So pushing the current from right to left improved mathematical learning, while the opposite direction hindered it. Is there anything that would be improved by the left to right current? Is this whole phenomenon an example of brain lateralization? This little wikipedia excerpt on lateralization of brain function is interesting in this light:
Linear reasoning and language functions such as grammar and vocabulary often are lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain. Dyscalculia is a neurological syndrome associated with damage to the left temporo-parietal junction. This syndrome is associated with poor numeric manipulation, poor mental arithmetic skill, and the inability to either understand or apply mathematical concepts.
In contrast, prosodic language functions, such as intonation and accentuation, often are lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. The processing of visual and audiological stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability seem to be functions of the right hemisphere.
There is some evidence that the right hemisphere is more involved in processing novel situations, while the left hemisphere is most involved when routine or well rehearsed processing is called for.
I think maybe you didn't understand me. What I was trying to say was that at 8% efficiency -- if the cost is not significantly cheaper than currently available solar tech -- the investment in these solar panels won't be justifiable for the average electricity consumer, relative to the cost of just buying power from the local utility.
I agree that cost/watt, over the life of the equipment, is probably the most important factor here. People would happily buy solar tech that was even less efficient than 8%, if the costs were low enough.
This sounds like a great idea, but it probably isn't the breakthrough that the summary might otherwise suggest. The efficiency of the resulting solar panels, even with triple-junction cells, is still only 8% at most (as stated in the article). At that level of efficiency, the manufacturing process will have to be very inexpensive for these to make sense for the average consumer.
Most light water reactors are capable of load following to some extent. I worked at a BWR/6 that had originally been designed (as probably most were) with a mode in which the transmission grid operator could control reactor power within a limited range (the MASTER AUTO setting of the recirculating flow control system). Manual load follow would be doable on a routine basis over a fairly significant power range (say from 70% rated up to 100%). We didn't do either because our utility had dirt-burners and gas plants for that, but it would have been possible.
I'm pretty sure some of the BWRs in Illinois used to load follow on a regular basis. It was discussed in my GE-provided Station Nuclear Engineering course.
According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html, the currently operating French nukes (PWRs) load follow to some extent. Furthermore, that page states that "...Plants being built today, eg according to European Utilities' Requirements (EUR), have load-following capacity fully built in." To my knowledge, that would include the two EPRs being built now at Olkiluoto (Finland) and Flamanville (France).
Consider Ramachandran's mirror box, a means of using illusion to "cure" the pain of phantom limbs. From the Wikipedia article:
The patient places his or her good limb into one side, and the stump into the other. The patient then looks into the mirror on the side with good limb and makes "mirror symmetric" movements, as a symphony conductor might, or as we do when we clap our hands. Because the subject is seeing the reflected image of the good hand moving, it appears as if the phantom limb is also moving. Through the use of this artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and to unclench it from potentially painful positions. Because this visual feedback elicits kinesthetic sensations... Repeated training in some subjects has led to long-term improvement... and in one exceptional case, even to the complete elimination of the phantom limb between the hand and the shoulder...
If such a low-tech visual illusion can rewire neurons, what can a high-fidelity, 3-dimensional illusion accomplish? (I'm not saying that Cameron's movie is going to have such effects, but how far will the technology go?)
I agree, there are some problem domains where Fortran is simply the right tool for the job. (This might not win me any points on Slashdot, but I actually like Fortran a lot!) My coding style is fairly modern for Fortran, although I have yet to make use of all the things that were added in the latest approved standard (Fortran 2003). I am looking forward to the next standard, though, because it finally incorporates co-arrays for parallel programming.
Hollerith constants Equivalences Computed Gotos Arithmetic Ifs Common blocks
There were worse things, horrible things... dirty tricks you could play to get the most out of limited memory, or to bypass Fortran's historical lack of pointers and data structures. Fortran-90 and its successors have done away with most of that cruft while also significantly modernizing the language.
They used to say that real men programmed in Fortran (or should I say FORTRAN). That was really before my time, but I've seen the handiwork of real men: impressive, awe-inspiring, crazy, scary. Stuff that worked, somehow, while appearing to be complete gibberish -- beautiful, compact, and disgustingly ingenious gibberish.
Long live Fortran! ('cause you know it's never going to go away)
Re:Focus more on long-term health than on enhancem
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 1
Thanks... if you don't mind, let me ask one more thing. Do you know anything about the dual n-back test for increasing working memory capacity and fluid intelligence? I've heard about this only recently, and I'm curious about its effectiveness and the amount of time required to achieve measurable improvements.
