Congratulations, Slashdot
High digit UIDs which show as facebook logins posting spam.
Oh, and to the poster
I swear, we could make Slashdot twice as intelligent by getting rid of the 7 digit ids.
Hiya! I'm not a bot!
obvious troll is obvious.
From your description it sounds like it wasn't the mercury so much as receiving a full dose of Obecalp.
Did you seek medical attention?
Ho-ho-ho. Have an internet.
From the (maximum of) 5 milligrams of mercury? What did you do? Break the lamp very carefully and then snort the contents?
I might as well have done. No, I was trying to remove the dead bulb from an overhead lamp when it shattered in my face. Unfortunately, it was in my office at home so I had to keep working in that environment (trying to meet a daily word-count). Even with the windows and doors open it still affected me for several hours. Not pleasant, though it seems to have been temporary.
Compared the coal-fired electric plant, that's nothing.
I had a broken FL bulb just the other day. I can assure you, the effects I suffered certainly did NOT feel like "nothing". The blindness, shakes, tingling and headaches didn't last long, but they were definitely not pleasant.
Cost dude cost. Nuclear is very expensive these days, decommissioning costs are far far higher than initial estimates.
Why did the costs go up? I think it was political interference and artificial price inflation. Why did the costs for renewables (aka unreliables) go down? Subsidies. Political interference.
From what I've seen and heard, the only obstacles to nuclear energy have been man made. Rather than any truly insurmountable physical challenges that couldn't be engineered around, it's always been blocked by those with a vested interest in ensuring the failure of nuclear fission.
Just out of interest, why are you so anti-nuke? What makes you feel that it shouldn't succeed?
If these new designs are so great then why does the nuclear industry keep going with the old designs?
Politics dude, politics.
A small reactor on a ship can be ramped quite quickly, but a large multi gigawatt land based reactor takes a lot of time in orde to minimize thermal stresses.
Who says we have to build huge?
Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
At the peak, German nuclear generation was 133 TWh in 2011. Since then, German renewables generation has grown from 47 TWh/year to 178 TWh/year, Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports.
I'm sorry the facts broke your narrative.
Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
I thought we in the Slashdot community were more civil. AND I quite doubt you are qualified to judge my mental health from afar. Be that as it may, if the fuel is "perfectly usable" why were they proposing to bury it in Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years??? Yes, I understand that fuel from some more modern reactors can be re-processed up to 95%. But some of this old stuff has been looking for a home for 50 years.
Why hasn't it been used already? It can be boiled down to political influence (ala IFR cancellation), "NIMBY"ism and (IMO) artificially inflated prices of other fuels keeping energy supply high enough so that nuclear operators can't make enough money. Even with all of that, the fuel will still be perfectly usable in the future as the other sources dry up and the so called 'renewables' fail to pick up the slack. Long story short, every obstacle that has been placed in the way of nuclear energy has been man made.
Btw, I once thought slashdot was supposed to be civil, but when one runs into the kind of insanity, nonsense and astroturfing on here every day it tends to reduce ones capacity for being civil. No, I'm not technically qualified to judge whether you are truly insane. That said, the nonsense you were spouting is a clear combat indicator of such insanity. "Smoke" and "fire" and all that.
It may sound far-fetched, but an electromagnetic rail gun would be feasible. Especially if the waste could be made into smaller units. Just aim it into the sun! No more problem. As a side benefit, the technology learned from this could be used to perhaps shoot material into orbit to build spacecraft out THERE, where the high cost of escaping the gravity well of earth would not be present.
Why fire perfectly usable fuel into the sun? Quite frankly, you're insane.
That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Even with modern fast reactor designs running on metallic fuel, some reprocessing is still necessary, though it's nowhere near as involved, messy and proliferation-prone as PUREX and aqueous processes. The most tantalizing prospect for fast reactors running on metallic fuel, especially for systems which incorporate fission product off-gassing and capture while in operation, is the ability to achieve extremely high burn up, which allows this reprocessing step to only be performed at very infrequent intervals (say once every 30-40 years). This means the power plant doesn't need its own attached reprocessing facility (as the IFR project proposed), but instead the investment in the reprocessing facility can be shared, concentrated into a single, well secured and efficient facility for, say, the whole country.
I'd mod you guys up as "Informative" if I could. The info is appreciated, thanks!
Oh wait, it's MDsolar again.
What about reprocessing it on-site? Not all of US Nuclear plants' nuclear "waste" is actually waste.
Long-term: nuclear energy is our species' only real option, especially if we want to get off the planet. The sooner we start making sensible and informed decisions about energy, the better.
Or we could just build fast neutron reactors instead. That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse
