Fission is the only solution we have for sufficient energy to drive civilization forward, the low density energies of wind and solar are too puny
In that case, we'll have to drive our civilization sideways around that road-block for a few centuries, and when our numbers are smaller and our worldwide economy has shrunk to something "renewables-sustainable" we can drive forward again:-)
I see it a bit like Moore's law: it's not a law, it's something we have got used to, but we don't have much faster processors with current technology, we're adapting by having more of them on a chip, having them use less energy, etc. etc.
The Tianhe-2 is constructed from Xeon Phi boards clocked at 1.1 GHz (and faster Intels at 2.2 Ghz) and it is rumored to have already achieved 30 Petaflops.
$3 billion in the bank plus long term interest earned on $3 billion minus the cost of a few security guards... might cover it.
You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out).
What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)? In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.
Remember economics is not actually real science, it's based on peoples' perceptions and behaviour. If the models don't fit reality then the models are wrong.
Well, since you seem to be the expert here, tell us if the steel in the reinforced concrete of the containment dome is especially depleted from element 27 (name not mentioned to not give people ideas). That's why you mention the gamma scan, amirite? *if* it got activated it has a half-life of 5 years but its a strong gamma emitter according to the wiki page. I once worked at a hospital where they replaced their source. It was an complicated, carefully orchestrated procedure with police protection IIRC.
If they start handing out multi-billion dollar contracts to clean things up then shit will get cleaned up.
Call me a cynical dirty hippy, but I have a problem imagining the directors of a commercial nuclear power station handing out a multi-billion dollar contract to clean things up 40 years after they're retired.
Or do you mean the government, payed by the taxpayer, hands out that multi-billion dollar clean-up contract? I agree, good for the economy 40 years onwards, but it's a bit of a broken-windows fallacy. If they hadn't dug up the uranium and built the reactor they wouldn't have to clean it up afterwards either.
Here's one (non-sensational but costly) issue that's known but little discussed: it is relevant for the former nuclear power plant of Dodewaard in the Netherlands:
If you have to wait some 40-60 years for the iodine and some of the cesium and strontium to decay, it means that:
* You have to guard the derelict plant for 40-60 years so that Evil Terrists(TM) and neighbourhood kids don't take bits of concrete to the local shopping mall, and
* After 40 years, you have to resurrect a teaching institute to teach a new crop of nuclear decommission engineers how to carry out the plans from 40 years ago how to demolish it safely. That's also an added cost that is probably not really accounted for beforehand.
OK, maybe it wouldn't work in France, as it is difficult for me to imagine a political coalition between Hollande and Le Pen... and if Marine Le Pen becomes the first female presidente, maybe you'd never have to vote again;-)
I think it is almost a given that certain centre-right political parties (mostly christian democrats in EU countries) attract the type of career politician that is out for power (because his/her party is almost always in government coalition due to the political place in the spectrum), and then after 20 years or so the rot sets in and instead of being a centre-right christian democrat party (religiously conservative, socially between right-wing liberal and labour party) they become the "Party of the Power".
What you can do then in your country is to vote the bastards out and watch them flail and squirm amongst themselves--let the infighting start!
In many countries there has been great progress once the Party of Power is excised from government; and in 4-8 years they can come back, chastised, leaner, and closer to their original centre-right christian democrat ideals, with the powermongers retired or in jail.
IMPORTANT: this mechanism only works in democratic countries with a representative voting system, i.e. the entire democratic world except for commonwealth (US, UK, Canada and Australia IIRC). So in order to let this cleansing mechanism work you must first change the constitution so that every party with more than 3 or 5% of the popular vote can get in governing coalition. For the US this would probably mean a Green Party government with the Republican-Democrat Power Party in opposition. It may seem a bit far-fetched this century, I admit...
have you ever seen electon microscope pictures of bacteriophage T4 virus? they're dodecahedrons. I kid you not. It looks like H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds".
Oh that's interesting.
