the last person ever to deserve lifetime compensation for his work was a german patent officer for what was essentially a bunch of math and, as such, uncopyrightable
I guess it depends on whether they are targeting 2mbit as in actually 2mbit or "2 mbit UNLIMITED at 1:1000 contention with 4gb/month cap". If it actually ends up averaging 2mbit and not 500kbps then it's not so bad.
With fast charging batteries this will be obsolete before it is deployed.
Say we consider 10 minutes an acceptable charge time.
The Tesla roadster fully charged is about 53 kWh, assuming we use a fast charging battery pack with this capacity in total ( such batteries already exist ) from flat we need to deliver 190.8 Mj in 10 minutes
10 minutes is 600 seconds, so the necessary power is 318 kW
Batteries will likely be able to handle this power since the better models have an efficiency exceeding 99.8%. I.e the heat generated close to batteries will likely be less than a kilowatt, which can probably be tolerated with careful design given that such a large battery pack will have quite an area for heat dissipation.
Lets say we cap the allowable voltage at 1kV for safety reasons. The required current is then 318 Ampere.
American Wire Gauge 1 can take 130 A of current, so we need 3 wires if we use 3-phase AC. Using AC does mean we need high efficiency and high temperature diodes for rectifiers, and unless precautions are taken to ensure the battery cells charge at the same rate it might be necessary to switch to DC towards the end of the charge cycle. Silicon Carbide Shotkey diodes would seem ideal given that they can operate at high temperatures and have a low forward voltage drop. There's already diodes rated for 1.2 kV in the reverse direction so the voltage should not be a problem either.
Of course all of this assumes a full charge, if you recharge before battery depletion the requirements can be relaxed.
Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
Depends what you mean with speed. The lowest possibel latency is limited by teh speed of light.
Bandwidth is limited by the number of "tubes" you can run and how much data you can push down each tube. In principle there's nothing stopping you from doing something crazy like encoding your data on DNA strands that you dissolve in a soup and push down an actual tube with cross section 10m, moving thousands of liters of DNA soup per second. The theoretical maximum bandwidth of such a setup would be staggering, but the latency would be horrid.
So basically latency is limited by the speed of light while the theoretical limit to bandwidth is so massive that other practical and economic concerns will limit it rather than fundamental physics.
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission.
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor,
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
Interestingly, it achieved about 97% mass to energy conversion - impressive.
If a nuclear weapon of Tsar bomba's size achieved that it would be a hell of a lot stronger than 50 megaton. The energy in a fusion based weapon comes from the very slight difference in mass between the reactants ( usually deuterium and lithium ) and the products ( usually helium isotopes and neutrons). If you somehow achived 97% energy to mass conversion you would up the energy released by a factor of 1000 or so and a weapon of Tsar bomba's size would then produce a staggering fifty gigatonnes, exceeding the collected potential energy of the world's collected nuclear arsenal. I say most likely you confused the numbers with the fact that Tsar bomba derived an unusually large proportion of its energy from fusion whereas most weapons get a great share of it from uranium fission.
This also illustrates the amount of energy that can be stored as antimatter. about 10kg of antimatter annihilated with the same amount of matter would produce a blast that exceeds the world's collected nuclear arsenals.
Both Sweden and the US are mixed economies. The word socialism is completely taboo in Sweden as much as it is in the US. Even when you discuss systems where there clearly is socialism, such as the public road system.
Well, when the party that has ruled Sweden for most of the past century and still has the most voters is called the "social democrats" I think you can have a guess how "taboo" socialism is here. It is true we are a mixed economy however. The main difference to places like the US is that we don't pretend to be capitalist. We have a reasonably free market with necessary regulations that is complemented with a comprehensive welfare state. Oh, and over here "liberal" is something you accuse politicians of NOT being, as opposed to the surreal American situation where you're apparently pro freedom but anti liberty. Doublethink at its finest.
Intent matters a lot in Swedish law. Chances are if TPB had posted a warning that sharing copyrighted material is illegal, if they had declined requests to take down torrent politely rather than mocking the copyright holders, and if they had not advertised themselves as essentially being "pirates" then they would not have been found guilty.
You can argue about if the justice system should work this way or not, but at the end of the day it basically boils down to this:
If you are going to argue that you're just a service provider and not responsible for what your users do, then advertise your page accordingly. No matter how good your argument is, judges and jurors will think "BULLSHIT" if you name your page "Pirate Bay" or "Pirate's Heaven" or anything similar.
Not saying the verdict is fair, or that I agree with it, just saying that it would be a whole lot easier for the courts to swallow their arguments if they had called themselves "Torrent Bay", and politely responded to legal threats with "we don't want to act as law enforcement".
