer from some imaginary reprocessing problems, real designs such as the Molten Salt Reactor are conveniently ignored. There is no solid fuel to start with, no separation necessary, and the "reprocessing" is basically just removing the reaction products, and can be done online.
The amount of real waste from such reactors is so small, and the timeframes so short, that it is ludicrous to even begin talking about geologic storage. For a comparison of the waste and mining requirements, see this presentation. In terms of raw environmental devastation and heath effects, it would also be nice to see a comparison with coal.
The dangers from Sodium and Fluorine are minimal today, and will be almost nonexistent in the future. The primary cause for concern is interaction with water, especially with the high pressure steam loops. However, this should be eliminated soon enough by Brayton cycle turbines using Supercritical CO2. Not only will they be 50% more efficient, but 30x smaller, and correspondingly cheaper. It may even allow the Sodium cooled reactors to eliminate the extra sodium loop, which was the main source of added cost.
For a PWR, the pressure vessel and containment have to be enormous to deal with the intense pressures, which also add significant cost. Refueling and fuel manufacture are also not cheap or easy. It is a lot easier when the contents are at atmospheric pressure in an IFR or MSR type reactor, and the fuel cycles are vastly more attractive as well.
Though desirable, Thorium isn't even necessary; most any modern reactor design is passively safe. Read up on the Molten Salt Reactor for one example: the reactors run at atmospheric pressure, with no active cooling necessary. The reaction naturally stops if it gets too hot, and you can literally walk away at any time. As an added benefit, they can consume other reactors waste as fuel, obviating any further mining for the next century, and the waste they produce is much smaller it quantity and far shorter lived.
The anti-nuclear comments on that site are truly depressing, as are the ignorant responses to your own post. Coal has, and continues to kill far more people than Nuclear, both from mining, as well as respiratory diseases and cancer. Coal is not clean by any measure; it has put an immense amount of radioactivity and heavy metals into our environment--far more than nuclear.
I keep hearing this bullshit over and over, as if peopel just cut and paste it from some random website.
Thorium is a rubbish choice for several reasons:
Using a rare isotope of Uranium in a thermal reactor while wasting 99% of the energy, and leaving behind a huge mess was the rubbish choice. Those reactors were born from the manufacture of fissile material for bombs, and while that was an unfortunate reality, it should have been nothing more than a stepping stone. For energy production though, they were a dead end, and we have had ample chance to pursue breeder reactors ever since. Or rather, they were under consideration from nearly the start, but we chose the dead end route of the PWR instead. Why is that?
Do you still consider Thorium a rubbish choice? You have merely given reasons why it may have been impractical in the very beginning, not that it was undesirable. It should have been the goal, and there is no good excuse for its neglect in the half century since. At the very least we should have pursued breeder reactors.
The advantages of the Thorium fuel cycle are manyfold, and as you mention it allows for a thermal breeder. Really, that is exactly what we want; a passively safe breeder reactor with plentiful fuel, which can burn our existing waste, and has little and short-lived waste of its own. Running at atmospheric pressure is far preferable, and the high temperatures allow for efficient electrical conversion, or hydrogen production.
Sort of tangential, but Sandia has made tremendous progress on thermal-electric conversion efficiency. Using supercritical carbon dioxide in the Brayton cycle, efficiency is 40-50% better than with the conventional steam cycle. As an added bonus, the system is thirty(!) times smaller, and will be correspondingly cheaper. The technology is applicable to existing coal, natural gas, nuclear, and even solar thermal plants.
Actually, Thorium was the natural choice for nuclear energy; Uranium was chosen instead so that we could build bombs.
It may come as a surprise, but right now, someone else owns your entire platform. The BIOS/EFI do not merely boot the system, they also provide run time services in the form of System Management Mode.
That's right, your system is running black box code at runtime. The TPM already lives there, and if you are "lucky", the future malware will be limited to DRM which can't be circumvented, or systems that only run signed code. The implications for security are staggering, and considering that modern systems even have access to your network from this code, the opportunity for abuse is truly frightening. (How trivial would it be for your government--or the manufacturers in China--to install backdoors, remote key logging facilities, or root kits and such?)
Support Coreboot, so that we may retain control of our own systems. Many thanks to its authors for their persistence, and AMD for their generous contributions. For further information, there was also an interesting google talk a while back.
How much of the money being spent on health care is actually used for that purpose? The insurance industry as it exists insulates the health care industry from market forces, and enables them to charge extortionate rates. Most of the money is being funneled away into the pockets of the rich and large pharma, rather than actually providing health care.
Rather than legislating mandatory insurance, we need to focus on addressing the cost of health care directly. Likewise with all of the other monopolies or near monopolies plaguing our economy; they only serve to concentrate wealth for a select few at the expense of everyone else. We desperately need to restore competition in our markets in order to increase the efficiency and productivity of our economy.
Our current course is completely unsustainable, and will utterly wreck our nation if not corrected. Cutting basic health and science programs is bad enough, but cutting energy research is pure insanity. Basic infrastructure included, these things are at the very foundation of our future, and they are being left to rot.
In a zero sum world where resources are finite, you cannot win without someone else losing.
This misconception is part of the reason that humanity is still stuck in the dark ages. We are so far from exhausting any resources, that it is completely irrelevant at this point. The only problem is that our resources are being put to exceedingly poor use, and those in power are doing their best to keep it that way.
Basically, nearly all resource problems can be solved with more energy, and there is plenty of that available, should we choose to tap nuclear or develop fusion.