Don't tell Herman Cain that Bill Gates is helping the Chinese get the bomb.

Mugato: Didn't he die of cancer last month?

You're thinking of Steve Keller.

Will it be made with Chinese Drywall?

/at least someone is doing research in this area

Not sure what's so scary about this....it's not like the Chinese don't have nuclear technology already...

/I see someone has already made the Cain joke, so I got nothin'

well if you folks want china to stop burning so much fossil fuel each year this would go a long way towards that goal. You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have three choices;

1)accept nuclear
2)stop biatching about CO2
3)cross your fingers and hope new technology is coming very soon.

It's not like we don't have an energy crisis here, Bill. It's not like we don't incredibly underfunded schools in the US.

But an army of cheap Indian programmers that are personally loyal and a Chinese middle class that has enough electricity to power his very self serving interests.

HMS_Blinkin: Not sure what's so scary about this....it's not like the Chinese don't have nuclear technology already...

The reason some are expressing concern is that famous Chinese Quality standards. As is frequently mentioned in the business tabs, the word quality does not seem to have a translation in Mandarin as english speakers know it. Rather their priority seems to be "cut as many corners as possible." There are some farkers who lived there or did QA for their assembly lines and can give personal tales where component X was filled with sand instead of whatever.

I think someone has posted pictures of some of their buildings which are unstable and have fallen over with alarming ease.

Actually, immediately after the earthquake last March, I remember some talk about mini reactors that could be used to power neighborhoods. The idea was that rather than building a huge reactor with large amounts of toxic waste, a self-contained, small reactor could run safely for decades (if not centuries) with little human intervention.

In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami, though, a lot of people, especially here in Japan, are wary of nuclear power, no matter how safe its proponents claim it to be. The tack the Japanese have taken, to halt all new nuclear power plant construction, is the wrong path. In the short term, nuclear is absolutely necessary to get us over the next energy hurdle. Once we have reasonably priced alternative clean energy production capabilities, then it becomes time to start relieving our reliance on fission, IMO.

...the real problem is that it will have to run with equipment it wasn't originally designed with and regardless of the safeguards and warnings, the Chinese will inevitably install several 3rd party generator parts that will come cheap and require that you install a coal fired steam generator as well to for them work properly. Unfortunately, this will cause the nuclear reactor to meltdown.

Egoy3k: well if you folks want china to stop burning so much fossil fuel each year this would go a long way towards that goal. You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have three choices;

1)accept nuclear
2)stop biatching about CO2
3)cross your fingers and hope new technology is coming very soon.

Fusion's coming in 50 years when hell freezes over!

Certainly better then if Linux Torvalds was trying to help. Imagine a reactor that's free to use if you can figure out how to run a cable from the plant to your house but doesn't work on most of your appliances and if you ask about that the response is always somewhere between 'why would even want to run a fridge? Just eat ramen instead.' or 'learn nuclear science and fix it yourself'.

They don't call it China Syndrome for nuttin'!

Franco: It's not like we don't have an energy crisis here, Bill. It's not like we don't incredibly underfunded schools in the US.

But an army of cheap Indian programmers that are personally loyal and a Chinese middle class that has enough electricity to power his very self serving interests.

He would love to build it in the US, however with regulations and nimby he really can't. The plan now with nuclear is to build the initial plants in India and China. Then when everything goes well build them stateside.

Have you tried extracting and reinserting the control rods?

Mugato: Didn't he die of cancer last month?

Your just trying to get my hopes up.

BalugaJoe: Will it be made with Chinese Drywall?

Along with tainted Heparin so they can kill another 36 Americans. Pssst, Bill, charge them $10 Trillion.

lucksi: Have you tried extracting and reinserting the control rods?

Nice +1

The_Homeless_Guy; The plan now with nuclear is to build the initial plants in India and China. Then when everything goes well build them stateside.

Fukushima is still in the news all over Japan (and thus lots of it gets into China through state media and the internet). Radioactive water being dumped into the Pacific, prefectures still closed, and a lot of very nervous Japanese people who are incredibly distrustful of their government.

I mean, since China is Communist still, they can just do it and ignore public opinion, but I don't imagine it'll be a resounding success with China's traditional safety standards.

India, though, as a democracy, is a totally different story.

The Travelling Wave Reactor is an interesting concept, but my long-term bet would be on LFTR.

Microshiat and china have very similar standards when it comes to quality control.

None

Egoy3k: well if you folks want china to stop burning so much fossil fuel each year this would go a long way towards that goal. You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have three choices;

1)accept nuclear
2)stop biatching about CO2
3)cross your fingers and hope new technology is coming very soon.

Don't they have enough people to just run giant hamster-wheel dynamos to power everything?

We should not use nuclear power. The temps the core generates when meltdown occurs exceed the ability to contain the accident when it melts through the steel and concrete containment. The radioactive fallout that results poisons the air, crops, land and water all over the globe. We still do not have a plan to store the waste.

