Well from what I gathered from the the JET talk funding wasn't an issue. They're already planning for the next reactor now based on technology they're expecting to learn with the Iter reactor; they've staggered the research so that one reactor follows the previous one as fast as possible, and I don't think there's much room to speed things up.
This will take time, we just can't wait for it or throw money at it and hope a miracle happens; if we can't work with what we have now we're just giving ourselves an excuse to leave it to the next generation (when it'll be even harder to deal with, and they'll have to make an even harder decision to wait or act now)
Remember that for fission it's already viable; the R&D goes into making it safer, more efficient, burn cheaper fuels, last longer, etc. The hard part is done, now it's just about improving a viable design. An odd time to decide to only devote research to a new technology
In fact the Americans commissioned a report asking "what can we learn from Chernobyl?", the answer was "nothing". When the Three Mile Island incident occurred, and was contained successfully, they actually build containment at Chernobyl. But they only build full containment around one side, and only half protected the other side.
If one of the contained reactors had blown the sarcophagus would have already been built, and it wouldn't have been so serious.
It's worth remembering that Chernobyl was a military reactor re-tooled to generate power. As you said it was never an example of a good civilian reactor. They say it's obsolete now, but it was always obsolete.
Well from what I gathered from the guy giving the JET talk funding wasn't an issue. They're already planning for the next reactor now based on technology they're expecting to learn with the Iter reactor; they've staggered the research so that one reactor follows the previous one as fast as possible, and I don't think there's much room to speed things up.
This will take time, we just can't wait for it or throw money at it and hope a miracle happens; if we can't work with what we have now we're just giving ourselves an excuse to leave it to the next generation (when it'll be even harder to deal with, and they'll have to make an even harder decision to wait or act now)
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
False. One European country gets a majority of their power from nuclear -- France. And the only reason France does is that they have no other feasible options (little coal, oil, or other domestic energy source).
France sells 18% of its nuclear power to neighboring countries (like Germany) which like to claim they have anti-nuclear pro-renewable policies. Lithuania is also powered by 70% nuclear, and are looking to replace their old Soviet reactor with a new EU one. Sweden gets 52% of its energy from nuclear, Ukraine gets 51%.
That counts as "a few" right? And most of the rest are at ~20-30% and looking to increase it (
The Italian energy minister has said that ditching nuclear in the early 90's was "a huge mistake", and they started back on the road to nuclear in 2008).
I think my point that "the power is cheap and will scale" is supported here.
growing piles of waste potentially for a million years?
If waste is radioactive for a million years it doesn't emit enough radiation to be dangerous (It's called "physics"). The concern is the mid/high-level waste, which lasts a few thousand years.
In breeder reactors nuclear waste is a fissile fuel, that waste will end up as a commodity once enrichable uranium becomes more expensive. And who knows what future tech might also be able to deal with radioactive waste?
Maybe once fusion is available to provide a powerful source of neutrons we can use it to break the waste down, maybe nanotech advances will allow us to build far better containers, maybe we'll figure out the material to make a space elevator so getting rid of it is cheap.
We have bigger problems facing us now which we don't have until the end of civilization to solve.
the threat of Human error/stupidity/wilful sabotage is alway there.
Modern reactors have physical limitations which prevent meltdowns/explosions. e.g. Chernobyl happened because of stupidity + an explosive moderator. An explosive moderator for a nuclear plant was decided to be a bad design choice, so now they're inert; Chernobyl can't happen with other reactors.
Other physical limitations in even newer reactors make meltdowns physically impossible.
As for stupidity and terrorism; those are sad, sad reasons to halt progress..
FYI, there are accidents of varying degrees of severity all the time.
Accidents varying from what to what? I haven't heard of any serious injury at a nuclear plant except at Chernobyl (did Three Mile Island even have any?), so I'm guessing they varying from stubbing a toe to spilling some hot coffee.