Re:Focus more on long-term health than on enhancem
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 1
I appreciate the points you make. I guess that, in some ways, I am making a gamble that the products I'm using will not have major adverse effects. I think I'm reducing the risk by choosing companies and products pretty carefully. I'm also being pretty conservative in my expectations and avoiding any really strong stuff.
You sound like you might know a lot about this type of thing, so let me just ask... if you had a goal of long-term preservation (and maybe mild enhancement) of brain health and function, what kind of program would you follow? (My experience is that diet and exercise are good, but only get you so far.)
Re:Focus more on long-term health than on enhancem
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 1
Uhmmm... Omega 3 is a medium chain fat. You get that in eggs and olive oil.
Sure, and I also get it from fish, flax, chia, and many other foods that I consume regularly. However, there is a lot of evidence that the typical North American diet is deficient in Omega-3, or at least skewed towards Omega-6. That's why I supplement with Omega-3.
Re:Focus more on long-term health than on enhancem
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've limited myself to vitamins, minerals, and herbal products, with a primary goal of maintaining long-term brain health.
Good to know you're restricting yourself to untested and largely un-quality controlled drugs.
The pharmaceutical route has its own drawbacks, and some notable failures, despite testing and quality control. This page on Wikipedia lists a number of them:
I do understand your point. However, note that I said I did research. I found many apparently well-designed, double-blind, and peer-reviewed studies on vitamins, minerals, and herbal extracts. I just had to look for them. Then I went and looked for companies that appeared to have qualified medical and research staff preparing their formulations, and that had apparent quality control programs. Then I checked around for any "bad news" about the companies and their formulations.
I am not one of those people that automatically equates "natural" to "good" and "man-made" to "bad". There is one thing to keep in mind, though: herbal products often have a much longer history of use than recently developed man-made drugs. There might not have been much hard science driving their use, but some of the herbal compounds have anecdotal evidence of safety and efficacy going back hundreds (or even thousands) of years. That can't be said for any of the pharmaceuticals. Many of the herbals have undergone significant scientific testing precisely because of their long histories (ginkgo comes to mind). Sometimes, the science shows an herbal remedy to be useless... but the converse also sometimes true. Some of the herbals even form the basis for the development of new pharmaceutical treatments.
In the end, what I'm restricting myself from is very powerful compounds that haven't been around that long and don't have long histories of safe human use. I'm also avoiding herbal extracts that have either been shown to be worthless or to have significant adverse side-effects. The result is that I'm probably not using the most powerful agents available to meet my purpose... but I still get some benefits while avoiding potentially significant side effects.
Focus more on long-term health than on enhancement
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Many people are taking smart drugs now -- solely for advantage, without prescribed a medical need -- but in most fields, I don't think it's to the point that *not* taking them is a disadvantage, yet. I admit to a certain amount of interest in nootropic drugs, especially those that could help me hyperfocus. However, I've limited myself to vitamins, minerals, and herbal products, with a primary goal of maintaining long-term brain health.
I've seen too many retirees and seniors slide away into fuzziness, dementia, or worse. On the other hand, I've seen a few that remained sharp as tacks into their 80s and 90s. There are some pretty clear differences between the lifestyles of these two groups. I've tried to learn something from those differences.
I'm turning 40 this year, which is about when most people say they start to feel age-related decline. I want a healthy, well-functioning brain for now and the future. So, I pay a lot more attention to my nutrition than I used to, have started a regular exercise program, and engage in a few different "brain training" activities on a regular basis. I actually feel many benefits now -- I feel better, I'm happier, and my mind seems a little sharper.
In addition to the above, I take a prepared "stack" that includes a variety of nutrients and compounds for both mild cognitive enhancement and neuroprotection. I did a lot of research before I picked AOR's Ortho-Mind, which seems pretty well-balanced and reasonably priced. I also take an Omega-3 supplement daily, along with a good multi-vitamin and a "green" drink with a lot of antioxidants and phytonutrients. My monthly investment, dollar-wise, is less than $100. I have friends that spend that amount each month on coffee.
The big thing here is to be careful in what you choose to take. I chose to focus first on overall brain health, and I'm happy with results so far. Only then did I start adding some mild cognitive enhancers, but even then, I made sure my chosen stack included agents specifically chosen for their neuroprotective properties. If I ever become convinced that any of the various smart drugs make sense from that perspective, then maybe I'll change my strategy... but right now, I think a little conservatism is a good thing.
