Animal. Even if microbial life is plentiful, multicellular life seems likely to be very uncommon. We've only had it on Earth for the last half-billion years, seemingly by some freak accident.
The appearance of animal life does not seem to be a freak accident (that would be the development of tool-making animals who also communicate symbolically). I suspect you are thinking of the endosymbiotic event that led to the Eucaryotes. But this happened a long time ago, more than 1.5 billion years. Eucaryotes remained microscopic single cell organisms for more than a billion years.
The development of animal life about 600 million years ago looks like it is tied to oxygen level of the atmosphere reaching somewhere in the range of 8-14% (different estimates of what it was at that time). There is a point where being able to oxidize fuel internally creates a concentrated controllable energy source, so large active multicellular systems become possible for the first time. It would seem that multicellular life arising, and then the Cambrian explosion (540 million years BP) are tied to the steadily climbing oxygen level. Since that time the oxygen level of Earth has fluctuated, but never dropped below the point where it was when the Cambrian explosion happened.
It is of course misleading to speak of AIs as being "silicon-based". They are right now due to a particular cost-driven technological choice (eliminating GaAs for example), but our current computing technology is a transitory phase. For example, the idea of building circuits with doped carbon nanotubes is being explored now and looks like it has real potential.
Our brightest "passive" emissions are our ballistic missile early warning radars. Most transmissions/emissions from Earth fade rapidly with distance. A signal that is tightly focused, powerful, and with a narrow spectrum will far outshine everything else on Earth in the electromagnetic spectrum.
So if aliens detect us from a distance they will be seeing the bright pulses of FPS-115 PAVE PAWS (Precision Acquisition Vehicle Entry Phased Array Warning System) whose signals are now 41 light years out.
These radars are detectable to 15 light years with a clone of the Arecibo radio telescope, and a thousand 100-m dishes (once proposed for a Project Cyclops) would be able to detect us to 250 light years. A really advanced civilization could have a radio telescope much larger than that so our radar signals might be detectable across much of the galaxy. There has to be some limit of detectability against natural noise though, but I don't know what it is.
So thanks to the nuclear arms race we have an interstellar beacon already operating!
Of course "detectable" is simply the lowest bar to clear. Since these beams sweep and also change frequency to avoid jamming, an alien is just going to pick up a few blips at different frequencies, with more blips not seen for a day until we are illuminating that part of the sky again. Not extremely obvious, but as they collect data across decades, it might be enough signal. But since these advanced aliens would presumably have a lot knowledge of natural signals they might be able to flag this as an anomaly fairly quickly. And of course we are only beaming things in the Northern Hemisphere, but the center of our galaxy is visible from PAVE PAWS sites.
I think this delusion is distinct from conditions where there are actual (but phantom) sensations of things crawling on your skin, though the latter could certainly cause the former.
The person experiencing real but neurologically-caused sensations does not generally develop the belief that they are manifestations of actual infestations, though they may thing so at first. Once it is explained and understood that migraines (say) are the cause of these phantoms the patient understands and accepts that is the case.
People prone to phantom sensations is probably a much larger group that people who believe they are infested by insects or other creatures. And the Ekbom sufferers include many who have no sensations at all (like the "Morgellons" cases).
With lotto and scratchers, most of the tickets are worthless. They don't enhance your life...
They are a form of entertainment. For the price of a ticket you rent a fantasy about what you would do with the money if you were to win, which indeed has some known chance of actually happening. It is fantasy that lasts for a few days (or until you scratch the ticket).
Why this form of entertainment is "worthless" compared to playing an on-line game is unclear to me. Indeed, you can indulge in the lottery fantasy while doing other useful things. Not so the on-line game.
Research on this (many decades of it) indicates that simple moored drift collection (letting ocean currents do all the work) is most cost effective, compared to dedicated circulation pumping (for uranium collection). But if you have desalinization plants anyway, this can be a bonus but not a huge one.
If all the urban areas of California were supplied by nothing but desalinized water the plants would ingest about 20 billion tons of water a year from which 60 tons of uranium could be extracted - worth about $6 million at the ten-year market value average. The 10 billion tons of fresh water produced would cost at least $10 billion, so this is just rounding error.
