Nuclear waste - The federal government charged a mandatory fee in exchange for a promise to dispose of the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain never opened, ergo the federal government renegaded on it's deal, but it's still collecting the fees.

I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.

Having the money available to do such a thing is a good first starting place and it makes sense to collect the money from the entities creating this externality, especially when you consider that the coal industry has, and continues, to get away with not paying for their externalities for so long.

If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.

Without them stepping in, the power companies would have figured something out themselves.

Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.

Lead is highly toxic by way of being a heavy metal and most versions of it are perfectly stable.

Yes, and look how long it took for us to get to handling that properly, industry had to be told what to do because of the harm it caused.

My opinion is that if we bury it X deep, that any future humans that go digging it up should be able to determine that it's toxic and mildly radioactive and know how to handle it if they're going that deep into the ground.

I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.

You're forgetting the 'more radioactive = shorter halflife' thing. The problem with nuclear waste and current standards isn't the short lived isotopes, it's the less radioactive long half life isotopes.

No, I'm not. I'm considering the life of the reactor vs the amount of fissile ash it produces over its lifespan.

Pull out the long-life ones, feed them through the reactors again until there's only short half-life isotopes left. Yes, they'd be radioactive as all hell. But only for a short period of time. "A Candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long" type thing.

If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.

Oh, and I disagree with you on our ability to construct a facility that would last 10k years. It'd be expensive, but we can do it rather easily.

Well I would like to see that, which is why I support collecting the fees from the operators who produce the waste product. Not doing so is effectively taxing future generation. I would like to see the political will to actually do something that bypasses political and commercial concerns and actually establishes the cutting edge of engineering and scientific principles to construct a facility that first supports a long term containment facility, and potentially be the site to facilitate the other activities.

So as for the expected duration of the facility you would still need to engineer a simple facility for pu-239 that can last 500M years, which the belly of a granite mountain provides the geological basis to start with.

If you built the fuel reprocessing and then reactors (i.e an 'Integrated' facility) you could then ask how long would it take to consume the 70,000 existing tons of pu-239 and the rest from decommissioned weapons?

From my understanding it's roughly 5000 years. Assuming the fissile ash you produce is say sr-90 for arguments sake (or whatever the reactor produces that is short lived, roughly 600 year halflive) as it decays through the daughter products you need to operate a complex facility that lasts 12K years. So pretty close to 10K and 17K years if you operate for 5000 years. However it maybe ten times that if the facility could burn u-238 as well.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to build a suitable long term facility into the belly of a granite mountain that could provide spent fuel containment for the current generation of reactors to avoid them having to store spent fuel on-site. This immediately reduces the most grave consequential threat at *all* nuclear sites, plutonium fires (as we are seeing potential for at Fukushima) because the spent fuel can be isolated from operating reactors.

Then endpoint for the current Nuclear industry becomes the platform for an advanced nuclear industry that is safer because the entire fuel cycle is enclosed and contained, exactly the way an Integral facility is intended to work to acheive the very thing you suggest.

I suspect that future generations would appreciate the containment facilities alone as a better legacy to receive than radioactive facilities scattered around, decaying.

because you can't plead the 1st.

So thought crimes are not far away then.

That's pretty much the modus operandi for many government departments and quite a hilarious thing to watch sometimes. Have you considered positioning your projects to take advantage of these moronic times to secure the equipment you need?

I love the work NASA does, that you do - even though I don't know the specifics. I just wish your work wasn't interfered with so much and used for porq. I think the risk adversity has handicapped the organizations capacity to achieve. With the amount of interference you guys suffer I'm amazed at what you are able to achieve while the goal posts are shifted around in front of you. Bravo to you sir!

Pretty much said this a few years ago and the M$ fanbois gave me a serve.

The surprise wasn't about whether the war was real or not, it was the human condition of Ender so that you had no choice but to emapthize for him when he finally found out what was going on.

Just stop doing anything to do with space then the budget will be saved!!

OR increase NASA's budget!!

All of those losses of forest are very different:

Of course they are the question about the loss is whether there is habitat loss or not.

* After wildfires, trees naturally re-grow.

The issue here is the increasing intensity of wildfires and bushfires as global temperatures rise and forests dry out.

Fire is generally a welcome component of the functioning of some types of forests, like bushland, burning off old growth and releasing minerals back into the soil, burning seed casings for new growth with older trees surviving and growing back in about 2-5 years. In other type of forests, like rainforest, fire is not a component. Alpine forests also behave differently.

From my understanding the measurement is done with a metal square placed on the subject forest floor and the leaf letter from the trees containing sticks, seeds and leaves, which provides habitat for bugs and the creatures that eat them, is measured. In bushland it's used to figure out how much fuel will be burnt and topsoil remaining afterwards. In rainforest, the depth of the leaf litter and the water content. In alpine environments seeds and seedlings.

So while the commonly held notion is that, yes the forest regrows, the underlying and important thing to grasp is how long does it take to regrow to provide habitat and if the forest floor was destroyed.

