phoenix_ca

I'd wager the first trip to Alpha Centauri is done in way less time than that. Say with a drive going at at least 3-4C, preferably 8C or more so it takes under a year. Not that I'll live to see it.

Answered via PM. Becouse like all major disasters, are not easy to buried.You totally just straw manned my argument. Was the rest of that paragraph too difficult to read? Here, let me quote it for you, with the relevant text in bold: Clearer now? 50-70 years? Where in the world did you get that number? The expected turn-around on investment for these designs is about a decade. It's a moot point until they reach net power output, but 50-70 years is a gross underestimate of how close the technology is to practical application. Here we go again. Suffice to say, you are reducing a complex issue to a false dichotomy. Okay, I'll do the same thing: Solar and wind make for ****-poor base load generation. Why? Because they can get turned-off at the whim of the weather. Nuclear power can provide huge amounts of power (a.k.a. 1GW per reactor), and it can run continuously. The new ACR-1000 design here in Canada will likely replace our older EC6 reactors, and we don't usually build just one. A single station with eight reactors will output a whopping 8GW of power, with almost no stoppage. This is not achievable with solar, wind, or even hydroelectric power (unexpected lack of inflow water can lead to the station needing to run at well below capacity). You need backups, preferably ones that can start very quickly, like gas turbines, to fill the gap, or risk brown-outs and black-outs, which aren't just an inconvenience, but a serious public safety issue, as well as a huge hit to a local economy. Nuclear power gives you a solid foundation to build on. Then you can slap all the other stuff on to deal with peak loads and maybe squeeze a little extra life out of your reactor fuel (though load following is a pretty new thing for reactor design and the jury's still out on just how good the results of that will be). Not if you rewrite the legislation protecting it to allow for geothermal power generation. If wind power is good enough to go mucking-up the pretty landscapes of the world, a comparatively small geothermal station in a national park should be no biggie. Yes, hundreds. We already have potential reactor designs that could reduce that waste to elements that will decay in hundreds of years. Like it or not, the best bet for cleaning-up all that nuclear waste are more nuclear reactors. Technically that work has already been done with regard to CANDU reactors. Mix it up as MOX and stick it back in. We just haven't bothered here in Canada because using new natural uranium is much easier and far more cost effective at the present time. I swear these things just eat-up whatever fissile material you throw at them.

Yellowstone National Park is very much an example of environmentalism taken too far leading to absurd problems. "We need greener power sources! Like geothermal! NO NO NO!!! Don't build it in Yellowstone! It won't look pretty! We'll build WIND FARMS instead!"

They're more promising, but like fusion reactors, they aren't ready for mass deployment. Current fission designs are something we can build and use right now to generate massive base loads for reasonable cost.

There's nothing rational about RationalWiki. (They're just as ideologically puritanical as Conservapedia.)

Playing devil's advocate for a bad idea is hard. Though I already knew that from my philosophy classes and being forced to defend positions I completely disagree with. As for printing money...sounds like a perfect idea! We can all be millionaires!

Whether or not it sounds plausible to you is immaterial. Whether or not it sounds implausible to me is also immaterial. I cited evidence, and those citations are backed-up by piles of literature. The German Wikipedia is wrong and should be corrected. Actually hydro is quite useful, if you have the geography for it. Canada gets a lot of power from hydro, but that's because we're lucky enough to have lots of good sites for placing dams. There are many other countries, like Japan and France, that simply don't have the land nor the appropriate locations for hydroelectric dams and have thus primarily used nuclear fission.