Why don't they put that at the beginning, saves reading time:-)
But even if on such a financial page it says "the author holds no shares in <company X>", cynical me can't help thinking:
"I'm sure you're telling the truth that you have no shares, but the rich guy who paid you to write this article, probably does! (or is shorting it)"
I'd imagine you can make bio-diesel out of chips waste oil but I thought that diesel was a different type of engine from a gasoline engine. Could you tell us more about what renewable gasoline substitutes are on the horizon? Ethanol? I thought methanol was bad for engines (too corrosive).
That's a bit of a weak argument.. after those special metals have been mined and refined once, after the 20 years or so useful life of the car, they can just be taken out of the car-cass and maybe resmelted a bit. OK if we talk NdFeB supermagnets then you need to remagnetize them somehow after smelting.. I don't actually know how that's done but it probably costs extra electricity (large electromagnet?) unless they use a Niobium-Tin "electromagnet" of course:-)
Remember the three "R" arrows of the recycling symbol are: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. In that order. And if the magnets haven't been above the Curie temperature (80C?) then maybe they can just be re-used.
Problem with rare-earth elements is not that they are rare, but that there are not really lodes (same for Indium IIRC), so that it becomes cheap to get a bulk of ore but expensive to refine.
E.g. Neodymium (I suspect it's needed for wind turbine magnets made of NdFeB, which we Europeans are going to need a lot more of very soon) was apparently mined from some kind of beach sand (Monazite).
1 A0 sheet of paper has an area of 1 m^2, so if it is "normal" paper of 80 g / m^2 then the A0 sheet weighs 80g and the 8 A3 sheets you can cut from that without any paper loss weigh 10 g each, and each of the 16 "standard" A4 sheets you can cut from it again, without any paper loss weighs 5 g.
It's so perfect that probably aliens use the same ratio 1 : sqrt(2) on their paper:-)
Question: Within the context of quantum mechanic, what is the behavior of TIME ?
AFAIK, it's simplest to describe things with the time-independent Schrödinger equation: H Psi = E Psi. This is close enough for most stable molecular states in chemistry. However, if you're talking about state transitions or spectroscopy or (as in this case) entanglement, you have no choice but to use the time-dependent Schrödinger equation: i h-bar d Psi / d t = H Psi, which is MUCH more difficult. That H is not a variable but any suitable Hamiltonian operator, which usually has second-derivative goodness AND a complicated Psi-dependent potential energy term. BTW whoever made that Wikipedia page on the Hamiltonian: thank you, it's very clearly written!
AFAIK, entropy is not described at the quantum level, so Ilya Prigogine's "arrow of time" doesn't really exist, and you can just reverse the behaviour of time by putting a minus sign in front of it and see what happens. In Physics, I read this can be done by drawing a Feynman diagram and turning it upside-down.
I hope this helped answer your question...
N.B. if any "real" quantum chemist or quantum physicist reads this and cringes, please mod this down; it's better to give no information than false information!
Why doesn't Microsoft make their own "MicroTube" video website, with a download button, no advertising, in the free VP8 format,(maybe also stop threatening with patent lawsuits about that coded) and serve it for free (including oodles of cache space bought from Akamai)?
Customers would flock to this, I'm sure. Google now has the network effect on its side with YouTube, but if MicroTube gives better value to its customers than that might slowly change.
Areas with strong democratic traditions tend to have fewer constituents per politician. And Iceland has a very very long tradition of democracy.
You can say that again.. I like the way they called it the "Aling" meaning all-thing ("thing" here has the old connotation of law meeting; it doesn't mean object).
Althing. Est. Anno Domini 930.
That's the essential core of democracy: everybody (well, only men in olden times) can go to the meeting and have their disputes settled and their plans discussed. On a grassy field. Preferably with some partying and quaffing going on afterwards.
Oops! My thorn has fallen off.. Slashdot, how to fix this? = U+00DE or (�xfe;) or þ or what..
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I think you missed the Youtube videos of the Mars 500 simulation somehow.. I especially liked the one about space pizza.