Put it this way, every major ISP make a load of cash supplying bandwidth for file sharing, but their legal team is smart enough to not boast about it, and hence it is easy for them to argue that they only provide a service.
In fact it's rather stupid to apply the "clean" label to a major industrial process anyway - it's a nasty PR trick whether it is nuclear or coal.
Agreed, the more accurate way to put it would be:
"As compared to all other energy sources that have been proven practical and economical on a large scale, nuclear power has the lowest life-cycle environmental impact per kilowatt hour of energy generated, and this can with high probability be further improved through careful use of modern reprocessing technologies."
Firstly in order to capture and sequester the CO2 you make the energy much more costly, approaching wind power and surpassing nuclear by quite a bit.
Secondly, the period of time the CO2 needs to be sequestered securely in order to avoid having a large impact on the climate is on the order of magnitude of ten thousand years, which is longer than properly reprocessed nuclear fuel. Also, the fly-ash remains toxic indefinitely.
So basically you have to ask yourself if clean coal is worth it, seeing that it will likely be much more costly, and involve greater waste storage problems, than nuclear power. It might be worth it to research retrofitting existing plants with scrubbers and filters, but in terms of our future energy supply coal seems like a dead end.
Just to restate this in blindingly simple terms -- if someone tries not to get caught when committing a crime, they should be subject to harsher punishment?
This is done all the time. If you get into a fight and kill somebody, and then call the police, saying you've done something terrible, apologize to the family etc... you're likely to get a far more lenient sentence than if you've hatched some advanced plot in which you did your very best to hide the body, avoid leaving fingerprints etc... One of these cases will be seen as a tragic case of a disagreement gone wrong, while the other will be seen as you mercilessly planing a vile crime.
The reason this becomes an issue is that it will be applied to things that should not be crimes in the first place, like whistle blowers revealing government corruption and mere accusations of file-sharing of copyrighted material without permission. Essentially the problem is not so much this guideline on its own, but the countless of other stupid things you may be punished for that could be applied in conjunction with it. If the only crimes this would be applied to were things like somebody using a proxy to cover their tracks while trying to break into some company's server, then quite frankly it is fine. However we all know that it will be used by failing industries who try to turn litigation into a business model.
Just realized and obvious challenge for my solution. To allow for a measurable change in mass the chlorine would initially produce a lot of heat, comparable in fact to that of a nuclear reactor, and seeing that argon is a poor thermal conductor there would be an issue with transporting this heat away while retaining a predictable mass of the sample.
Reading the amount of radioactivity in a sample to a precision of even 1 day in 3.6 million is nontrivial. Doing it with a device that will survive 3.6 million days while being exposed to said radiation is even more so.
Building a clock that lasts 3.6 million days is not a project for a single day, let alone the five minutes spent on a slashdot comment.
36-Chlorine has a half-life of 30 000 years, decaying into either stable Sulfur-36 or Argon-36. Since the ratio of decay events that result in Argon-36 is known the sample could be prepared as to let the Argon diffuse away, thus causing a predicable loss of mass of the sample. Part of the container could then be built as to allow noble gases to diffuse out, but not let anything else in. The problem is then reduced to that of constructing a mechanical balance of sufficient accuracy as to weigh the reduction in mass of the sample. Designing a balance with sufficient accuracy and longevity would no doubt be a challenging task, but at least there is no requirement for any rapidly moving parts, thus substantially reducing wear and tear.
There is a great solution to this: Just make it totally deadly radioactive for the next 10,000 years. ^^
Believe it or not but this is amazingly tricky to do. An isotope that has a high enough radioactivity to be lethal even when handeled carefully will have a half-life much shorter than 10.000 years. Conversely an isotope with a long enough half life will not be very radioactive. As an example Plutonium-239 can be handled with minimal protection. You hear a lot of fuss about nuclear waste, but reality is that beyond the first few hundred years or so it is only moderately more toxic than many other things we handle daily.
All Tesla really does is offload the environmental footprint to the electric generation station
Siiiigh, do we have to go through this every time ?
i)Even if that was all they did it would still be worth it to move emissions away from population centers.
ii)Power station turbines are more efficient than internal combustion engines, even when transmission losses are taken into account.
iii)Because power stations are stationary you can fit them with better filters, catalysts and scrubbers that are superior to what you can fit on a moving car.
iv)Because power stations have an even burn that doesn't peak at equally high temperatures they produce less nitrous oxides than internal combustion engines.
v)Power stations generally achieve a more complete combustion than internal combustion engines, which helps reduce emissions.
vi)Not all power stations use coal. Nuclear and Hydroelectrics produce orders of magnitude lower emission levels. Natural gas produces quite a bit of CO2 , but much less so than coal and petroleum ( due to a higher fraction of hydrogen ) and the rest of their emissions are lower too.
vii)Using electric cars reduces reliance on oil from unstable regions of the world.
