The 100,000 years thing is a scam meant to make the nuclear waste problem look intractable. LONG before that, the "waste" will be no more radioactive than natural rocks laying out in the desert in the U.S.
Not quite. Unless the actinides have been removed by reprocessing the spent fuel does not return to the same level as ore for a few hundred thousand years. The period chosen: 100,000 years is about right - not quite long enough to reach that point, but pretty good. The legacy waste they are dealing with contains actinides and is a nightmare to try reprocess due to its non-standard composition.
Imagining that all waste problems are really that of disposing of nearly non-existent reprocessed fuel waste with all actinides removed is silly. They are dealing with real waste that really needs disposal, not hypothetical types of waste.
BTW: the (quasi*) natural rocks laying out in the desert (tailings) are a significant waste problem since they have been removed from their stable geological context.
*They have been physically and chemically altered.
Cue the knee-jerk fuel-reprocessing-and-fast-reactor-is-the-complete-solution-to-all-nuclear-waste-problems-everywhere nutter comment.
Pointing out the problems with this comment is a bit of a problem in itself knowing what I should start with.
First, the 200,000 cubic meters of high-level waste already exists and is the product of the British nuclear weapons program, and possibly some of the high-level waste already created by fuel reprocessing. This stuff is a radiological and chemical witches brew that cannot be easily treated in any way. Some means of reducing this stuff to a stable state for long term storage is essential.
Second, there are only three operating (or soon to be operating) commercial scale breeder reactors in the world, two in Russia (operating) and one in India (not yet operating). A non-existent world fleet of breeder reactors cannot solve any real existing problems. Building a world-wide industrial deployment of breeder reactors is an exercise orders of magnitude more costly than waste disposal problems.
Third, breeder reactors do not make fission products go away. These must still be disposed of once the actinides are burned.
Fourth, fuel reprocessing systems currently operating produce larger volumes of high-level waste in physical terms than they take in. This must be converted to some form that be stored long term (see point one, above).
Fifth, spent fuel from power reactors does not contain "98% of their fissile material". Real nuclear fuel today is enriched to about 4% U-235 for loading (96% U-238), plutonium is bred and burned in place so that 5% of the actinide content is consumed, and the discharged fuel is about 0.8% U-235, 1.2% plutonium and 0.2% other actinides, for a "fissile content" of 2.2%. Reprocessing can only recover about 44% more usable energy content that the fuel already has provided. If you are thinking of the U-238, it is not fissile, but must be bred further to make it fissile. We can obtain U-238 far more cheaply and easily, if we need it, by simply converting the millions of tons of depleted uranium currently in storage into breeding fuel element.
Sixth, reprocessing is very expensive. Make that "VERY expensive". The cost of the fissile material produced is much higher than enriching natural uranium, and every aspect of fuel fabrication and handling is much more expensive due to it being "hot" from the beginning. The value of mixed oxide fuel on the market is less than zero. Utilities must be paid a subsidy to take it for free.
Seventh, a breeder reactor power economy cost much more than a conventional power reactor economy. As things now stand the high capital cost of conventional power reactors make them economically unattractive without some sort of construction mandate, or special economic support. A system that is much more expensive is a non-starter if the conventional power reactor problem is not solved in practice (see point two, above).
Eighth+ (yes, I have more points), but I am tired of typing.
No, they mean cement. You add aggregate to provide structural properties and reduce the cost of the mix when used for construction. This is for waste disposal.
However there are also advantages. It is more stable and easier to get a policy through if there are only two parties involved.
Until you have a situation when one of the parties becomes truly radical and ideologically rigid, and refuses to pass anything at all that they did not write. When that one party declares unilaterally that politics is a zero-sum game, and succeeds in writing a permanent majority into election districting rules then a true multi-party system becomes a huge advantage. The only way to change the system otherwise is to threaten revolution.
I am of course describing South Africa and the National Party starting with the 1948 election.
(You didn't think I was referring to something else, did you?)
No, the United States has two socialist parties that need to go.
But only socialism-for-the-rich: public bears the losses, profits are private. Wars for oil. Lavish government spending for defense contractors.
Corporate welfare is estimated at in the vicinity of $125 billion a year. This rough figure is supported both by the Cato Institute (formerly the Koch Institute) and Bernie Sanders, so this seems to be a matter of general agreement.
What do you do, if the company replaces you and gives you the bum's rush escort by either security or the police? No notice, just 15 minutes to clear the desk and you are out on the street. Because its standard procedure these days.You must have a good resume to be hired in that 15 minutes.