Research on extracting uranium from seawater using polymer matrix materials has been going for decades, with significant progress. The projected cost of extraction has fallen to as low as $350/kg, which is actually less than the peak spot market price of uranium hit in 2007, but higher than the 10 year average of about $100/kg.
This paper does a nice survey of this work up to about 2014, and does not include this most recent project. You can use SciHub to get the whole article but the abstract I link to provides a good summary of its key points which are:
Adsorption capacity was the largest driver of cost.
A higher capacity did not necessarily mean a lower cost.
Many substrates were employed: polyethylene was the most widely and recently used.
Passive mooring systems were more economical than pumping seawater systems
The abstract gives a price range of $400-$1000/kg but if you read the paper the lower bound is really about $350, and obviously only the most cost-effective systems are going to be candidates for eventual commercial use. This latest work cited in TFA uses (potentially recycled) acrylic, and the focus seems to be on finding a better cost/performance ratio, whereas most of the research has focused primarily on performance. I would like to see this work put into context with all the other work that has been done, to see exactly what the advancements/benefits are.
But that won't be for a long time. We have proven uranium reserves on land good for over 100 years at current rates of use before the price will rise to $350/kg. The world produced $75 billion of electricity from nuclear power last years (at $30/MWh wholesale price) and the cost of the uranium to fuel it was $6.8 billion (using the ten year average price). At $350/kg the cost would be $24 billion, a significant increase in total electricity cost, but in the context of the trillions of dollars of economic output that runs on that electricity, one that could easily be absorbed. But the uranium in seawater is a 13,000 year supply, so it will not run out on any relevant timescale.
And if and when we need to use seawater uranium, one can expect that that $350/kg figure can be driven lower, with an additional century of research and a sustained focus on commercialization.
On-line it has become well-nigh universal to ping users after every transaction to give a rating score, and then when you give a score, you are prompted to write a review also. And then we get prompted for satisfaction surveys after we buy stuff at a store. And if we talk to someone on the phone we get transferred to survey at the end of the call. And now we are being pinged for surveys at every meal in a restaurant.
Mostly I just want to buy something, or get something to eat -- I don't want to be cajoled every time into providing extra customer tracking data (the likely major use for this - instead of, y'know, better service).
Thanks for this, it is a well balanced statement of the situation.
It is amusing, and predictable on/., to see when a natural science story posted how the commentors here split between "that's a stupid study because it is so obvious" and "that isn't true because I just thought up another reason without reading the TFA".
Lots of people here don't get the whole "science" thing.
Which is why, when another problem recurrent problem arose, seen on multiple launches, of ice forming on the liquid fuel tanks, and breaking off, causing near accidents NASA quickly halted all further launches until a fix could be put in place, thus avoiding the repeat of a lost shuttle and crew.
Oh wait, that's not what happened. They kept launching, and ignoring the videos of ice chunks passing close to the shuttle until one fatally compromised the wing of the Columbia resulting in the loss of shuttle and crew. Only then was a fix for the ice debris put in place.
And returning to the situation with the Challenger, the excuse you quote does not give NASA any sort of pass. As the Feynman quote you are responding to says quite accurately:
"In fact, previous NASA experience had shown, on occasion, just such difficulties, near accidents, and
accidents, all giving warning that the probability of flight failure
was not so very small."
There was a clear pattern of increasingly severe compromise of O-ring integrity with lower and lower launch temperatures, and the fatal launch was 15 degrees colder than any previous launch, and 27 degrees below the recommended launch temperature limit. It is entirely on NASA that this information was not in the launch procedure guides used by launch managers. There was no excuse for the relevant facts not being known.
An additional point is that in the lead up to the go-ahead for that launch NASA managers had spent hours badgering Morton Thiokol management into signing off on the launch. This is disastrous practice for any safety procedure - demanding that you get the answers that you would like to have, until you get them. So yet more bad management practice at NASA.
Mod parent up. This is crucial for any productive activity. Predictable behavior is important. Configurable predictable behavior is even better, but we skip "configurable" if we must choose.
