Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation, lower frequency than Infrared even...no significan shielding required

Those bunker bombs are designed to penetrate then explode, not a lotta collateral damage but some (EPW) use a small nuclear detonation focused toward the ground for penetration with conventional explosives in the main warhead. Radiation residuals could be a problem.

I was seeing that very last bit as "Dammit enough of you. You get the HELL in the house!". Otherwise he wouldn't have brought it all the way back across the road.

Spouse's cat, most likely. Unspayed and cranky. Hates him. Continually stares and growls at him. Shreds his slippers. Chews the corners of his briefcase after pissing on it. Tries to get underfoot when he's carrying in an armful of groceries. Yowls at nothing at 3AM. Dreams of putting a yarn tripline at the top of the stairs. Poops next to the litterbox whenever the spouse is away. Hides his car keys next to the radiator in hopes that the car remote starter will melt. Has been secretly training in a correspondence course in opposable thumbs so it can knife him to death in his sleep.

Yeah.

There are similar spiders, in the genus Cyclosa, that use debris to create a line in their web so that when the spider sits atop the line it is almost impossible to detect, as it looks just like a piece of debris. This protects the spider from two of its main predators: birds and parasitic wasps.

This could be a similar situation, but slightly modified (i.e. evolved), so that the web debris is not just a line, but lines radiating out from a central point. Now, those predators that would've preyed upon or parasitized a small spider (such as the one living in this web), are not drawn to the web of such a large-looking spider.

In certain cases, this would cause an energy drain rather than boost. Infrared light is pretty much the electromagnetic form of radiant heat (thermal radiation). In many places in the world, it is usually the times of cold that more energy is used; as the heat deltas of a cold winter are much greater than the heat delta of a hot summer. So, heat from the sun, as sparse as it is in the winter, is still radiating into your house. Blocking it, and turning it into electrical energy, then turning that back into heat energy is most surely a loosing proposition. Depending on the needs of the user, this might inflict a greater cost than cost savings. So while there are times that blocking thermal radiation and turning into electrical energy would be of worth, it is a regional issue that has a lot to do with local climate swings and average annual temperature; the colder the average temperature, the more of a waste this could be.

Recent history teaches in the U.S., Russia, China, central Europe, that peeps without guns get slowly (or quickly) fucked by the people they think they elected or believe to be sovereign or otherwise appointed by God. All of these man-created entities, societies, governments, all mutate, collapse, etc.-What is the ultimate end of everyone being armed? Who cares. There will never be a time when this is true.

Look, it's real simple for me. Wealth and power and the abuse of both have brought humanity to the brink before-The fucks who have bankrupted the United States would that nobody looked their way for payback, would that their children (fuck everyone elses) will inherit their influence and power and wealth, and that this machine will continue until power is consolidated into the hands of a few-This shit hasn't changed for thousands of years-Walls protect from invasion, sharp sticks puncture eyeballs of the guy with a rock in his hand.
The negative externalities of there being a shitload of guns in a country?? What, these children being shot by a whack job? Again, address the cause of the cancer don't simply bombard the body with radiation.
You will never be able to guess when someone will snap in our society but there are definite warning signs to clue the somewhat lucid in, and NONE of that shit has to do with why Johnny should or shouldn't be able to have a weapon. Anything may be used as a weapon, including automobiles, but you don't see everyone up in arms to ban cars whenever a CRAZY FUCK, careens through a crowd of peeps on Rodeo Drive.

Historically, the worst atrocities with firearms are perpetrated by governments gone bad, now mine is inching again towards taking mine away??
Again sir, fuck that shit.

Reminds me of Mater's Tractor ride in the Radiator Springs section of Disney's California Adventure.

Okay,

Weaknesses
1). His love of humanity - Absolutely
2). Lois Lane (and Jonathan & Martha Kent)
3). Kryptonite - Proven Absolutely
4). Red Sun or Starless worlds would void his powers but first you have to make him go there.
5). Magic - Can slow him down, but can't kill him
6). Virus X - Kryptonian leprosy, the only form of disease for which Kryptonians had not found a cure (Turns out Blue Kryptonite is the cure)
7). Mind Control - He has no powers against mind control but he is a strong minded individual and has battled this and won before.
8 ). Extreme amounts of force/impact ("Darkseid and a few others have this power").
9). No air/Food/water - Superman could survive indefinitely without food, water, or rest due to the yellow sun's radiation sustaining him.