Even this is more than you may get. Your boss (or HR) might intercept you coming back from lunch and point to your stuff (or most/some of it...) in a box on a cart and tell you to hit the bricks. I've seen that done.
Some places just cancel your badge, and you have to ask security why you can't get in. And then you find out. (This sounds even tougher but it actually fallible since your fellow co-workers will usually badge you in when you tell them you left yours on your desk.) I've seen this too.
Don't forget the bane of all new telescopes - it will definitely be cloudy the first time you try to use it.
Heck, even buying a new eyepiece can clause clouds in my neighborhood!
Yep. My astro club calls it the "new equipment curse" and if a star party clouds out, they look for the culprit (in good fun of course).
Make network devices designed specifically to shut off all Windows 10 spying. Looks there should be a good market for this. Anyone know of product announcements? I'd be interested in a consumer-priced one. As it is I am stocking up on Windows 7 systems - the last usable MicroN$Aoft OS product.
It's a cool idea, no doubt. But no matter how good your telescope is, I doubt it can easily surpass observing systems in space like the Hubble. At its altitude, roughly 25% of the atmosphere is beneath it, which reduces the problem of scintillation. Furthermore, the position in the Atacama Desert means it's a dry place, so there isn't a big problem with moisture causing differences in air density, leading to scintillation or even just refraction by the atmosphere. That said, why in Chile? Why not in Tibet, where it could be positioned at an even higher altitude but with many of the same favorable characteristics of being dry and away from light and air pollution? I recognize that it just isn't possible to build an observatory at the summit of one of the higher Andean peaks, but Tibet is probably a better place. That said, why don't we have plans (that I know of) for a replacement for the aging Hubble?
This is a raft of AC questions. In order the answers are:
They can easily surpass Hubble in many ways, since in astronomy it is aperture, aperture, aperture, baby. Hubble is only 2.4 meters. It cannot compete in light-gathering power.
Scintilllation is removed by adaptive optics, which have been in use for 30 years and are quite sophisticated now. This drives the resolution of these big ground-based scopes down below Hubble's resolution.
No, the dry climate does not create a "a big problem with moisture causing differences in air density", just the opposite.
The reason these telescopes are on islands (Hawaii, Canary) or on a high west coast mountain range is because of the laminar flow on air moving eastward (the jet stream and so forth) over thousands of miles of flat ocean (same is true of Hale, Mt. Wilson, Lick, etc.)
Tibet is surrounded by thousands of miles of other high mountains creating lots of turbulence. Adaptive optics can do a lot but the technology isn't magic. The more stable the air the better.
We do have plans for a replacement for the aging Hubble. It is the James Webb telescope, a 6.5 meter telescope due to launch in 2018, if the schedule does not slip (they will accept slippage to make sure it works properly).
The one area where Hubble will remain unsurpassed is in high resolution ultraviolet astronomy. The ground-based telescopes can handle all optical band work quite nicely, the James Webb is designed to look at extremely distant objects with high red-shift which puts everything in the infrared (it does overlap the visual range slightly, it can see up to orange-red light), observations that cannot be done from the ground at all. High resolution ultraviolet observations are great, but not enough to justify (yet) a follow on replacement for that niche. There are other projects to do an ultraviolet all-sky (i.e. wide angle) survey which Hubble cannot do because of its narrow field of view.
I was disappointed when the 100 meter conceptual OWL (Overwhelming Large Telescope) project was abandoned as impractical. Now that would have been cool to have an instrument officially described as "overwhelming large"!
mdsolar's point isn't that we should build no new nuclear, at least not in this thread. His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
The first one might be overcome. After all, if world leaders were able to simultaneously lay out this plan and get political support for it, part of the plan would include training more engineers, trades, and other jobs necessary. We might not be able to build 100 per year in 2016 (or even 2020), but we could ramp up.
The world went from building roughly zero a year in 1960 to building 26 a year by 1967, and even then was not an all-out worldwide construction effort. Ramping up large scale construction over a 35 year period should be no real trick, if the funds and will are available.
The second one might be overcome. After all, with pressure for more fuel, we might go out and find more fuel, develop new techniques to find, recover, and process more fuel, etc. I doubt we could overcome it, but generally speaking if we went "long" on nuclear, at least some more fuel would turn up.
