john cox made me aware of the most excellent alexa traffic analyzer. because alexa runs as spyware in the browser, they are able to collect lots of interesting data. and they make it available for analysis too, which i hadn’t expected.
interestingly, they fold subdomains into the top domain. i take 85% of all traffic going to *.abstrakt.ch. they currently only collect data from internet explorer users, so they may be misrepresenting sites with a large geek audience. also, they state that statistical significance is an issue for sites not in the top 100k.
Watching the mummy returns reminded me of an article i had read some time ago, arguably one of the scariest i ever read. it talks about the problem of marking a site as dangerous for 10 ka into the future.
These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is … by … kilometers and the buried waste is … kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.
Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area.
Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10 ka. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site when it was closed in …
2006-10-16: Well-researched Thorium piece, but Michael needs to become more concise: he repeats himself too much in this piece.
Sometime between 2020 and 2030, we will invent a practically unlimited energy source that will solve the global energy crisis. This unlimited source of energy will come from thorium. A summary of the benefits, from a recent announcement of the start of construction for a new prototype reactor:
There is no danger of a melt-down like the Chernobyl reactor.
It produces minimal radioactive waste.
It can burn plutonium waste from traditional nuclear reactors.
It is not suitable for the production of weapon grade materials.
Global thorium reserves could cover our energy needs for 1000s of years.
The new reactor, which is only 7m x 2m, could change everything for a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
2008-05-22: Why bother with oil-based stuff when you can have distributed nuclear energy with Uranium hydride batteries? 2008-07-24: Uranium Deep Burn
It is projected that volumes of high-level waste could be reduced by a factor of 50, while extra electricity is generated.
Besides the low amount of waste and almost complete burning of all Uranium and Plutonium, another big advantage of liquid fluoride reactors is fast and safe shutoff and restart capability. This fast stop and restart allows for load following electricity generation. This means a different electric utility niche can be addressed other than just baseload power for nuclear power. Currently natural gas is the primary load following power source. Wind and solar are intermittent in that they generate power at unreliable times. LFTR would be reliable on demand power.
Fuck ethanol. Lets have some 21st century nuclear power
Thorium is one of the victims of the brainless scare campaign against nuclear that has infected most western nations over the last 30 years. Instead of doing silly stunts like the germans, whose “exit” from nuclear energy will mean more coal plants being built, an enlightened nation would chose thorium.
Instead, we are stuck with aging reactors (how does that make anyone safer?) and scientific illiteracy both in the general population and elected representatives.
I’m generally dismayed how little discussion about thorium there is in energy circles.
Kirk Sorensen provides an update on the current state of thorium power. The bad news is that it still remains mostly theoretical concept; no operational reactor has been deployed yet — even as a prototype. However, new thorium nuclear molten salt experiments were just started in Europe. We have good “line of sight” on the science to build one — so, at this point, the limiting factor is mostly funding. In a world of privately-funded space travel, such a gating obstacle shouldn’t remain for long. 4 specific difficulties have been mentioned:
Salts can be corrosive to materials.
Designing for high-temperature operation is more difficult
There has been little innovation in the field for several decades
The differences between LFTRs and the light water reactors in majority use today are vast; the former “is not yet fully understood by regulatory agencies and officials.”
Andrew Yang has proposed a nuclear subsidy—$50B over 5 years
he is pro-nuclear and has a deep understanding of all the technical issues around energy. Real change from the Bush administration in selecting extreme competence. It is not in any way a guarantee of correct energy choices because there is still political reality.
At stake is the 100s of billions spent on meaningless levels of “safety” around nuclear power plants and waste storage, the projected costs of next-generation nuclear plant designs to reduce greenhouse gases worldwide, and the extremely harmful episodes of public panic that accompany rare radiation-release events like Fukushima and Chernobyl. (No birth defects whatever were caused by Chernobyl, but fear of them led to 100K panic abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that 100s or 1000s would die or become ill from the radiation. In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.) 2014-02-14: You can power the world for 72 years with the nuclear waste that exists today, at a price cheaper than coal. Of course it will likely not happen due to collusion between the coal industry and the fear industrial complex.
China approved 2 reactors this month as it vowed to cut coal use to meet terms of a CO2-emissions agreement reached in November between President Xi Jinping and US counterpart Barack Obama. About $370b will be spent on atomic power. Plans to 3x nuclear capacity by 2020 to as much as 58 gigawatts.