Wikipedia doesn't "mention it" because it's not true, and if you bothered to do your research you'd know that. The concentration of plutonium from the output fuel from a CANDU reactor is about half (or less) than that from most LWR designs, and even less than other reactors that are purpose-built for plutonium production. Furthermore, India's weapons tests were not done with material from a CANDU reactor, but another Canadian design, the NRX research reactor. Straight from the Wikipedia page on CANDU reactors: The idea that these reactors are somehow super-useful for generating weapons-grade plutonium is wildly over-blown fear-mongering. If you want to have a serious discussion about nuclear proliferation fine, but get your facts straight first. (Here's a fun fact: Every nuclear fission reactor poses a proliferation risk. Even thorium reactors do, by creating U-233. There are, however, many ways to reduce or eliminate this risk, primarily with public policy designed to do so.) And what's-more, India's reactors are CANDU-derived, not licensed designs. We only had a part in building two of the things. Canada stopped offering nuclear technology to India after those tests. And this is why I'm so strongly opposed to people saying that all nuclear power is bad and dangerous. Fine, live in your fantasy world, just get your hands off our nuclear reactors. We're keeping them, because they work and work well, and what's more, we aren't stinking-up the world with nuclear weapons. In fact we're instead figuring-out ways to stick that plutonium back into the reactor and burn it. Edit: And if you want even more information, start here and read sections F2, F3, and F4.

For one, 200 years is something of a low-ball estimate for various reasons, that that very article points out. Again, that very article you're quoting explains how that supply of uranium could be stretched-out significantly, and how extraction from seawater could make available many thousands of years worth of uranium. Your argument is unsound, based on your own citation. With a heavy water moderator, you can even use straight-up natural uranium, no enrichment required. Canada's ACR-1000 design is planned to use lightly enriched uranium that's at most half as enriched as that used in an LWR. And again, your own citation does nothing for your argument. I can even use it to refute it. Do you see just how much cheaper that thorium oxide is in comparison to uranium oxide? You're not even accounting for the energy density of that material. With some refining, that material can produce great heaping gobs (which is totally a technical term) of electrical energy. No, it absolutely is a problem in Japan, that is mired in the history of the nation after WWII and its relationship with the USA, and all the politics that surrounded that. They should've taken us up on CANDU reactors when we offered them, but CANDU wasn't American enough, so they wasted time and energy on horribly inefficient LWR designs, building at least twice as many reactors as would've been necessary. http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2011/09/no-candu/

To play devil's advocate...heat pipes? Cheaper than solid blocks of metal, and also much more efficient.

Um...okay? Is there a question in there?

Why is everyone still talking about Fukushima-Daiichi as if it were caused by an inherent problem with nuclear engineering? It wasn't; it was a policy problem. They bloody well knew their retaining wall as too short and did nothing to fix it. They knew the buildings couldn't withstand an earthquake of significant magnitude. They bloody well knew that they had to resolve all these issues, and did nothing, because Japan has an absolutely terrible mentality when it comes to using nuclear fission. What they need better oversight from an independent body that provides public reports; Canada has just that with the CNSC, and we've got lots of public data on the safety of our reactors (and yes, those reports include the various issues that crop-up over time too). There's practically no room in this system for power plant owners to ignore orders to improve safety at their plants and instead put all that money into resorts and bonuses. Maybe you should stop strawmanning and actually present a cogent argument. Where the world's estimated supply is isn't the same as where most of the supply is being mined, and guess what, a lot of that supply does come from Canada and Australia, but the top producer is Kazakhstan. @AngelLestat: Your separation of power sources into strong force and weak force categories betrays your ignorance of the mechanisms involved in energy production. By that logic, I should consider all of those energy sources nuclear fusion, because ultimately that's where all the energy came from: The Sun. Furthermore, both strong and weak force interaction are involved in both nuclear fusion and fission...which might be part of the reason you never see them used to categorize nuclear power, and instead see (wait for it) nuclear fusion and fission. Fusion is more-or-less right around the corner, not 20-or-whatever years away. Maybe it'll take that long for widespread use, maybe a little longer, but working prototypes for dense plasma focus and polywell designs are very close to achieving net energy output. Fission is the most viable option. Not because it's amazingly safe (it is), but because it produces tremendous amounts of power for base load generation, with cheap and abundant fuel. If you use thorium as a fuel source it's even more cheap and abundant (it's quite literally everywhere on the surface of the planet, in varying concentrations, and is one of the primary contributors to radioactivity on beaches). And on top of all that, we know how to use it, we know how to use it safely and we know how to go about making it even safer. By making policy banning fission power generation, Austria shot itself in the foot. Thorium reactors may be available soon, and promise to be far, far safer than uranium-fuelled reactors. Ignorance and planting your head in the sand because of your ignorance is nothing to be proud of.

