A new study from UCSB finds significant increases in businesses hiring organized shills to push products online. These 'malicious crowd-sourcing systems' enlist dozens or hundreds of professional shills to orchestrate mass account creation, generate bogus ratings, and post canned cut-and-paste positive reviews -- with each 'task' costing between 13 and 70 cents. 'Unscrupulous crowd-sourcing sites, coupled with international payment systems, have enabled a burgeoning crowdturfing market that targets U.S. websites, but is fueled by a global workforce.'
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Member since:2005-07-08
France is also a nuclear weapons state.
You are right, the pluses are obvious, low cost power, avoidance of CO2, not much foreign dependance except on friendly Australia. Its base load and stable.
The minuses include the Pu239 that comes out of Uranium fission reactions, it is nasty and as the greens remind us has 20k year half life, so even 100k years still leaves it hot and deadly poisonous.
But there is a really good alternative in Thorium in the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor or LFTR (Lifter) named after the god of war Thor ironically. It was invented by the same guy that invented the current PWR reactor, Alvin Weinberg a nuclear chemist.
Pluses, 4* more Th232 than U238 and it burns almost 100% into lighter valuable elements. U238 only burns about 1-5% in the once through cycle so almost all the waste is in fact unspent U238 fuel mixed with deadly Pu239 and useless Pu240 and other waste that needs a complex future breeder reactor. That won't likely ever happen anywhere.
The Thorium LFTR produces no Pu (okay 10000 less) in the waste so it decays to background in 300 yrs and this can be exploited for rare earths and radio medical isotopes worth their weight in gold in just 5 years.
Thorium is very simple to process into stable fluoride salts, 1 ton of metal per year produces 1GW continuous power for 1M homes with 1 ton of simple waste with very short decays.
The LFTR is intrinsically safe, if it overheats it melts a safety plug and shuts down, no backup needed. It is the ultimate passive design and it also follows load.
With the efficiency gained, Thorium allows for 100 times the total energy capacity of Uranium, enough for 10B people for 10000 years. Uranium can only power the worlds richest countries with a hidden agenda for weapons Pu.
The LFTR is also an excellent way to dispose of the current stock of unspent fuels, it eats them in the process of burning Thorium, that is how we get rid of the Pu waste.
So why do we use Uranium, simple, the US, UK, France, Israel, Russia, China, NKorea and Iran want the Pu for weapons and Thorium was killed off by Nixon because it is totally useless for weapons.
Member since:2010-03-08
Member since:2010-03-08
Also, another question about the LFTR reactor : even if it is subcritical, doesn't it have the same cooling problems that plagued some of Fukushima's reactors ?
IIRC, the problem with some reactors was that the core of the reactor remained hot while the flow of coolant was interrupted due to a power shortage, which caused the bottom of the reactor to melt and wastes to flow to someplace where they were not supposed to flow (the sea ?)
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
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Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote about why OSNews was no longer OSNews: the alternative operating system scene had died, and OSNews, too, had to go with the times and move towards reporting on a new wave of operating systems - mobile, and all the repercussions that the explosion of smartphones and tablets have caused. Still, I was wondering something today: why aren't we seeing alternative operating systems on mobile?
Member since:
2010-03-08
I'm with you on this one
I think there are enough proofs of global warming right now to stop arguing with the few remaining shills of the oil industry. If they stop getting people's attention, they should naturally disappear.
However, I am also of the opinion that much of the discussion on nuclear power is blinded by misinformation on both side. Between people who are afraid of the natural radioactivity of potatoes and people who pretend that there's nothing to change in the way we currently operate nuclear power plants, it's hard to form a relatively objective opinion on the exact advantages and drawbacks of the technology.
And that's speaking from France, which is pretty much the home country of nuclear power -- a reign which has been disputed ever since the Chernobyl politics and media manipulation, but without anyone proposing a serious alternative.
Edited 2011-12-16 09:35 UTC