I don't think it invalidates the pebble bed reactor idea per sé entirely, since the accident at THTR-300 was a stuck ball of fuel in a pipe. IANANE but the Helium coolant seems volatile (i.e. disappears during earthquake) and the graphite moderator balls are flammable (à la Chernobyl).
However, my primary complaint is that whichever reactor model is proposed, the waste disposal issue is a much more difficult problem with underwhelmingly few safe long-term solutions.
For example: let's say a low-lying country wants to stuff steel barrels of vitrified waste in a salt mine underground. 1000 years later, that part of the country is under water. Warm salt water is not good for steel. Now what?
Well, I'm not sure, but for example this waste pool B30 in Sellafield; according to the Wikipedia article it contains Plutonium (presumably Pu-239, half-life 24 200 years) and you can't stay for longer than 2 minutes next to it. That means in the year 244 011 you could stay for more than a day next to it (34 hours). Timespans so large are meaningless. 200 000 years ago was called the "Middle Pleistocene" when Fred Flintstone probably felt more at home than you (think: Smilodon, Mastodon (an uncle of mine once found a molar while fishing on the Oosterschelde), the Würm ice age covering Britain (incl. Sellafield) under 1 km of ice).
WHO is going to clean this mess up?!?? Do you volunteer to work there? Remember, radioactive elements can not be changed by any chemical process, they have to be transmuted in a nuclear reaction or you have to wait until they are naturally decayed.
Imagine good old Fred Flintstone leaving us this mess, I'd hate him for it despite his good-natured antics.
</long_incoherent_rant>
The gist of my incoherent ranting is: the kind of people who are in favour of nuclear fission energy have no concept of exponential processes or of time. There, I said it.
That means the onus of cleaning things up afterward falls on the taxpayer (our far descendants).
TMI, Pennsylvania, USA finished 1993 (14 years, $1 billion, yay!)
THTR-300 pebble bed thorium reactor, Germany 2027
Dodewaard, Netherlands 2045
AVR, Jülich, Germany late 21st century
Superphénix liquid Sodium breeder, France ???
Sellafield, UK ??? profit
Chernobyl, Ukraine ???
In spite of the limited amount of radioactivity released (0.1 GBq Co60, Cs137, Pa233 the THTR management tried to hide the accident, probably because this accident pointed to some specific problems of pebble bed reactors, i.e. pebble flow and radioactive dust. The management probably expected that the emission might not be detected due to the Chernobyl fallout happening just in the same time. However a whistle-blower informed authorities and public. The THTR management continued to charge the Chernobyl fallout for all the contamination in the surrounding, until the presence of Pa-233 in the vicinity of the THTR-300 was detected: Pa233 is not formed in Uranium reactors as Chernobyl, but only in thorium reactors. Thus, step by step, the THTR management reported the whole truth. The activity in the vicinity of the THTR-300 was finally found to result to 25 % from Chernobyl and to 75 % from THTR-300. The handling of this minor accident severely damaged the credibility of the German pebble bed community, and pebble bed reactors lost a lot of support in Germany.[
Protactinium-233 has a half-life of only 27 days, fortunately, unlike Cesium-137 with its 30 year half-life.
and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300:
... It started generating electricity on April 9, 1985, however it did not receive permission from the atomic legal authorizing agency to feed electricity to the grid until November 16, 1985.
On September 1, 1989 the THTR-300 was deactivated due to its ever rising cost: in August, 1989, the THTR-company became almost bankrupt after a long shut down time due to broken components in the hot gas duct. It had to be bailed out by the government with an amount of 92 million Deutschmark (...)
And the aftermath (for the taxpayers):
(...) The remaining facility was "safe enclosed" and dismantling will not start before 2027.
I'd even say that the current "war on terror" is mostly a bunch of idiots who are trying to use the trappings of religion for political purposes, and it isn't the religion itself that is the motivating factor.