But they are on topic. How is discussion of better alternatives off-topic?

I wouldn't recommend that, even if it were tasty and non-toxic, given how hot it needs to be to soften. O.o

It's not even close to that simple. That kind of reductionism is just absurd. You're lumping-in modern reactors with piles of safeties with old and poorly managed reactors that didn't even have a freaking containment vessel (like Chernobyl). This is what a modern reactor looks like (remember that Chernobyl and Windscale didn't even have containment vessels) when designed with safety in mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vggzl9OngaM The CNSC has a pile of other videos that go into detail about reactor safety systems here, and you should watch them, and hopefully you'll see there's a massive difference between these things and the reactors you're talking about. You can also very easily find videos about Europe's reactor designed and their own myriad of safety features. You're pointing at absurdly poorly designed and managed reactors and using them as "proof" that reactors like these are "unsafe". They aren't. Edit: And here's a useful article on just how Japanese bureaucrats messed-up when choosing reactors and were, frankly, dumb enough to not take the CANDU design Canada was offering them. Fukushima might not have happened had they been wiser. Now would you kindly stop trying to conflate all these modern designed reactors with other designs that were notoriously unstable? Nuclear power isn't dangerous. Idiots fighting over control of it and ignoring safety entirely is what's dangerous, just like with nuclear weapons, or drugs, or guns.

Dr. Harold White in the video Aethon linked has a very different take on that. He suggests that instead the particle would pass through the compressed spacetime, into the bit of flat spacetime, and assuming it doesn't hit anything there, straight though and out again. The particle would be translated in position when it pops-out again, but it wouldn't get stuck on the bubble.

Flashing lights on roads are limited to emergency vehicles and high-priority signage, and with good reason. Making the whole road flash would be very inadvisable. Not possible from a policy perspective (at least not any time soon). You would need to mandate that all road vehicles in that jurisdiction have the ability to communicate with the road, or they would have no markings, seriously increasing the risk of accidents not only to that vehicle but every vehicle nearby. Those sorts of policy decisions are possible; Canada relatively recently mandated running lights on all cars. The thing is that compliance took decades, to give people a fair chance to upgrade their vehicles or buy new ones. For smart roads that would disable markings, you may even be looking at even longer, or a government subsidy program to reduce or eliminate the cost of upgrading current vehicles. Which just means more money spent, by everyone, which is generally unwise. The easier thing to do economically is to mandate that all new vehicles have that ability, and wait at least a decade (or more) before implementing the changes to the roads.

You stick it in concrete. It's not like you need to keep the lights on or something. Or even have lights.

That page pegs the total cost of nuclear power as less than solar and offshore wind, not more. I said most of the best places for geothermal is near fault lines, not the actual plants themselves. You need to into read harder.

If homo sapiens around for that long, it's pretty safe to say that by that time our use of technology will have changed us into something completely unrecognizable to us. Hell, it's safe to say that if technology continues its current progression, that'll be true in even a thousand years, though probably not to the point of whatever we do to ourselves being considered speciation.

Sure (sorta), but it's hardly that simple, and some people are predisposed to storing more of that energy as fat. Men kinda get the lucky end of that by being predisposed to storing body fat around the vital organs, rather than in subcutaneous layers. The thing is, you can have a lower caloric intake than what you use every day, and doing so can actually be extremely detrimental to your overall health. Don't eat enough protein or vitamins and you'll be in far worse shape than you were before you started. Eating less isn't as simple as just eating less. In fact its rather complex, something which people who don't have a solid grasp of biology can easily screw-up.