The things that have been occuring is that bushland is burning with greater ferocity which has been destroying the older trees and burning the seed and casing, in rainforest lower water content and the fires burning to a much deeper level of the forest floor exposing the roots of very large trees so the rainforest slowly dies. In alpine regions, again the fires are more intense, burning seeds so there is a much lower density of seedlings growing over the previous measurements after fires, In alpine forests, the seedlings are becoming rarer.

All these things are signs of the natural processes being impacted enough so that they don't recover and that habitat is lost, so the natural forests have a persistant and permanent loss that is not restored.

The reason why that is concerning is because forests aren't growing back after natural events.

* Some deforestation is replaced with new trees, but not all.

However the habitat is gone and all the crreatures that live there are also dead with survivors putting pressure on other habitat. Also some deforestation, for cash crops, is counted as forest even when the forest floor and the habitat it supported is still gone. So there is less habitat *available*

This is what leads to extinction of species, such as Orangutag whose habitat is destroyed for palm plantations.

* After development, trees are usually planted - sometimes where there used to be no trees.

Again, habitat destroyed because the trees are where the animals and insects live. If you have ever seen 2 D10 dozers clear felling land with a hundred metres of ship anchor chain between them, tearing trees down. The tress are chipped and the forest floor is bulldozed into a pile then, usually, burnt.

You see the habitat that was there is now dead and it isn't coming back.

What is the net gain/loss of trees across ALL development, not just development taking place in a forest...

Actually the question is what percentage of that loss is permanent habitat loss. Developments are already lost habitat. Tree Canopy loss is the first sign of a permanent loss of habitat, which indicates that the percentage of habitat permantly lost that year is related to the type of loss that occurred in the forest in question.

To turn it upside down you could look at the measurements this way: if we stopped the deforestation now we could have saved 30,000 hectares of habitat on 70,000 hectares of canopy , next year we are scheduled to loose another 40,000 hectares of habitat on 80,000 hectares of canopy.

So there is no gain of habitat, just a increasing rate of loss.

To say nothing of; what is the natural level of variation in forest year to year? From wildfires alone you would think there would be a substantial amount.

Of course, but again, the variation is only relevant when it is leading to recovery of the underlying habitat. Increased temperatures and drought lead to more frequent fires before the forest and bushland has had a chance to properly regrow and the habitat is destroyed because the forest floor can no longer support it.

Pretty much any time nowadays someone wants you to panic, you should look very closely at the message they are trying to sell you.

That is a great way to deflect any responsibility for even having any knowledge of ongoing destruction of ecosphere. There's a proverb that says: "When the last tree is cut, when the last river has been poisoned, when the last fish has been caught, then we will find out that we can't eat money."

It is difficult for any sane, informed, reasonable person to say that there is no problem with deforestation, species loss and habitat destruction in the 21st Century.

Well he does have a point about the zirconium cladding around the fuel rod. That is activated and becomes an emitter in its own right . So it does contribute to the radio active waste steam as opposed to fissionable material.

Second of all there is good reason not to like MOX in a reactor, because the fuel is more toxic and accident scenarios where that is the fuel (like Unit 3 or 4 IIRC of Fukushima) and can be released into the environment. Pretty much a nightmare scenario because of the toxicity and that it is readily bio-concentrated into the food chain.

mostly.

I think you summed it up phantomfive. I'm just wetting my self laughing that your mod as troll for enjoying something geeky sums up just how lame all these haters have been made to look.

The people modded up are the ones that look like jerks. I hope I get modded down too.

Ok. Here we are HHG2TG. Great series, just too much ridiculous fun, great movie. Marvin reminds me that all the haters have a 'brain the size of a planet' and haven't worked out that the long arm of the geek turning them into a bunch of whining sock puppets. I'm laughing to think those posts can't be undone, does reddit let you do that?

Frankly the last two weeks for me have been filled with messaging systems, state based machines, programming signal processors, doing intelligence tests, psychometric tests, reasoning tests, language tests, reading and analyzing a bill of law, speaking in public, writing to politicians to stop something dumb, on top of being eaten by mites, 36 hours without sleep, my bedroom flooding and now I am sleeping on the floor in another room. So don't mind the geek distraction.

A great opportunity for an on topic discussion about a geeky puzzle to figure out the movie/book and enjoy it. I don't mind playing, I loved this series. I am geek! I didn't read the books though - loved the BBC series. Great work on the movie.

I haven't figured out the next puzzle yet so maybe I haven't seen this one, but so far my geek credentials are pretty high. Yes people who used to play Dungeons and Dragons used to be as lame as you think this all is and just didn't care what you think, still don't. Great puzzle /. I think I'm missing 2 so far.

April fool on the haters, absolutely hilarious.

Moan Moan, the geeks didn't entertain you today with knowledge, it's all about what geeks love and the haters have been totally had - fucking hilarious!!!!

That is a *fucking awesome* explanation!!! Bravo, Sir!