There's more, but that is all I can be bothered with for now.
I am a geology student, studying seismology, and it is a personal pet peeve when someone says that a small earthquake will relive the pressure of a large fault. The force of an earthquake is measured on the Richter scale*
I'm a physics student and if you are going to moan at somebody for getting their physics wrong, at least try to not confuse fundamental physical concepts:
Force:
The rate of change of momentum of a rigid body.
SI unit: Newton = kg * meter / second^2
Energy:
The integral of the scalar product between a force acting on a body and the body's displacement taken over a path.
SI unit: Joule = Newton * meter
Pressure:
The force exerted on surface per unit area of the surface in question.
SI unit: Pascal = Newton / meter^2
Then there is Persistent Organic Pollutants, which while not as long-lived as rad-waste are produced in far larger quantities and can still be a severe problem for many generations.
Then there's pollutants that are short-lived but considerably more mobile, including nitrous oxide emissions, sulfates, fly-ash , carbon particulates etc...
You know what, a reasonably small volume of radioactive but chemically inert ceramic stored underground in bedrock is WAY better than the crap we currently dump in the biosphere. Every year carbon particulates alone kills more people than have died from radiation accidents in the entire history of nuclear power. If you include Hiroshima and Nagasaki you might need 3 years or so, but the point remains the same. Compared to our present practice nuclear power is extremely clean.
Then there is also the philosophical question of whether it is likely that radioactive waste will be a problem with the technology our descendants will have access to in 100.000 years time. To put it in perspective, electric lighting is just above a century old, and the atomic theory of matter did not enter mainstream science until about 200 years ago. Heck, the fact that a nuclear reactor could be built was not demonstrated until the 40ies. There's still people alive from that time.
America must get over the ideology of spreading American democracy around the world. While it's wonderful as a system
As a citizen of a country that uses parliamentary proportional representation and has strong protections for workers and limitations on what companies can and cannot do in order to try to force their customers/employees to obey, I have to respectfully disagree.
I say, "Hey power company. I'm paying you guys to deliver me some kilowatt-hours. Nothing in my contract limits how I suck up those kWh: if I do it in a way you're not expecting, it's your job to install equipment to handle it."
You will probably find that in most jurisdictions there's rules about what you can and cannot connect to the grid, and power factor will be an issue here. Many jurisdictions ( including the EU ) require components with a low non-linear load factor to implement power factor correctors. This is what most of the massive solenoids in cheaper computer PSUs are used for.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called tenure.
I guess it depends on whether they are targeting 2mbit as in actually 2mbit or "2 mbit UNLIMITED at 1:1000 contention with 4gb /month cap". If it actually ends up averaging 2mbit and not 500kbps then it's not so bad.
With fast charging batteries this will be obsolete before it is deployed.
Say we consider 10 minutes an acceptable charge time.
The Tesla roadster fully charged is about 53 kWh, assuming we use a fast charging battery pack
with this capacity in total ( such batteries already exist ) from flat we need to deliver 190.8 Mj in 10 minutes
10 minutes is 600 seconds, so the necessary power is 318 kW
Batteries will likely be able to handle this power since the better models have an efficiency exceeding 99.8%. I.e the heat generated close to batteries will likely be less than a kilowatt, which can probably be tolerated with careful design given that such a large battery pack will have quite an area for heat dissipation.
Lets say we cap the allowable voltage at 1kV for safety reasons. The required current is then 318 Ampere.
American Wire Gauge 1 can take 130 A of current, so we need 3 wires if we use 3-phase AC. Using AC does mean we need high efficiency and high temperature diodes for rectifiers, and unless precautions are taken to ensure the battery cells charge at the same rate it might be necessary to switch to DC towards the end of the charge cycle. Silicon Carbide Shotkey diodes would seem ideal given that they can operate at high temperatures and have a low forward voltage drop. There's already diodes rated for 1.2 kV in the reverse direction so the voltage should not be a problem either.
Of course all of this assumes a full charge, if you recharge before battery depletion the requirements can be relaxed.
Depends what you mean with speed. The lowest possibel latency is limited by teh speed of light.
