To give you an idea of just how retarded political and administrative dealings with nuclear power is, consider what we've been doing in Sweden. Nuclear was bad, so we banned construction of new reactors, then we closed down one of our existing plants, replacing its energy generation by turning up the power on the other plants ( thereby reducing safety margins). Now because the renewables that were supposed to replace nuclear didn't make it (surprise surprise ), we will extend the reactor lifetimes by 50% or so.
I.e, rather than building newer and safer designs we have cranked up the power on the old ones and extended their operation permits beyond their design lifetime, and we still don't have any plausible way to replace them other than some wishful thinking about wind power. We're not building new reactors, so the obvious outcome will be further life extensions to our already ageing reactor fleet. Then when they finally do fall apart at 6+ decades of operation, it will all be because nuclear is inherently dangerous, and not at all because we stopped its development and improvement for 40 years and decided to go with a wind power pipe dream that saw the reactors pushed way beyond what they were ever designed for.
If it was down to me we would be building ESBWR or CANDU reactors for the short to medium term, with an aim of Lead or Molten Salt cooled breeders in the long term, but there's far too many people here who honestly think we will replace Petrol and Nuclear with Wind farms and Solar Photovoltaics. Yes, Solar, in Sweden... It isn't even economical in California, but somehow we expect to do better because we're not Americans.
Just as well transsexual people will be hard for these things: hormonal medication does not change skeletal features,
Even so quite a few transsexuals undergo various forms of plastic surgery that certainly can change a lot of skeletal features. This can range from rhinoplasty, forehead contouring, chin reductions etc...
This is becoming a joke, first people try to claim health care is a right
Hi there. I live in Sweden. Over here basic medical care IS considered a human right, and we recently even passed a law which grants it for people who are here illegally (shocking, I know ). Somehow our society has not collapsed despite this fact.
Seriously, why do you think this is ridiculous? Diseases tend to spread you know.. Deny treatment for the poor and eventually those infections will hit somebody you care about. Even if you don't think it is immoral to leave people to suffer unnecessarily, it is just better for everybody to have universal health care.
I'm transsexual and take testosterone blockers in order to help feminise my body, and changes in sex drive were quite noticeable. Propecia's active substance, finasteride, is essentially a testosterone blocker ( thou admittedly a weaker one than what I am taking ) so I'm not at all surprised it can have such side effects.
Are they TRYING to lose relevance? This is just bound to drive developers towards android, and what exactly would the benefit be? It's not as if they're in a position to press clients into paying license fees since that would just drive them away.
This is probably a joke or troll, but since there actually have been morons trying to do this sort of thing before:
If you do not have enough knowledge and experience with radioactive materials and radiation safety to know how to generate neutrons, attempting to do so is a Bad Idea (TM). Neutrons are very penetrating and hard to shield against, and when absorbed they activate the material they are absorbed in, creating secondary radiation hazards. Using them to irradiate fissionable isotopes, like thorium or uranium, is an even more insane idea since it will not only multiply the number of neutrons generated, but also produce a dirty mix of fission products, many of which are gaseous and hard to contain.
Seriously, just go do something safer instead, like base-jumping or sword-swallowing.
See the clever thing for Europe to do in response to all this crap is pretty much to keep the cool. Let the Americans shoot themselves in the foot and then welcome the companies that decide to emigrate as a result. Heck we don't even have to do anything, you guys are doing a great job of stifling your ability to compete on your own. Sadly it seems the EC, while probably not quite as bad as the US congress, also gives in to short sighted business interests far too easily.
Admitting it was a mistake rather than coming up with some bogus excuse gives them points in my book. Whether the decision was by marketing or just company policy it at least suggests they have one or two competent people over there.
Reactor grade plutonium is everything but great for making nuclear weapons. The DOE analysis of the actinide component from sodium cooled fast breeders suggested that simply lumping it together as a sphere ( as you do in plutonium based nukes ) would cause the plutonium to melt under its own decay heat. Now you're going to do that with the thing surrounded by plastic explosives, somehow shield the weapon and workers from the intense neutron radiation generated by isotopes of Californium and Einsteinium, and even then the large number of spontaneous neutrons would make it almost impossible to get a high yield from such a weapon.