I don't know if I have ADHD (I suspect I might), but I do know that I often have trouble quieting my mind enough to start concentrating heavily on something. When I am successful, I can superfocus for extended periods of time... but getting there is difficult, and I'm not able to control it. A toy like this could be useful for someone like me, as a sort of warmup for serious work. It could also be useful as a sort of "meditation trainer".
Your argument about exotic, expensive materials is crap. Your argument about President Carter is crap, too. Your huge capital cost argument (with respect to US) has historical validity (30-year old data), but the economics must look good elsewhere, like Finland, Japan, South Korea, France, etc. By the way, the huge capital costs you cite are not so much capital costs, but interest-carrying costs due to construction time periods that were doubled or tripled due to insane regulatory policies which have since been remedied.
Look, your whole argument is old and tired. This post even reads just like your past posts. Rather than argue with you again, I'll just refer to the previous thread and remind you of the facts.
I call bullshit on this - otherwise you would never have been clueless enough to made the concrete and steel comment. Exotic, expensive, and very interesting materials are used in areas exposed to radiation. Please ask your science teacher to post here, they may say something useful.
Believe me, or don't... it doesn't matter. However, you may be interested in the following web pages, which will tell you a little bit more about the materials used in nuclear reactors. By and large, fairly common steels and concretes are used. The "exotic" materials are generally found in fuel (uranium, gadolinium, erbium), control rods (boron carbide, silver, indium, cadmium, hafnium), and detectors (too many to list here).
I wish posters on slashdot would at least read the complete sentences they reply to. I'll make it shorter: Japan has nuclear in case of blockade = strategic reasons.
Oh, I read your whole sentence. The problem is that your claim glosses over a whole number of reasons why Japan, or any other nation without abundant local energy resources, might choose nuclear over other alternatives. Strategic concerns definitely contributed to the choice of nuclear, but that doesn't mean it was the only reason.
Um, actually existing in a full size prototype of the technologies that are supposed to break even? I thought lask of existance would make it self evident that it is unproven.
Um, cost comparison is not usually the primary indicator of whether a technology is proven or not. However, if you insist on break-even, I can point to several proven (your definition) US plants constructed prior to the regulatory meltdown that occurred in the mid to late 70s.
Now I understand where you are coming from - nuclear power is not a magic bean you put in a pot of water in a concrete bucket.
Wow, are you sure about that? It sure seemed like magic to me when I was working on my Master's degree in nuclear engineering, or when I was writing codes to calculate neutron flux distributions in nuclear fuel assemblies, or when I was a reactor engineer telling operators which control rods to pull during startups. It must be magic, 'cause that math stuff is hard!
Concrete and plain carbon or stainless steel isn't going to get you far - that's just what you see on the outside. Fuel rod casings are an interesting and complicated application of metallurgy - reactors that use sodium have all kinds of special requirements etc.
Concrete and plain carbon or stainless steel are used all over a nuclear plant... yes, even for containment. Granted, "fuel rod casings" are generally made of zircaloy, but are generally not that complicated based on the fuel rods I have seen put together and those that I have actually handled during new fuel inspections. Oh, by the way, there aren't that many sodium cooled reactors around.
There is no person anywhere who knows anything about nuclear power that will tell you that the capital cost of a nuclear plant is cheap - they are complicated and expensive things and are designed to get the money back by saving on fuel and in earlier plants by the sale of material for weapons production.
Oh, the capital cost is expensive? I never would have guessed. I mean, I've only been working in the industry for 11 years, and have only been involved in the construction work for two major nuclear refurbishment projects. What do I know?
By the way, I'd love some citations regarding this sale of material for weapons production. Please note that I'm talking about US commercial nuclear plants here.
Then why didn't Reagan bring it in, old Bush, new Bush even Clinton - since he would have probably managed to put a green slant on it? Why did Thatcher stop building them? I think if you were correct, one of those I mentioned would have jumped at the chance.
In one short phrase... the rush to natural gas. Gas prices were low, and new technology became available to burn it very efficiently. Ten years ago, putting up a natural-gas fired merchant power plant was almost a no-brainer, financially. Today, you have to think a little harder. As gas prices go up, the pressure to find an alternative increases. That's one major reason that nuclear hasn't been of major political interest until the past couple years.
Anyway - what is a nuclear troll post about coal doing in a tide power article?
Hey, I was just responding to an anti-nuclear troll post that contained a lot of inaccurate statements. I'm apparently doing it again.
The UK, USSR, French, Isreali, South African, Pakistani, Indian, North Korean, Iranian and Indonesian experience is that it is a very complicated and expensive technology which is only worth doing if you are developing weapons.