Homer Simpson isn't really a nuclear safety technician; nuclear power has a great safety record compared to other power sources (except for wind, solar, and hamster-wheel power of course).
Already Alberta is floating the idea of 12 never-built-before reactors to supply the energy to extract Oil from the Tar sands without the sarcophagus because these new plants theoretically can't melt down and darn it if building all those pesky safety features takes time and money.
Maybe it can't melt down? Maybe we've learned a thing or two since Chernobyl? I don't know why some people can't get their head around the idea that fission reactor designs can improve
By the way oil companies deciding to use nuclear power, so that the public can generate their power with oil, is a really bizarre scenario of the sort which only seems to happen when the public is being superstitious.
Wind, Solar, Solar Thermal, Geothermal ect. are also ready to go now.
Then why does no country get a significant portion of its power from them? The ultimate test of whether a power source is viable is "does anyone use it?"
(Please no examples of icelandic towns on a volcano using geothermal, villages in scotland using wind or saharan communities using solar, no stats about new/future technology or conspiracy theories about power companies).
Renewables are expensive, can be environmentally damaging (solar panels are dirty to make, hydro-electric has huge impacts of course), may not be available everywhere, and can't scale. If this wasn't true we'd be using it already. If research into these technologies makes them viable then great, but we need solutions now.
You can ask for the government switch to renewables all you want, but they'll never do it and nothing will change. What you'll get are token gestures like a solar plant that powers a few thousand homes and a useless carbon capture plant. Perhaps instead of building a coal/nuclear plant they'll import coal/nuclear power from your neighboring country, which has stronger leadership or a more reasonable populace.
Boron fusion solves the second two issues. The Bussard polywell design is looking promising, and the navy's still funding it after testing some prototypes, so...
A good response to this information: Sounds interesting, I'd be interested in reading a report on it to decide if it's worth funding some R&D
A bad, but all too common response: Fission isn't the answer to solving global warming, I heard about this boron thing and it sounds really good; once that comes along we'll be set, so let's not be hasty and start building fission plants. The researchers said just a few more years, by the time we've built a new generation of plants they'll be done
If you want a real ecological disaster try heavy metal poisoning with radiation.
Another example of the double standards fission faces when it comes to safety.
We dump our electronics full of toxic chemicals in land fills, factories all over the world have filled rivers with all sorts of industrial waste, we used to (and in many places still do) discharge cities worth of sewage directly into rivers, but when it comes to nuclear waste secure burial in a radiation absorbing medium in an underground concrete bunker isn't enough.
Yet this goes even further than the usual double-standard because you actually don't have a problem with nuclear waste from a fusion plant, just from fission plants. But that's green nuclear waste of course; high-tech nuclear waste, powered by water and magnetic coils.
Also those prices don't include decommissioning cost.
Really? They do where I come from, because how else is the company that built it going to decommission it?
I thought the lifetimes of the reactors had increased because the safety margins were large, designs were sound, and estimates were conservative.
Well, all the more reason to get started right away then!
We have started, we're building Iter at the moment, and by the time Iter is in full swing we'll be working on the next one. They're going just about as fast as they can, but it'll still take too long.
Are you looking at cost including all development of the technology or cost once the technology is mature? Have you included costs that are not directly related to running the fusion plant, such as environmental cost of alternatives?
Look at it whichever way you like; how much will the research cost before it becomes commercial, or how much will the reactors cost, how much will the power cost at your house, how long will the reactors last for.
Except for the fuel we just don't know how much it'll cost, and what will we do if the perfect power supply that we're all waiting for turns out to cost too much to be economical?
It is not at all "like any fission plant". The volumes and halflife of the waste are much smaller, and therefore much more managable. Think "hundreds of years" instead of hundreds of thousands.
We're worried about the high-level waste. The stuff that is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years isn't a concern (except for its toxicity) because obviously to have a huge half-life it has to be very inactive.
