$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power
Rubbish. Over in Britain the royal academy of engineering compared costs of nuclear ( yes, including decommissioning costs) to that of various energy sources: http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf . Essentially, while nuclear is expensive to build, the overall cost is comparable to coal fired power plants due to the low cost of fuel, and if you add on carbon capture and storage then the cost of coal overtakes nuclear rapidly.
A further thing to take into consideration is that increased energy consumption across the world combined with decreasing oil reserves is likely to drive up the price of coal/uranium. Since the fuel is a much lower proportion of the cost of nuclear power than it is for coal power this is likely to have a much lower impact upon the cost of nuclear power than for coal.
Finally, since nuclear power technology is advancing rapidly at the moment ( High temperature reactors around 2016 , breeders by 2025 , high efficiency hydrogen estimated 2030 ) the cost of nuclear plants is likely to drop ( per kilowatt generated ), while the cost of coal plants is likely to spike due to tighter emission standards.
The capture and storage research is worth it mainly because we can't expand other energy sources quick enough. In the long term it is not going to be economically competitive.
I'm in physics, and no I'm not talking about things we can patent, I'm talking about trying to describe the polarization of the proton inside a oxygen nucleus, or how light scatters from a plasma. Things like that. As it is the current copyright or patent system does not permit you to patent/copyright/claim ownership over theories that explain these phenomena (and it's a damn good thing too ).
This does mean we need public institutions to throw funding at us, because you just don't get private companies buying high energy synchrotrons and the like to do basic research. (btw, here "high energy" means "we have to call the power company and check if they have some power left" high ). Now, if you could patent physical theories, maybe we would get more private investment into syncrotrons lineacs, neutrino labs etc... but it would be a disaster. It would completely destroy our ability to bring physics further. The people studying bio-medicine are already starting to feel this because silly patents on methods for producing certain chemicals/hormones are getting in the way. Like one of my friends put it "Ten years ago, if I needed a particular cell culture to research this or that phenomena I would call up the people who were experts in it and they would put some of it in a test tube and give it to me during a visit. Nowadays you're looking at a $10.000 license in order for them to drop me a few cells from a practically unlimited supply." Sounds familiar? You can grow cells in a petri dish like you can grow fungus, yet to do research on some of them you are now talking massive license fees.
The purpose of the patent/copyright system is not to give hard working people an income. It is to promote the sciences and arts. With my education I could probably earn a lot more money if we were allowed to patent silly things like "a method for accurately measuring the polarization of small systems by manipulating the spatial measurements of scintillators" , but I still think such laws are absolutely disgraceful.
$100 to register, Free to renew for the first 10 years. $10 to renew every year after that. That way it works out to $10 per year for those who stay with a domain, and there is a big incentive not to register a domain you do not wish to keep. In combination with trademark law that would probably take the sting out of most of this nonsense.
Moral truths? Restricting the definition of life? You are talking about an organization which denounced condom use in face of millions of people dieing from STDs merely because it went against their religious dogma. The pope is opposing biomedical technology for the same reason the creationists are opposing evolutionary theory. The more detailed scientists knowledge about humans become the more obsolete the church's dogma will be. The ultimate fear of the church is that scientist's will one day be able to show that sentient beings can be artificially created from inanimate matter, thus completely shattering their view of mind and body as separate. Science has already made religion obsolete when it comes to physical reality, they now fear it will also be able to demonstrate that minds and thoughts can arise from artificial processes. Expect them to oppose AI as "non-human" once it starts getting advanced enough.
Unfortunately not. Under Swedish law there is no such thing as illegal evidence - anything may be presented as evidence, even if it was illegally obtained.
It is still worth to point out as the judge is also allowed to take such things into consideration. I.e, it doesn't mean the evidence is inadmissible, but it could very well have consequences for the outcome of the trial.
They employ thousands of people. DIS alone has some 130k employees. $4m is somewhere in the range of one of their CEO's pay.
... and this is of course the source of the problem. Seriously, if 4 people can do it why do they need hundreds and thousands of employees and CEOs who make millions per year? Sounds a bit inefficient don't you think?
Ok, there are royalties, but those are hardly the main share of the record industry's expenses.