You're right, I'm incredibly frightened of what could happen as a result of the burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenals in Finland and Sweden.
The Canadians appear to be making money selling their technology to others, so they can break even - addicts can make money when they turn pusher.
Wow, what a fair and balanced analogy.
The Japanese had the navies of the USSR and the Chinese to worry about, and an energy supply that only came by sea, so expensive nuclear was an option for strategic reasons.
Expensive compared to what available alternatives? Japan's large and abundant reserves of coal and natural gas? Their mighty rivers? Broad expanses of unpopulated land for wind and solar?
It is still an unproven technology - even pebble bed is still at the prototype stage and it's forerunners are expensive white elephants running on 1950's technology.
Unproven compared to what? LWR technology may not be the latest hot, new concept in power generation, but it has a lot of advantages... not the least of which is that it is fairly well proven. Improvements are possible, yes... but look at the improvements over the past twenty years. US plants are now running 90% of the time, unplanned shutdowns are at a very low level, planned outages now take two weeks instead of two months, personnel exposures and radwaste are at all-time lows... what else do you want, free milk and cookies?
Nuclear power is an incredibly complex way to boil water...
Complex, but manageable. It also has the benefit of extremely low fuel, operation, and maintenance costs. Oh, and it's reliable baseload.
containment requires exotic materials which do not come cheap...
Yeah, concrete and steel are pretty exotic, and so expensive.
The theory has always been that the incredible capital cost is offset by the low running costs with nuclear power - but this has not yet been the case.
That depends on where and when the plant was built, and in comparison to the available alternatives at the time. If your benchmark is coal, then nuclear usually doesn't look so great economically. If your benchmark is wind or solar, then nuclear looks much better. Oh yeah, go talk to Finland about how terribly expensive nuclear is compared to the alternatives... maybe they'll decide not to build a new 1600 MWe reactor.
Fraud has certainly occurred on a large scale in the US electricity market - now is it that or some strange superiority over the British that has provided the huge disparity in apparent costs between the USA and the UK with respect to nuclear power.
Actually, there is a big difference betweeen US and UK nuclear. In the UK, you have old Magnox plants operating at very high cost relative to average LWR technology used in the US and elsewhere. Magnox was basically the first generation of nuclear power technology, and a lot of its design was dictated by the desire to extract plutonium for weapons production. Then you have AGR, which appears to be very good technologically, but was eventually dropped in favour of LWR technology. So, in the end, the UK has just one fairly modern LWR at Sizewell B, and a bunch of old, expensive plants based on technology that nobody else is using.
Another question to consider, is why Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer president, stopped building nuclear power plants?
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, and he was President, but to say he stopped all building of nuclear power plants in the US is simply false. Old plant orders were
What kind of manager do you want to be?
on
Geeks in Management?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Take stock of your surroundings, and decide if you want to be a "Successful" manager or a "Good" manager. "Successful" managers are dynamic, demanding, decisive, and action-oriented. These are all good qualities, as long as they don't lead to disaster. "Good" managers have these qualities too, but they are also dependable, respectful, thoughtful, and solution-oriented.
Unfortunately, being "good" often doesn't lead to advancement as quickly as being "successful". We all admire the person that can step in and take control of a crisis. It's too bad we don't usually notice the person that prevents the crisis from ever occurring.
So, first you need to decide what kind of manager you're going to be. Then go out and [wreak havoc | do good].
... but robust, high reliability systems should keep the shit from hitting the fan.
Perrow's a pessimist. His theory's good up to a point, but it ignores robustness. Look up "high reliability organization" and you'll find a wealth of information contradicting Perrow's main premise (i.e., that it's impossible to manage a system that exhibits both high connectivity and high interactive complexity).
The nicest, easiest, simplest, and most customizable content management system I've found is Etomite... see http://www.etomite.org/
It is PHP/MySQL based, has very flexible templating features, and allows easy customization using snippets (small bits of PHP) and or chunks (small bits of straight html). It also sports a nice WYSIWIG editor.
It doesn't have a lot in the way of community features, like messageboards and such, but it is perfect for organizing content. You can have any number of users generating or modifying content, and it provides nice access controls to keep people from touching stuff they shouldn't. It also has the best management interface I've seen yet.
You want food in big cities? Best to pay attention to what's happening in rural America, because that's where the food is. You don't get food growing in LA, New York, Seattle; you get food from Podunk: the place where crops are sown, herds are tended, and people have to deal with the aftermath of urban elitist policies that don't take rural concerns into account.