Also the method they'll use to contain the fusion radiation is still being developed. Liquid sodium is an option, but they don't know and you're comparing the best-case future scenario for fusion with existing fission technology (and not even comparing with fission waste reprocessing)
Tritium is helpful but not required.
My understanding was tritium is the T in "D-T" fuel that Iter will be using. Unless you're talking about some different type of fusion that'll take even longer to develop I think there'll be a long waiting period for commercial reactors to ramp up because they have to wait for tritium.
That's only true for France.
Fair enough, but supposing you need a carbon-free fuel source now. A good way to do it would be to look at the world's power generators by %, because actual usage is the best test of viability.
You'll see nuclear up at the top, and limited availability hydro-electric power, followed a long ways off by solar/wind.
The fuel for fusion reactors is effectively unlimited while uranium is a finite resource just like oil.
Fissile fuels are abundant. We have about as much thorium as we have lead. Just like fusion the cost of the power is the cost of the plant.
The amount of radioactive waste is far more managable with fusion. And there is no risk of a meltdown. Other than that, they are completely the same...
Talk to me about the pros and cons of fusion waste when it's ready. Until then we just don't know.
Regarding meltdown new reactors are critically safe; meaning that there is no risk of a meltdown. Instead of the fusion research which has gone into making it work the last decades of fission research have gone into making it safer, output less waste, use different kinds of fuel.
Why accept that fusion can advance but dismiss fission; surely if it was dangerous then it must be now right?
It has had plenty of accidents so far, and that "one" accident you refer to (probably meant to be Chernobyl, but possibly Three Mile Island or Windscale) laid waste to a significant part of a country. I'm not opposed to fission power at all, but don't bullshit us about safety. There is a clear risk and the potential damage done if something goes wrong is immense.
Three Mile Island was handled fine and nothing came of it, and Windscale was about generating plutonium for a nuclear device and bears no resemblance to a nuclear plant (and although it's not nuclear power so I'm not interested in d
Now the "its available now" comes with a caveat. What to do with the waste?
Bury it. It's a relatively small problem which we can solve when we have better tech (assuming the waste won't become a commodity), we have bigger things to worry about now.
First it is *not* cheap.
"Cheap" is relative, and hard to work out. Should we include a portion of the potential cost of dealing with global warming into the price of a coal plant? Nuclear power, as you said, includes the cost of decommissioning and clean-up.
Also we don't know how long these plants last. Our current generations of reactors have been able to run long past their original estimated expiry dates; when the cost of the fuel is so cheap and plants last a very long time the cost of the plant has to be taken in context.
Yes Chernobyl occurred because of human stupidity, but it also occurred because of new undeveloped technology because in a modern reactor you can't make the sorts of mistakes they made. Also an accident became a disaster because the moderator was explosive, it isn't any more.
"[New energy source] or bust" is a very irresponsible thing to say; we need to learn to compromise. But I'll just focus on your particular suggestion of fusion:
We don't know when it'll be ready: I went to a talk by one of the guys behind the JET reactor and he said 30-40 years before the first commercial reactor
We don't know how much it'll cost: What use will fusion be if it costs more than current power sources?
It isn't radiation free: The huge neutron flux it outputs makes the reactor walls highly radioactive, it produces high-level nuclear waste just like any fission plant
It needs tritium: Yes fusion plants can produce tritium, but this is a long process and means that even once the technology is ready it'll still be a couple of decades before we have enough tritium being generated to start up large numbers of new power plants
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead. Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
It's available now: We cannot wait for the perfect power supply. We need to change over now. We've got the fuel, the tech, the experience. All we need is for the public to get their heads out of their asses and learn to accept compromise.
if they invest in solar/wind and managed to improve efficiency enough to reduce demand for oil then they lose money
Before someone comments that they'd be selling panels/turbines instead of oil; remember oil is a commodity, panels/turbines are a technology. They would much rather deal with selling energy rather than selling energy generators.
