Bill Gates To Develop a Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor With Korea 413
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged to develop with Korea a revolutionary nuclear reactor that will leave far less radioactive waste than existing ones. Gates invested US$35 million in a nuclear-power venture company TerraPower in 2010. TerraPower is led by John Gilleland. It was formed from an effort initiated in 2007 by Nathan Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures. The company includes expert staff and individual consultants who have worked for some of the most prestigious nuclear laboratories and engineering companies in the world." You may remember that Gates worked with China to build a reactor late last year.
My God (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
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As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games...
That may be, but prepending "North" or "South" is so simple that very few people are lazy enough to drop it. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen the term to refer to a country rather than the continent.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
I believe you mean peninsula, not continent; the continent is Asia and the plate is Amuria [wikipedia.org]. The more you know...
As it so happens, though, Koreans invariably refer to their native country as the true and default Korea. That's probably how this story got messed up in the first place.
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And "America" often means USA.
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AND, the continent isn't called America, it's NORTH America. And there are two "Unites States" right next door to each other, the United States of America and the United States of Mexico.
OT, but I think you're needed "a href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/20/1323250/blood-cells-converted-into-chemical-sensors">here.
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As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea.
But, the story would be much more interesting if they actually meant the DPRK.
Re:My God (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:My God (Score:5, Funny)
It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games
To resolve this problem I suggest that we start calling South Korea for The Democratic Republic of Korea.
As opposed to North Korea's official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Yeah, that'll surely clear things up.
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Re:My God (Score:5, Insightful)
When your country name has "democratic" in it, you can usually count on that not actually being the case:
-Democratic Republic of the Congo (non-functioning government)
-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Communist)
-People's Democratic Republic of Laos (Communist)
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Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany) - Communist
Re:My God (Score:4, Insightful)
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First create actual communism, then we can discuss what it does require.
Actual communism (Score:5, Insightful)
There are working communes around in North America. The ones I know of are small (1000 or so), and religiously conservative, high trust groups. Transparency is high, leadership is a calling (and more work than non-leadership, with few/no perks).
Personally, I think the size is a key issue, because the small size (and transparency) enable trust. Lack of trust is the big fail in communism. If your going to all share alike, you have to have some confidence that everyone else is contributing their best efforts, or your going to slack off yourself. Someone sees you slacking, and slacks (a little more?) themselves - its a downward spiral. The only way to combat the race to the bottom is to reform or boot the slackers. The key piece here is that slackers can't hide.
Re:Actual communism (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?
No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.
In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.
But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.
No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
When your country name has "democratic" in it, you can usually count on that not actually being the case:
-Democratic Republic of the Congo (non-functioning government)
-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Communist)
-People's Democratic Republic of Laos (Communist)
Democratic is NOT the opposite of Communist. You are looking for dictatorship. There is nothing inherently oxymoronic about Democratic Communism, which is what Trotsky was all about.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
NK doesn't even pretend to be communist these days. Apparently it wasn't such a good descriptor because none of the Kims invented the word, and so people could think that someone else was smarter than them or something; while in reality, of course, all revolutionary political thought that leads the great Korean people to their superior destiny only originates with the Kims. So now it's all about Juche and songun. They've even dropped all mentions of "communism" from their constitution in 2009.
Re:My God (Score:4, Funny)
The People's Democratic Republic of Korea is still available.
Re:My God (Score:4, Funny)
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Because there are no true Democracies in existence today, and often that term is used loosely to describe countries with some democratic principles. Meanwhile, there are many "democratic" dictatorship where the dictator is elected by a group of small party officials and therefore they are technically a democratically elected republic (as many of the SSR states were in the soviet era).
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Does it run Linux?
Don't be ridiculous.It runs DOS.
There's no need to panic, it's fool proof. They've appointed General P. F. to take care of that.
I would start to worry when I see an Azure Cloud over Korea.
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Well that's okay. I'd rather Microsoft worked with Kim Jong-Un than Kim Dotcom. The latter is a real danger to democracy.
Re:My God (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is working together with the North Koreans to kill us all! Give all my moneys to DHS and TSA!
South Korea.
South - good.
North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
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You should watch some videos of people who have been to North Korea and video taped some of it. There's also a documentary about the more underground life.
It's absolutely terrible. I'd say it's like 1984, but at least in 1984 they had chocolate.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing next to that.
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My God (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you get into total war, there is no moral high ground. Just be glad your side won and move on.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see:
Japan invaded China and Manchuria, killing 300k in Shanghai alone.
The US tried the darling of the left, sanctions.
Then, while the Japanese were in Washington, in negotiation with the US on resolving the conflict peacefully, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning. That afternoon, the Japanese ambassador delivered the declaration of war.
Along the way, there was the Bataan Death March (definitely genocide).