Also plutonium is not really that powerful a poison compared to stuff you can make yourself in a test-tube. There are other things in spent nuclear fuel that is however...
This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates longlived fission products like technetium99 (halflife over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.
Technetium can be destroyed through neutron capture. Same with Iodine. Since a thorium breeder would necessarily make use of reprocessing technology there is no reason not to do this. The remaining fission products decay to uranium-ore levels within a few hundred years.
Also, while you would still need a repository, the capacity of a repository is limited by heat generation, not the volume of the waste. Since thorium generate orders of magnitude fewer actinides the long-term heat generation ( past a few hundred years ) is much lower than for a once through uranium cycle. It is also much easier to design a repository for a few hundred years than for a hundred thousand years.
Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly.
This is correct, but your reasons are wrong. The main reason is that a thorium thermal breeder would have to reprocess the fuel much more often than a plutonium based fast breeder, and this greatly increases costs. The attractiveness of thorium is mostly due to the possibility of creating a thermal breeder reactor, but with advances in fast breeder technology, in particular the possibility of using safer coolants than liquid sodium ( lead, supercritical water, molten salts or helium ) this advantage is not as great anymore.
Lastly, no one has actually made a commercial level thorium cycle reactor despite decades of trying. It MIGHT have some advantages and engineering and research efforts should continue, but it's hardly a viable solution as of yet.
This is not due to technical limitations, but is mostly because it is cheaper to just dig up more uranium. In the long term our once through use of uranium is of course not sustainable, but as long as it remains cheap it is likely to dominate in commercial nuclear power. Also India is developing thorium reactors aggressively and have a few prototypes running.
The problem with pebble bed reactors is that even thou a thorium cycle could in principle be used to make them breeders, it is a royal pain to try to reprocess the spent fuel for recycling. It involves combustion of large quantities of radioactive carbon, which then has to be scrubbed out of the resulting exhaust. In general carbon is a problem in reprocessing operations because it forms a large variety of compounds and allotropes that are resistant to dissolution in nitric acid as well as molten salts ( the two type of solvents favored for reprocessing).
The corollary is that such reactors would be highly unsuitable for making weapons grade plutonium. It just isn't practical to run them on a short refueling cycle, which would be necessary for producing weapons material.
Fact of the matter is we can't deduce what happened during the early BB because we can't make experiments to determine how quantum gravity works. Until somebody comes up with a theory which actually produces testable predictions for it all the weirdo suggestions is just pure speculation.
Most people that have posted here seem to think the accident is a very good argument for retiring old reactors, and replace them with newer designs that have passive safety features and more reliable containments. In particular the following seems to be the "slashdot view":
*Fossil fuels is an orders of magnitude worse than nuclear, even when accidents like this are taken into consideration.
*The probability of disasters like this can be greatly reduced with designs like the ESBWR, that don't rely on pumps to circulate coolant
*The renewables are difficult to scale to the capacity required to replace fossil fuels, either due to intermittent generation, cost or both.
*In the event of a meltdown large radiation leaks can be avoided if the containment is properly constructed. As an example many modern reactors have special filters which allow venting of steam to reduce the pressure without large releases of radiation. Cooling ponds for spent fuel can also be better protected.
Most people that know what they are talking about seem to recognize that this accident is very serious, but at the same time recognize that it is unlikely we will be able to control greenhouse gas emissions without new nuclear plants. The question should thus be "what can we do to make it safer" rather than "should we use it at all".
There is an argument to be had for having a nuclear deterrent, but the kind of madness where a country builds thousands of megaton yield thermonuclear weapons is just tragic. If nothing else it is a fantastic waste of money and resources when even a small nuclear arsenal with maybe 50-100 weapons would appear to work as an effective deterrent. Ideally it would be better if one could do without them altogether, but if one feels there is a need for it then at least keep it sensible rather than blowing away resources that could be better spent elsewhere on a stupid pissing contest.