Shazam - Almost killed Superman with his lightning bolts which are magic
Lex Luthor used a magical artifact called the Powerstone to take his powers away.
Wonder Woman's magic sword can cut him.
Hulk kicked his ass once too but wasn't able to follow through.

Looks like his next major weakness after Kryptonite is Magic. Not all magic though. Only some magic granted by Gods, and then only some gods has the power to affect him. Magic has been able to lay him out but has never stopped him.

Check this forum where they clearly argue it out:
http://forums.comicbookresources.com/archive/index.php/t-72127.html

In what way ?

Hot water radiators (possibly the type in this skit) are powered by circulating hot water from a boiler. the water only gets to a certain temperature and then is dispursed through the pipes of the building.

The water stops flowing when the room itself/thermometer registers that the air temperature is what you want it to be.

The water/radiator does not heat up quicker if you jack the temperature on the dial, the water just flows longer to heat the air up longer. The water is at a constant temperature, unless you have a shit boiler/water heater.

Electrics might be different, well they are actually when they have settings like 500 watt 1000 watt and 1500 watt settings. But in apartments it all depends on what the thermostat reads.

Now I wonder if your comment was facetious...

@RFlagg @Sniper007 @Tokoki

Many airports in the US have backscatter X-ray scanners set up at the TSA security gates. Nearly everything that the TSA and the government has ever said about the scanners has been a fabrication.

1) They don't show that much detail
--Nooo, you can pretty clearly see someone's breasts or junk

2) The images are not stored
--Nope. A bunch got leaked onto the internet.

3) They work.
--Nope. Security reviews have shown that it's trivial to get a gun past the scanner by just positioning it correctly on your body.

4) They're safe.
--They refuse to do safety studies on them. They don't even test how much radiation they actually put out.

But, travelers have the right to 'opt out' of going through the scanners and undergo a pat down instead. The pat downs are probably intended to be humiliating as a disincentive to take that route, and they don't tell you that it's an option. But, they take longer, and a large number of people opting out can cause backups in the line. Get enough people to opt out and you can consider it a protest. These people seem to be informing travelers of their right to opt out.

I take the public groping rather than the unrated radiation box. I figure it's at least as embarrassing for the TSA guy.

(All of the things on the list above were accurate at one point. Some were allegedly cleared up. Supposedly they don't get to see an outline of your penis anymore, but they've lied before...)

Also, InfoWars and Alex Jones suck.

Indeed, I am all for reactor simplification, the reactor I want to see constructed could theoretically be nearly completely made on a factory line then shipped and installed very simply. The molten salt reactor concept is just a bunch of pipes with a graphite core. Most of the Gen4 reactors have this goal, and while large construction projects do mean jobs, usually good jobs...they are also costs, and if we want China and India to adopt greener power systems, they need to be cheaper than coal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

I am going to sift this after I post, but it is a short look into reactors in general, and why the MSR and other potential Gen4 concepts could eliminate that huge capital and labor cost. And nearly completely eliminate radioactivity problems to the general public.

300 billion is actually not to much money when you get down to it. Each year, the global economy spends up to 10 trillion dollars on dino fuel technology. Considering the reliability of NPPs and the nearly 90% load rate over the course of many years...those costs are really really good! Typically speaking, when you consider the costs of decommissioning, waste transportation, nuclear generally ends up being about on par with coal...mostly because nuclear plants last so darn long, over 60 years for some of our gen2 plants in the US and still going strong! Compare that to the 150 billion or so Germany has spent on solar project to their total ACTUAL output and it is a very telling tail. Even more so when you look at total carbon emissions of Germany compared to France.

Waste is actually what made me anti-nuclear myself. My introduction to caring (negatively) about nuclear was the Fukushima Daiichi incident. But after learning more about that situation, I actually really started to appreciate nuclear more. No one died as a result of FD failure, the containment building stopped most of the most harmful radiation, and the stuff that did get out is the really mild stuff (stuff with the million year half lives). I don't want to downplay this, it is still a very serious industrial mess to clean up, but compared to the 20 thousand people who died in the Tsunami and the tons of fuels, trash and other crap that got souped around in Japan as a result, the old reactor help up respectably, and is a credit to the operators (all of whom are currently alive an well).