Lots of fuel has already turned up. Enough for 5,000 years of once-through burning, no breeding or reprocessing. It is in the sea. Technologies have been demonstrated that can extract uranium at about the same price point as uranium spot prices that have already been encountered. The cost of uranium fuel is a very small part of the cost of nuclear electricity, and even if the uranium-from-seawater costs never come down (though surely they will), it does not have an important impact on the cost of nuclear electricity.
The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar. Given that wind and solar don't have the political opposition, don't have 10-15 year lags from "let's build it" to "let's turn it on", and can be built in more places at far smaller increments, it's really tough to argue that we should spend the money on nuclear when there are cheaper options.
Right, this is the true Achilles heel of nuclear power. The high capital costs, and the long pay-back time. Only intervention by national governments can get large scale power plant construction to happen. The market will never do it. It is important to focus on the true fundamental issue if nuclear power is going to contribute more to zero carbon electricity.
The sharp rise in inequality is driven by the complete disconnect between productivity growth and real wages, which used to track each other very closely. This disconnect appeared abruptly in 1971. So Reagan and China are not the origin of this problem whatever role that might have in perpetuating it.
I have commented on the exponentially egregious fundraising scam, err campaign, in another post above, and yes, you cite my other major peeve about Wikipedia: the scourge of 'notability'.
Why would any new editor want to start an article today knowing that the (free) labor they contribute to the site is likely to be wiped away, unrecoverably, without recourse or consultation, by an editor who decides on a whim that it is not 'notable'? And if they did not know this might happen, they sure would be turned off when they found out the hard way. This is a sure fire way to drive away any editor permanently.
There is absolutely nothing objective about this "standard", it is completely arbitrary, impossible to define, and even more troubling, totally unnecessary. Is there a shortage of disk space for these articles? Of course not. Wikipedia could host a vast store of obscure, niche, specialized information - not just for present users, but for future generations, a detailed record of modern world society, including the obscure. It seems to be a combination of a sense of self-flattery, Wikipedia needing to prove it is a "real" encyclopedia, and power-tripping by their pathological senior editor culture.
Mod this guy up. The perpetual fundraising machine has become very troubling. They have cumulatively raised well more than $200 million dollars, most of that in just the last few years. We are constantly greeted by banners about how far they are away from their current fundraising 'goals' but those goals seem to be exploding every year, with no explanation about what that money is actually 'needed' for.
Jimmy used to boast about how little it cost to keep Wikipedia on-line, just a few million at most, and with the money raised in just the last two years they could easily have set up an endowment that would keep those servers running forever, without requiring another dollar in fundraising, ever.
Oh, and they are finally starting an endowment now next year of $5 million, after having burned through $200+ million, and representing only 7% of their new $71.4 million base goal.
With the cost of operating Wikipedia low and nearly fixed, and without paying any staff to actually produce their product (which is what this has become), why the 'need' for double digit annual revenue growth every single year?
I am now telling everyone I know not to contribute to Wikipedia. They really, really, really do not need the money. Their days of paupery are long past. Jimmy is now in $profit$ mode.
-Britain didn't even have a constitutional republic, it had a monarchy with a parliament bolted on to deal with some of the more mundane stuff the King didn't want to waste time on. These days, it's no different except the Queen doesn't really do anything as far as governing and Parliament does it all along with the Prime Minister et al.
Says someone without a clue about British political history.
The Crown has not had any significant role in governance since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when Parliament inf effect fired the King and hired a new monarch. Since that time the Crown has been acutely aware that it serves at the pleasure of Parliament, who holds all of the reigns of power.
You second sentence seems to be aware of the real situation (but which has not changed since the American Revolution), though you preface it with the strange statement " These days, it's no different except..." and then go on the describe a situation which is completely different.
They don't say where the Neptunium itself comes from, other than mentioning an existing inventory.
U.S. supplies of this are a byproduct of plutonium separation for weapons. I don't have exact figures handy, but the U.S. holds some tons of separated Np-237.
Pu-238 is not used in weapons specifically because it fissions too fast spontaneously. That's why it makes so much heat.
No, it makes so much heat because it undergoes alpha decay with an 87.77 year half-life. Its half-life for spontaneous fission is 47.7 billion years, so for each fission it produces 500 million alpha decays. Only 0.00001% of the heat is from fission. It would be a whole lot less useful if it were producing all that heat from fission since it would be similar to a nuclear reactor and the extremely intense neutron flux would require very heavy shielding.
no, go look it up. Neither or the US bombs were efficient at all, and one was very nearly a fizzle. The total amount of material that underwent fission (including both bombs) was on the order of 1 - 5 GRAMS if I've got it right.