Has there ever been a scientific study on the effectiveness of wind or solar power in reducing carbon emissions once all factors are considered (production, maintenance, lifetime energy output)? That last one's a serious question; if you know please link me.
Energy consumption is largest during the day, and thus solar can actually help do some load leveling. Yea, you can't get all the energy from solar, but having the plant peak in power output around noon is actually a good thing.
If you are using concentrators for solar power you really ought to consider a thermal cycle like a brayton turbine or a sterling engine, rather than solar cells. Thermal cycles tend to have higher conversion efficiencies, the equipment is more reliable, and their power output is more easily converted to grid voltage ( AC as opposed to DC ). Solar cells also tend to see reduced lifetimes when used with very concentrated light. The advantage with cells is pretty much that they don't need concentrators to work, since they don't rely on a high temperature. They can also be used in places where space/weight is an issue, such as on sailboats, rooftops or sattelites. Thus if you are already using a bulky concentrator to get the light intensity up, you may as well use a sterling engine.
Most amusingly, however, nearly a quarter of the 1,000 patient respondents said they don't even trust themselves with access to their own electronic health records.
What the hell is amusing about this? I dare claim I know miles more about information security than your average patient, and I'd certainly prefer to have my medical details kept safe by the pros than trying ( and probably failing ) to do so myself. For the same reason I keep my money in a bank as opposed to underneath my mattress. Now granted some doctors may have lax security, but for myself to keep the records in addition would just open up more avenues of attacks. The only good reason I can see why I would keep such records myself is to ensure I have a backup of them if my doctor was to screw up and erase them by accident or something.
The problem is not our rape laws. The problem is prosecutors that will file a case when they have no evidence, and judges who don't understand the phrase "innocent until proven guilty". Yes, this is because of other failures in the justice system, but on the overall Sweden's laws, including rape laws, are quite mild.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the failure in Sweden's treatment of rape cases is not in the specification, it's the implementation that sucks.
A much easier and tested way is to simply use a vegan diet reinforced with supplements for the essential nutrients that are hard to get from plants.
This has considerably lower CO2 footprint than an omnivorous diet,
but anybody that wishes to try it needs to know that supplementing some vitamins is an absolute must for a vegan diet to work. In particular vitamin B12 has no reliable plant sources since it is only made from bacteria, and failing to supplement it while on a vegan diet WILL cause a dangerous deficiency.
There are other things one may want to supplement in a vegan diet as well, but they are more dependent on individual factors and your eating habits.
How about ensuring doctors work humane shifts as opposed to trying to squeeze every penny out of the system?
This is not just a problem with the US btw. I've spoken to doctors from lots of different countries, including Sweden, the US and England. In general they are overworked, get little time to recover between shifts, and are expected to work overtime as part of the job description.
That's not going to be good for either doctor or patient.
I'm transsexual myself and I believe I can answer this.
Most ( all ? ) countries I know of have only two legal genders. Changing your legal gender typically requires a psychiatric diagnosis of "gender identity disorder" or transsexualism. This is a diagnosis that is HARD to get. Psychiatrists don't like to make it on a whim because the standard treatment involves irreversibly altering the patient's body.
Now assuming you do get diagnosed as such, I imagine the military could come up with all kinds of reasons (good or bad ) to kick you out.
I don't agree with how we are classified as disordered by psychiatrists, but it will take a heck of a lot more than repealing DADT before the military will have a problem with kicking us out as they please.
Mathematicians and physicists aren't immune either.
I have a joint degree in Mathematics and Physics, and I highly disagree with your claim. In fact without any previous formal education in engineering I have designed a robotic arm which will revolutionize modern medicine.
Why would I bother buying SSD's when they have a known failure point at after given number of writes?
They have faster seek times, they are silent, and some brands have a very low power consumption.