If anything, religious tendencies might arguably be a tempering force and usually it is religious leaders who are crying for peace and patience.
That's interesting, because here in Europe, the only American religious leader who did that and gained any media attention, was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and he was mostly depicted in the mainstream news as naïve for his belief the Newyorkers were already ready for the "Ground Zero mosque" reconciliation attempt.
Could you please give examples of other American religious "doves", for example from the Christian communities, because we sure haven't heard a peep from them over here.
h.264 is an "open standard", as is GSM.
An open standard is documented and available standard that can be implemented by different companies or projects and be assured (theoretically) of compatibility because everything about how to implement it is out there in the open.
Your definition of "open standard" is wrong: consider the following:
You say h.264 is an open standard
You say an open standard can be implemented by different companies or projects
So, I can implement h.264 in software and write a program that encodes raw video to h.264
So far I agree with you. However, in the U.S.A and Japan and other jurisdictions that believe in software patents, it would be illegal for me to sell or distribute this program, because someone might actually use it, and then they would have to pay MPEG-LA their patent license dues.
So you may call it an "open standard" if it can be implemented, but I believe most people implement standards with the purpose of actually being allowed to also use the resulting computer program executable:-)
Agreed!
Lesson 1: if you find it difficult to create a sustainable mini-ecosystem where the first martian pioneers can survive and thrive, don't fuck up the only known (but complex) ecosystem which is proven to work.
(...) some basic appreciation of the fact that we, people, are very resourceful and ingenious and that our collective intelligence and capacity to manipulate our environment to suit our needs is a very potent force, as consistently demonstrated in modern history.
Because scientists have managed to improve our capacity to manipulate our environment so far, by the lucky byproducts of their labor, we expect this to continue. That's normal.
But, we also live in reality. When scientists point out that there are expected results from our behaviour, and that everyone should modify their behaviour instead of only waiting for the scientists/industrialists to modify our environment, they are painted as "extremist Malthusian doomsayers".
One expression I learned from reading the OilDrum blog, and that may be very interesting to you is "EROEI":
Energy Returned On Energy Invested. This is a coin that can't be manipulated.
plus it is humiliating and tedious to collect government handouts,
I think this is the most important factor, because we are social animals. Unfortunately, I'm not a sociologist or economist so I have no idea where the optimal point is for any given society for their unemployment benefits level.
I suspect that in countries that don't have or can't afford this subsistence-level unemployment benefits (such as the USA and developing countries), the arguments for or against it cannot easily be discussed, because the real reasons why people work or don't work under this (European-like) system can sometimes be vague and difficult to quantify, i.e. it's not always clear-cut when people start looking for a job because they are shamed into it by their near and dear:-).
b) and d) I believe you when you say so. Maybe it's limited to MS Windows PDF readers then, because I haven't heard of this with Linux.
a)
Why, exactly? What business is it of anyone's what format I want to read something in? Suppose I want to read it from a console. Most pdf to text converters have a 50% success rate at best.
Yes, of course, you can do what you like:-) What I meant was: PDF being designed as a "end-of-the-line" format, it is generally much easier to edit the texts in the precursor format from which your word processor made the PDF, and because PDF is not meant for editing, it can be difficult.
Bad analogy: If you want to move (=edit) a painting (=text), you *can* carefully break open a wall with a fresco on it and transport the whole thing to a different museum, but most painters who care about the portability of their art-medium paint on a lightweight piece of canvas instead of on a wall. And when they do paint on a wall, they know it's not meant to be moved (e.g. Sistine Chapel).
Although Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format became an ISO standard two years ago, the company still hasn't built any software that truly complies with the standard.
Maybe it's fixed now in MS Office 2010, that article was from April 2010 after all.
IMHO it was a very appropriate "lol":-)
What if the choice is between PDF, DOC and ODF?
ODF is meant to be editable, and there are efforts to compare how it renders in different word processors and viewers (http://officeshots.org/).