IANAL but as far as I know the police in Sweden is not actually allowed to search your property unless the crime you're accused for is serious enough that it could result in a prison sentence... So what they are basically saying is the police broke the law?
Somebody suggested that solution for nuclear waste, but it was deemed unpractical due to the fallout risk. The current best proposal is to cleave the troublesome elements into pieces by partitioning them using nitric acid and subsequently bombarding them with a large quantity of radiation. According to my calculations the same method should work very well in this case too.
To put it this way, the European Spallation Source is a planned particle accelerator which is planned to have a proton-beam current in the range of a few milli-ampere. That is, comparable to the current drawn by your LCD monitor in standby. The catch is that ESS will be using proton energies up to a billion electron volts, thus making the power output of the accelerator comparable to a small nuclear reactor.
You can NOT quote power in terms of ampere without specifying the voltage. Conversely I've generated several thousands of volts using my bare hands and a piece of nylon, but because the current was rather small nobody noticed.
What is even more interesting is the time over which you can sustain a given power output. Over at our physics department we have lasers with power outputs beyond all the worlds nuclear reactors taken together. The pulse doesn't last very long however...
If there was water in any of those multitudes of pipes overhead that started leaking, the whole place would have been one large crater.
I give you one chance to guess why the reactor was built to carry the hot sodium far away from the reactor before using the heat from it to boil water for the turbines. Also, the white powder was probably not sodium ( sodium is silver-like in colour ) but rather sodium-oxides produces when the sodium is oxidized in the air.
Now for the record, had those pipes actually been carrying high-pressure water for a power turbine you would certainly be dead had they leaked. To achieve high turbine efficiency power plant engineers try to maximize the pressure and temperature on the hot side of the turbine, which means that if one of those pipes bursts when you are standing next to it, you are in deep shit. In fact Japanese workers have indeed died from steam pipes bursting at a nuclear power plant. Was no sodium involved in that one thou.
In general there is only one point in a sodium cooled power plant where water and sodium are even remotely close to one another, namely the secondary sodium-water heat exchanger. Mixing of sodium and water has occurred in Russian plants in the past, but it didn't cause any damage that was beyond repair, and no release of radioactive material.
Are breeder reactors the type people are advocating for a return to nuclear power? I don't think so...
There are other coolants you can use for breeder reactors. My personal favorite is the lead cooled system. It can safely shut itself down even without any computer or operator intervention (thanks to thermal expansion of the core ), there is no pressure in the reactor, so it can't explode, lead doesn't boil at the temperatures involved, so a loss of coolant accident as happened at TMI is unlikely, and it can reach temperatures high enough to allow high-efficiency thermochemical production of hydrogen from seawater. The latter will be important as natural gas gets more expensive ( virtually all fertilizer used in agriculture is made using hydrogen from natural gas ). Main issue is corrosion in molten lead, but already proven materials can handle it for electricity generation. The more advanced high-temperature system that produces hydrogen thermochemically at 850 C will require more advanced materials to be developed however.
The halflife of Sodium-24 is around 15 hours. The primary decay route is beta emission to an excited Magnesium-24 which then emits two gamma rays at 2.75Mev and 1.37Mev. So the snow is probably pretty radioactive too.
Siiiigh, again.. The leak was in teh SECONDARY LOOP. It wasn't any radioactivity in it. Nada, zero, zip... Yes, it was a bad accident, but the only thing nuclear about it was that it occurred in a nuclear power plant. The same thing would be much less likely to occur in the radioactive primary loop, because that counts as part of the nuclear island and is hence under much stricter safety requirements.
No you are right. Lead, Bismuth, Helium, Molten Salts, and even Water has been suggested. As for the last one, water is often claimed to be unusable in a breeder reactor because it absorbs too many neutrons. However, this is only true if you run the reactor on plutonium and use a thermal low-enrichment neutron spectrum. It is quite possible to design water/steam cooled reactors that have a fast neutron spectrum, and if you use heavy water it is even possible to design breeder reactor running on U-233 / Thorium in a thermal spectrum.
Sodium still has some advantages thou, such as favorable melting/boiling points, no long lived radioactivity under neutron irradiation , low corrosion rates against steel, and superior heat conductivity.
There is another factor to consider in this. Chernobyl used a design whereby a lack of water caused a positive feedback loop in the reactor to cause it to get even hotter.