You said '..."once-through boilers" which are a unique British design developed specifically for nuclear reactors and used nowhere else in the world.'
I don't believe that's completely true. The Babcock & Wilcox designed PWRs use once-through steam generators as well. There were not too many of these plants built, though. As far as the historical US reactor vendors go, B&W had the fewest units.
I don't know too much about AGRs. I've never understood why more weren't built... then again, I've never really researched it.
Those shipboard "atomic" power generators you refer to run on highly-enriched fuel, have a hell of a lot of excess reactivity, and can safely change power levels at excessive rates. In other words, they are race-car engines. You would not use a race-car engine, or even a bunch of race car engines, to pull a train. It would be an inefficient use of resources, and the cost would be prohibitive.
Instead, you would use an engine that maximizes fuel economy, can pull real hard for a long time, and doesn't have to throttle that much. The performance and economic criteria of race-car engines vs. locomotive diesels are completely different, even thought the basic design is similar. The same comparison holds for naval propulsion reactors vs. commercial power reactors. They serve different purposes, have different load profiles, different economic requirements, and different safety implications.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your "fine for me but not for thee" comment. I can interpret that a dozen different ways. If you care to elaborate, please do so.
No steam. PBMR coolant (helium gas) feeds a gas-turbine directly. This is different from the previous generation of HTGRs, which used intermediate boilers to generate steam for a steam-cycle turbine.
Slashdot Mirror
So pushing the current from right to left improved mathematical learning, while the opposite direction hindered it. Is there anything that would be improved by the left to right current? Is this whole phenomenon an example of brain lateralization? This little wikipedia excerpt on lateralization of brain function is interesting in this light:
Linear reasoning and language functions such as grammar and vocabulary often are lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain. Dyscalculia is a neurological syndrome associated with damage to the left temporo-parietal junction. This syndrome is associated with poor numeric manipulation, poor mental arithmetic skill, and the inability to either understand or apply mathematical concepts.
In contrast, prosodic language functions, such as intonation and accentuation, often are lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. The processing of visual and audiological stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability seem to be functions of the right hemisphere.
There is some evidence that the right hemisphere is more involved in processing novel situations, while the left hemisphere is most involved when routine or well rehearsed processing is called for.
I think maybe you didn't understand me. What I was trying to say was that at 8% efficiency -- if the cost is not significantly cheaper than currently available solar tech -- the investment in these solar panels won't be justifiable for the average electricity consumer, relative to the cost of just buying power from the local utility.
I agree that cost/watt, over the life of the equipment, is probably the most important factor here. People would happily buy solar tech that was even less efficient than 8%, if the costs were low enough.
This sounds like a great idea, but it probably isn't the breakthrough that the summary might otherwise suggest. The efficiency of the resulting solar panels, even with triple-junction cells, is still only 8% at most (as stated in the article). At that level of efficiency, the manufacturing process will have to be very inexpensive for these to make sense for the average consumer.
Your post reminds me of a quote from Gordon Box that I often relate to new trainees: "All models are wrong, but some are useful."
I don't think this modeling difficulty is unique to economics. (You didn't state or imply that it was... I just wanted an excuse to quote Gordon Box.)
I like your characterization of the problem though. It applies to pretty much any complex system.
Most light water reactors are capable of load following to some extent. I worked at a BWR/6 that had originally been designed (as probably most were) with a mode in which the transmission grid operator could control reactor power within a limited range (the MASTER AUTO setting of the recirculating flow control system). Manual load follow would be doable on a routine basis over a fairly significant power range (say from 70% rated up to 100%). We didn't do either because our utility had dirt-burners and gas plants for that, but it would have been possible.
I'm pretty sure some of the BWRs in Illinois used to load follow on a regular basis. It was discussed in my GE-provided Station Nuclear Engineering course.
According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html, the currently operating French nukes (PWRs) load follow to some extent. Furthermore, that page states that "...Plants being built today, eg according to European Utilities' Requirements (EUR), have load-following capacity fully built in." To my knowledge, that would include the two EPRs being built now at Olkiluoto (Finland) and Flamanville (France).
Consider Ramachandran's mirror box, a means of using illusion to "cure" the pain of phantom limbs. From the Wikipedia article:
If such a low-tech visual illusion can rewire neurons, what can a high-fidelity, 3-dimensional illusion accomplish? (I'm not saying that Cameron's movie is going to have such effects, but how far will the technology go?)
