Seriously, as far as slashdot goes, CmdrTaco's last missive and farewell really has to stand as a notable event in 2011, at the very least for Slashdot.
1. Current uranium-based reactors are more affordable than thorium reactors.
2. The path for licensing a thorium-based reactor in the US is exceedingly uncertain.
While a thorium-based fuel cycle may be a good idea, it's just not going to be done by any commercial enterprise today. The costs and risks are too high. When staring at a $5B initial investment cost, any electrical utility is going to favor the known route
India, however, is going full-bore on a thorium-based fuel cycle, and has already built a few reactors that are capable of accepting thorium. Copied shamelessly from world-nuclear.org:
India's plans for thorium cycle
With huge resources of easily-accessible thorium and relatively little uranium, India has made utilization of thorium for large-scale energy production a major goal in its nuclear power programme, utilising a three-stage concept:
Pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs) fuelled by natural uranium, plus light water reactors, producing plutonium.
Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) using plutonium-based fuel to breed U-233 from thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (particularly Pu-239) is produced as well as the U-233. Advanced heavy water reactors (AHWRs) burn the U-233 and this plutonium with thorium, getting about 75% of their power from the thorium. The used fuel will then be reprocessed to recover fissile materials for recycling.
This Indian programme has moved from aiming to be sustained simply with thorium to one 'driven' with the addition of further fissile plutonium from the FBR fleet, to give greater efficiency. In 2009, despite the relaxation of trade restrictions on uranium, India reaffirmed its intention to proceed with developing the thorium cycle.
A 500 MWe prototype FBR under construction in Kalpakkam is designed to produce plutonium to enable AHWRs to breed U-233 from thorium. India is focusing and prioritizing the construction and commissioning of its sodium-cooled fast reactor fleet in which it will breed the required plutonium. This will take another 15 â" 20 years and so it will still be some time before India is using thorium energy to a significant extent.
If you haven't seen, the scale of construction on these projects is mind-bogglingly large. See here for some juicy pictures of the site under construction. It's just astounding.
THE EXAMPLES PROVIDED IN THE LINK ARE FOR THE 4TH AND 8TH GRADE LEVEL TESTS. The article discusses how the school board member couldn't pass the tests for the 10th grade level.
So, unfortunately, we're not given samples of the types of questions that the school board member flubbed so badly. While I'm likely to agree with him -- even as an engineer I have used perhaps 5% of the math I've learned -- I would prefer to come to that judgement on my own.
That, and playing at night with headphones
I used to drive the mac computer lab managers nuts by secretly installing Marathon Infinity on all the macs, then making the folder invisible so they couldn't (easily) delete it. Good times, indeed.
Oh, and grenade hopping FTW.
Even in 2009, President Obama set college tuition hikes in his sights. Alas, he didn't (hasn't) follow(ed) through.
I hope Ron Paul's suggestion re-ignites the debate to bring down tuition, and quit having the government pay for it.
In all seriousness, how do you (appropriately) balance work, family, and play time? In looking at your website, you seem to do at least two of those (family + play time) very well.
Do 1 or 2 laps around the outer edge to give you a buffer so you don't spray grass all over the sidewalks, etc., and then choose the longest dimension of the ~rectangular shape you have left. Make long passes back and forth along this edge, alternating left, right, left, right. (If you're not bagging, this means you will run over some of your discharge sometimes, but that's OK as long as the grass isn't too tall.)
Using this method reduced the time necessary to mow my 1/3 acre by about 10%. Fairly handy.
The only other comment I would make is that the government has made a stark change away from hard, technically inclined people to "soft," general-management types
Stories like yours above, where the DoD was paying 4x your salary for the services of one, are examples of where some government PM didn't know better. I suppose it's also possible that you were working on some super-classified system, for which the pay scale increases significantly.
I actually pine for the days when 50% of all government GS-15's have to have been prior contractors. Who better to manage the work than someone who has done it before? It has been spun as a bad thing in the press ("Oh Noes! Government official sends money to his prior employer!"), but in my experience, that happens because the government PM is experienced, knows what he or she wants, and the PM usually wrings out a good deal for the government in the process.
Take, for example, the program management of the F-35 fighter aircraft. The person in charge of managing a $300 BILLION weapon system had better have some serious acquisition chops.
Praise #2: He's not satisfied with just building the thing, he wants to apply the thing. That's what I find truly commendable.
So he goes off and learns a lot of good science and engineering in how to look for special nuclear material. Dennis Slaughter, of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, was featured on the front page of the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear News magazine in November of 2007 for his "nuclear car wash." Basically the same idea: use a neutron generator (a big one, in this case) and look for signatures of delayed neutrons in response.
So, what Taylor has done isn't revolutionary, but I'm sure it's a lot cheaper than any other neutron active interrogation system out there. Good for him. And, again, awesome job for hunting for useful applications of technology.
Searching for "Apple Kidsafe" brings up a few more recent widgets that appear to do something similar.
This article by some nuclear engineers at NC State is an excellent, fact-based breakdown of what the effects are of the Fukushima accident, with known numbers to date.
Bottom line: Three cancers.
Three cases of cancer that would not otherwise have occurred, and this is using the (very conservative) linear-no-threshold assumption.
Others in this thread have been bleating about how bad nuclear power accidents have been. The following quote from the UN's final report on the Chernobyl accident (a summary can be found here ) doesn't support their claims:
"Apart from the increase in thyroid cancer after childhood exposure, no increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality have been observed that could be attributed to ionizing radiation. The risk of leukemia, one of the main concerns (leukemia is the first cancer to appear after radiation exposure, because of its short latency time of 2 to 10 years), does not appear to be elevated, even among the recovery operation workers. Neither is there any proof of other non-malignant disorders that are related to ionizing radiation. However, there were widespread psychological reactions to the accident, which were due to fear of the radiation, not to actual radiation doses."
People's fear is very real and important. But it's not substantiated by facts.
That said, in the grand scheme of things, it has not presented a harm to the general public that is greater than other risks: look at the poor folks in the spillways of the Mississippi. Or the coal ash spill from the coal-fired plant in Kingston, TN.
Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap? One possibility is it stems from fear since it all started with a few mushroom clouds, but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.
College Tuition has been rising at about twice the rate of inflation over the past ten years. If you look at Harvard's endowment, they could easily pay every student's tuition based on extremely conservative returns on their 26 billion investment.
Colleges and universities are a racket. Few other industries, as a whole, have experienced the same kind of wholesale constant increase in funds like the education market.
Well, except for the defense industry, but that's another story.
To get back on topic, donating voting shares to MIT would have been a very interesting opportunity for students -- they would get to run the company, and learn all about the real-world application of technology. Alas, with dividends only, I'm not sure there's as much education going on as there could have been.
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