Oh if that was the ONLY thing that was wrong with it...
1)The end of the control rods were made of graphite, which accelerated the reaction rather than slowing it when the operators pushed the panic button.
2)The channels that contained the control rods were far too narrow, causing the control rods to get jammed when they deformed due to the intense heat.
3)The reactor did not have a containment building, allowing the radioactive gases to escape into the atmosphere after the accident blew the roof of the reactor itself.
4)The reactor core was unusually large, containing much more nuclear fuel than other reactor designs, thus making the radioactive release worse.
5)The reactor was staffed with uneducated workers that didn't have significant experience with nuclear reactors.
6)The operators were not told about the design problems with the reactors even thou they were well known at the time.
7)The operators ran the reactor outside of safety regulations, withdrawing many more control rods than the reactor was designed to operate with ( that this was even possible is another design flaw ).
Actually their main problem was that the plants they built ashore in order to heat the reactors didn't manage to supply enough heat so they ended up running the reactors non-stop without service, and they were not designed for that so they eventually broke under the stress. Also, lead-bismuth and sodium are very different coolants. While sodium reacts explosively with water , lead does not. Lead does however corrode steal quite aggressively while sodium is completely non-corrosive to steel ( unless it is mixed with air/water ).
a) It is liquid at temperatures suitable for the reactor operation meaning you don't need any pressure in the cooling system. In contrast pressurized water reactors and gas cooled reactors need to keep the entire core under high pressure.
b) Sodium is a metal and hence conducts heat very well, this allows you to build a very compact reactor that is still capable of dissipating its heat after shutdown even if the cooling pumps were to fail.
c) Sodium doesn't absorb neutrons nearly as much as water does, and this allows you to build a reactor which produces more plutonium than it consumes, thus eliminating the need to enrich uranium.
d) Sodium atoms are heavier than hydrogen atoms, so the neutrons will not lose their energy as quickly. As a consequence the neutron spectrum is a lot harder, and capable of destroying much of the long-lived waste. The Waste from a breeder reactor would hit uranium levels of radioactivity in 300 years rather than tens of thousands of years.
e)While sodium is corrosive when mixed with air or water, pure sodium is almost completely non-corrosive to steel. This is in sharp contrast to 300 C pressurized water with boric-acid dissolved in it. A sodium cooled reactor generally experiences virtually no corrosion to the reactor core unless an accident occurs.
Basically, if it wasn't for the fire-hazard sodium would be close to an ideal reactor coolant.
Would not have made much difference to be honest. If you get several atmosphere pressure of radioactive water suddenly blowing a hole in your sub and disabling its power system, you would be fairly stuffed as well. The US navy stopped using sodium cooled reactors mainly because they wanted to standardize on one design. Sodium would have a lot of merits, even at sea. In particular, because it doesn't boil at the temperatures used you don't have any pressure in the reactor, so an explosion or leaking of primary coolant is a lot less probable ( and sodium or not, leaking of primary coolant would certainly be a show-stopper for a naval mission ).
Oh, and btw, the summary is misleading. Sodium is very corrosive to concrete and a lot of other materials, but provided it remains pure ( i.e, doesn't mix with water / air ) it is in fact very non-corrosive to steel, which is one of the reasons why it is used. It is certainly a lot less corrosive than 300 C water with boric acid in it.
sodium cooled reactors also have a tendancy to produce radioactive isotopes of sodium like Na22 or Na24 from the high levels of neutron radiation exposure
Except that the leak was in the secondary loop, which is never in contact with the core, and hence not radioactive. Had the leak been inside the primary loop you wouldn't have been able to walk up to it with a video camera because there would have been quite a bit of radiation shield and concrete in the way.
There wasn't any radioactivity in the area. The leak occurred in the secondary loop which is not radioactive. The primary loop is inside quite a bit of shielding so even if there was a leak there you couldn't just walk up to it with a video camera.
So what do you do when you CANT destroy the RFID because it is necessary for the device you bought to function? E.g, when your credit card doesn't work without the rfid chip, when you are not allowed to enter the subway without an rfid enabled ticket etc... Take your money elsewhere? Say hello to cartels and monopolies that are in cahoots with the government.