Now, for the failure modes. Let us assume your drive can handle 10 000 writes ( a low estimate ). Modern drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to the same sector all the time. Thus for a 100GB drive you would have to write over a thousand terabytes before it would start to fail, and even then the failure is a "soft" failure in the sense that reads are fine, so your OS should be able to tell you that the writes are failing, allowing you to copy down unsaved work to your USB stick, mail it to yourself, save on another drive , whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
To give you an idea of just how retarded political and administrative dealings with nuclear power is, consider what we've been doing in Sweden. Nuclear was bad, so we banned construction of new reactors, then we closed down one of our existing plants, replacing its energy generation by turning up the power on the other plants ( thereby reducing safety margins). Now because the renewables that were supposed to replace nuclear didn't make it (surprise surprise ), we will extend the reactor lifetimes by 50% or so.
I.e, rather than building newer and safer designs we have cranked up the power on the old ones and extended their operation permits beyond their design lifetime, and we still don't have any plausible way to replace them other than some wishful thinking about wind power. We're not building new reactors, so the obvious outcome will be further life extensions to our already ageing reactor fleet. Then when they finally do fall apart at 6+ decades of operation, it will all be because nuclear is inherently dangerous, and not at all because we stopped its development and improvement for 40 years and decided to go with a wind power pipe dream that saw the reactors pushed way beyond what they were ever designed for.
If it was down to me we would be building ESBWR or CANDU reactors for the short to medium term, with an aim of Lead or Molten Salt cooled breeders in the long term, but there's far too many people here who honestly think we will replace Petrol and Nuclear with Wind farms and Solar Photovoltaics. Yes, Solar, in Sweden ... It isn't even economical in California, but somehow we expect to do better because we're not Americans.
Even so quite a few transsexuals undergo various forms of plastic surgery that certainly can change a lot of skeletal features. This can range from rhinoplasty, forehead contouring, chin reductions etc...
Hi there. I live in Sweden. Over here basic medical care IS considered a human right, and we recently even passed a law which grants it for people who are here illegally (shocking, I know ). Somehow our society has not collapsed despite this fact.
Seriously, why do you think this is ridiculous? Diseases tend to spread you know.. Deny treatment for the poor and eventually those infections will hit somebody you care about. Even if you don't think it is immoral to leave people to suffer unnecessarily, it is just better for everybody to have universal health care.
But don't listen to me, what do I know. I'm obviously brainwashed by this crazy socialist state I live in.
Btw: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13053999
I'm transsexual and take testosterone blockers in order to help feminise my body, and changes in sex drive were quite noticeable. Propecia's active substance, finasteride, is essentially a testosterone blocker ( thou admittedly a weaker one than what I am taking ) so I'm not at all surprised it can have such side effects.
Are they TRYING to lose relevance? This is just bound to drive developers towards android, and what exactly would the benefit be? It's not as if they're in a position to press clients into paying license fees since that would just drive them away.
This is probably a joke or troll, but since there actually have been morons trying to do this sort of thing before:
If you do not have enough knowledge and experience with radioactive materials and radiation safety to know how to generate neutrons, attempting to do so is a Bad Idea (TM). Neutrons are very penetrating and hard to shield against, and when absorbed they activate the material they are absorbed in, creating secondary radiation hazards. Using them to irradiate fissionable isotopes, like thorium or uranium, is an even more insane idea since it will not only multiply the number of neutrons generated, but also produce a dirty mix of fission products, many of which are gaseous and hard to contain.
Seriously, just go do something safer instead, like base-jumping or sword-swallowing.
See the clever thing for Europe to do in response to all this crap is pretty much to keep the cool. Let the Americans shoot themselves in the foot and then welcome the companies that decide to emigrate as a result. Heck we don't even have to do anything, you guys are doing a great job of stifling your ability to compete on your own. Sadly it seems the EC, while probably not quite as bad as the US congress, also gives in to short sighted business interests far too easily.
Admitting it was a mistake rather than coming up with some bogus excuse gives them points in my book. Whether the decision was by marketing or just company policy it at least suggests they have one or two competent people over there.
Reactor grade plutonium is everything but great for making nuclear weapons. The DOE analysis of the actinide component from sodium cooled fast breeders suggested that simply lumping it together as a sphere ( as you do in plutonium based nukes ) would cause the plutonium to melt under its own decay heat. Now you're going to do that with the thing surrounded by plastic explosives, somehow shield the weapon and workers from the intense neutron radiation generated by isotopes of Californium and Einsteinium, and even then the large number of spontaneous neutrons would make it almost impossible to get a high yield from such a weapon.
