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Typically the efficiency is ~34%. Canadian CANDUs are 40%. So a 2.5 thermal gigawatt plant has a lot of waste heat.
A nuclear plant will generate more like 2 gigawatts of thermal power. The issue of thermal pollution as actually one of a much more local concern than global warming. The idea is a nuclear plant is placed right next to a river or lake so that it can easily get rid of excess heat, and the temperature increase above the normal level changes the ecology negatively. I don't know any details.
However, with the emergence of a blossoming and relativley 'new' type of mathematics, things are looking up for a decent method of prediction of the future. At least on a quantum level, anyway. This exciting branch of mathematics is called quantum determinacy; and I think they might have a few experiments in that direction at CERN. If they don't, I give my permission for you to beat me senseless with witty remarks and sarcasm.
Theoretically speaking, wave functions yield a probability distribution, so we can't even theoretically determine the future. As for this new thing you speak of, I don't know anything about it, but if it's true and the future can be predicted, then there would be no free will because you are destined to do something.
Their spirit weighed in at just under thirty pounds - it left approximatley six minutes after death.
If the spirit weighed thirty pounds, then it would be blatantly measureable. The mass of a person can be determined by knowing the density of various tissues, which are all basically about 1 g/cc, and the volume of the person. No, I think there is some very bad science at work here. If there are spirits then they should be nonphysical (thus nonmeasureable) considering that they have not been measured. So I'm not saying there aren't spirits, but in the case that there aren't then this lack of free will I speak of stands.
Uhm. If you can think that you have free will, then you do - if you didn't have free will then you wouldn't be able to think that you did. Its a bit like if you don't have legs, you can't run - discounting artificial attachments and the like, naturally.
Ah, but in the scenario I outlined, every thought is a function of physics (determinable or not, you have no control over it)which is out of your control. Thus every choice is also, and you may think you have free will, but it is an illusion.
If you stare at an electron cloud, your free will cannot help you to force the particle to appear in some exact chosen position when you measure the position. The 'random element' (which I called random statistical processes) are in fact truly random quantum mechanical probabilities. There are only probabilities so there is no free will.
Your choices affect the function but all of your choices are generated utterly by the Function -- your brain is electrons, protons, neutrons, EM waves. So, really, it's just the function determining everything.
A lack of free will says nothing about whether or not we can predict the future (which we cannot do).
Such is the case, in any event, in a spirit-less world.
(somewhat off-topic) In a strictly non-spiritual world, there is no free will with quantum mechanics either. You may think you have free will, but every moment is a function of the previous state of the universe and random statistical processes.
Not that this rules out punishment, in the sense of preventing future crimes by someone who's demonstrated he's bad.
Could you lead me to some material where electron-positron flipping has been demonstrated? The closest thing I can find on the subject is pair production of electrons and positrons from high energy electrons incident on heavy nuclei -- very intense lasers are used to heat the electrons.
The fusion reaction itself won't give gammas, I believe, but basically they do indirectly because gammas come from inelastic collisions of neutrons with deuterons and reactor materials.
I read that the holly/ivy thing is based on Christ's crown of thorns, and the red in it represents his beads of blood.
There is an article on space.com about the Christmas star http://www.space.com/spacewatch/star_be … 21220.html that also mentions the Flock Hypothesis. And it makes the claim that they celebrated it on Dec. 25 because that's the same date as a Roman celebration with gift giving and all, and they wanted to mesh the two celebrations so that it wouldn't look like they were celebrating Christ. Is this the same as the Pagan holiday Cindy mentioned?
Robert, I'm not certain about what the numbers would actually look like but I think you'd need a pretty massive magnetic field gradient to stop neutrons -- the force on a dipole such as a neutron is proportional to the magnetic field gradient. Given the size of a tokomak, the gradient would be small. F=m grad B, I think, where m is the dipole moment, B is the mag field. So unlike what we have for a proton or electron, it won't radiate it's energy away so easily. And even thermal neutrons go around 1000 m/s, so they'd zip right out anway.
With a 50/50 D-3He fuel at 50 keV, the reaction rate is ~21 times greater for D-3He than it is for D-D. There are two reactions with an equal chance of occuring for D-D:
D + D => n(2.45 MeV) + 3He(0.82 MeV)
D + D => p(3.02 MeV) + T(1.01 MeV)
Charged products heat the plasma and are 'filtered' out, but the neutron is about the energy of one you'd get from fission.