There are no current scandals around ODF in the news, but that doesn't mean there has been no progress in crafting ODF 1.2 (currently committee draft #5, maybe published still this year) and to make it work on a lot of platforms:-)
a) it's not meant to be converted to anything else
b) that's not a problem of PDFs but of Adobe Acrobat
c) see a); use an ODF file if you want it editable.
d) really?? I'm guessing this is b) again.
The Linux graphics drivers are in a state of extremely heavy development at the moment, you can follow the fun here, here and here. The main Phoronix website also has a lot of articles.
Why in your opinion do the hard working have a duty to carry the lazy on their shoulders?
That's actually a really good question, and possibly the key to this whole discussion.
In my opinion, the answer is: because they, for their own personal reasons, want to show solidarity to "the lazy" (as you call them).
Seeing as how most of the viewing audience of Slashdot seems to be Americans, and I've read discussions where the word was painstakingly circumscribed, you may want to look that word up in a dictionary.
It's a difficult word, "solidarity".
But I think it's an essential component of any viable society (another difficult word, "society" comes from "socius", "companion". Or "comrade" as you describe it;-). But you don't always have to like your "companions"--it's more neutral than "comrade").
The essence, I think, is that you're not required to like solidarity, but many people see it as something that is necessary nevertheless (maybe like paying taxes).
Maybe it depends on a mental picture of exchanging places with someone else, which would leave most people with a feeling that it's not good that people have it much worse than themselves. I can't explain it better than this unfortunately:-( Any sociologists around here??
In this context, you and the other Slashdotters might be interested in this recent BBC article: From grinding poverty to Hollywood in three generations - Richard Bilton. It's about poor people in 1910 participating in a statistical study about poverty in the U.K., which for the first time put some concrete data to light: e.g.
Monday:
* Breakfast - Tea, bread and margarine
* Dinner - Tea, bread and margarine
* Supper - Tea, bread
(presumably this was before the guy who wrote that diary got his job in the chocolate factory).
Do you happen to work for Trafigura, by any chance?
They could have paid a disposal fee of € 500 000 in Amsterdam, instead they opted to make 30 000 West-Africans sick and still ended up having to pay US$ 198 000 000 cleanup fee.
Sounds like exactly the same attitude towards reality, environment regulations and profits that you display here.
TANSTAAFL indeed.
US-China trade statistics
Guess where most people on our world live who buy cheap chinese products.
Hint: it's not the USA.
Hence, if the USA goes bankrupt, they'll have a heavy economic loss, of 18%, but it may be survivable:
Table 7: China's first trade partner is the USA, with 221 billion $ in 2009.
Table 4: China's trade with the world: export in 2009 is 1202 billion $, that gives export to the USA a 18.3% share.
I'm a European, and I thought there was evolution in the USA when you lot elected Barack Obama.
After Rupert Murdoch and your "Tea party" votes his party out in the midterm elections coming November, can you make sure he steps down and looks for employment here?
We've got an economic crisis going, on and could do with a good prime-minister (in both countries I've lived in). Apparently we appreciate him more than you, so give him to us:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it invalidates the pebble bed reactor idea per sé entirely, since the accident at THTR-300 was a stuck ball of fuel in a pipe. IANANE but the Helium coolant seems volatile (i.e. disappears during earthquake) and the graphite moderator balls are flammable (à la Chernobyl).
However, my primary complaint is that whichever reactor model is proposed, the waste disposal issue is a much more difficult problem with underwhelmingly few safe long-term solutions.
For example: let's say a low-lying country wants to stuff steel barrels of vitrified waste in a salt mine underground. 1000 years later, that part of the country is under water. Warm salt water is not good for steel. Now what?
