Reactors aren't actually economical when you use acceptable accounting practices, so that wouldn't be a money-making policy. At best you'd still have to clean up these small reactors, which would be basically the same problem.

Secondly, even assuming you made a profit, there's nothing saying that small reactors and thorium reactors will ever actually be produced. The net effect is you'd leave the site idle and hazardous in a floodplain for at least 3-4 decades while said reactors were designed, tested, built, and deployed. You'd also be betting on thorium, which has no commercial track record and in the form you're talking about has only had a sum total of a few 100 hours of operation in one test reactor that itself is now a very nasty pile of waste.

I don't feel comfortable having my decommissioning plan being based on highly speculative factors. As it is we have to put up with on-site dry-cask storage for FSM-knows-how-long until a high level waste repository is built. If someone DOES manage to build a thorium/breeder/traveling-wave/hybrid fusion/etc reactor to burn it all up in in the meantime, great, but I'm not wanting to hold my breathe for this. Reprocessing was supposed to be the solution to all our problems too and we can see how THAT turned out.

Gosh yes, and we should just leave this nuclear plant to rust in the middle of a flood plain, you know full of all kinds of fuel. You realize this is a GE MK1, the same as the reactors at Fukushima, with all the same design flaws, the nice spent fuel pool on the top floor, etc. Sorry, cleanup isn't an OPTION, its a necessity.

This is uttermost nonsense.

The plant was originally licensed for 20 years and had an expected design lifetime of 40 years, that is 2012. The fund was set up in 1972 and should have been managed such that it would be adequate in 2012 to shut the plant down. Thus the point is quite valid since said funds clearly are short by 40% or so. Entergy tried to extend the lifetime of the plant by another 20 years (and succeeded, they can legal go ahead and run it until 2032 and I believe even do so at a higher power output). They didn't need 'approval to run to the end of the year' except in the sense that there were certain regulatory questions that they needed answers for. If they HAD continued to operate then its possible the State would have continued various legal actions to get them shut down, but they weren't required to do so as of a year ago.

Yes, except those are the fantasy numbers that the nuclear industry and its dog, the NRC, publish. We're talking about REAL costs, what you actually pay, not the bogus ones.

Nothing the State of Vermont did caused the plant to be shut down. It was entirely Entergy's own stupidity on multiple levels. First they decided to run as a 'Merchant' plant, refusing to sign a contract to provide VT with power (ironic as it was us who bore the burden of the threat of some disaster, etc). They could have locked in a profitable rate but they were stupid and greedy and screwed themselves. Secondly they were INCOMPETENT, or at least in many instances managed to LOOK incompetent. Parts of the cooling tower fell down, they lied to the regulators about tritium leak issues, etc. Thirdly they failed to do basic good cost accounting, for instance not planning for the replacement of a condenser who's rebuilding was MUCH MUCH more expensive than they 'guessed' it would be.

As for the decommissioning cost thing, this is not some new thing or a bolt out of the blue. The original operators sold the plant to Entergy to get out of these liabilities and Entergy never properly funded the fund. It was a routine matter of discussion in VT TEN YEARS AGO that this day would come. What they did back then was come up with a plan to 'invest' the fund in something-or-other and then decommission in 60 years using the projected proceeds (and then of course get hammered in 2008, like they cared). After that they tried to spin the plant off so they too could escape from the burden of dealing with the twin messes of decommissioning and waste disposal.

Overall Entergy has been rather dishonest and conniving, not to mention a bit less than totally competent at some level. Mark my words, the state will end up getting boned. Everyone will be paying for decades, yet magically "Nuclear power is cheap!" continues to be the mantra. All I can do is roll my eyes.

A complete highly extensible interpreted language with a built-in editor, macro assembler, etc in under 10k lines of code which did everything any modern scripting language does, except they all require at least 200KLOC to do it in.... This is the most elegant piece of software ever written, bar none. It isn't even a contest.

Creationists have all the air time and chance to express their views anyone could ever wish for. Equal time, what a bunch of crap.

As for the "our views aren't being considered", this is a SCIENCE SHOW, it deals with scientific evidence. The day creationists can show ANY EVIDENCE that the Earth is young, that life forms didn't progressively evolve from simpler to more complex, that there is no single unifying tree of life, etc then they can complain that they haven't gotten a proper scientific airing. Given that they have NOTHING, no contrary testable hypothesis, no evidence that stands up to any scrutiny, etc they've got no leg to stand on. Its too bad for them that their Flying Spaghetti Monster is not science, but it isn't our problem.

Yeah, well, there is that. Once a system can learn then it can change, and it won't ever be really predictable. We'll have to get used to our machines having personality, or else turn back the clock to good old FORTRAN :)

Code exists because code is very flexible and plastic. Its the duct tape of systems. You can do anything in hardware, but we do do everything in code. Once you leave the lower levels of abstraction where you can achieve anything you move into a realm where code, in the form of instructions to computers, just isn't that valuable. Either the assumptions and built in limitations of the platform have to becomes greater and greater in order to reduce complexity, or procedural/declarative/imparative logic are simple not adequate to the task of dealing with higher level things in the real world. We tried 'visual programming', but it didn't actually fix the complexity problems or the brittleness problems, and it only allowed at best a tiny increase in abstraction at a huge cost.

The way forward, IMHO has to be natural learning systems and adaptive systems. The 'ware needs to learn how to write itself. Not sure we will want to call it software anymore at that point.

Yeah, that's the definition I always knew, a Coulomb is one Avagadro's Number of fundamental charges. The problem is that's a great theoretical definition, but actually measuring out 6.022x10^23 electrons is a bit difficult... As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the error in the known value of NA is about 1 part in 30 billion, which is not bad, but not good enough either. There are some other ways to measure an Amp of course, but they all get complicated rather quickly because you have to know at least 2 other values very precisely.

Indeed, learning assembly language is a real good start. I got my first real understanding of computers by learning PACE machine code. My uncle gave me an S-100 based typesetting workstation he scavenged parts for. I learned by reading the PACE manual (helpfully supplied) and learning about how a computer bootstraps, how the disk drive worked, and most important how the CPU actually works at a low level. I never did get that machine to do a whole lot, but 6 months of wrestling with machine language will really make a good understanding.

What I like about FORTH is its underlying simplicity and elegance. The entire language and all its features are contained in a few 1000 lines of code, and all of it is accessible for experimentation using the outer interpreter. Because the language and the stack machine/inner interpreter are highly exposed in FORTH code it is both easy and necessary for a student to understand how the thing works at a pretty low level. Yet at the same time you can construct powerful domain-specific languages and applications. Certainly powerful enough to satisfy any beginning programmer (and frankly there are plenty of spacecraft, aircraft, and many other systems around that are built using FORTH, its not a toy).

I think its sad that the language and the philosophy of simplicity and transparency of technology has gone out of style. IMHO starting out software engineers on FORTH would be a great boon to the industry. They will go on to other things, but the lesson of simplicity and elegance of design is never lost.

LOL, yeah, you can write it in FORTH in maybe 5 minutes ;)