The problem is there's a conflict of interest; if they invest in solar/wind and managed to improve efficiency enough to reduce demand for oil then they lose money. They will promote whichever energy source gives them the largest profits, and don't have an incentive to invest in new energy sources when there are hugely profitable oil fields to look for.
Don't get me wrong I'm not a crackpot who thinks you can power the world with solar/wind, but I do think oil companies need a bit of government coercion to invest in research.
Have you seen Dell's YouTube video? They actually call it an aphrodisiac (no joke), and say they want to "redefine power".
It's clearly trying to be the Mac "meet the designers" segment (right down to the foreign sounding artistic designer), but it ends up more like a parody of one.
Remember Apple's iPhone conference for enterprises? It could be summarized as "With MS Exchange iPhone is perfect for corporations and is used by loads of fortune 500 companies."
In fact the GP is probably from the corporate world himself, and his manager may have bought into Apple's short-lived corporate iPhone thing
Even Firefox has different rendering modes depending on what sort of site it's looking at. Most web-dev plugins for it will tell you whether it's rendering in Standards mode or Quirks mode.
It's more about pragmatism than sloppiness; they need to support new sites which need a correct implementation of standards, and they need to support the old sites used in corporate internets which are kludgy messes, that no-one would dare try and update.
It has existed for some time, and even supports it on some very cheap hardware, by calculating and storing the speech synth on a PC while the player is plugged in.
The shuffle also works that way; it sounds different on Windows than on OS X.
The Clinton incident was a farce. If the American populace had one ounce of common sense, they'd have shoved the media hype down the boulevard press' throat.
He lied under oath, if he had told the truth right away he would definitely have stayed on at least until the end of his term.
I didn't see anything in the article about Helium removal. I thought that was the biggest remaining problem with nuclear fusion -- removing the Helium-4 "waste" from the reaction before the Helium "poisons" it and shuts down. Someone please correct me. I'm sure that's not entirely accurate.
Geez, just use a fan.. Those NIF guys must really need some fresh blood.
We're talking about the manufacturing process data for a critical piece of a thermonuclear bomb which makes up the majority of the world's third largest nuclear power's arsenal, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Well from what I gathered from the the JET talk funding wasn't an issue. They're already planning for the next reactor now based on technology they're expecting to learn with the Iter reactor; they've staggered the research so that one reactor follows the previous one as fast as possible, and I don't think there's much room to speed things up. This will take time, we just can't wait for it or throw money at it and hope a miracle happens; if we can't work with what we have now we're just giving ourselves an excuse to leave it to the next generation (when it'll be even harder to deal with, and they'll have to make an even harder decision to wait or act now)
Remember that for fission it's already viable; the R&D goes into making it safer, more efficient, burn cheaper fuels, last longer, etc. The hard part is done, now it's just about improving a viable design. An odd time to decide to only devote research to a new technology
In fact the Americans commissioned a report asking "what can we learn from Chernobyl?", the answer was "nothing". When the Three Mile Island incident occurred, and was contained successfully, they actually build containment at Chernobyl. But they only build full containment around one side, and only half protected the other side.
If one of the contained reactors had blown the sarcophagus would have already been built, and it wouldn't have been so serious.
It's worth remembering that Chernobyl was a military reactor re-tooled to generate power. As you said it was never an example of a good civilian reactor. They say it's obsolete now, but it was always obsolete.
Well from what I gathered from the guy giving the JET talk funding wasn't an issue. They're already planning for the next reactor now based on technology they're expecting to learn with the Iter reactor; they've staggered the research so that one reactor follows the previous one as fast as possible, and I don't think there's much room to speed things up.
This will take time, we just can't wait for it or throw money at it and hope a miracle happens; if we can't work with what we have now we're just giving ourselves an excuse to leave it to the next generation (when it'll be even harder to deal with, and they'll have to make an even harder decision to wait or act now)
False. One European country gets a majority of their power from nuclear -- France. And the only reason France does is that they have no other feasible options (little coal, oil, or other domestic energy source).