Well, I'm not sure, but for example this waste pool B30 in Sellafield; according to the Wikipedia article it contains Plutonium (presumably Pu-239, half-life 24 200 years) and you can't stay for longer than 2 minutes next to it. That means in the year 244 011 you could stay for more than a day next to it (34 hours). Timespans so large are meaningless. 200 000 years ago was called the "Middle Pleistocene" when Fred Flintstone probably felt more at home than you (think: Smilodon, Mastodon (an uncle of mine once found a molar while fishing on the Oosterschelde), the Würm ice age covering Britain (incl. Sellafield) under 1 km of ice).
WHO is going to clean this mess up?!?? Do you volunteer to work there? Remember, radioactive elements can not be changed by any chemical process, they have to be transmuted in a nuclear reaction or you have to wait until they are naturally decayed.
Imagine good old Fred Flintstone leaving us this mess, I'd hate him for it despite his good-natured antics.
</long_incoherent_rant>
The gist of my incoherent ranting is: the kind of people who are in favour of nuclear fission energy have no concept of exponential processes or of time. There, I said it.
That means the onus of cleaning things up afterward falls on the taxpayer (our far descendants).
TMI, Pennsylvania, USA finished 1993 (14 years, $1 billion, yay!)
THTR-300 pebble bed thorium reactor, Germany 2027
Dodewaard, Netherlands 2045
AVR, Jülich, Germany late 21st century
Superphénix liquid Sodium breeder, France ???
Sellafield, UK ??? profit
Chernobyl, Ukraine ???
Protactinium-233 has a half-life of only 27 days, fortunately, unlike Cesium-137 with its 30 year half-life.
and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300:
And the aftermath (for the taxpayers):
I think you'd make a good Imperial Planetologist :-)
That's interesting, because here in Europe, the only American religious leader who did that and gained any media attention, was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and he was mostly depicted in the mainstream news as naïve for his belief the Newyorkers were already ready for the "Ground Zero mosque" reconciliation attempt.
Could you please give examples of other American religious "doves", for example from the Christian communities, because we sure haven't heard a peep from them over here.
Well, the Dutch neurobiologist Dick Swaab was practically ostracized for his work on brain differences between homo- and hetero-men. Apparently, homos have a bigger one.
I mean suprachiasmatic nucleus, of course.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_hormones_and_sexual_orientation
Your definition of "open standard" is wrong: consider the following:
So far I agree with you. However, in the U.S.A and Japan and other jurisdictions that believe in software patents, it would be illegal for me to sell or distribute this program, because someone might actually use it, and then they would have to pay MPEG-LA their patent license dues. :-)
So you may call it an "open standard" if it can be implemented, but I believe most people implement standards with the purpose of actually being allowed to also use the resulting computer program executable
Agreed!
Lesson 1: if you find it difficult to create a sustainable mini-ecosystem where the first martian pioneers can survive and thrive, don't fuck up the only known (but complex) ecosystem which is proven to work.
I dunno, maybe this computer using this software and accessing this network seems a good start.
Because scientists have managed to improve our capacity to manipulate our environment so far, by the lucky byproducts of their labor, we expect this to continue. That's normal.
But, we also live in reality. When scientists point out that there are expected results from our behaviour, and that everyone should modify their behaviour instead of only waiting for the scientists/industrialists to modify our environment, they are painted as "extremist Malthusian doomsayers".
One expression I learned from reading the OilDrum blog, and that may be very interesting to you is "EROEI": Energy Returned On Energy Invested. This is a coin that can't be manipulated.
I think this is the most important factor, because we are social animals. Unfortunately, I'm not a sociologist or economist so I have no idea where the optimal point is for any given society for their unemployment benefits level. :-).
I suspect that in countries that don't have or can't afford this subsistence-level unemployment benefits (such as the USA and developing countries), the arguments for or against it cannot easily be discussed, because the real reasons why people work or don't work under this (European-like) system can sometimes be vague and difficult to quantify, i.e. it's not always clear-cut when people start looking for a job because they are shamed into it by their near and dear
Aha, and that in turn explains the two Swedish women...
a)
Why, exactly? What business is it of anyone's what format I want to read something in? Suppose I want to read it from a console. Most pdf to text converters have a 50% success rate at best.