In that case, we'll have to drive our civilization sideways around that road-block for a few centuries, and when our numbers are smaller and our worldwide economy has shrunk to something "renewables-sustainable" we can drive forward again :-)
I see it a bit like Moore's law: it's not a law, it's something we have got used to, but we don't have much faster processors with current technology, we're adapting by having more of them on a chip, having them use less energy, etc. etc.
The Tianhe-2 is constructed from Xeon Phi boards clocked at 1.1 GHz (and faster Intels at 2.2 Ghz) and it is rumored to have already achieved 30 Petaflops.
That does sound like a good way to do it.
So, after this court case, the law has been revoked, yes?
You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out).
What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)?
In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.
Remember economics is not actually real science, it's based on peoples' perceptions and behaviour.
If the models don't fit reality then the models are wrong.
Ergo, coal is ALSO too expensive to be sustainable.
I concur.
Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal it is then.. at least unless ITER and DEMO pay off.
I suspect it's mostly commissioner Karel de Gucht's pet boycot. He's Belgian, but I suspect he's a bit of a US shill or maybe just anti-EU.
Well, since you seem to be the expert here, tell us if the steel in the reinforced concrete of the containment dome is especially depleted from element 27 (name not mentioned to not give people ideas). That's why you mention the gamma scan, amirite? *if* it got activated it has a half-life of 5 years but its a strong gamma emitter according to the wiki page. I once worked at a hospital where they replaced their source. It was an complicated, carefully orchestrated procedure with police protection IIRC.
Call me a cynical dirty hippy, but I have a problem imagining the directors of a commercial nuclear power station handing out a multi-billion dollar contract to clean things up 40 years after they're retired.
Or do you mean the government, payed by the taxpayer, hands out that multi-billion dollar clean-up contract? I agree, good for the economy 40 years onwards, but it's a bit of a broken-windows fallacy. If they hadn't dug up the uranium and built the reactor they wouldn't have to clean it up afterwards either.
If you have to wait some 40-60 years for the iodine and some of the cesium and strontium to decay, it means that:
OK, maybe it wouldn't work in France, as it is difficult for me to imagine a political coalition between Hollande and Le Pen... and if Marine Le Pen becomes the first female presidente, maybe you'd never have to vote again ;-)
I think it is almost a given that certain centre-right political parties (mostly christian democrats in EU countries) attract the type of career politician that is out for power (because his/her party is almost always in government coalition due to the political place in the spectrum), and then after 20 years or so the rot sets in and instead of being a centre-right christian democrat party (religiously conservative, socially between right-wing liberal and labour party) they become the "Party of the Power".
What you can do then in your country is to vote the bastards out and watch them flail and squirm amongst themselves--let the infighting start!
In many countries there has been great progress once the Party of Power is excised from government; and in 4-8 years they can come back, chastised, leaner, and closer to their original centre-right christian democrat ideals, with the powermongers retired or in jail.
IMPORTANT: this mechanism only works in democratic countries with a representative voting system, i.e. the entire democratic world except for commonwealth (US, UK, Canada and Australia IIRC). So in order to let this cleansing mechanism work you must first change the constitution so that every party with more than 3 or 5% of the popular vote can get in governing coalition. For the US this would probably mean a Green Party government with the Republican-Democrat Power Party in opposition. It may seem a bit far-fetched this century, I admit...
have you ever seen electon microscope pictures of bacteriophage T4 virus? they're dodecahedrons. I kid you not. It looks like H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds".
Oh that's interesting. :-)
Why don't they put that at the beginning, saves reading time
But even if on such a financial page it says "the author holds no shares in <company X>", cynical me can't help thinking:
"I'm sure you're telling the truth that you have no shares, but the rich guy who paid you to write this article, probably does! (or is shorting it)"
I'd imagine you can make bio-diesel out of chips waste oil but I thought that diesel was a different type of engine from a gasoline engine. Could you tell us more about what renewable gasoline substitutes are on the horizon? Ethanol? I thought methanol was bad for engines (too corrosive).