I agree, there are some problem domains where Fortran is simply the right tool for the job. (This might not win me any points on Slashdot, but I actually like Fortran a lot!) My coding style is fairly modern for Fortran, although I have yet to make use of all the things that were added in the latest approved standard (Fortran 2003). I am looking forward to the next standard, though, because it finally incorporates co-arrays for parallel programming.
Hollerith constants
Equivalences
Computed Gotos
Arithmetic Ifs
Common blocks
There were worse things, horrible things... dirty tricks you could play to get the most out of limited memory, or to bypass Fortran's historical lack of pointers and data structures. Fortran-90 and its successors have done away with most of that cruft while also significantly modernizing the language.
They used to say that real men programmed in Fortran (or should I say FORTRAN). That was really before my time, but I've seen the handiwork of real men: impressive, awe-inspiring, crazy, scary. Stuff that worked, somehow, while appearing to be complete gibberish -- beautiful, compact, and disgustingly ingenious gibberish.
Long live Fortran! ('cause you know it's never going to go away)
Thanks... if you don't mind, let me ask one more thing. Do you know anything about the dual n-back test for increasing working memory capacity and fluid intelligence? I've heard about this only recently, and I'm curious about its effectiveness and the amount of time required to achieve measurable improvements.
I appreciate the points you make. I guess that, in some ways, I am making a gamble that the products I'm using will not have major adverse effects. I think I'm reducing the risk by choosing companies and products pretty carefully. I'm also being pretty conservative in my expectations and avoiding any really strong stuff.
You sound like you might know a lot about this type of thing, so let me just ask... if you had a goal of long-term preservation (and maybe mild enhancement) of brain health and function, what kind of program would you follow? (My experience is that diet and exercise are good, but only get you so far.)
Uhmmm... Omega 3 is a medium chain fat. You get that in eggs and olive oil.
Sure, and I also get it from fish, flax, chia, and many other foods that I consume regularly. However, there is a lot of evidence that the typical North American diet is deficient in Omega-3, or at least skewed towards Omega-6. That's why I supplement with Omega-3.
I've limited myself to vitamins, minerals, and herbal products, with a primary goal of maintaining long-term brain health.
Good to know you're restricting yourself to untested and largely un-quality controlled drugs.
The pharmaceutical route has its own drawbacks, and some notable failures, despite testing and quality control. This page on Wikipedia lists a number of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Withdrawn_drugs
I do understand your point. However, note that I said I did research. I found many apparently well-designed, double-blind, and peer-reviewed studies on vitamins, minerals, and herbal extracts. I just had to look for them. Then I went and looked for companies that appeared to have qualified medical and research staff preparing their formulations, and that had apparent quality control programs. Then I checked around for any "bad news" about the companies and their formulations.
I am not one of those people that automatically equates "natural" to "good" and "man-made" to "bad". There is one thing to keep in mind, though: herbal products often have a much longer history of use than recently developed man-made drugs. There might not have been much hard science driving their use, but some of the herbal compounds have anecdotal evidence of safety and efficacy going back hundreds (or even thousands) of years. That can't be said for any of the pharmaceuticals. Many of the herbals have undergone significant scientific testing precisely because of their long histories (ginkgo comes to mind). Sometimes, the science shows an herbal remedy to be useless... but the converse also sometimes true. Some of the herbals even form the basis for the development of new pharmaceutical treatments.
In the end, what I'm restricting myself from is very powerful compounds that haven't been around that long and don't have long histories of safe human use. I'm also avoiding herbal extracts that have either been shown to be worthless or to have significant adverse side-effects. The result is that I'm probably not using the most powerful agents available to meet my purpose... but I still get some benefits while avoiding potentially significant side effects.
Many people are taking smart drugs now -- solely for advantage, without prescribed a medical need -- but in most fields, I don't think it's to the point that *not* taking them is a disadvantage, yet. I admit to a certain amount of interest in nootropic drugs, especially those that could help me hyperfocus. However, I've limited myself to vitamins, minerals, and herbal products, with a primary goal of maintaining long-term brain health.
I've seen too many retirees and seniors slide away into fuzziness, dementia, or worse. On the other hand, I've seen a few that remained sharp as tacks into their 80s and 90s. There are some pretty clear differences between the lifestyles of these two groups. I've tried to learn something from those differences.
I'm turning 40 this year, which is about when most people say they start to feel age-related decline. I want a healthy, well-functioning brain for now and the future. So, I pay a lot more attention to my nutrition than I used to, have started a regular exercise program, and engage in a few different "brain training" activities on a regular basis. I actually feel many benefits now -- I feel better, I'm happier, and my mind seems a little sharper.