Nuclear power is irresponsible to use. Fukushima's meltouts and China Syndromes are going to be the headline news in 2012. There is no way to contain it, the technology does not exist.

Snarfangel: The Travelling Wave Reactor is an interesting concept, but my long-term bet would be on LFTR.

I forgot to mention the last link is a Youtube video.

Egoy3k: well if you folks want china to stop burning so much fossil fuel each year this would go a long way towards that goal. You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have three choices;

1)accept nuclear
2)stop biatching about CO2
3)cross your fingers and hope new technology is coming very soon.

We also have Africa on deck for expanding energy requirements. India is already there. To a lesser degree South and Latin America will also likely need more energy as their economies expand as well.

We have solar and wind on the table as well, but fission and fusion are where it is all at (and we only have one of those mastered).

The containment area will be about 1/8 of an inch of overly sandy concrete over bamboo lathe with no
footings in poorly drained soil...Every nut and bolt will have different threading and be off size and will be made
from re-bar that was recycled from earthquake rubble. Like many near 3rd world construction, the public areas will be richly appointed in the finest veneers to hide the poor quality of the actual construction.

/he'd have them build his machines, duh
/that's his trademarked, patented reality distortion field

What the hell is his problem? I thought Bill Gates and his wife were do-gooders. But he's pushing the ridiculous Monsanto Franken-seeds, and now a nuclear reactor. And if you don't know what's wrong with nuclear reactors, then you're clueless, and you should read what is happening with nuclear waste both in our country and around the world right now.

I recall 15 years ago, a nuclear design that had the radioactive material the size of mables coated in carbon. You would put a bucket of them together and the uranium would warm each other up. At the same time as the carbon got hot it would isolate the uranium throttling the reacion. The idea was that these would be so safe that they could be employed anywere, from small African villages to small American villages.

The pellets would be tracked, needing to be returned to get more material. Though you would still need a lot of theft security. I think the idea was they would bury them in a vault. It made so much sense, I'm (not) suprised it hasn't come to market.

Franco: It's not like we don't have an energy crisis here, Bill. It's not like we don't incredibly underfunded schools in the US.

But an army of cheap Indian programmers that are personally loyal and a Chinese middle class that has enough electricity to power his very self serving interests.

Your a farking dipshiat. We are #4 in spending. The problem is too much of the money goes to administration and bullshiat and there is no accountability. The system doesn't farking work and everyone screams bloody murder whenever an attempt is made to address it.

[CITATION] (new window)

I hope English is your second language.

TheGogmagog: The pellets would be tracked, needing to be returned to get more material. Though you would still need a lot of theft security. I think the idea was they would bury them in a vault. It made so much sense, I'm (not) suprised it hasn't come to market.

They're sticking spent nuclear material into mines under mountains out west, as far as I know; dis nuclear all you want but it's better than burning coal, natural gas, or gasoline in any form. worse than wind/water power.

SDRR: Franco: It's not like we don't have an energy crisis here, Bill. It's not like we don't incredibly underfunded schools in the US.

But an army of cheap Indian programmers that are personally loyal and a Chinese middle class that has enough electricity to power his very self serving interests.

Your a farking dipshiat. We are #4 in spending. The problem is too much of the money goes to administration and bullshiat and there is no accountability. The system doesn't farking work and everyone screams bloody murder whenever an attempt is made to address it.

[CITATION] (new window)

I hope English is your second language.

[CITATION WITH NEWER NUMBERS THAT SHOWS WE ARE NOW #2] (new window)

Glad to see the research and work being done in the nuclear field. Too bad more cannot be done in the US, but that's our loss.

Please, please let it be Pebblebed or Thorium Salt tech. We have to get away from batch burning of nuclear fuel....

PsiChi: What the hell is his problem? I thought Bill Gates and his wife were do-gooders. But he's pushing the ridiculous Monsanto Franken-seeds, and now a nuclear reactor. And if you don't know what's wrong with nuclear reactors, then you're clueless, and you should read what is happening with nuclear waste both in our country and around the world right now.

He's not a do gooder.

He's a scumbag who spends a lot of time trying to cover up the scumbag things he's done to the middle-class through outsourcing. I'm on this damn portable device again so I can't get to the article but I just read another one about how he is trying to screw the middle-class.

I'll post it later.

RexTalionis: Gergesa: HMS_Blinkin: Not sure what's so scary about this....it's not like the Chinese don't have nuclear technology already...

The reason some are expressing concern is that famous Chinese Quality standards. As is frequently mentioned in the business tabs, the word quality does not seem to have a translation in Mandarin as english speakers know it. Rather their priority seems to be "cut as many corners as possible." There are some farkers who lived there or did QA for their assembly lines and can give personal tales where component X was filled with sand instead of whatever.

I think someone has posted pictures of some of their buildings which are unstable and have fallen over with alarming ease.