Assuming a 25% conversion efficiency, a Radioisotope Power Source (RPS) would have 400K MJ / kg (electric) compared to 0.72 MJ / kg for Li-ion batteries. The goal is make a 5 watt “D cell” but with nuclear power that lasts decades
Bill Gates is funding Nathan Myhrvold’s Terrapower, a fast breeder reactor that burns a U238 duraflame log for 60 years, with 99% efficiency vs 1% for today’s U235 reactors. No fuel to reload or waste to ship around. Existing nuclear waste could be used as fuel.
“It is the first time a comprehensive IAEA international meeting on molten salt reactors has ever taken place. Given the interest of Member States, the IAEA could provide a platform for international cooperation and information exchange on the development of these advanced nuclear systems.” Molten salt reactors operate at higher temperatures, making them more efficient in generating electricity. In addition, their low operating pressure can reduce the risk of coolant loss, which could otherwise result in an accident. Molten salt reactors can run on various types of nuclear fuel and use different fuel cycles. This conserves fuel resources and reduces the volume, radiotoxicity and lifetime of high-level radioactive waste.
2016-11-28: Making nuclear energy radically less expensive
“The big thing is that the government is making national lab resources available to private companies in a way that it wasn’t before. If you are a nuclear startup, you can only go so far before you need to do testing, and you are not going to build a nuclear test facility, because that is hard and expensive. But now you could partner with a national lab to use their experimental resources. I’ve been talking about how to set up a pathway from universities for this kind of research.”
2016-12-01: Coal to nuclear can rapidly address 30% of CO2
The high temperature reactors can replace the coal burners at 100s supercritical coal plants in China. The lead of the pebble bed project indicates that China plans to replace coal burners with high temperature nuclear pebble bed reactors.
The amount of used nuclear fuel will continue to increase, reaching around 1M tons by 2050. The uranium and plutonium that could be extracted from that used fuel would be sufficient to provide fuel for at least 140 light water reactors of 1 GW capacity for 60 years. “It makes sense to consider how to turn today’s burden into a valuable resource.”
The overall cost of this first of a kind nuclear plant will be in the neighborhood of $5K/kw of capacity. That number is based on signed and mostly executed contracts, not early estimates. It is 2x the initially expected cost. 35% of the increased cost could be attributed to higher material and component costs that initially budgeted, 31% of the increase was due to increases in labor costs and the remainder due to the increased costs associated with the project delays.
Zhang Zuoyi described the techniques that will be applied to lower the costs; he expects them to soon approach the $2k / kw capacity range. If this can be achieved then the 210 MW reactor would be $525m. A 630 MW reactor would be $1.5b. It could be less if the 600 MW reactor only had to have the thermal unit and could use the turbine and other parts of an existing coal plant.
Terrestrial Energy is leading the way to getting regulatory approvals for its molten salt
fission reactor design. Terrestrial Energy aims to build the first walkaway safe molten salt modular reactor design in the late 2020s. IMSR generates 190 MW electric energy with a thermal-spectrum, graphite-moderated, molten-fluoride-salt reactor system. It uses standard-assay low-enriched uranium (less than 5% 235U) fuel.
Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100 ka, able to endure a future ice age. 100 ka ago 3 major river systems flowed across the Sahara. 100 ka ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4.6 ka old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2 ka old.
This Finnish tomb has some of the most secure containment protocols ever devised: more secure than the crypts of the Pharaohs, more secure than any supermax prison. It is hoped that what is placed within this tomb will never leave it by means of any agency other than the geological.
The tomb is an experiment in post-human architecture, and its name is Onkalo, which in Finnish means “cave” or “hiding place.” What is to be hidden in Onkalo is high-level nuclear waste, perhaps the darkest matter humans have ever made.
The reams of data generated by 3D-printing parts can speed up the certification process and lower the cost of getting a nuclear reactor online.
2021-04-20: Nuclear power failed. We need to deeply understand these reasons, because there won’t be a energy transition without new nuclear.
To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy. In developing economies, every kWh of energy consumed is worth $5 of GDP.
How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production, increasing our current 2.3 TW by over 5 additional TW:
If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy (building heating, industrial processes, electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, etc.), we need more like 25 TW. The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can’t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.Why is nuclear expensive? I’m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don’t even build plants anymore.)
2022-09-14: Simple reactor designs that can be iterated quickly may be the future
Much of the future lies with KRUSTY-like kilowatt-scale systems. Nuclear has a power density problem that keeps it from powering our cars and planes. The shielding and heat engines are too heavy. The radiation and particles are harmful because they contain a lot of energy. The answer is to make solid-state technologies that convert heat and radiation into electricity. It is theoretically possible to turn gamma rays into electricity with something similar to a solar cell. Shielding gets lighter and generates electricity! It also brings new life to many isotopes that require too much shielding to be practical in radioisotope generators. In the meantime, kilowatt-scale systems can compete in smaller remote power applications and supplement solar microgrids. Further cost decreases could enable electricity customers to defect from the grid where solar is not feasible. Competing manufacturers promise a much more competitive industry than exists today, where incentives rarely encourage falling prices.