In addition to the above, I take a prepared "stack" that includes a variety of nutrients and compounds for both mild cognitive enhancement and neuroprotection. I did a lot of research before I picked AOR's Ortho-Mind, which seems pretty well-balanced and reasonably priced. I also take an Omega-3 supplement daily, along with a good multi-vitamin and a "green" drink with a lot of antioxidants and phytonutrients. My monthly investment, dollar-wise, is less than $100. I have friends that spend that amount each month on coffee.
The big thing here is to be careful in what you choose to take. I chose to focus first on overall brain health, and I'm happy with results so far. Only then did I start adding some mild cognitive enhancers, but even then, I made sure my chosen stack included agents specifically chosen for their neuroprotective properties. If I ever become convinced that any of the various smart drugs make sense from that perspective, then maybe I'll change my strategy... but right now, I think a little conservatism is a good thing.
I don't know if I have ADHD (I suspect I might), but I do know that I often have trouble quieting my mind enough to start concentrating heavily on something. When I am successful, I can superfocus for extended periods of time... but getting there is difficult, and I'm not able to control it. A toy like this could be useful for someone like me, as a sort of warmup for serious work. It could also be useful as a sort of "meditation trainer".
Your argument about exotic, expensive materials is crap. Your argument about President Carter is crap, too. Your huge capital cost argument (with respect to US) has historical validity (30-year old data), but the economics must look good elsewhere, like Finland, Japan, South Korea, France, etc. By the way, the huge capital costs you cite are not so much capital costs, but interest-carrying costs due to construction time periods that were doubled or tripled due to insane regulatory policies which have since been remedied.
Look, your whole argument is old and tired. This post even reads just like your past posts. Rather than argue with you again, I'll just refer to the previous thread and remind you of the facts.
Previous Thread
Believe me, or don't... it doesn't matter. However, you may be interested in the following web pages, which will tell you a little bit more about the materials used in nuclear reactors. By and large, fairly common steels and concretes are used. The "exotic" materials are generally found in fuel (uranium, gadolinium, erbium), control rods (boron carbide, silver, indium, cadmium, hafnium), and detectors (too many to list here).
Anything else?
Oh, I read your whole sentence. The problem is that your claim glosses over a whole number of reasons why Japan, or any other nation without abundant local energy resources, might choose nuclear over other alternatives. Strategic concerns definitely contributed to the choice of nuclear, but that doesn't mean it was the only reason.
Um, cost comparison is not usually the primary indicator of whether a technology is proven or not. However, if you insist on break-even, I can point to several proven (your definition) US plants constructed prior to the regulatory meltdown that occurred in the mid to late 70s.
Wow, are you sure about that? It sure seemed like magic to me when I was working on my Master's degree in nuclear engineering, or when I was writing codes to calculate neutron flux distributions in nuclear fuel assemblies, or when I was a reactor engineer telling operators which control rods to pull during startups. It must be magic, 'cause that math stuff is hard!
Concrete and plain carbon or stainless steel are used all over a nuclear plant... yes, even for containment. Granted, "fuel rod casings" are generally made of zircaloy, but are generally not that complicated based on the fuel rods I have seen put together and those that I have actually handled during new fuel inspections. Oh, by the way, there aren't that many sodium cooled reactors around.
Oh, the capital cost is expensive? I never would have guessed. I mean, I've only been working in the industry for 11 years, and have only been involved in the construction work for two major nuclear refurbishment projects. What do I know?
By the way, I'd love some citations regarding this sale of material for weapons production. Please note that I'm talking about US commercial nuclear plants here.
In one short phrase... the rush to natural gas. Gas prices were low, and new technology became available to burn it very efficiently. Ten years ago, putting up a natural-gas fired merchant power plant was almost a no-brainer, financially. Today, you have to think a little harder. As gas prices go up, the pressure to find an alternative increases. That's one major reason that nuclear hasn't been of major political interest until the past couple years.
Hey, I was just responding to an anti-nuclear troll post that contained a lot of inaccurate statements. I'm apparently doing it again.
You're right, I'm incredibly frightened of what could happen as a result of the burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenals in Finland and Sweden.
Wow, what a fair and balanced analogy.
Expensive compared to what available alternatives? Japan's large and abundant reserves of coal and natural gas? Their mighty rivers? Broad expanses of unpopulated land for wind and solar?