France sells 18% of its nuclear power to neighboring countries (like Germany) which like to claim they have anti-nuclear pro-renewable policies. Lithuania is also powered by 70% nuclear, and are looking to replace their old Soviet reactor with a new EU one. Sweden gets 52% of its energy from nuclear, Ukraine gets 51%.
That counts as "a few" right? And most of the rest are at ~20-30% and looking to increase it ( The Italian energy minister has said that ditching nuclear in the early 90's was "a huge mistake", and they started back on the road to nuclear in 2008).
I think my point that "the power is cheap and will scale" is supported here.
growing piles of waste potentially for a million years?
If waste is radioactive for a million years it doesn't emit enough radiation to be dangerous (It's called "physics"). The concern is the mid/high-level waste, which lasts a few thousand years.
In breeder reactors nuclear waste is a fissile fuel, that waste will end up as a commodity once enrichable uranium becomes more expensive. And who knows what future tech might also be able to deal with radioactive waste?
Maybe once fusion is available to provide a powerful source of neutrons we can use it to break the waste down, maybe nanotech advances will allow us to build far better containers, maybe we'll figure out the material to make a space elevator so getting rid of it is cheap.
We have bigger problems facing us now which we don't have until the end of civilization to solve.
the threat of Human error/stupidity/wilful sabotage is alway there.
Modern reactors have physical limitations which prevent meltdowns/explosions. e.g. Chernobyl happened because of stupidity + an explosive moderator. An explosive moderator for a nuclear plant was decided to be a bad design choice, so now they're inert; Chernobyl can't happen with other reactors.
Other physical limitations in even newer reactors make meltdowns physically impossible.
As for stupidity and terrorism; those are sad, sad reasons to halt progress..
FYI, there are accidents of varying degrees of severity all the time.
Accidents varying from what to what? I haven't heard of any serious injury at a nuclear plant except at Chernobyl (did Three Mile Island even have any?), so I'm guessing they varying from stubbing a toe to spilling some hot coffee.
Homer Simpson isn't really a nuclear safety technician; nuclear power has a great safety record compared to other power sources (except for wind, solar, and hamster-wheel power of course).
Already Alberta is floating the idea of 12 never-built-before reactors to supply the energy to extract Oil from the Tar sands without the sarcophagus because these new plants theoretically can't melt down and darn it if building all those pesky safety features takes time and money.
Maybe it can't melt down? Maybe we've learned a thing or two since Chernobyl? I don't know why some people can't get their head around the idea that fission reactor designs can improve
By the way oil companies deciding to use nuclear power, so that the public can generate their power with oil, is a really bizarre scenario of the sort which only seems to happen when the public is being superstitious.
Wind, Solar, Solar Thermal, Geothermal ect. are also ready to go now.
Then why does no country get a significant portion of its power from them? The ultimate test of whether a power source is viable is "does anyone use it?"
(Please no examples of icelandic towns on a volcano using geothermal, villages in scotland using wind or saharan communities using solar, no stats about new/future technology or conspiracy theories about power companies).
Renewables are expensive, can be environmentally damaging (solar panels are dirty to make, hydro-electric has huge impacts of course), may not be available everywhere, and can't scale.
If this wasn't true we'd be using it already. If research into these technologies makes them viable then great, but we need solutions now.
You can ask for the government switch to renewables all you want, but they'll never do it and nothing will change. What you'll get are token gestures like a solar plant that powers a few thousand homes and a useless carbon capture plant. Perhaps instead of building a coal/nuclear plant they'll import coal/nuclear power from your neighboring country, which has stronger leadership or a more reasonable populace.
Boron fusion solves the second two issues. The Bussard polywell design is looking promising, and the navy's still funding it after testing some prototypes, so...