Bandwidth is limited by the number of "tubes" you can run and how much data you can push down each tube. In principle there's nothing stopping you from doing something crazy like encoding your data on DNA strands that you dissolve in a soup and push down an actual tube with cross section 10m, moving thousands of liters of DNA soup per second. The theoretical maximum bandwidth of such a setup would be staggering, but the latency would be horrid.
So basically latency is limited by the speed of light while the theoretical limit to bandwidth is so massive that other practical and economic concerns will limit it rather than fundamental physics.
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
If a nuclear weapon of Tsar bomba's size achieved that it would be a hell of a lot stronger than 50 megaton. The energy in a fusion based weapon comes from the very slight difference in mass between the reactants ( usually deuterium and lithium ) and the products ( usually helium isotopes and neutrons). If you somehow achived 97% energy to mass conversion you would up the energy released by a factor of 1000 or so and a weapon of Tsar bomba's size would then produce a staggering fifty gigatonnes, exceeding the collected potential energy of the world's collected nuclear arsenal. I say most likely you confused the numbers with the fact that Tsar bomba derived an unusually large proportion of its energy from fusion whereas most weapons get a great share of it from uranium fission.
This also illustrates the amount of energy that can be stored as antimatter. about 10kg of antimatter annihilated with the same amount of matter would produce a blast that exceeds the world's collected nuclear arsenals.
Well, when the party that has ruled Sweden for most of the past century and still has the most voters is called the "social democrats" I think you can have a guess how "taboo" socialism is here. It is true we are a mixed economy however. The main difference to places like the US is that we don't pretend to be capitalist. We have a reasonably free market with necessary regulations that is complemented with a comprehensive welfare state. Oh, and over here "liberal" is something you accuse politicians of NOT being, as opposed to the surreal American situation where you're apparently pro freedom but anti liberty. Doublethink at its finest.
They seriously expect the average teenager to be unable to circumvent a simple blacklist ?
Intent matters a lot in Swedish law. Chances are if TPB had posted a warning that sharing copyrighted material is illegal, if they had declined requests to take down torrent politely rather than mocking the copyright holders, and if they had not advertised themselves as essentially being "pirates" then they would not have been found guilty.
You can argue about if the justice system should work this way or not, but at the end of the day it basically boils down to this:
If you are going to argue that you're just a service provider and not responsible for what your users do, then advertise your page accordingly. No matter how good your argument is, judges and jurors will think "BULLSHIT" if you name your page "Pirate Bay" or "Pirate's Heaven" or anything similar.
Not saying the verdict is fair, or that I agree with it, just saying that it would be a whole lot easier for the courts to swallow their arguments if they had called themselves "Torrent Bay", and politely responded to legal threats with "we don't want to act as law enforcement".
Put it this way, every major ISP make a load of cash supplying bandwidth for file sharing, but their legal team is smart enough to not boast about it, and hence it is easy for them to argue that they only provide a service.
Agreed, the more accurate way to put it would be:
"As compared to all other energy sources that have been proven practical and economical on a large scale, nuclear power has the lowest life-cycle environmental impact per kilowatt hour of energy generated, and this can with high probability be further improved through careful use of modern reprocessing technologies."
There were quite a few academics involved in this one.
Clean coal is a dead end for two reasons:
Firstly in order to capture and sequester the CO2 you make the energy much more costly, approaching wind power and surpassing nuclear by quite a bit.
Secondly, the period of time the CO2 needs to be sequestered securely in order to avoid having a large impact on the climate is on the order of magnitude of ten thousand years, which is longer than properly reprocessed nuclear fuel. Also, the fly-ash remains toxic indefinitely.
So basically you have to ask yourself if clean coal is worth it, seeing that it will likely be much more costly, and involve greater waste storage problems, than nuclear power. It might be worth it to research retrofitting existing plants with scrubbers and filters, but in terms of our future energy supply coal seems like a dead end.
This is done all the time. If you get into a fight and kill somebody, and then call the police, saying you've done something terrible, apologize to the family etc... you're likely to get a far more lenient sentence than if you've hatched some advanced plot in which you did your very best to hide the body, avoid leaving fingerprints etc... One of these cases will be seen as a tragic case of a disagreement gone wrong, while the other will be seen as you mercilessly planing a vile crime.
The reason this becomes an issue is that it will be applied to things that should not be crimes in the first place, like whistle blowers revealing government corruption and mere accusations of file-sharing of copyrighted material without permission. Essentially the problem is not so much this guideline on its own, but the countless of other stupid things you may be punished for that could be applied in conjunction with it. If the only crimes this would be applied to were things like somebody using a proxy to cover their tracks while trying to break into some company's server, then quite frankly it is fine. However we all know that it will be used by failing industries who try to turn litigation into a business model.
