Tech Tuesday 05/22/18 – Ryan Reynolds is My God Edition
TT01 – Space is a busy place. At least, this video makes it seem busy. Those objects are still small compared to the vast distances involved.
TT02 – It’s kinda like Pokemon, but with photons.
TT03 – We have discovered how bacteria are able to develop drug resistance so fast. Now we just gotta figure out how to turn that little feature off.
TT04 – I swear, at this point, materials scientists are just adding graphene to whatever they can get their hands on just to see what happens. If someone hasn’t added it to the old bowl of pudding in the break room fridge by now, I will be sorely disappointed.
TT05 – THIS JUST IN: Canada develops novel technology that defeats all known stealth technology. Immediately apologizes to everyone for making their expensive toys utterly fishing useless.
TT06 – Fourteen years ago, Bose developed a nifty active suspension system, and then essentially sat on it. Last year, Clear Motion bought the tech from Bose and is busy developing it for driver-less cars, so we will better be able to get stuff done as our robotic chauffeurs take us to work.
TT07 – The jokes, just so damn many…
TT08 – I love the idea of living on the water like this (houseboats are forever intriguing to me), but whenever I see designs like this, I always wonder, is this person really keeping in mind how difficult it is to live on water. Seawater is corrosive, and full of life that just loves to attach to any solid thing it can find. And cleaning that life off of things is no easy task. Maybe they think about it, but I rarely see anything in these promos that suggests that they’ve given it serious thought.
TT09 – I get a kick out of self-assembling structures like these. Always been a source of fascination since the first time I watched crystals grow in one of those crystal growing kits you get as a kid.
TT10 – A new polymer that is easily and nearly infinitely recyclable. I am beginning to foresee a future with two primary plastics, recyclable, and compostable. Anything else will need permission and probably require some kind of plan on file to recover and recycle it.
TT11 – Makes sense to me. Space is the place where radiation will add energy to things a changing. Coupled to vast expanses and timescales, and yeah, sure, it all started out there.
TT12– Using nuclear power to balance out renewable sources is probably more efficient than trying to run it as a full time base load. Speaking of Nuclear, NuScale has gotten their Small Modular Reactor past Phase 1 Review. Also, PNNL has developed a process to encase low level nuclear waste in glass. And NASA is not clowning around with this space reactor.
TT13 – Swallow a dye pill to make your malignant tumors glow (under IR light).
TT14 – Twisting the conventional approach to battery design. I especially like the improved energy density and recharge rate. Now how many cycles before it begins to degrade?
TT15 – Despite the completely inhumane way he was treated, Alan Turing continues to give back to the human race. And not in a way you might suspect.
TT16 – Wood is working to supplant spiders as the makers of the strongest stuff we know.
TT17 – A blood test for chronic pain. And malingerers everywhere suddenly cried out as they were kicked off disability.
[TT08] He figures he’ll find his sea pyramid scheme by renting a pyramid out for 1/352 of the construction cost per night. That’s ambitious.
I have some friends who are aggressively using AirBnB to pay the mortgage down faster, but their rate of return is a smidge lower…
[TT17]
2018: a blood test that can reveal chronic pain
2025: wow, our costs have gone down since we kicked all those malingerers off benefits
2043: so, um, it turns out our blood test only reveals certain kinds of chronic painReport
TT17: Dragonfrog, my initial reaction was somewhat similar to yours and then I remembered Oscar has chronic pain. And relevant benefits and/or lacking of such. So I assume that was packed into his statement.Report
The thing that is interesting is that the test isn’t testing for pain, it’s testing for the physiological telltales of chronic pain, the ways the body changes when it is in chronic pain.
This is a good thing, especially when dealing with people who can not communicate their pain. It’s also good for people who are in pain, but who do not have a definitive cause for it (and who are often not believed, which is (IIRC) more common for women than men). It might also be a useful way to tell if a treatment program is having an effect (are the pain markers changing for the better).
But, I also foresee people trying to use this to go after malingerers. I would hope that a result that indicates a person is not being honest about their pain would result in an investigator looking for other evidence of fraud, rather than the test being the only thing.
I would also be curious what such a test would show when used on a person for whom the pain is really all in their head. Does the body still show the signs, even if the sensory nerves aren’t actually sending the signals?
I do know that the WoD has hampered out ability to study pain. Maybe this will open other avenues of research.Report
I wonder, to the extent that different painkillers act in different ways, whether using the blood test in lieu of placebo trials might mess things up.
That is – do some painkillers suppress pain in ways that would show up in the test as “absence of pain” while others do so in ways that would show up as “presence of pain” despite the patient experiencing a similar subjective relief from pain…Report
TT12:
Third link: Let us review the history of vitrification at the Hanford site…
(1) Most of 30 years ago, a lab-scale continuous vitrification process was demonstrated.