Also plutonium is not really that powerful a poison compared to stuff you can make yourself in a test-tube. There are other things in spent nuclear fuel that is however...
Technetium can be destroyed through neutron capture. Same with Iodine. Since a thorium breeder would necessarily make use of reprocessing technology there is no reason not to do this. The remaining fission products decay to uranium-ore levels within a few hundred years.
Also, while you would still need a repository, the capacity of a repository is limited by heat generation, not the volume of the waste. Since thorium generate orders of magnitude fewer actinides the long-term heat generation ( past a few hundred years ) is much lower than for a once through uranium cycle. It is also much easier to design a repository for a few hundred years than for a hundred thousand years.
This is correct, but your reasons are wrong. The main reason is that a thorium thermal breeder would have to reprocess the fuel much more often than a plutonium based fast breeder, and this greatly increases costs. The attractiveness of thorium is mostly due to the possibility of creating a thermal breeder reactor, but with advances in fast breeder technology, in particular the possibility of using safer coolants than liquid sodium ( lead, supercritical water, molten salts or helium ) this advantage is not as great anymore.
This is not due to technical limitations, but is mostly because it is cheaper to just dig up more uranium. In the long term our once through use of uranium is of course not sustainable, but as long as it remains cheap it is likely to dominate in commercial nuclear power. Also India is developing thorium reactors aggressively and have a few prototypes running.
The problem with pebble bed reactors is that even thou a thorium cycle could in principle be used to make them breeders, it is a royal pain to try to reprocess the spent fuel for recycling. It involves combustion of large quantities of radioactive carbon, which then has to be scrubbed out of the resulting exhaust. In general carbon is a problem in reprocessing operations because it forms a large variety of compounds and allotropes that are resistant to dissolution in nitric acid as well as molten salts ( the two type of solvents favored for reprocessing).
The corollary is that such reactors would be highly unsuitable for making weapons grade plutonium. It just isn't practical to run them on a short refueling cycle, which would be necessary for producing weapons material.
Fact of the matter is we can't deduce what happened during the early BB because we can't make experiments to determine how quantum gravity works. Until somebody comes up with a theory which actually produces testable predictions for it all the weirdo suggestions is just pure speculation.
Most people that have posted here seem to think the accident is a very good argument for retiring old reactors, and replace them with newer designs that have passive safety features and more reliable containments. In particular the following seems to be the "slashdot view":
*Fossil fuels is an orders of magnitude worse than nuclear, even when accidents like this are taken into consideration.
*The probability of disasters like this can be greatly reduced with designs
like the ESBWR, that don't rely on pumps to circulate coolant
*The renewables are difficult to scale to the capacity required to replace fossil fuels, either due to intermittent generation, cost or both.
*In the event of a meltdown large radiation leaks can be avoided if the containment is properly constructed. As an example many modern reactors have special filters which allow venting of steam to reduce the pressure without large releases of radiation. Cooling ponds for spent fuel can also be better protected.
Most people that know what they are talking about seem to recognize that this accident is very serious, but at the same time recognize that it is unlikely we will be able to control greenhouse gas emissions without new nuclear plants. The question should thus be "what can we do to make it safer" rather than "should we use it at all".
There is an argument to be had for having a nuclear deterrent, but the kind of madness where a country builds thousands of megaton yield thermonuclear weapons is just tragic. If nothing else it is a fantastic waste of money and resources when even a small nuclear arsenal with maybe 50-100 weapons would appear to work as an effective deterrent. Ideally it would be better if one could do without them altogether, but if one feels there is a need for it then at least keep it sensible rather than blowing away resources that could be better spent elsewhere on a stupid pissing contest.
Swedish study. Keep in mind that due to Sweden's northern latitude the numbers for Solar are much worse than they would be in the southern US states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vattenfall_Electricity_CO2_Lifecycle.PNG
In any case all the renewables ( and nuclear ) have lifecycle emissions per kWh that are almost negligible compared to the fossil fuels.