A good response to this information: Sounds interesting, I'd be interested in reading a report on it to decide if it's worth funding some R&D
A bad, but all too common response: Fission isn't the answer to solving global warming, I heard about this boron thing and it sounds really good; once that comes along we'll be set, so let's not be hasty and start building fission plants. The researchers said just a few more years, by the time we've built a new generation of plants they'll be done
If you want a real ecological disaster try heavy metal poisoning with radiation.
Another example of the double standards fission faces when it comes to safety.
We dump our electronics full of toxic chemicals in land fills, factories all over the world have filled rivers with all sorts of industrial waste, we used to (and in many places still do) discharge cities worth of sewage directly into rivers, but when it comes to nuclear waste secure burial in a radiation absorbing medium in an underground concrete bunker isn't enough.
Yet this goes even further than the usual double-standard because you actually don't have a problem with nuclear waste from a fusion plant, just from fission plants. But that's green nuclear waste of course; high-tech nuclear waste, powered by water and magnetic coils.
Also those prices don't include decommissioning cost.
Really? They do where I come from, because how else is the company that built it going to decommission it?
I thought the lifetimes of the reactors had increased because the safety margins were large, designs were sound, and estimates were conservative.
Well, all the more reason to get started right away then!
We have started, we're building Iter at the moment, and by the time Iter is in full swing we'll be working on the next one. They're going just about as fast as they can, but it'll still take too long.
Are you looking at cost including all development of the technology or cost once the technology is mature? Have you included costs that are not directly related to running the fusion plant, such as environmental cost of alternatives?
Look at it whichever way you like; how much will the research cost before it becomes commercial, or how much will the reactors cost, how much will the power cost at your house, how long will the reactors last for.
Except for the fuel we just don't know how much it'll cost, and what will we do if the perfect power supply that we're all waiting for turns out to cost too much to be economical?
It is not at all "like any fission plant". The volumes and halflife of the waste are much smaller, and therefore much more managable. Think "hundreds of years" instead of hundreds of thousands.
We're worried about the high-level waste. The stuff that is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years isn't a concern (except for its toxicity) because obviously to have a huge half-life it has to be very inactive.
Also the method they'll use to contain the fusion radiation is still being developed. Liquid sodium is an option, but they don't know and you're comparing the best-case future scenario for fusion with existing fission technology (and not even comparing with fission waste reprocessing)
Tritium is helpful but not required.
My understanding was tritium is the T in "D-T" fuel that Iter will be using. Unless you're talking about some different type of fusion that'll take even longer to develop I think there'll be a long waiting period for commercial reactors to ramp up because they have to wait for tritium.
That's only true for France.
Fair enough, but supposing you need a carbon-free fuel source now. A good way to do it would be to look at the world's power generators by %, because actual usage is the best test of viability.
You'll see nuclear up at the top, and limited availability hydro-electric power, followed a long ways off by solar/wind.
The fuel for fusion reactors is effectively unlimited while uranium is a finite resource just like oil.
Fissile fuels are abundant. We have about as much thorium as we have lead. Just like fusion the cost of the power is the cost of the plant.
The amount of radioactive waste is far more managable with fusion. And there is no risk of a meltdown. Other than that, they are completely the same...
Talk to me about the pros and cons of fusion waste when it's ready. Until then we just don't know.
Regarding meltdown new reactors are critically safe; meaning that there is no risk of a meltdown. Instead of the fusion research which has gone into making it work the last decades of fission research have gone into making it safer, output less waste, use different kinds of fuel.
Why accept that fusion can advance but dismiss fission; surely if it was dangerous then it must be now right?
It has had plenty of accidents so far, and that "one" accident you refer to (probably meant to be Chernobyl, but possibly Three Mile Island or Windscale) laid waste to a significant part of a country. I'm not opposed to fission power at all, but don't bullshit us about safety. There is a clear risk and the potential damage done if something goes wrong is immense.
Three Mile Island was handled fine and nothing came of it, and Windscale was about generating plutonium for a nuclear device and bears no resemblance to a nuclear plant (and although it's not nuclear power so I'm not interested in d
Now the "its available now" comes with a caveat. What to do with the waste?