If it was as easy as just destroying the chip ( and if destroying the chip was legal ) then it wouldn't be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. Over in Britain the royal academy of engineering compared costs of nuclear ( yes, including decommissioning costs) to that of various energy sources: http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf . Essentially, while nuclear is expensive to build, the overall cost is comparable to coal fired power plants due to the low cost of fuel, and if you add on carbon capture and storage then the cost of coal overtakes nuclear rapidly.
A further thing to take into consideration is that increased energy consumption across the world combined with decreasing oil reserves is likely to drive up the price of coal/uranium. Since the fuel is a much lower proportion of the cost of nuclear power than it is for coal power this is likely to have a much lower impact upon the cost of nuclear power than for coal.
Finally, since nuclear power technology is advancing rapidly at the moment ( High temperature reactors around 2016 , breeders by 2025 , high efficiency hydrogen estimated 2030 ) the cost of nuclear plants is likely to drop ( per kilowatt generated ), while the cost of coal plants is likely to spike due to tighter emission standards.
The capture and storage research is worth it mainly because we can't expand other energy sources quick enough. In the long term it is not going to be economically competitive.
I'm in physics, and no I'm not talking about things we can patent, I'm talking about trying to describe the polarization of the proton inside a oxygen nucleus, or how light scatters from a plasma. Things like that. As it is the current copyright or patent system does not permit you to patent/copyright/claim ownership over theories that explain these phenomena (and it's a damn good thing too ).
This does mean we need public institutions to throw funding at us, because you just don't get private companies buying high energy synchrotrons and the like to do basic research. (btw, here "high energy" means "we have to call the power company and check if they have some power left" high ). Now, if you could patent physical theories, maybe we would get more private investment into syncrotrons lineacs, neutrino labs etc... but it would be a disaster. It would completely destroy our ability to bring physics further. The people studying bio-medicine are already starting to feel this because silly patents on methods for producing certain chemicals/hormones are getting in the way. Like one of my friends put it "Ten years ago, if I needed a particular cell culture to research this or that phenomena I would call up the people who were experts in it and they would put some of it in a test tube and give it to me during a visit. Nowadays you're looking at a $10.000 license in order for them to drop me a few cells from a practically unlimited supply." Sounds familiar? You can grow cells in a petri dish like you can grow fungus, yet to do research on some of them you are now talking massive license fees.
The purpose of the patent/copyright system is not to give hard working people an income. It is to promote the sciences and arts. With my education I could probably earn a lot more money if we were allowed to patent silly things like "a method for accurately measuring the polarization of small systems by manipulating the spatial measurements of scintillators" , but I still think such laws are absolutely disgraceful.
$100 to register, Free to renew for the first 10 years. $10 to renew every year after that. That way it works out to $10 per year for those who stay with a domain, and there is a big incentive not to register a domain you do not wish to keep. In combination with trademark law that would probably take the sting out of most of this nonsense.
Moral truths? Restricting the definition of life? You are talking about an organization which denounced condom use in face of millions of people dieing from STDs merely because it went against their religious dogma. The pope is opposing biomedical technology for the same reason the creationists are opposing evolutionary theory. The more detailed scientists knowledge about humans become the more obsolete the church's dogma will be. The ultimate fear of the church is that scientist's will one day be able to show that sentient beings can be artificially created from inanimate matter, thus completely shattering their view of mind and body as separate. Science has already made religion obsolete when it comes to physical reality, they now fear it will also be able to demonstrate that minds and thoughts can arise from artificial processes. Expect them to oppose AI as "non-human" once it starts getting advanced enough.
Far too many registered voters and politicians.
True, I need another step to show that any positive number can be written as X * 2^n , where n is in N and X is arbitrarily close to 0.
It is still worth to point out as the judge is also allowed to take such things into consideration. I.e, it doesn't mean the evidence is inadmissible, but it could very well have consequences for the outcome of the trial.
Ok, there are royalties, but those are hardly the main share of the record industry's expenses.
Let X be a small number greater than 0.
A: Under the assumption that double of a small number is a small number we have: Y is small => 2Y is small
B: Thus for all n > 0 we have (2^(n-1)) * X is small => (2^n)X is small
C: Thus by the principle of mathematical induction we have that (2^n) * X is small for all n > 0 and X > 0.