I actually kinda like the cockpit placement. But then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the CF-188 is indeed a gorgeous plane. (Yes I must mention Canada everywhere.)

Those predictions are based on the tokamak, which is just absurdly problematic. Dense plasma focus and polywell fusion devices have a very real chance of being practical in under a decade. Bring on the radiation? It's not like I was saying you'd want to live there, just that people's reaction to nuclear disaster tend to be clouded in fear of a thing that can kill but they cannot see. That was an illustration of my point that I just reiterated. If you didn't make that connection it's your failing, not mine. I dare say my post was pretty clear. I would gladly tour the Chernobyl exclusion zone for the sake of science. The radiation there isn't all that terrible. A few milliseiverts above background; big freaking whoop. When there's science to be done, a little radiation isn't going to kill you. Radiation workers have a yearly dose limit of 50mSv. Scientific advancement and the progression of human society are worth that small price. I can't tell what you're trying to say. Are you saying you should put poles in people's crop fields? Do you have any idea what kind of havoc that could wreak? What do you do when they fall over? Just put your planting on hold? Sure, it's not like planting seasons are...seasonal. Unless you have proof, I've got to write this off as paranoia. As to Canada, yes, we have Alberta that loves to extract from the tar sands, but you know what? We don't even use most of that crap. The Americans do, and China wants in. We're a nation that earns its wealth through natural resources; I won't apologize for that, as many nations do. China does it with heavy metals, South American nations have done it with crude oil and precious metals. By far, our power is generated by hydro, supplemented by wind, solar, and nuclear, with a few fossil fuel plants, the exception again being Alberta, which has a penchant for burning coal. Lots and lots of it. The other provinces are phasing-out coal power completely; Ontario closed its last coal-fired power plant this year, and a great deal of Ontario's power come from nuclear (Canadian-designed CANDU reactors). And if oversight is what you want, Canada has great goddamn gobs of it. Say what you will, our reactors are pretty darn safe. Worst-case scenarios have been considered in detail and even if everything failed (meaning the reactor was damaged and the primary and secondary backups all fail and both kill methods fail and fire services and portable emergency equipment can't access the site), the radiation release would still be minimal. Plus you know, we don't put the damn things in tsunami areas. Remarkably puny, at least in Canada. The entire stockpile of "spent" interim fuel for our reactors takes-up all of two soccer fields worth of water pools, and that fuel can be very slightly reprocessed and fed back into the reactors (if we had much interest in that; right now its just easier to shove more natural uranium in them). After it's finished in interim storage, it goes to dry storage in concrete casks, in concrete silos and vaults. As I pointed-out earlier, nuclear power, when properly managed and designed, is ridiculously safe. The problems come when you have poor design and crap management.

Actually, that's a maybe. Specifically these concerns come from fracking, which might help cause earthquakes. If true, they might be small enough to ignore, or the might be so big that geothermal near fault lines is a terrible idea (which is a problem since most of the best places for geothermal are right on fault lines). We just don't have enough data.

The drives to read and write to them are expensive as all hell (like, $1,500 a piece), but the media (the tapes themselves) are dirt cheap per unit of storage, and they can be incredibly high density. This makes them extremely effective for long-term, large storage (like needing to store petabytes of data; it sounds insane but there are institutions that do need that kind of storage, but they don't need it all to be accessible immediately). That really depends on what you consider normal use. If you're using them in a workstation, you can work through whatever endurance it might have in far less time. Copying 60-200GB files over and over will take a toll. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to this problem because I do some work like this, blasting through terabyte upon terabyte of data. O.o As for Intel, their performance is stable and predictable. On top of that Intel has some brutal QA standards, for all their tech.