You don't have it right. Each bomb fissioned about 1 kg of material, for the Fat Man this makes it about 20% efficient. That is pretty good for a first design. Fission bombs are generally no more than 50% efficient, usually less.
Slashdot Mirror
The 100,000 years thing is a scam meant to make the nuclear waste problem look intractable. LONG before that, the "waste" will be no more radioactive than natural rocks laying out in the desert in the U.S.
Not quite. Unless the actinides have been removed by reprocessing the spent fuel does not return to the same level as ore for a few hundred thousand years. The period chosen: 100,000 years is about right - not quite long enough to reach that point, but pretty good. The legacy waste they are dealing with contains actinides and is a nightmare to try reprocess due to its non-standard composition.
Imagining that all waste problems are really that of disposing of nearly non-existent reprocessed fuel waste with all actinides removed is silly. They are dealing with real waste that really needs disposal, not hypothetical types of waste.
BTW: the (quasi*) natural rocks laying out in the desert (tailings) are a significant waste problem since they have been removed from their stable geological context.
*They have been physically and chemically altered.
Cue the knee-jerk fuel-reprocessing-and-fast-reactor-is-the-complete-solution-to-all-nuclear-waste-problems-everywhere nutter comment.
Pointing out the problems with this comment is a bit of a problem in itself knowing what I should start with.
First, the 200,000 cubic meters of high-level waste already exists and is the product of the British nuclear weapons program, and possibly some of the high-level waste already created by fuel reprocessing. This stuff is a radiological and chemical witches brew that cannot be easily treated in any way. Some means of reducing this stuff to a stable state for long term storage is essential.
Second, there are only three operating (or soon to be operating) commercial scale breeder reactors in the world, two in Russia (operating) and one in India (not yet operating). A non-existent world fleet of breeder reactors cannot solve any real existing problems. Building a world-wide industrial deployment of breeder reactors is an exercise orders of magnitude more costly than waste disposal problems.
Third, breeder reactors do not make fission products go away. These must still be disposed of once the actinides are burned.
Fourth, fuel reprocessing systems currently operating produce larger volumes of high-level waste in physical terms than they take in. This must be converted to some form that be stored long term (see point one, above).
Fifth, spent fuel from power reactors does not contain "98% of their fissile material". Real nuclear fuel today is enriched to about 4% U-235 for loading (96% U-238), plutonium is bred and burned in place so that 5% of the actinide content is consumed, and the discharged fuel is about 0.8% U-235, 1.2% plutonium and 0.2% other actinides, for a "fissile content" of 2.2%. Reprocessing can only recover about 44% more usable energy content that the fuel already has provided. If you are thinking of the U-238, it is not fissile, but must be bred further to make it fissile. We can obtain U-238 far more cheaply and easily, if we need it, by simply converting the millions of tons of depleted uranium currently in storage into breeding fuel element.
Sixth, reprocessing is very expensive. Make that "VERY expensive". The cost of the fissile material produced is much higher than enriching natural uranium, and every aspect of fuel fabrication and handling is much more expensive due to it being "hot" from the beginning. The value of mixed oxide fuel on the market is less than zero. Utilities must be paid a subsidy to take it for free.
Seventh, a breeder reactor power economy cost much more than a conventional power reactor economy. As things now stand the high capital cost of conventional power reactors make them economically unattractive without some sort of construction mandate, or special economic support. A system that is much more expensive is a non-starter if the conventional power reactor problem is not solved in practice (see point two, above).
Eighth+ (yes, I have more points), but I am tired of typing.
No, they mean cement. You add aggregate to provide structural properties and reduce the cost of the mix when used for construction. This is for waste disposal.
However there are also advantages. It is more stable and easier to get a policy through if there are only two parties involved.
Until you have a situation when one of the parties becomes truly radical and ideologically rigid, and refuses to pass anything at all that they did not write. When that one party declares unilaterally that politics is a zero-sum game, and succeeds in writing a permanent majority into election districting rules then a true multi-party system becomes a huge advantage. The only way to change the system otherwise is to threaten revolution.
I am of course describing South Africa and the National Party starting with the 1948 election.
(You didn't think I was referring to something else, did you?)
LOL The witch loses to everyone in head to head polls So does the commie.
Not surprising when your party is about Identity politics.
Except none of that is true.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html
Ah, but he is using the unskewed polls that only Republicans can see!
No, the United States has two socialist parties that need to go.
But only socialism-for-the-rich: public bears the losses, profits are private. Wars for oil. Lavish government spending for defense contractors.