So 1/40 of the reactions will give a 2.45 MeV neutron at this mean temp when you do D-3He.
and FYI, D + 3He => p(14.68 MeV) + 4He(3.67 MeV).
The D-T reaction is D + T => n(14.07 MeV) + 4He(3.52 MeV).
Slightly less than half of the reactions will make tritium in a D-D reactor.
I should think that a space reactor only would need neutron absorbers (high Z material) for the direction that is toward the crew (..?). The rest can just be moderated with light or heavy water. I'm thinking heavy water doesn't absorb neutrons as well as a chunk of heavy metal.
One can decide that he cannot know the "why's."
That is the number of deaths (~26) that came immediately to fireman and other workers at the time of the accident. But from thyroid cancer and other such events, we find that "Figures from the Ukraine Radiological Institute suggest that over 2,500 deaths were caused by the Chernobyl accident." (http://www.chernobyl.co.uk/) 135,000 were evacuated.
Nuclear power is, of course, much safer now.
I haven't heard anything about it in many months, it seems.
He also said he might make a miniseries based on the 3 KSR books. Haven't heard more about that, either.
Woops, I was away for a few days --
Tether assisted hypersonic spaceplanes are a combonation of the suborbital hypersonic spaceplane concept and tethers. It's the same idea behind other tether systems, extended to assisting the launch of suborbital payloads. A nice paper on it is here: http://www.whidbey.com/forward/pdf/tp158.pdf and some more can be found here: http://www.whidbey.com/forward/TechPubs.html (page with all the papers the late Robert L. Forward has ever gotten published)
So a suborbital system can be used as a stepping stone to greater things.
From what I can tell, HASTOL doesn't give you a payload beyond 10 tonnes, but that's for the earliest systems, and it can eventually be made better (bigger solar arrays for raising the orbit of the tether boost facility, and a more massive tether boost facility). In any event, it seems like a good way to get passengers into orbit.
I'd also tend to favor something like a spaceplane SSTO or hypersonic tether assisted launch than one of those nuclear monsters sending hundreds of people to space at once...
Agreed. I tend to believe that there is one objective reality, and postmodernism isn't worth much. So there is one true religion (or lack of religion).
We can't know all the states of the universe, but maybe we can know all the laws of the universe.
When I mentioned a cell phone, I implied that the waves go in all directions. The same is true for the big antennae used for radio and tv stations. (I may be mistaken since they might emit a donut of radiation, but it's still a large fraction of the sphere).
First consider the fact that the Deep Space Network could detect a cell phone if it were on Mars. Keep in mind that radio waves are of ridiculously low energy, so it doesn't take much energy to generate a massive quantity of them. So our transmissions that go in every direction are even powerful enough to reach at least some of the closer star systems.
I like how the list says "Not a balloon" after "Unlimited flight time" -- they know people are trying to guess what their magic nonexistent contraption is and are having fun with it.
Another thing: In Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe, I think that he claims both that string theory has only one constant and no constants (aside from the laws of string theory itself and the number of dimensions it claims) at two different parts of the book -- a contradiction. Can anyone clear that up? And it seems to have some relevance to the Hawking proposal.
Regarding the Drake equation, this is a little off topic but there is also the question of whether or not different universes are likely to be able to make intelligent life. Or if not make new life, then at least life is able to exist in it. This universe for example is obviously suited to life, but if changed slightly, life could not exist in it. Has anyone seen a recent Hawking lecture or read something about these relatively new ideas (past few decades)? Hawking speculates that there is an infinite number of universes which have an infinitely varied set of constants and laws (eg # of dimensions) in them. This must be true if there is no God. If it IS true, then the God question cannot be answered by this alone.
0.469 (year^-1) is the inverse of the synodic period. You have to take the inverse of that to get the synodic period, 2.13 years.
In other words Psyn = (1/Pearth - 1/Pmars)^-1
Indeed. And I just read that it could eventually be worth $400 billion over the life of the contract after a few decades, and global sales are taken into account.
Certainly a capable person could kill someone else without a gun if they had the will. They could even do some sort of elaborate sabotage to the persons pressure suit and avoid getting caught. The issue though is how much will it takes to a kill a person vs. the difficulty in killing the person. One might get really angry and the gun would be an easy way to do the job, and the fit of rage would be enough. On the other hand, if there was no gun around, then it would take more will to kill the person, because then you're talking about a more deliberate death, be it by strangling the person with your bare hands or a methodical sabotage of some kind.
That says nothing about the right to protect yourself from criminals, though.