That's a bit of a weak argument.. after those special metals have been mined and refined once, after the 20 years or so useful life of the car, they can just be taken out of the car-cass and maybe resmelted a bit. OK if we talk NdFeB supermagnets then you need to remagnetize them somehow after smelting.. I don't actually know how that's done but it probably costs extra electricity (large electromagnet?) unless they use a Niobium-Tin "electromagnet" of course :-)
Remember the three "R" arrows of the recycling symbol are: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. In that order. And if the magnets haven't been above the Curie temperature (80C?) then maybe they can just be re-used.
Somewhere like Ytterby, perhaps..
Problem with rare-earth elements is not that they are rare, but that there are not really lodes (same for Indium IIRC), so that it becomes cheap to get a bulk of ore but expensive to refine.
E.g. Neodymium (I suspect it's needed for wind turbine magnets made of NdFeB, which we Europeans are going to need a lot more of very soon) was apparently mined from some kind of beach sand (Monazite).
That's incorrect: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html (read it; it's very informative!)
:-)
1 A0 sheet of paper has an area of 1 m^2, so if it is "normal" paper of 80 g / m^2 then the A0 sheet weighs 80g and the 8 A3 sheets you can cut from that without any paper loss weigh 10 g each, and each of the 16 "standard" A4 sheets you can cut from it again, without any paper loss weighs 5 g.
It's so perfect that probably aliens use the same ratio 1 : sqrt(2) on their paper
That doesn't help.. Bayesian statistics is difficult to wrap my head around..
<shame>
I have trouble enough understanding the Monty Hall goat-deselection problem without enumerating the solution space..
</shame>
AFAIK, it's simplest to describe things with the time-independent Schrödinger equation: H Psi = E Psi. This is close enough for most stable molecular states in chemistry. However, if you're talking about state transitions or spectroscopy or (as in this case) entanglement, you have no choice but to use the time-dependent Schrödinger equation: i h-bar d Psi / d t = H Psi, which is MUCH more difficult.
That H is not a variable but any suitable Hamiltonian operator, which usually has second-derivative goodness AND a complicated Psi-dependent potential energy term. BTW whoever made that Wikipedia page on the Hamiltonian: thank you, it's very clearly written!
AFAIK, entropy is not described at the quantum level, so Ilya Prigogine's "arrow of time" doesn't really exist, and you can just reverse the behaviour of time by putting a minus sign in front of it and see what happens. In Physics, I read this can be done by drawing a Feynman diagram and turning it upside-down.
I hope this helped answer your question...
N.B. if any "real" quantum chemist or quantum physicist reads this and cringes, please mod this down; it's better to give no information than false information!
I have to keep clipping my eyebrows though...
Why doesn't Microsoft make their own "MicroTube" video website, with a download button, no advertising, in the free VP8 format,(maybe also stop threatening with patent lawsuits about that coded) and serve it for free (including oodles of cache space bought from Akamai)?
Customers would flock to this, I'm sure. Google now has the network effect on its side with YouTube, but if MicroTube gives better value to its customers than that might slowly change.
Maybe the name "MicroTube" sucks (heh) and they can call it "ReallyPlaysForSureForeverBecauseYouCanDownloadItWithoutDRM" or something.
Europeans are lazy gits; we can't be arsed to clamber around in our apple trees all spring(*), wielding a small brush.
Even though it would be the perfect cure for our high unemployment rates!
(* well, *I* can't be arsed; besides, it's a small tree and I'm afraid it would break if I climbed in it).
You can say that again.. I like the way they called it the "Aling" meaning all-thing ("thing" here has the old connotation of law meeting; it doesn't mean object).
Althing. Est. Anno Domini 930.
That's the essential core of democracy: everybody (well, only men in olden times) can go to the meeting and have their disputes settled and their plans discussed. On a grassy field. Preferably with some partying and quaffing going on afterwards.
Oops! My thorn has fallen off.. Slashdot, how to fix this? = U+00DE or (�xfe;) or þ or what..