Corporate welfare is estimated at in the vicinity of $125 billion a year. This rough figure is supported both by the Cato Institute (formerly the Koch Institute) and Bernie Sanders, so this seems to be a matter of general agreement.
And that would be just for One Term. Then they step aside; they are too old, and let the Next Generation in. Warren perhaps.
Warren is the same generation as Clinton. They are two years apart in age.
What do you do, if the company replaces you and gives you the bum's rush escort by either security or the police? No notice, just 15 minutes to clear the desk and you are out on the street. Because its standard procedure these days.You must have a good resume to be hired in that 15 minutes.
Even this is more than you may get. Your boss (or HR) might intercept you coming back from lunch and point to your stuff (or most/some of it...) in a box on a cart and tell you to hit the bricks. I've seen that done.
Some places just cancel your badge, and you have to ask security why you can't get in. And then you find out. (This sounds even tougher but it actually fallible since your fellow co-workers will usually badge you in when you tell them you left yours on your desk.) I've seen this too.
Don't forget the bane of all new telescopes - it will definitely be cloudy the first time you try to use it. Heck, even buying a new eyepiece can clause clouds in my neighborhood!
Yep. My astro club calls it the "new equipment curse" and if a star party clouds out, they look for the culprit (in good fun of course).
Only to be succeeded by The Ludicrusly Large Telescope...
And then the IHT (Insanely Huge Telescope).
Make network devices designed specifically to shut off all Windows 10 spying. Looks there should be a good market for this. Anyone know of product announcements? I'd be interested in a consumer-priced one. As it is I am stocking up on Windows 7 systems - the last usable MicroN$Aoft OS product.
and a REALLY BIG dust problem.
Is that much of a problem? Doesn't it just stay on the ground?
No, it doesn't..
...plentiful raw materials for making fused silica and aluminum surfaces.
Because it is really easy to make a world-class scientific instrument out of dirt?
I really wish the Slashdot editors would stop letting this crap through.
Maybe Dice and Forbes have an "arrangement"...
It's a cool idea, no doubt. But no matter how good your telescope is, I doubt it can easily surpass observing systems in space like the Hubble. At its altitude, roughly 25% of the atmosphere is beneath it, which reduces the problem of scintillation. Furthermore, the position in the Atacama Desert means it's a dry place, so there isn't a big problem with moisture causing differences in air density, leading to scintillation or even just refraction by the atmosphere. That said, why in Chile? Why not in Tibet, where it could be positioned at an even higher altitude but with many of the same favorable characteristics of being dry and away from light and air pollution? I recognize that it just isn't possible to build an observatory at the summit of one of the higher Andean peaks, but Tibet is probably a better place. That said, why don't we have plans (that I know of) for a replacement for the aging Hubble?
This is a raft of AC questions. In order the answers are:
I was disappointed when the 100 meter conceptual OWL (Overwhelming Large Telescope) project was abandoned as impractical. Now that would have been cool to have an instrument officially described as "overwhelming large"!
mdsolar's point isn't that we should build no new nuclear, at least not in this thread. His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
The first one might be overcome. After all, if world leaders were able to simultaneously lay out this plan and get political support for it, part of the plan would include training more engineers, trades, and other jobs necessary. We might not be able to build 100 per year in 2016 (or even 2020), but we could ramp up.
The world went from building roughly zero a year in 1960 to building 26 a year by 1967, and even then was not an all-out worldwide construction effort. Ramping up large scale construction over a 35 year period should be no real trick, if the funds and will are available.
The second one might be overcome. After all, with pressure for more fuel, we might go out and find more fuel, develop new techniques to find, recover, and process more fuel, etc. I doubt we could overcome it, but generally speaking if we went "long" on nuclear, at least some more fuel would turn up.
Lots of fuel has already turned up. Enough for 5,000 years of once-through burning, no breeding or reprocessing. It is in the sea. Technologies have been demonstrated that can extract uranium at about the same price point as uranium spot prices that have already been encountered. The cost of uranium fuel is a very small part of the cost of nuclear electricity, and even if the uranium-from-seawater costs never come down (though surely they will), it does not have an important impact on the cost of nuclear electricity.
The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar. Given that wind and solar don't have the political opposition, don't have 10-15 year lags from "let's build it" to "let's turn it on", and can be built in more places at far smaller increments, it's really tough to argue that we should spend the money on nuclear when there are cheaper options.