D: However, if X > 0 , then the sequence a(n) = (2^n) * X has no upper bound and is strictly increasing. Hence it diverges towards infinity.
E: So either double of a small number is not necessarily a small number, or all positive numbers are small numbers.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3697881/ubuntu-7.04-server-i386.iso
I'm sure there are more examples.
IANAL but as far as I know the police in Sweden is not actually allowed to search your property unless the crime you're accused for is serious enough that it could result in a prison sentence... So what they are basically saying is the police broke the law?
Somebody suggested that solution for nuclear waste, but it was deemed unpractical due to the fallout risk. The current best proposal is to cleave the troublesome elements into pieces by partitioning them using nitric acid and subsequently bombarding them with a large quantity of radiation. According to my calculations the same method should work very well in this case too.
Not true, try clicking on some of the NPCs multiple times.
Ampere is a measure of current, not power.
To put it this way, the European Spallation Source is a planned particle accelerator which is planned to have a proton-beam current in the range of a few milli-ampere. That is, comparable to the current drawn by your LCD monitor in standby. The catch is that ESS will be using proton energies up to a billion electron volts, thus making the power output of the accelerator comparable to a small nuclear reactor.
You can NOT quote power in terms of ampere without specifying the voltage. Conversely I've generated several thousands of volts using my bare hands and a piece of nylon, but because the current was rather small nobody noticed.
What is even more interesting is the time over which you can sustain a given power output. Over at our physics department we have lasers with power outputs beyond all the worlds nuclear reactors taken together. The pulse doesn't last very long however...
I give you one chance to guess why the reactor was built to carry the hot sodium far away from the reactor before using the heat from it to boil water for the turbines. Also, the white powder was probably not sodium ( sodium is silver-like in colour ) but rather sodium-oxides produces when the sodium is oxidized in the air.
Now for the record, had those pipes actually been carrying high-pressure water for a power turbine you would certainly be dead had they leaked. To achieve high turbine efficiency power plant engineers try to maximize the pressure and temperature on the hot side of the turbine, which means that if one of those pipes bursts when you are standing next to it, you are in deep shit. In fact Japanese workers have indeed died from steam pipes bursting at a nuclear power plant. Was no sodium involved in that one thou.
In general there is only one point in a sodium cooled power plant where water and sodium are even remotely close to one another, namely the secondary sodium-water heat exchanger. Mixing of sodium and water has occurred in Russian plants in the past, but it didn't cause any damage that was beyond repair, and no release of radioactive material.
There are other coolants you can use for breeder reactors. My personal favorite is the lead cooled system. It can safely shut itself down even without any computer or operator intervention (thanks to thermal expansion of the core ), there is no pressure in the reactor, so it can't explode, lead doesn't boil at the temperatures involved, so a loss of coolant accident as happened at TMI is unlikely, and it can reach temperatures high enough to allow high-efficiency thermochemical production of hydrogen from seawater. The latter will be important as natural gas gets more expensive ( virtually all fertilizer used in agriculture is made using hydrogen from natural gas ). Main issue is corrosion in molten lead, but already proven materials can handle it for electricity generation. The more advanced high-temperature system that produces hydrogen thermochemically at 850 C will require more advanced materials to be developed however.
Siiiigh, again.. The leak was in teh SECONDARY LOOP. It wasn't any radioactivity in it. Nada, zero, zip... Yes, it was a bad accident, but the only thing nuclear about it was that it occurred in a nuclear power plant. The same thing would be much less likely to occur in the radioactive primary loop, because that counts as part of the nuclear island and is hence under much stricter safety requirements.
No you are right. Lead, Bismuth, Helium, Molten Salts, and even Water has been suggested. As for the last one, water is often claimed to be unusable in a breeder reactor because it absorbs too many neutrons. However, this is only true if you run the reactor on plutonium and use a thermal low-enrichment neutron spectrum. It is quite possible to design water/steam cooled reactors that have a fast neutron spectrum, and if you use heavy water it is even possible to design breeder reactor running on U-233 / Thorium in a thermal spectrum.
Sodium still has some advantages thou, such as favorable melting/boiling points, no long lived radioactivity under neutron irradiation , low corrosion rates against steel, and superior heat conductivity.