Yes, of course, you can do what you like :-) What I meant was: PDF being designed as a "end-of-the-line" format, it is generally much easier to edit the texts in the precursor format from which your word processor made the PDF, and because PDF is not meant for editing, it can be difficult.
Bad analogy: If you want to move (=edit) a painting (=text), you *can* carefully break open a wall with a fresco on it and transport the whole thing to a different museum, but most painters who care about the portability of their art-medium paint on a lightweight piece of canvas instead of on a wall. And when they do paint on a wall, they know it's not meant to be moved (e.g. Sistine Chapel).
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/iso-ooxml-convener-microsofts-format-heading-for-failure.ars
Maybe it's fixed now in MS Office 2010, that article was from April 2010 after all. :-)
IMHO it was a very appropriate "lol"
What if the choice is between PDF, DOC and ODF? :-)
ODF is meant to be editable, and there are efforts to compare how it renders in different word processors and viewers (http://officeshots.org/).
There are no current scandals around ODF in the news, but that doesn't mean there has been no progress in crafting ODF 1.2 (currently committee draft #5, maybe published still this year) and to make it work on a lot of platforms
a) it's not meant to be converted to anything else b) that's not a problem of PDFs but of Adobe Acrobat c) see a); use an ODF file if you want it editable. d) really?? I'm guessing this is b) again.
The Linux graphics drivers are in a state of extremely heavy development at the moment, you can follow the fun here, here and here. The main Phoronix website also has a lot of articles.
That's actually a really good question, and possibly the key to this whole discussion. ;-). But you don't always have to like your "companions"--it's more neutral than "comrade").
:-( Any sociologists around here??
In my opinion, the answer is: because they, for their own personal reasons, want to show solidarity to "the lazy" (as you call them).
Seeing as how most of the viewing audience of Slashdot seems to be Americans, and I've read discussions where the word was painstakingly circumscribed, you may want to look that word up in a dictionary.
It's a difficult word, "solidarity".
But I think it's an essential component of any viable society (another difficult word, "society" comes from "socius", "companion". Or "comrade" as you describe it
The essence, I think, is that you're not required to like solidarity, but many people see it as something that is necessary nevertheless (maybe like paying taxes).
Maybe it depends on a mental picture of exchanging places with someone else, which would leave most people with a feeling that it's not good that people have it much worse than themselves. I can't explain it better than this unfortunately
You're describing a Progressive tax system. I thought every country had this as income tax formula :-)
(presumably this was before the guy who wrote that diary got his job in the chocolate factory).
That's bullshit.
Do you happen to work for Trafigura, by any chance?
They could have paid a disposal fee of € 500 000 in Amsterdam, instead they opted to make 30 000 West-Africans sick and still ended up having to pay US$ 198 000 000 cleanup fee.
Sounds like exactly the same attitude towards reality, environment regulations and profits that you display here.
TANSTAAFL indeed.
US-China trade statistics
Guess where most people on our world live who buy cheap chinese products. Hint: it's not the USA.
Hence, if the USA goes bankrupt, they'll have a heavy economic loss, of 18%, but it may be survivable:
Table 7: China's first trade partner is the USA, with 221 billion $ in 2009.
Table 4: China's trade with the world: export in 2009 is 1202 billion $, that gives export to the USA a 18.3% share.
Replying to undo inadvertent downmod. Good idea!
I'm a European, and I thought there was evolution in the USA when you lot elected Barack Obama. :-)
After Rupert Murdoch and your "Tea party" votes his party out in the midterm elections coming November, can you make sure he steps down and looks for employment here?
We've got an economic crisis going, on and could do with a good prime-minister (in both countries I've lived in). Apparently we appreciate him more than you, so give him to us