Right, this is the true Achilles heel of nuclear power. The high capital costs, and the long pay-back time. Only intervention by national governments can get large scale power plant construction to happen. The market will never do it. It is important to focus on the true fundamental issue if nuclear power is going to contribute more to zero carbon electricity.
The sharp rise in inequality is driven by the complete disconnect between productivity growth and real wages, which used to track each other very closely. This disconnect appeared abruptly in 1971. So Reagan and China are not the origin of this problem whatever role that might have in perpetuating it.
I have commented on the exponentially egregious fundraising scam, err campaign, in another post above, and yes, you cite my other major peeve about Wikipedia: the scourge of 'notability'.
Why would any new editor want to start an article today knowing that the (free) labor they contribute to the site is likely to be wiped away, unrecoverably, without recourse or consultation, by an editor who decides on a whim that it is not 'notable'? And if they did not know this might happen, they sure would be turned off when they found out the hard way. This is a sure fire way to drive away any editor permanently.
There is absolutely nothing objective about this "standard", it is completely arbitrary, impossible to define, and even more troubling, totally unnecessary. Is there a shortage of disk space for these articles? Of course not. Wikipedia could host a vast store of obscure, niche, specialized information - not just for present users, but for future generations, a detailed record of modern world society, including the obscure. It seems to be a combination of a sense of self-flattery, Wikipedia needing to prove it is a "real" encyclopedia, and power-tripping by their pathological senior editor culture.
Mod this guy up. The perpetual fundraising machine has become very troubling. They have cumulatively raised well more than $200 million dollars, most of that in just the last few years. We are constantly greeted by banners about how far they are away from their current fundraising 'goals' but those goals seem to be exploding every year, with no explanation about what that money is actually 'needed' for.
Jimmy used to boast about how little it cost to keep Wikipedia on-line, just a few million at most, and with the money raised in just the last two years they could easily have set up an endowment that would keep those servers running forever, without requiring another dollar in fundraising, ever.
It appears that the 'goals' are being set by simple formula: whatever we raised last year, plus 20%, and with an additional 20% "stretch goal". Seriously - that appears to be the only rationale I can glean from their reports.
Oh, and they are finally starting an endowment now next year of $5 million, after having burned through $200+ million, and representing only 7% of their new $71.4 million base goal.
With the cost of operating Wikipedia low and nearly fixed, and without paying any staff to actually produce their product (which is what this has become), why the 'need' for double digit annual revenue growth every single year?
I am now telling everyone I know not to contribute to Wikipedia. They really, really, really do not need the money. Their days of paupery are long past. Jimmy is now in $profit$ mode.
-Britain didn't even have a constitutional republic, it had a monarchy with a parliament bolted on to deal with some of the more mundane stuff the King didn't want to waste time on. These days, it's no different except the Queen doesn't really do anything as far as governing and Parliament does it all along with the Prime Minister et al.
Says someone without a clue about British political history.
The Crown has not had any significant role in governance since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when Parliament inf effect fired the King and hired a new monarch. Since that time the Crown has been acutely aware that it serves at the pleasure of Parliament, who holds all of the reigns of power.
You second sentence seems to be aware of the real situation (but which has not changed since the American Revolution), though you preface it with the strange statement " These days, it's no different except..." and then go on the describe a situation which is completely different.
They don't say where the Neptunium itself comes from, other than mentioning an existing inventory.
U.S. supplies of this are a byproduct of plutonium separation for weapons. I don't have exact figures handy, but the U.S. holds some tons of separated Np-237.
Actually Pu238 doesn't fission spontaneously.
Yes it does. The half-life for this mode of decay is 47.7 billion years, a pretty low rate but sufficient to get 2200 neutrons a second from each gram.
Pu-238 is not used in weapons specifically because it fissions too fast spontaneously. That's why it makes so much heat.
No, it makes so much heat because it undergoes alpha decay with an 87.77 year half-life. Its half-life for spontaneous fission is 47.7 billion years, so for each fission it produces 500 million alpha decays. Only 0.00001% of the heat is from fission. It would be a whole lot less useful if it were producing all that heat from fission since it would be similar to a nuclear reactor and the extremely intense neutron flux would require very heavy shielding.
no, go look it up. Neither or the US bombs were efficient at all, and one was very nearly a fizzle. The total amount of material that underwent fission (including both bombs) was on the order of 1 - 5 GRAMS if I've got it right.
You don't have it right. Each bomb fissioned about 1 kg of material, for the Fat Man this makes it about 20% efficient. That is pretty good for a first design. Fission bombs are generally no more than 50% efficient, usually less.