Just realized and obvious challenge for my solution. To allow for a measurable change in mass the chlorine would initially produce a lot of heat, comparable in fact to that of a nuclear reactor, and seeing that argon is a poor thermal conductor there would be an issue with transporting this heat away while retaining a predictable mass of the sample.
36-Chlorine has a half-life of 30 000 years, decaying into either stable Sulfur-36 or Argon-36. Since the ratio of decay events that result in Argon-36 is known the sample could be prepared as to let the Argon diffuse away, thus causing a predicable loss of mass of the sample. Part of the container could then be built as to allow noble gases to diffuse out, but not let anything else in. The problem is then reduced to that of constructing a mechanical balance of sufficient accuracy as to weigh the reduction in mass of the sample. Designing a balance with sufficient accuracy and longevity would no doubt be a challenging task, but at least there is no requirement for any rapidly moving parts, thus substantially reducing wear and tear.
Believe it or not but this is amazingly tricky to do. An isotope that has a high enough radioactivity to be lethal even when handeled carefully will have a half-life much shorter than 10.000 years. Conversely an isotope with a long enough half life will not be very radioactive. As an example Plutonium-239 can be handled with minimal protection. You hear a lot of fuss about nuclear waste, but reality is that beyond the first few hundred years or so it is only moderately more toxic than many other things we handle daily.
How about: "You're either corrupt or incompetent, and neither is acceptable."
Siiiigh, do we have to go through this every time ?
i)Even if that was all they did it would still be worth it to move emissions away from population centers.
ii)Power station turbines are more efficient than internal combustion engines, even when transmission losses are taken into account.
iii)Because power stations are stationary you can fit them with better filters, catalysts and scrubbers that are superior to what you can fit on a moving car.
iv)Because power stations have an even burn that doesn't peak at equally high temperatures they produce less nitrous oxides than internal combustion engines.
v)Power stations generally achieve a more complete combustion than internal combustion engines, which helps reduce emissions.
vi)Not all power stations use coal. Nuclear and Hydroelectrics produce orders of magnitude lower emission levels. Natural gas produces quite a bit of CO2 , but much less so than coal and petroleum ( due to a higher fraction of hydrogen ) and the rest of their emissions are lower too.
vii)Using electric cars reduces reliance on oil from unstable regions of the world.
There's more, but that is all I can be bothered with for now.
The US has a state religion but pretends not to; Top that.
I'm a physics student and if you are going to moan at somebody for getting their physics wrong, at least try to not confuse fundamental physical concepts:
Force:
The rate of change of momentum of a rigid body.
SI unit: Newton = kg * meter / second^2
Energy:
The integral of the scalar product between a force acting on a body and the body's displacement taken over a path.
SI unit: Joule = Newton * meter
Pressure:
The force exerted on surface per unit area of the surface in question.
SI unit: Pascal = Newton / meter^2
*clears throat*
Elemental toxic metals that remain toxic indefinitely: mercury, cadmium, lead, lithium, nickel, antimony, barium , thallium, vanadium ... etc
Then there is Persistent Organic Pollutants, which while not as long-lived as rad-waste are produced in far larger quantities and can still be a severe problem for many generations.
Then there's pollutants that are short-lived but considerably more mobile, including nitrous oxide emissions, sulfates, fly-ash , carbon particulates etc ...
You know what, a reasonably small volume of radioactive but chemically inert ceramic stored underground in bedrock is WAY better than the crap we currently dump in the biosphere. Every year carbon particulates alone kills more people than have died from radiation accidents in the entire history of nuclear power. If you include Hiroshima and Nagasaki you might need 3 years or so, but the point remains the same. Compared to our present practice nuclear power is extremely clean.
Then there is also the philosophical question of whether it is likely that radioactive waste will be a problem with the technology our descendants will have access to in 100.000 years time. To put it in perspective, electric lighting is just above a century old, and the atomic theory of matter did not enter mainstream science until about 200 years ago. Heck, the fact that a nuclear reactor could be built was not demonstrated until the 40ies. There's still people alive from that time.
You expect us to be impressed by a percentage increase over a trivial base?
As a citizen of a country that uses parliamentary proportional representation and has strong protections for workers and limitations on what companies can and cannot do in order to try to force their customers/employees to obey, I have to respectfully disagree.
You will probably find that in most jurisdictions there's rules about what you can and cannot connect to the grid, and power factor will be an issue here. Many jurisdictions ( including the EU ) require components with a low non-linear load factor to implement power factor correctors. This is what most of the massive solenoids in cheaper computer PSUs are used for.
If you're writing this from the US I'm going to laugh at you.