Smart help is only helpful if it is really smart, that is - sentient, i.e. another person.
Because if a person does something you don't like you tell them, and they understand what you said, and they remember and they are effectively infinitely flexible and adaptable.
It is certainly within the ability of seismometers to detect nearby people jumping, heck they are can detect people walking nearby. So I am prepared to encounter a story about crowd activity being detected by a local station, there is nothing inherently unreasonable about it.
But the only source for this story appear to be a Spanish language tweet with three seismic channels snippets displayed without scales on any axis, or other identifying information, and with a red and a green line drawn on it. One of them presumably marking the goal.
But the two lines look like they intersect the data stream at random points. Neither one seems to mark anything that stands out from the background activity.
When on-line searching I found absolutely no credible sources coming up, it is all popular media repeating more or less the same thing, but with the "telephone game" effect. Some stories quite magnitudes, but they range from 1 to 3, an energy range 30,000 fold and are probably just speculation reported as fact.
Until someone comes with an actual source for the measurement and a real magnitude measurement (with someone to back it up) I'm dismissing this as BS.
It lost to not having anyone to sell the power to. The nuclear power building boom was based on projections for electricity demand that had been climbing (on a per capita basis) since 1960 until 1975 one a constant trend-line then started falling way off the trend-line even declining slightly in 1981 and 1982.
WPPSS signed up for an aggressive reactor construction program in 1971 and went bankrupt that first year actual demand dropped (1981). It was basic market economics.
There are only two commercial-scale breeders operating anywhere in the world, and they are both prototypes built and supported by the Russian government. They haven't sold any to anyone.
Reprocessing breeder reactor spent fuel is too expensive. And the cost of handling the new fuel rods (which are quite radioactive due the hot actinides in them) is far higher than with natural enriched uranium fuel.
Uranium is a minor cost in nuclear power, and can tolerate large increases in uranium price without significantly affecting the economics of nuclear power. Uranium on the spot market has already on occasion (2007) exceeded the estimated extraction cost of uranium from seawater (~$350/kg actual uranium), and at that price uranium is still a minor contributor to operating costs.
Actual seawater uranium mining won't happen (barring a breakthrough) until existing terrestrial resources have been largely mined out. There is a 75 year known reserve at current uranium prices, around $100/kg (the ten-year average), and when prices rise so will the size of the reserve (unprofitable ore bodies aren't counted).
Research on extracting uranium from seawater has proceeded at a modest pace for over 50 years, but has not really been focused on lowest cost of production, as has never been positioned to go commercial. For example research has focused on finding higher and higher capacity capturing molecules, without examining closely whether they provide the cheapest way to extract uranium (which might call for minimizing material costs, say). The prospects of actual commercial production would likely drive down the costs significantly as more intensive, commercial focused work proceeds. In a century when it is needed, much better extraction technology will most likely exist.
How does Jimmy Carter still control the U.S. government energy programs 38 years after he left office? How is he maintaining this unshakeable ban?
Carter was followed by 12 years of pro-nuclear Republican rule, who also went on a deficit spending spree. Why didn't they build a demonstration breeder reactor? Pro-nuclear Republicans have held office for 21 years since then, why no action? How does Carter control them?
But the U.S. is not the only country with a large nuclear infrastructure. France, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Canada have all been big players here. How many of them are operating commercial breeder reactors? Answer - Russia has two which are government subsidized, and that is it. Breeder reactors are a solution in search of a problem. Uranium is cheap and will always be cheaper than reprocessing nuclear fuel, even if it is extracted from seawater. Breeder reactors will never be economically competitive.
Handing money over to private businesses to achieve some public policy goal should be on the table as policy option, but only if it is a cost-effective way to achieve that goal. But before that discussion can even begin here we need to have a government that recognizes that reducing CO2 emissions is extremely important as a public policy goal. Only then can actual goals be set, and the cost of policy options drawn up to meet them.
Subsidizing existing nuclear power plants may be a cost effective way of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not saying it is (or isn't) but it should be evaluated along with all of the other options. Even building new nuclear power plants should be considered - but cost-effectiveness should be the ruling criterion.