Energy consumption is largest during the day, and thus solar can actually help do some load leveling. Yea, you can't get all the energy from solar, but having the plant peak in power output around noon is actually a good thing.
If you are using concentrators for solar power you really ought to consider a thermal cycle like a brayton turbine or a sterling engine, rather than solar cells. Thermal cycles tend to have higher conversion efficiencies, the equipment is more reliable, and their power output is more easily converted to grid voltage ( AC as opposed to DC ). Solar cells also tend to see reduced lifetimes when used with very concentrated light. The advantage with cells is pretty much that they don't need concentrators to work, since they don't rely on a high temperature. They can also be used in places where space/weight is an issue, such as on sailboats, rooftops or sattelites. Thus if you are already using a bulky concentrator to get the light intensity up, you may as well use a sterling engine.
What the hell is amusing about this? I dare claim I know miles more about information security than your average patient, and I'd certainly prefer to have my medical details kept safe by the pros than trying ( and probably failing ) to do so myself. For the same reason I keep my money in a bank as opposed to underneath my mattress. Now granted some doctors may have lax security, but for myself to keep the records in addition would just open up more avenues of attacks. The only good reason I can see why I would keep such records myself is to ensure I have a backup of them if my doctor was to screw up and erase them by accident or something.
The problem is not our rape laws. The problem is prosecutors that will file a case when they have no evidence, and judges who don't understand the phrase "innocent until proven guilty". Yes, this is because of other failures in the justice system, but on the overall Sweden's laws, including rape laws, are quite mild.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the failure in Sweden's treatment of rape cases is not in the specification, it's the implementation that sucks.
A much easier and tested way is to simply use a vegan diet
reinforced with supplements for the essential nutrients that
are hard to get from plants.
This has considerably lower CO2 footprint than an omnivorous diet,
but anybody that wishes to try it needs to know that supplementing
some vitamins is an absolute must for a vegan diet to work. In particular
vitamin B12 has no reliable plant sources since it is only made from
bacteria, and failing to supplement it while on a vegan diet WILL cause
a dangerous deficiency.
There are other things one may want to supplement in a vegan diet as well,
but they are more dependent on individual factors and your eating habits.
How about ensuring doctors work humane shifts as opposed to trying to squeeze every penny out of the system?
This is not just a problem with the US btw. I've spoken to doctors from lots of different countries, including Sweden, the US and England.
In general they are overworked, get little time to recover between shifts, and are expected to work overtime as part of the job description.
That's not going to be good for either doctor or patient.
I'm transsexual myself and I believe I can answer this.
Most ( all ? ) countries I know of have only two legal genders.
Changing your legal gender typically requires a psychiatric diagnosis of "gender identity disorder"
or transsexualism. This is a diagnosis that is HARD to get. Psychiatrists don't like to make it on a
whim because the standard treatment involves irreversibly altering the patient's body.
Now assuming you do get diagnosed as such, I imagine the military could come up with all kinds
of reasons (good or bad ) to kick you out.
I don't agree with how we are classified as disordered by psychiatrists, but it will take a heck of a lot
more than repealing DADT before the military will have a problem with kicking us out as they please.
I have a joint degree in Mathematics and Physics, and I highly disagree with your claim.
In fact without any previous formal education in engineering I have designed a robotic arm
which will revolutionize modern medicine.
Now does anybody know how to open the toolbox ?
They have faster seek times, they are silent, and some brands have a very low power consumption.
Now, for the failure modes. Let us assume your drive can handle 10 000 writes ( a low estimate ). Modern drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to the same sector all the time. Thus for a 100GB drive you would have to write over a thousand terabytes before it would start to fail, and even then the failure is a "soft" failure in the sense that reads are fine, so your OS should be able to tell you that the writes are failing, allowing you to copy down unsaved work to your USB stick, mail it to yourself, save on another drive , whatever.
I know this is slashdot, but I do prefer to be called "miss" .;)