Bury it. It's a relatively small problem which we can solve when we have better tech (assuming the waste won't become a commodity), we have bigger things to worry about now.
First it is *not* cheap.
"Cheap" is relative, and hard to work out. Should we include a portion of the potential cost of dealing with global warming into the price of a coal plant? Nuclear power, as you said, includes the cost of decommissioning and clean-up.
Also we don't know how long these plants last. Our current generations of reactors have been able to run long past their original estimated expiry dates; when the cost of the fuel is so cheap and plants last a very long time the cost of the plant has to be taken in context.
Yes Chernobyl occurred because of human stupidity, but it also occurred because of new undeveloped technology because in a modern reactor you can't make the sorts of mistakes they made. Also an accident became a disaster because the moderator was explosive, it isn't any more.
"[New energy source] or bust" is a very irresponsible thing to say; we need to learn to compromise. But I'll just focus on your particular suggestion of fusion:
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
All we need is for the public to get their heads out of their asses and learn to accept compromise.
if they invest in solar/wind and managed to improve efficiency enough to reduce demand for oil then they lose money
Before someone comments that they'd be selling panels/turbines instead of oil; remember oil is a commodity, panels/turbines are a technology. They would much rather deal with selling energy rather than selling energy generators.
The problem is there's a conflict of interest; if they invest in solar/wind and managed to improve efficiency enough to reduce demand for oil then they lose money. They will promote whichever energy source gives them the largest profits, and don't have an incentive to invest in new energy sources when there are hugely profitable oil fields to look for.
Don't get me wrong I'm not a crackpot who thinks you can power the world with solar/wind, but I do think oil companies need a bit of government coercion to invest in research.
NetBeans and Eclipse are practically the same thing, I'm sure they'll either merge them or keep them going separately but sharing code.
Have you seen Dell's YouTube video? They actually call it an aphrodisiac (no joke), and say they want to "redefine power".
It's clearly trying to be the Mac "meet the designers" segment (right down to the foreign sounding artistic designer), but it ends up more like a parody of one.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QUJqWc6seYk
Remember Apple's iPhone conference for enterprises? It could be summarized as "With MS Exchange iPhone is perfect for corporations and is used by loads of fortune 500 companies."
In fact the GP is probably from the corporate world himself, and his manager may have bought into Apple's short-lived corporate iPhone thing
The summary seems to suggest that the rules don't apply to them
Even Firefox has different rendering modes depending on what sort of site it's looking at. Most web-dev plugins for it will tell you whether it's rendering in Standards mode or Quirks mode.
It's more about pragmatism than sloppiness; they need to support new sites which need a correct implementation of standards, and they need to support the old sites used in corporate internets which are kludgy messes, that no-one would dare try and update.
I'm not going to work around it
You will :-)
It has existed for some time, and even supports it on some very cheap hardware, by calculating and storing the speech synth on a PC while the player is plugged in.
The shuffle also works that way; it sounds different on Windows than on OS X.
Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.
You could still do this with linux though, if its an option
The Clinton incident was a farce. If the American populace had one ounce of common sense, they'd have shoved the media hype down the boulevard press' throat.
He lied under oath, if he had told the truth right away he would definitely have stayed on at least until the end of his term.
But a nuclear fission plant had an accident 20 years ago.. Sorry but we'll just have to wait for fusion and use coal in the meantime.
I didn't see anything in the article about Helium removal. I thought that was the biggest remaining problem with nuclear fusion -- removing the Helium-4 "waste" from the reaction before the Helium "poisons" it and shuts down. Someone please correct me. I'm sure that's not entirely accurate.
Geez, just use a fan.. Those NIF guys must really need some fresh blood.
We're talking about the manufacturing process data for a critical piece of a thermonuclear bomb which makes up the majority of the world's third largest nuclear power's arsenal, right?