Oh if that was the ONLY thing that was wrong with it...
1)The end of the control rods were made of graphite, which accelerated the reaction rather than slowing it when the operators pushed the panic button.
2)The channels that contained the control rods were far too narrow, causing the control rods to get jammed when they deformed due to the intense heat.
3)The reactor did not have a containment building, allowing the radioactive gases to escape into the atmosphere after the accident blew the roof of the reactor itself.
4)The reactor core was unusually large, containing much more nuclear fuel than other reactor designs, thus making the radioactive release worse.
5)The reactor was staffed with uneducated workers that didn't have significant experience with nuclear reactors.
6)The operators were not told about the design problems with the reactors even thou they were well known at the time.
7)The operators ran the reactor outside of safety regulations, withdrawing many more control rods than the reactor was designed to operate with ( that this was even possible is another design flaw ).
Actually their main problem was that the plants they built ashore in order to heat the reactors didn't manage to supply enough heat so they ended up running the reactors non-stop without service, and they were not designed for that so they eventually broke under the stress. Also, lead-bismuth and sodium are very different coolants. While sodium reacts explosively with water , lead does not. Lead does however corrode steal quite aggressively while sodium is completely non-corrosive to steel ( unless it is mixed with air/water ).
A number of reasons:
a) It is liquid at temperatures suitable for the reactor operation meaning you don't need any pressure in the cooling system. In contrast pressurized water reactors and gas cooled reactors need to keep the entire core under high pressure.
b) Sodium is a metal and hence conducts heat very well, this allows you to build a very compact reactor that is still capable of dissipating its heat after shutdown even if the cooling pumps were to fail.
c) Sodium doesn't absorb neutrons nearly as much as water does, and this allows you to build a reactor which produces more plutonium than it consumes, thus eliminating the need to enrich uranium.
d) Sodium atoms are heavier than hydrogen atoms, so the neutrons will not lose their energy as quickly. As a consequence the neutron spectrum is a lot harder, and capable of destroying much of the long-lived waste. The Waste from a breeder reactor would hit uranium levels of radioactivity in 300 years rather than tens of thousands of years.
e)While sodium is corrosive when mixed with air or water, pure sodium is almost completely non-corrosive to steel. This is in sharp contrast to 300 C pressurized water with boric-acid dissolved in it. A sodium cooled reactor generally experiences virtually no corrosion to the reactor core unless an accident occurs.
Basically, if it wasn't for the fire-hazard sodium would be close to an ideal reactor coolant.
Would not have made much difference to be honest. If you get several atmosphere pressure of radioactive water suddenly blowing a hole in your sub and disabling its power system, you would be fairly stuffed as well. The US navy stopped using sodium cooled reactors mainly because they wanted to standardize on one design. Sodium would have a lot of merits, even at sea. In particular, because it doesn't boil at the temperatures used you don't have any pressure in the reactor, so an explosion or leaking of primary coolant is a lot less probable ( and sodium or not, leaking of primary coolant would certainly be a show-stopper for a naval mission ).
Oh, and btw, the summary is misleading. Sodium is very corrosive to concrete and a lot of other materials, but provided it remains pure ( i.e, doesn't mix with water / air ) it is in fact very non-corrosive to steel, which is one of the reasons why it is used. It is certainly a lot less corrosive than 300 C water with boric acid in it.
Except that the leak was in the secondary loop, which is never in contact with the core, and hence not radioactive. Had the leak been inside the primary loop you wouldn't have been able to walk up to it with a video camera because there would have been quite a bit of radiation shield and concrete in the way.
There wasn't any radioactivity in the area. The leak occurred in the secondary loop which is not radioactive. The primary loop is inside quite a bit of shielding so even if there was a leak there you couldn't just walk up to it with a video camera.
So what do you do when you CANT destroy the RFID because it is necessary for the device you bought to function? E.g, when your credit card doesn't work without the rfid chip, when you are not allowed to enter the subway without an rfid enabled ticket etc... Take your money elsewhere? Say hello to cartels and monopolies that are in cahoots with the government.
If it was as easy as just destroying the chip ( and if destroying the chip was legal ) then it wouldn't be a problem.