The current administration's scheme to subsidize both coal and nuclear power is incoherent and obviously a case of political corruption -- transferring money to a private company from the public purse simply as pay-off for support. That one part of it, nuclear power, reduces carbon release is merely accidental.
One could imagine what an optimal plan (most cost effective) for nuclear power to contribute to CO2 emissions would look like. In addition to simply keeping current plants operating, building new ones would break from past practice by building a single standardized design that has passed all design approvals (siting approvals will always be necessary), and would build them on a regular schedule so that the production infrastructure can be built, and efficient production techniques instituted, and replacement parts kept available at reasonable cost.
Each nuclear power plant unit produces 0.2% of the nation's annual electricity consumption, 66% of which is supplied from a carbon releasing source. If you build 5 units a year, that would knock 1% off of that 66%, and after 25 years, would have made a major contribution toward getting it down to zero.
A long term public-private partnership to accomplish a public policy goal is a pipe dream in the U.S. for the forseeable future, but it isn't impossible. U.S. governments can carry out expensive long term plans. New York City's Water Tunnel No. 3 is a very costly and complex engineering project to dig a 24 foot wide tunnel, deep underground, 60 miles long, running the length of New York City, that has been under construction for 50 years (almost completed now). A national plan to build nuclear reactors could be created - Republicans have always been nuclear power enthusiasts, and Democrats support CO2 reduction - so the basis for the broad support required exists.
Absolutely. And there is a very effective, and unfortunately extremely plausible warning film about this released in November of last year called SlaughterBots.
All of the pieces of technology described in this short film are available, and can soon be integrated into the little drone packages depicted.
Slashdot Mirror
Animal. Even if microbial life is plentiful, multicellular life seems likely to be very uncommon. We've only had it on Earth for the last half-billion years, seemingly by some freak accident.
The appearance of animal life does not seem to be a freak accident (that would be the development of tool-making animals who also communicate symbolically). I suspect you are thinking of the endosymbiotic event that led to the Eucaryotes. But this happened a long time ago, more than 1.5 billion years. Eucaryotes remained microscopic single cell organisms for more than a billion years.
The development of animal life about 600 million years ago looks like it is tied to oxygen level of the atmosphere reaching somewhere in the range of 8-14% (different estimates of what it was at that time). There is a point where being able to oxidize fuel internally creates a concentrated controllable energy source, so large active multicellular systems become possible for the first time. It would seem that multicellular life arising, and then the Cambrian explosion (540 million years BP) are tied to the steadily climbing oxygen level. Since that time the oxygen level of Earth has fluctuated, but never dropped below the point where it was when the Cambrian explosion happened.
It is of course misleading to speak of AIs as being "silicon-based". They are right now due to a particular cost-driven technological choice (eliminating GaAs for example), but our current computing technology is a transitory phase. For example, the idea of building circuits with doped carbon nanotubes is being explored now and looks like it has real potential.
Our brightest "passive" emissions are our ballistic missile early warning radars. Most transmissions/emissions from Earth fade rapidly with distance. A signal that is tightly focused, powerful, and with a narrow spectrum will far outshine everything else on Earth in the electromagnetic spectrum.
So if aliens detect us from a distance they will be seeing the bright pulses of FPS-115 PAVE PAWS (Precision Acquisition Vehicle Entry Phased Array Warning System) whose signals are now 41 light years out.
These radars are detectable to 15 light years with a clone of the Arecibo radio telescope, and a thousand 100-m dishes (once proposed for a Project Cyclops) would be able to detect us to 250 light years. A really advanced civilization could have a radio telescope much larger than that so our radar signals might be detectable across much of the galaxy. There has to be some limit of detectability against natural noise though, but I don't know what it is.
So thanks to the nuclear arms race we have an interstellar beacon already operating!