The endgame is a chunk of nuclear material that can regulate itself based on user demand, surrounded by energy-capturing devices that soak up every bit of emitted energy. Power density could exceed today’s liquid fuels and batteries while having extreme energy density. We’d finally get our flying cars! Reactors that look like KRUSTY are on the path to that endgame.
2023-03-25: Nuclear has some near-fatal problems that make it a non-starter on earth. Beyond the well-known overregulation, the biggest problem is that nuclear produces relatively low temperature heat that then has to be converted to electricity, which is very inefficient. A process would have to be found to turn radiation and heat directly into electricity, without the steam turbines. 2023-07-13: How we got the current regulatory regime
In a world where industry and activists fought to a standstill, Probabilistic Risk Assessment provided the only credible guiding light. Rasmussen and team first began to compile and model relevant data in the early 1970s. Over the decades the industry’s database grew, and the NRC developed an opinion on every valve, every pipe, the position of every flashing light in a plant. This angered the utilities, who could not move a button on a control panel without reams of test data and its associated paperwork. This angered activists when the refinement of models predicted safety margins could be relaxed.
But Probabilistic Risk Assessment has no emotions. Probabilistic Risk Assessment estimated, validated, learned. Probabilistic Risk Assessment would form the barrier protecting us from catastrophe.
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.
Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:
Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”
With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because
The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics
Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.
Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old
2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?
almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.
Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot. 2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.
While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.
Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.
2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.
Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.
Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.
Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week
2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further. 2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.
THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.
The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.
Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”
One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn’t just a Web server, it’s a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago about building corporate component libraries. But the problem is that by simply having that code there, you didn’t have the context.
software is plentiful these days, talent to make heads and tails of it not. who wants to write software from scratch? not me. i always found it more interesting to stitch something together from existing parts, usually losing interest after a solution started to manifest itself.
What always frustrated me, in computer science, was how we learned all the low-level things — which we have libraries for nowadays — but we didn’t learn large-scale integration. What’s the skill set to be able to jump into the code base of something like Mozilla, read the architecture docs, and figure out the makefiles? Computer science classes don’t teach you how to dive into foreign code bases.
you need capabilities to:
analyze and visualize a code base
identify the community leaders
learn the community customs
understand the real scope of a piece of software
It’s becoming a game of free agents, and by operating in this public and transparent way, free agents advertise themselves — as a brand — along with the products and components they have expertise with.
right on. no longer is software production a solitary discipline, with engineers huddled over manuals and out of sight in some cubicle. rather, in a world where you cant possibly write a significant portion of the code you gonna need, the person with the best social skills wins.
the playing around with jabber gets its first fruits in this transcript from a chat i had. it seems tools like weblogs and instant messaging really make a difference. excerpts from a chat i had on jabber with ben today. gregor i wonder whether the topic is above the heads of 95% of our members? ben well, is always the same story, people fear to get involved 😦 ben it certainly is… no question I would rate it as far as 98% gregor hmm. so basically we are doing something that is only of interest for ourselves? ben but the real bad thing is, people don’t want to learn anymore … they are knowledge-aversive. ben I hope not so much, people might get curios if the show is just big enough. gregor i wonder what these guys do all day? website design with dreamweaver? ben I’m talking about product demos, free cd’s hands-on workshops, some high-tech playground air. gregor what is their idea of computer science? proficiency in ms office? ben worse, number punching with AS400 @ CS. gregor i don’t know, but i would certainly not employ one of them. ben Well, some do know something, like christian or thomas (not the VS guy, the staff one), but they don’t care … ben most of them are living a lonely life, girlfriend, mom, dad and one or tow guys from high-school… probably still living with their parents. gregor ben the sociologist 🙂 ben I’m urged to be… it’s quite difficult to come to a new country, especially if the last one was .mx … gregor actually i will have a discussion about basically these topics (interest in new tech etc) with my kpmg team on monday