Give it time. Cars used to not be able to drive themselves.

Remember all those egg drop experiments during science week in grade school? Wrap the egg so it falls and doesn't break? Now we have a practical purpose.

Give it time.

Maybe some wording changes will help. The flight ended as expected, which isn't necessarily a failure. Let's then say it ended as expected, in an explosion yielding useable results.

TL;DR: FTFY

Sounds like Protoss Carriers.

I want to say that you're right, they should have used the much better recognized and international standard: Libraries of Congress.

But I find myself having a helpful answer that I think will clear it up. Yes, journalists suck, as other posters claim. 4km (not KM's, unless that's a foreign notation standard I'm not familiar with, I'm curious on this one) is difficult for most people to visualize. Some of us Americans will recognize it quite easily as ~2.5 miles. That's over 13,000 feet, which is over 4000 yards.

These get lost as just a bunch of numbers and it's just "something big". Almost unfathomable to most, not because it's unbelievable, but because they can't visualize it. So 4000 yards becomes 40 football fields. That's still a lot and hard to visualize. The goal is to find something that you can use as few of as possible that people recognize so they can visualize the magnitude.

Essentially, it's a comparison meant to make visualizing the depth/distance/size easier. Doesn't do as much for us technical folk, but we are still the minority (I think).

Also, journalists are stupid.

Libraries of Congress would be much more appreciated and well understood.

SmallMouth Bass

Hanford waste is a different beast altogether. It's not just radioactive; that's half the problem it was (the cesium and strontium both have half lives around 30 years). [Disclaimer, I'm going to oversimplify some things to emphasize others] The problem is everything else that's mixed with it.

There's also too much bureaucracy that's preventing moving forward. Sure, there's technical limitations, but the strongest blockers I've seen are regulatory/beaurocratic. Like not being able to build more double-shell tanks to get us through the interim until the technical barriers can be resolved. Not being able to put any additional waste in the double-shell tanks also gets in the way of retrieving waste from the tanks.

From a technical standpoint, the radiation/radioactive materials are easy to deal with. They're well understood and easily contained in water/steel/lead. The protections for workers are followed strictly and religiously adhered to.

But what we have a hard time protecting workers against is the multitude of other constituents in the waste. We don't know exactly what's in them, or exactly how they react all the time. We can't predict its effects on the tank material very well. It can seemingly randomly burp, releasing hazardous fumes that are hard to capture for analysis.

I live nearby, and have more thoroughly modeled the waste treatment process than any other group. I've thoroughly read the reports about what would happen if, in a few hundred years, the landfill where the waste is stored is forgotten about and a farmer inadvertently drills a well straight through the waste: nothing.

Please do not use Hanford as your metric against which to weigh nuclear power.

From TFS:

They may need more energy than their renewables can provide in a short time. By using a battery, they can have smaller renewable generation systems. This iron powder is presumably less environmentally toxic than lithium mining.

I've only just gotten into BSD with FreeNAS. I like the ideas of Jails over VMs or containers, after getting used to them, they seem much simpler with less overhead. BSD seems to put some things in different places than *nix, but that's just a matter of getting used to it.

There's a lot less hand-holding, which I'm finding as liberating as switching from a TI-89 to an HP 35s; sure there's more work up front, but I'm better for it.

As far as relevant? I hope so.

Finally!

THIS is news! THIS is stuff that matters!

Please, Microsoft. Leave this one alone. You never could estimate when my file was going to be done transferring. 30 seconds, 2 hours, 1.5 hours, 45 minutes, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, a few seconds, done (for 5 minutes)...

I'm going to respectfully disagree, and say that the previous universe was the first, and ours is the second.

First the worst, second the best!