Of course "detectable" is simply the lowest bar to clear. Since these beams sweep and also change frequency to avoid jamming, an alien is just going to pick up a few blips at different frequencies, with more blips not seen for a day until we are illuminating that part of the sky again. Not extremely obvious, but as they collect data across decades, it might be enough signal. But since these advanced aliens would presumably have a lot knowledge of natural signals they might be able to flag this as an anomaly fairly quickly. And of course we are only beaming things in the Northern Hemisphere, but the center of our galaxy is visible from PAVE PAWS sites.
Yes, /. just posted a story about giant-size DC comic books. Now that's "news for nerds"! Got to keep out priorities straight.
I think this delusion is distinct from conditions where there are actual (but phantom) sensations of things crawling on your skin, though the latter could certainly cause the former.
The person experiencing real but neurologically-caused sensations does not generally develop the belief that they are manifestations of actual infestations, though they may thing so at first. Once it is explained and understood that migraines (say) are the cause of these phantoms the patient understands and accepts that is the case.
People prone to phantom sensations is probably a much larger group that people who believe they are infested by insects or other creatures. And the Ekbom sufferers include many who have no sensations at all (like the "Morgellons" cases).
With lotto and scratchers, most of the tickets are worthless. They don't enhance your life...
They are a form of entertainment. For the price of a ticket you rent a fantasy about what you would do with the money if you were to win, which indeed has some known chance of actually happening. It is fantasy that lasts for a few days (or until you scratch the ticket).
Why this form of entertainment is "worthless" compared to playing an on-line game is unclear to me. Indeed, you can indulge in the lottery fantasy while doing other useful things. Not so the on-line game.
These days usually the University itself is also a profit-participant, owning the intellectual property.
After the 13th Rule of Acquisition is "Anything worth doing is worth doing for money."
Research on this (many decades of it) indicates that simple moored drift collection (letting ocean currents do all the work) is most cost effective, compared to dedicated circulation pumping (for uranium collection). But if you have desalinization plants anyway, this can be a bonus but not a huge one.
If all the urban areas of California were supplied by nothing but desalinized water the plants would ingest about 20 billion tons of water a year from which 60 tons of uranium could be extracted - worth about $6 million at the ten-year market value average. The 10 billion tons of fresh water produced would cost at least $10 billion, so this is just rounding error.
Research on extracting uranium from seawater using polymer matrix materials has been going for decades, with significant progress. The projected cost of extraction has fallen to as low as $350/kg, which is actually less than the peak spot market price of uranium hit in 2007, but higher than the 10 year average of about $100/kg.
This paper does a nice survey of this work up to about 2014, and does not include this most recent project. You can use SciHub to get the whole article but the abstract I link to provides a good summary of its key points which are:
The abstract gives a price range of $400-$1000/kg but if you read the paper the lower bound is really about $350, and obviously only the most cost-effective systems are going to be candidates for eventual commercial use. This latest work cited in TFA uses (potentially recycled) acrylic, and the focus seems to be on finding a better cost/performance ratio, whereas most of the research has focused primarily on performance. I would like to see this work put into context with all the other work that has been done, to see exactly what the advancements/benefits are.
But that won't be for a long time. We have proven uranium reserves on land good for over 100 years at current rates of use before the price will rise to $350/kg. The world produced $75 billion of electricity from nuclear power last years (at $30/MWh wholesale price) and the cost of the uranium to fuel it was $6.8 billion (using the ten year average price). At $350/kg the cost would be $24 billion, a significant increase in total electricity cost, but in the context of the trillions of dollars of economic output that runs on that electricity, one that could easily be absorbed. But the uranium in seawater is a 13,000 year supply, so it will not run out on any relevant timescale.
And if and when we need to use seawater uranium, one can expect that that $350/kg figure can be driven lower, with an additional century of research and a sustained focus on commercialization.
On-line it has become well-nigh universal to ping users after every transaction to give a rating score, and then when you give a score, you are prompted to write a review also. And then we get prompted for satisfaction surveys after we buy stuff at a store. And if we talk to someone on the phone we get transferred to survey at the end of the call. And now we are being pinged for surveys at every meal in a restaurant.
Mostly I just want to buy something, or get something to eat -- I don't want to be cajoled every time into providing extra customer tracking data (the likely major use for this - instead of, y'know, better service).
Thanks for this, it is a well balanced statement of the situation.
It is amusing, and predictable on /., to see when a natural science story posted how the commentors here split between "that's a stupid study because it is so obvious" and "that isn't true because I just thought up another reason without reading the TFA".
Lots of people here don't get the whole "science" thing.
It is required - by law - that the name of this organization always be pronounced: "SPAAAAACCCCCCE FOOOOORRRRRCCCCCE!"
Any other pronunciation would be criminalized.
Which is why, when another problem recurrent problem arose, seen on multiple launches, of ice forming on the liquid fuel tanks, and breaking off, causing near accidents NASA quickly halted all further launches until a fix could be put in place, thus avoiding the repeat of a lost shuttle and crew.
Oh wait, that's not what happened. They kept launching, and ignoring the videos of ice chunks passing close to the shuttle until one fatally compromised the wing of the Columbia resulting in the loss of shuttle and crew. Only then was a fix for the ice debris put in place.
And returning to the situation with the Challenger, the excuse you quote does not give NASA any sort of pass. As the Feynman quote you are responding to says quite accurately:
"In fact, previous NASA experience had shown, on occasion, just such difficulties, near accidents, and accidents, all giving warning that the probability of flight failure was not so very small."
There was a clear pattern of increasingly severe compromise of O-ring integrity with lower and lower launch temperatures, and the fatal launch was 15 degrees colder than any previous launch, and 27 degrees below the recommended launch temperature limit. It is entirely on NASA that this information was not in the launch procedure guides used by launch managers. There was no excuse for the relevant facts not being known.
An additional point is that in the lead up to the go-ahead for that launch NASA managers had spent hours badgering Morton Thiokol management into signing off on the launch. This is disastrous practice for any safety procedure - demanding that you get the answers that you would like to have, until you get them. So yet more bad management practice at NASA.
Mod parent up. This is crucial for any productive activity. Predictable behavior is important. Configurable predictable behavior is even better, but we skip "configurable" if we must choose.
Smart help is only helpful if it is really smart, that is - sentient, i.e. another person.
Because if a person does something you don't like you tell them, and they understand what you said, and they remember and they are effectively infinitely flexible and adaptable.
Attributes that none of FB's algorithms possess.
It is certainly within the ability of seismometers to detect nearby people jumping, heck they are can detect people walking nearby. So I am prepared to encounter a story about crowd activity being detected by a local station, there is nothing inherently unreasonable about it.
But the only source for this story appear to be a Spanish language tweet with three seismic channels snippets displayed without scales on any axis, or other identifying information, and with a red and a green line drawn on it. One of them presumably marking the goal.
But the two lines look like they intersect the data stream at random points. Neither one seems to mark anything that stands out from the background activity.
When on-line searching I found absolutely no credible sources coming up, it is all popular media repeating more or less the same thing, but with the "telephone game" effect. Some stories quite magnitudes, but they range from 1 to 3, an energy range 30,000 fold and are probably just speculation reported as fact.
Until someone comes with an actual source for the measurement and a real magnitude measurement (with someone to back it up) I'm dismissing this as BS.
Currently the fund is underfunded by about $22 billion out of the $76 billion that is estimated to be required.
It lost to not having anyone to sell the power to. The nuclear power building boom was based on projections for electricity demand that had been climbing (on a per capita basis) since 1960 until 1975 one a constant trend-line then started falling way off the trend-line even declining slightly in 1981 and 1982.
WPPSS signed up for an aggressive reactor construction program in 1971 and went bankrupt that first year actual demand dropped (1981). It was basic market economics.
There are only two commercial-scale breeders operating anywhere in the world, and they are both prototypes built and supported by the Russian government. They haven't sold any to anyone.
Reprocessing breeder reactor spent fuel is too expensive. And the cost of handling the new fuel rods (which are quite radioactive due the hot actinides in them) is far higher than with natural enriched uranium fuel.
How long will the U-235 last us?
Several thousand years.