I had a common misconception about radioactivity, I thought something with a long half-life was bad because it was going to be radioactive for a long, long time. That is mostly wrong. What that means is it is going to be hardly radioactive for a long time, elements that are short lived are VERY radioactive, but disappear very fast. I don't want to mire you in most of the gritty details, but the fission products reactors produce don't last very long, most only hours, a fewer some decades, and only a few longer than that. Stuff that has billion year a billion year half life...well, you don't really need to worry about it at all, it just isn't that radioactive. Most of the worry is based around "transuranics". That is just fancy speak for "stuff heavier than uranium". This is the stuff like Plutonium and Curium ect. The great thing about modern, Gen4 reactors is they don't really make those things...the thorium reactor I like starts with thorium, which is a long, long way from making anything heavier than uranium (less than 1% theoretically possible). So micrograms per year...not really that much to worry about (there is also no way to really get that to go into the environment because we don't use pressure vessels, but I will leave that to Kirk to explain).

I don't want to make it sounds like there isn't any risk or anything, but the risks have been way overplayed by political interests and not technical ones. For instance, many of the exclusions zones for FD were way overblown, they were no more radioactive than my home in the mountains ...but that isn't want you heard in the news.

But I think I will leave it like that. Nuclear has a bunch of mystic joojoo around it. Don't take my work for it, please, give "bill gates nuclear" a google, or other "gen4 reactor" stuff a chance before you completely write off nuclear as a green option for the future. I personally think it will have a big role to play if we want to stem off CO2 production AND bring more people into a western quality of life. Thanks again for the back and forth.

O by the by, neutrons decay in free-space, in other words, free neutrons are radioactive. With a decay time of less than 15 mins, it means 2 things: slow neutrons will be less detectable at distance because they decay, you still need to be relatively close to the source of neutrons to detect them regardless of speed. Neutrons are also the only form of radiation that will make things radioactive, meaning if you get to close and the bombardment is to intense , you can cause damage to your equipment via internal radiation of beta and gamma rays.

This is also why they use water in nuclear reactors, hydrogen, and in particular deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) slow neutrons better than anything. Water is mostly hydrogen by mole, so it is a very good moderator, both light water (regular water) and heavy water (deuterium water).

What is happening in this particular case is known as nuclear spallation. When a high energy proton hits something like carbon or nitrogen, it will at times knock a proton or neutron loose. Those neutrons are moving at relativistic speeds in most cases, so on the flip side, when those neutrons bounce their way out back to space, if there is water in the way they get slowed way down...enough that they decay before they reach the detector.

This is the same exact effect that allows for carbon dating, sometimes, the high energy neutrons that come out via spallation will in turn knock out a proton from a nitrogen atom, it then becomes mildly radioactive carbon. This happens at a relatively predictable rate, and since the decay of carbon 14 is also predictable, dating is possible.

Science rant over

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

As a kind of plug (sorry), thorium based reactors are really great sources of Pu238 creation via neptunium exposure to flux. Pu238 is unique among isotopes as to be both physically and radioactively hot, but that radiation relatively benign, weak alpha particles (but your still number one if my heart!). Very simple shielding is needed to keep electronics safe...and a layer of human skin is all the shielding you need for a human . Problem is, isotopes of plutonium are all chemically identical, in a normal uranium reactor, you get the full range of Pu (239 weapons, 240 spontaneous fissions, 241 smoke detector ect). This means you don't get that nice predictable alpha decay, you get a mix of everything...not so good, you need REALLY pure Pu238 to be useful in Radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, the things that powers curiosity). Just one of the many overlooked but awesome things about radionuclides. </end shameless plug>

I'm no expert, but I believe all Corvettes since their inception in the 50's have opened forward. Safety at speeds mostly, but I understand it makes them far easier to service as, other than the radiator, there's nothing to do at the front of the engine. Even then, the resevoir is pushed back for weight balance.