That's stupid. There's also no exact Chinese translation for "yes" and "no." By your logic, that must mean Chinese people can't answer in the negative or affirmative.

English doesn't have an exact translation for schadenfreude, then that must mean that English speakers are incapable of feeling that emotion by that same logic.


You seem to have missed the part where I was relaying what was said in the business tab by others who have lived/worked in China and posted about it.

Wasn't there a story about this like 4-5 years ago on FARK where this was already achieved in Los Alamos National Laboratory? They were taking spent fuel rods and had developed some sort of process involving fusion where within the span of a second they could generate enough electricity to power like a million homes for a year, and in the process the spent fuel rods were completely destroyed. It was considered a huge achievement because it could replace the Four-Corners power plant, as well as since the high-level radioactive waste was fully consumed in the process, the concerns over the logistics of long-term storage were erased entirely.

There was even an awesome picture that accompanied the story, but it went red after being green for a couple of hours. Scientists quoted in the article were supposedly quoted as saying that while the process was a monumental achievement, it was almost totally useless because there was no way to capture the electrical power generated from the reaction. As such better capacitance systems and additional infrastructure would need to be introduced into the electrical grid so that it could be slowly released rather than being consumed or dumped all at once.

I know I read this story on here.

mark12A: Please, please let it be Pebblebed or Thorium Salt tech. We have to get away from batch burning of nuclear fuel....

He's actually talking about Travelling Wave Reactors. I'm a LFTR fan, myself.

I shouldn't laugh, since I'm a U.S. citizen, but heh. Good for China. Bill Gates and TerraPower pitched the technology as a way to use all the depleted uranium we have in the U.S., and it's been largely laughed at. He pitches it to China, and they go for it.

In China, they also have Carter's solar panels in a museum. Apparently they walk by and laugh about how stupid Americans are at throwing away every advance in technology...

...but I'm sure the strategy of denouncing technological advancements as socialism will work out fine for us.

I am really excited about the terra power travelling wave idea. These reactors "burn up" nuclear waste as their fuel in a reaction that looks something like a cigarette burning down in an ashtray. the fuel and the waste stay contained in the one capsule, which you swap out and dispose of in 50 years, like a goddamn big D-cell battery. There is little proliferation or weaponization risk, since if the thing is going to run 50 years, you just bury it in concrete at the site. It actually reduces proliferation, since it uses and depletes nuclear waste. You could make these small enough for individual city utilities to operate.

I'm also for pebble-bed and thorium reactors, both would be "meltdown-proof", like the TWR. The thorium reactors would aslo be a safe way to incinreate radwaste while harvesting its energy and reducing leftover spent fuel waste. What's left after processing thru a thorium salt reactor would have a very short half-life, well within our current capability to safely store.

yagottabefarkinkiddinme: We should not use nuclear power. The temps the core generates when meltdown occurs exceed the ability to contain the accident when it melts through the steel and concrete containment. The radioactive fallout that results poisons the air, crops, land and water all over the globe. We still do not have a plan to store the waste.

Nuclear power is irresponsible to use. Fukushima's meltouts and China Syndromes are going to be the headline news in 2012. There is no way to contain it, the technology does not exist.

This is untrue. The latest generation of nuclear reactors are designed to be able to self shut down without external cooling or any other outside force.

The problems you see in the news are happening at plants built over 40 years ago. Think about that... they basically didnt even have modern computing back then.

They were built a decade before I was born, and I have a child of my own!

Gergesa: I think someone has posted pictures of some of their buildings which are unstable and have fallen over with alarming ease.

It's funny because this seems like something Steve Jobs might be suited for, in that if one detail was off spec then several people would be fired (and given that this is China, it would involve actual fire).

Any Pie Left: I'm also for pebble-bed and thorium reactors, both would be "meltdown-proof", like the TWR

Are they people-proof?
As in, if they're built with every conceivable flaw (i.e. how they actually would be built) would they still be safe?

PsiChi: What the hell is his problem? I thought Bill Gates and his wife were do-gooders. But he's pushing the ridiculous Monsanto Franken-seeds, and now a nuclear reactor. And if you don't know what's wrong with nuclear reactors, then you're clueless, and you should read what is happening with nuclear waste both in our country and around the world right now.

Notsureiftrolling.png

Very glib, with the Chernobyl throwaways... but nobody builds the Chernobyl type reactor anymore. The latest PWR/BWR designs are quite safe. The reason Gates is pushing the TWR is that is one of the "meltdown-proof" designs.

Gates was an asshole for a long time. He became fabulously rich. Now he's a rich asshole, who, like Andrew Carnegie, may be seeing his approaching mortality and deciding that he should earn his way to heaven by using that wealth for the common good. You can forgive Gates or not, nobody cares. if he succeeds with these reactors andhis othe charitable works like the anti-malaria and anti-AIDS campaigns, and etc., history will forget and forgive all his Microsoft days and only remember his final works.

And I would be okay with that.

/typing this from a Carnegie library.