Uranium is a minor cost in nuclear power, and can tolerate large increases in uranium price without significantly affecting the economics of nuclear power. Uranium on the spot market has already on occasion (2007) exceeded the estimated extraction cost of uranium from seawater (~$350/kg actual uranium), and at that price uranium is still a minor contributor to operating costs.
Actual seawater uranium mining won't happen (barring a breakthrough) until existing terrestrial resources have been largely mined out. There is a 75 year known reserve at current uranium prices, around $100/kg (the ten-year average), and when prices rise so will the size of the reserve (unprofitable ore bodies aren't counted).
Research on extracting uranium from seawater has proceeded at a modest pace for over 50 years, but has not really been focused on lowest cost of production, as has never been positioned to go commercial. For example research has focused on finding higher and higher capacity capturing molecules, without examining closely whether they provide the cheapest way to extract uranium (which might call for minimizing material costs, say). The prospects of actual commercial production would likely drive down the costs significantly as more intensive, commercial focused work proceeds. In a century when it is needed, much better extraction technology will most likely exist.
How does Jimmy Carter still control the U.S. government energy programs 38 years after he left office? How is he maintaining this unshakeable ban?
Carter was followed by 12 years of pro-nuclear Republican rule, who also went on a deficit spending spree. Why didn't they build a demonstration breeder reactor? Pro-nuclear Republicans have held office for 21 years since then, why no action? How does Carter control them?
But the U.S. is not the only country with a large nuclear infrastructure. France, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Canada have all been big players here. How many of them are operating commercial breeder reactors? Answer - Russia has two which are government subsidized, and that is it. Breeder reactors are a solution in search of a problem. Uranium is cheap and will always be cheaper than reprocessing nuclear fuel, even if it is extracted from seawater. Breeder reactors will never be economically competitive.
Handing money over to private businesses to achieve some public policy goal should be on the table as policy option, but only if it is a cost-effective way to achieve that goal. But before that discussion can even begin here we need to have a government that recognizes that reducing CO2 emissions is extremely important as a public policy goal. Only then can actual goals be set, and the cost of policy options drawn up to meet them.
Subsidizing existing nuclear power plants may be a cost effective way of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not saying it is (or isn't) but it should be evaluated along with all of the other options. Even building new nuclear power plants should be considered - but cost-effectiveness should be the ruling criterion.
The current administration's scheme to subsidize both coal and nuclear power is incoherent and obviously a case of political corruption -- transferring money to a private company from the public purse simply as pay-off for support. That one part of it, nuclear power, reduces carbon release is merely accidental.
One could imagine what an optimal plan (most cost effective) for nuclear power to contribute to CO2 emissions would look like. In addition to simply keeping current plants operating, building new ones would break from past practice by building a single standardized design that has passed all design approvals (siting approvals will always be necessary), and would build them on a regular schedule so that the production infrastructure can be built, and efficient production techniques instituted, and replacement parts kept available at reasonable cost.
Each nuclear power plant unit produces 0.2% of the nation's annual electricity consumption, 66% of which is supplied from a carbon releasing source. If you build 5 units a year, that would knock 1% off of that 66%, and after 25 years, would have made a major contribution toward getting it down to zero.
A long term public-private partnership to accomplish a public policy goal is a pipe dream in the U.S. for the forseeable future, but it isn't impossible. U.S. governments can carry out expensive long term plans. New York City's Water Tunnel No. 3 is a very costly and complex engineering project to dig a 24 foot wide tunnel, deep underground, 60 miles long, running the length of New York City, that has been under construction for 50 years (almost completed now). A national plan to build nuclear reactors could be created - Republicans have always been nuclear power enthusiasts, and Democrats support CO2 reduction - so the basis for the broad support required exists.
Of soliciting the hack? Of course. Next question?
Absolutely. And there is a very effective, and unfortunately extremely plausible warning film about this released in November of last year called SlaughterBots .
All of the pieces of technology described in this short film are available, and can soon be integrated into the little drone packages depicted.
Someday Slashdot will discover the wonder that is Unicode.
I jest of course.
Or to stay Metric, 4200 hectares, or (if you are part of the former Ottoman Empire) 42,000 dunams.