Unproven compared to what? LWR technology may not be the latest hot, new concept in power generation, but it has a lot of advantages... not the least of which is that it is fairly well proven. Improvements are possible, yes... but look at the improvements over the past twenty years. US plants are now running 90% of the time, unplanned shutdowns are at a very low level, planned outages now take two weeks instead of two months, personnel exposures and radwaste are at all-time lows... what else do you want, free milk and cookies?
Complex, but manageable. It also has the benefit of extremely low fuel, operation, and maintenance costs. Oh, and it's reliable baseload.
Yeah, concrete and steel are pretty exotic, and so expensive.
That depends on where and when the plant was built, and in comparison to the available alternatives at the time. If your benchmark is coal, then nuclear usually doesn't look so great economically. If your benchmark is wind or solar, then nuclear looks much better. Oh yeah, go talk to Finland about how terribly expensive nuclear is compared to the alternatives... maybe they'll decide not to build a new 1600 MWe reactor.
Actually, there is a big difference betweeen US and UK nuclear. In the UK, you have old Magnox plants operating at very high cost relative to average LWR technology used in the US and elsewhere. Magnox was basically the first generation of nuclear power technology, and a lot of its design was dictated by the desire to extract plutonium for weapons production. Then you have AGR, which appears to be very good technologically, but was eventually dropped in favour of LWR technology. So, in the end, the UK has just one fairly modern LWR at Sizewell B, and a bunch of old, expensive plants based on technology that nobody else is using.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, and he was President, but to say he stopped all building of nuclear power plants in the US is simply false. Old plant orders were
Take stock of your surroundings, and decide if you want to be a "Successful" manager or a "Good" manager. "Successful" managers are dynamic, demanding, decisive, and action-oriented. These are all good qualities, as long as they don't lead to disaster. "Good" managers have these qualities too, but they are also dependable, respectful, thoughtful, and solution-oriented.
Unfortunately, being "good" often doesn't lead to advancement as quickly as being "successful". We all admire the person that can step in and take control of a crisis. It's too bad we don't usually notice the person that prevents the crisis from ever occurring.
So, first you need to decide what kind of manager you're going to be. Then go out and [wreak havoc | do good].
... but robust, high reliability systems should keep the shit from hitting the fan.
Perrow's a pessimist. His theory's good up to a point, but it ignores robustness. Look up "high reliability organization" and you'll find a wealth of information contradicting Perrow's main premise (i.e., that it's impossible to manage a system that exhibits both high connectivity and high interactive complexity).
The nicest, easiest, simplest, and most customizable content management system I've found is Etomite... see http://www.etomite.org/
It is PHP/MySQL based, has very flexible templating features, and allows easy customization using snippets (small bits of PHP) and or chunks (small bits of straight html). It also sports a nice WYSIWIG editor.
It doesn't have a lot in the way of community features, like messageboards and such, but it is perfect for organizing content. You can have any number of users generating or modifying content, and it provides nice access controls to keep people from touching stuff they shouldn't. It also has the best management interface I've seen yet.
I highly recommend it. Oh yes, it's GPL.
You want food in big cities? Best to pay attention to what's happening in rural America, because that's where the food is. You don't get food growing in LA, New York, Seattle; you get food from Podunk: the place where crops are sown, herds are tended, and people have to deal with the aftermath of urban elitist policies that don't take rural concerns into account.
You said '..."once-through boilers" which are a unique British design developed specifically for nuclear reactors and used nowhere else in the world.'
I don't believe that's completely true. The Babcock & Wilcox designed PWRs use once-through steam generators as well. There were not too many of these plants built, though. As far as the historical US reactor vendors go, B&W had the fewest units.
I don't know too much about AGRs. I've never understood why more weren't built... then again, I've never really researched it.
Those shipboard "atomic" power generators you refer to run on highly-enriched fuel, have a hell of a lot of excess reactivity, and can safely change power levels at excessive rates. In other words, they are race-car engines. You would not use a race-car engine, or even a bunch of race car engines, to pull a train. It would be an inefficient use of resources, and the cost would be prohibitive.
Instead, you would use an engine that maximizes fuel economy, can pull real hard for a long time, and doesn't have to throttle that much. The performance and economic criteria of race-car engines vs. locomotive diesels are completely different, even thought the basic design is similar. The same comparison holds for naval propulsion reactors vs. commercial power reactors. They serve different purposes, have different load profiles, different economic requirements, and different safety implications.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your "fine for me but not for thee" comment. I can interpret that a dozen different ways. If you care to elaborate, please do so.
No steam. PBMR coolant (helium gas) feeds a gas-turbine directly. This is different from the previous generation of HTGRs, which used intermediate boilers to generate steam for a steam-cycle turbine.