ben ppl have different moral values, most are thinking in their own world, and in their heart they may even don’t like IT, but computers. gregor its the same situation there. ben oh, thing this is even very much worse:-) ben I think their motivation is money, since thats what have been in plenty supply the last few years. the good ones are either those who don’t care about $, or who have it anyway. ben /start spelling gregor well, for my team the issue is to either: a) innovate & take great risks b) continue with building asp web applications as before. ben 🙂 gregor i think you have a good point there. ben we’ll see it in 2 years ben I’d say don’t let them decide over that topic, plant a migration path to risk… gregor you think the downturn will last 2 years? gregor problem is, i made most of the decisions for them the last 1.5 years. ben I mean, provide them with a framework for the next 6 month, and ask them whether they like that, or trying to find new asp client do the specs etc. gregor they have to be committed to what we do, or else it won’t work out. ben true gregor we might take a bold step and go with .net. ben how do you generate commitment and motivation? gregor however we would have to find clients willing to pay for that. gregor it cannot be generated, only encouraged. it has to come from themselves gregor if i knew a recipe for that, i would have applied it countless times at icu & other places.. ben It can be generated, let the remember the words. ben motivation by identification on mental, physical and social levels. ben here you go ben deep integration of the people in the community culture etc. why do you think people are visiting university? gregor to meet their friends at the cafeteria ben It fits into their social concept ben right ben why do coderz code? gregor i have done some research on rewards in communities. ben what the outcome? gregor if you can get others to acknowledge you in some meaningful way, it helps a lot for motivation gregor its like andy warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. gregor for instance i think the tight feedback loop that is emerging with tools like jabber, personal weblogs ben i thought about that for the ms thing ben if their projects get out to the world they feel rewarded gregor will really forge people together. it does for me. ben if i.e. other colleagues use their say webservice, they’ll think is cool, we are back at social integration gregor in fact i have already received a lot of good feedback because i share my thoughts with anyone who gregor cares to listen. ben yeah the feedback is important, good point. gregor i thought for years that it’s just so much work until you have eliminated enough communication barriers to let interesting (and rewarding) discussions flourish. ben that’s why i’m so keen about php-nuke, it helps to express people’s thoughts and it gets organized as well. gregor same for me. gregor and on a much higher semantical level than /. ben yeah! gregor basically, sites like /. are only input and gain value through digesting and thinking about them ben well, that is a good conversation i have lacked since the departure of my dad.. thanks! gregor in fact i have seldom come across more interesting links and ideas since i started to collect them on purpose. ben true, and the /. community has no means of focusing on topics… gregor you are very welcome 🙂 ben 🙂 gregor my submission queue has currently 17 items that i might write some thoughts about. ben urg gregor since i am in no obligation to deliver anything, this is not actually a problem.. ben I haven’t come that far, i’m currently more interested in bring the right infrastructure into place. am thinking about how to get webservices organized on php nuke gregor its more like there are far more interesting things than time to check them out. ben same problem over here gregor i wanted to do the same thing. my first web service would have been a web service to full text search phpnuke gregor however the mess that is apache soap turned me off 🙂 ben I actually envy your job, you can explore interesting topics and even get paid for it 🙂 gregor i don’t do this as part of my job. ben is no mess, its smooth running gregor actually at my job i am currently doing very boring things like setting up nt 4 servers because the it department cannot do it themselves. ben my first one is running… no big deal, but my second one will be a “Sprueche” DB from ancient asian war-philosopher ben oh, well, nt 4 ?!? ben forget it 🙂 gregor it’s not even an operating system in my eyes, its so crappy it’s hard to believe ben You know “Sun Tzu” ? gregor the art of war or something? ben war yes … ben I’m impressed! gregor i think this guy is standard reading in certain managerial circles 😉 ben oh it is? So that’s where you are heading 🙂 gregor no, but you have to watch out. many predatory business practices actually have their roots in some manager donkey reading up on stuff like that.. ben btw. did you read “B@ speed of thought”? gregor no, is it any good? ben try it, I’ve just finished it. gregor can i lend if from you? gregor i have some interesting books in return like goedel escher bach ben sure i’ll cp it to you post box together with Cryptonomicon gregor hmm. i will be gone on 24th evening.. ben so I better do i fast 🙂 ben when do you plan to breakfast tomorrow? gregor around 9 i hope. gregor i have to do a major part of the coding for that site tomorrow gregor why do you ask? ben we could meet for B and exchange books, I’ll have to visit the Kanzelei anyway gregor ah ok, and i have to get that stupid practica sheet from ifi ben any place ? gregor ah i know.. there is actually a tea room very near to my place (have never been in there though) gregor its at haldenbach station, and subtly named tea room 😉 ben so, i’ll try to be there at, say 0915? gregor ok, i better be going to bed then.. ben uah, yea. ben so cu tomorrow.. bonitos suenos 🙂 gregor was nice. we’ll keep it up. ben sure gregor gracias
Gregor J. Rothfuss 