(2) DOE spent $4B or so (of a then-projected $12B total) on initial construction.
(3) Eventually, with startup more than a decade late, a whistle-blower told people, “It’s a crock; the process doesn’t scale; sometimes it doesn’t work at all.”
(4) When sued by the State of Washington, DOE admitted that the process doesn’t scale, suggested that after a fresh start vitrification operations might begin in 2039. That date includes an unstated assumption that Congress will provide more funding, which it has been increasingly slow to do.
(5) A new lab-scale continuous vitrification process is demonstrated. The researchers note that the test involved only one of the many types of waste present at Hanford, and might not work with the others…
Fourth link: The Idaho National Lab is the traditional site for new reactor tests. Why, then, was this tested in Nevada? When the agreed-upon date for DOE to finish cleaning up the INL passed with essentially zero work accomplished, Idaho successfully forced an agreement that DOE couldn’t bring any more radioactive materials to Idaho until the existing mess was cleaned up.
If Washington State were to obtain the same sort of agreement Idaho has, the US Navy would be up a creek: retired naval reactors currently go to Hanford, where they are stored in an open-air trench. All of them.Report
The reactor compartments aren’t all that contaminated (and the newest retired RC’s are practically mess decks compared with the oldest ones).
It’s the spent fuel that’s unbelievably nasty (which I thought also went to Hanford, but I’m not sure)Report
Spent Navy fuel has historically all gone to INL (much of it into a cooling pool first, then into above-ground casks). The Navy is not part of the DOE agreement with Idaho, but has a separate one that (a) requires the Navy to reduce its stockpile of spent fuel in Idaho to nine tons (from the current 31 tons and growing) by 2035 and then keep the stockpile below that level. No one realistically expects that to happen; Congress would have to pick a location and fund a new repository site, or repurpose an existing one. (Neither WIPP in New Mexico or the (currently inoperative) Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada can legally accept military spent reactor fuel.) Most people’s expectation — certainly mine — is that come 2035, the feds will simply ignore the agreement and continue shipping spent fuel into Idaho.
I skipped over the second link. The current plan is that the first NuScale reactors would be deployed on INL land. The DOE/Idaho agreement specifically forbids DOE from bringing additional radioactive material onto INL without the state’s blessing. Whether that also covers DOE giving permission for third parties (NuScale, the utility purchasing the reactors, both acting under the authority of the NRC) to bring in radioactive material is an open legal question.Report
@michael-cain
I am constantly impressed with how dialed in to the legal landscape of nuclear materials you are.Report
Recall that I have a lunatic prediction about an east-west partition of the US, with electricity an important piece at a critical time. (On my crazier days, I have been known to call it my retirement hobby.) Many of the scenarios involve a West that has decided against thermal generation in general and nuclear in particular, and an East that can’t do that. So far, I see no reason to believe that such an East wouldn’t continue to vote to do its nuclear testing and waste disposal in the West, over the objections of the West. Which leads me to spend a certain amount of effort following (a) what promises are being made to western states and (b) are those promises being kept?
To head off a certain set of comments, yes, I’m perfectly aware that the worst of the messes and broken promises about clean-up are about military facilities, not commercial. I assert that when the time comes, it won’t matter — the important thing will be 50 years of broken promises to clean up the messes, not where the messes came from.Report
There are days I don’t think it’s that lunatic.
And yeah, the broken promises are a sore spot. I do a pretty good job keeping a hard divide between my geek joy at the various forms of nuclear power generation, and my disappointment in how poorly the feds have handled nuclear power on multiple fronts. But I get that most people aren’t me.Report
To piggyback on something Oscar just said about legal minutia, what is the definition of radioactive material for that injunction? On my ‘retail’ side experience, there was stuff that was contaminated due to exposure to ionizing radiation, stuff that was potentially contaminated due to contact with that first stuff, stuff that was ‘inherently’ radioactive (e.g. test sources), and then the big bad stuff in the core that was only handled by specialists every 15 years or so (and now even less often than that).
All of these had somewhat different procedures for handling, storage, and disposal.Report
I believe the agreement covers high-level waste generally and spent fuel specifically. Also stuff like the plutonium-laced soil from the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver (the Rocky Flats site is about eight miles NW of my house; the house is outside the areas where any plutonium has been detected, and the groundwater flow is away from me). IIRC, the Rocky Flats soil was the trigger for Idaho’s initial suit. The soil was being delivered faster than the receiving site could be prepared, and just dumped out in the open, and the wind was carrying enough plutonium in the dust to be detected outside the INL boundary.Report
TT16: How flammable is something made almost entirely of cellulose? Should we be making aeroplanes out of something that will catch fire?Report
How flammable something is depends on more than just whether or not the molecule will undergo rapid oxidation in the presence of heat. The structure of the material plays an equally important role.
It’s entirely possible the stuff, being so tightly packed, has a very high ignition point.Report