On Saipan, the US had translators and loudspeakers trying to convince the Japanese civilians that they would not be harmed. The Japanese military told them the Americans would kill them. They jumped off a cliff into the sea. Can you have genocide within the same racial group.
Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we asked the Japanese to surrender. Sound of crickets as the Japanese, with their custom, killed the peace proposal with silence.
Then the B-29s were sent out, not with bombs, but risking flak, etc., to drop leaflets telling everyone in town to get out or face a new and powerful bomb. They chose to stay, working in the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works, the shipyards and other armaments plants.
After the first bomb, the US waited three days. Still the sound of crickets from the Imperial Palace.
So, your definition of genocide is striking back in force after an unprovoked attack? Interesting definition.
And, once the Japanese surrendered, we spent millions feeding their people. Genocide?
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Re:My God (Score:5, Insightful)
No genocide is when you try to systematically kill of a whole racial ethnic, or religious/political group. What happened in WWII against the people of japan was not genocide. We were at war and during war some civilians will died. that is the nature, unfortunately, of war. The US never tried to kill japans entire populous. We fought them until they surrendered. (If we had not the would have gone right back on the offensive.) Then we rebuilt their country. Had we been engaging in genocide we would not have stopped killing them. If you want to know what genocide is look at the other side of the war what happened in the Philippians and Manchuria. Or look over in Europe where the Germans most definitely pursued genocide killing any and all jews, roma, poles, gays, masons, J.W.'s, soviets, and serbs.
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
While I won't argue that Japan did some really terrible things (war crimes, crimes against humanity) I think it is important to understand that the average Japanese person was not generally supportive of those acts. Just like in Nazi Germany most of the population was tired of war and would not have supported mass slaughter had they known exactly what was happening and had the power to do anything about it.
Again, I am not arguing that what happened was wrong, I just want to point out that some of the events you describe were not quite how you pitch them. For example when the US told people to get out of Hiroshima they would have had to consider the possibility that the enemy was just lying in an attempt to harm their war effort and the fact that the government would have acted to prevent a mass exodus. There was also loyalty to Japan and the war effort to consider, no matter how misguided it was. Even the second time around in Nagasaki word of what happened in Hiroshima had not exactly been publicised or explained to most Japanese people. Remember there was no TV and all radio and newspaper output was censored or written by the government anyway, and they were not keen on rumours of this new weapon spreading. My point is just that the civilians didn't "choose to stay" in the face of nuclear attack.
Similarly the attack of Pearl Harbour was an act of desperation by the Japanese. They didn't want to enter a war with the US because they knew it would be extremely difficult to win, and they had to consider the likely possibility of other nations attacking them too from the west. If you look at the records of what the Japanese government was doing at the time it is clear that there was much dissent over Pearl Harbour, and the feeling that surrender was inevitable well before the atomic bombs were dropped. In fact some argued that it would be better to negotiate a surrender earlier, before unconditional surrender was forced on them. As it happens McArthur was the right man to accept the surrender and allow Japan to keep some of its dignity, which I can't commend him enough for.
War is rarely black and white. The Japanese people were as much victims of their government as anyone else. Plus the alternative to not helping them after the war would have been to create another post-WWI Germany.
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Not so. Wikipedia, Surrender of Japan will give you some insight. I have also run across a diary account of one of the Imperial cabinet staff documenting the discussions of the cabinet in those 3 days. Japan had two seperate nuclear bomb initiatives running, so they understood the concept and capability (generally) already. The cabinet's concerns were:
1) we can still bargain for a better cease-fire/surrender agreement (by inflicting heavy casualties on the Americans).
2) we can get the still-neutral US
And why not in the US? (Score:5, Insightful)
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where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Annnnd where's there's very little regulation governing how you dispose of your environmental waste, or hazmat containment/exposure. Yep, he's a genius.
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA dude (yes, I know, this is /. where nobody RTFAs) The reactor is designed to produce significantly LESS waste than existing designs. the problem is that getting permits for experimental reactors in the US is even harder than getting one for a known reactor design. We have hobbled ourselves in the Nuclear power area, indeed in ALL power areas due to our extreme fear of all things nuclear. (Despite living on a radioactive mostly molten ball with a thin hard crust orbiting around a giant fusion reaction in space as we get bombarded with interstellar radiation.)
Simple answer: (Score:3)
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Maybe you should read up on fast reactors [nationalcenter.org] - a fast reactor is not necessarily also a breeder; a light water reactor breeds plutonium whether you want it to or not.
Also, the plutonium IFRs make is _less_ useful for weapons:
"... plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle was so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today'
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Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Kind of. SFRs are about 50 years old, even in the USA. We have, err, had, about a half dozen of them. Those crazy soviets put them in subs which they promptly set on fire and sunk. Its old icky tech. No one wants them if they can use a PWR or BWR design instead. The latest spin is to try to market them as something new even though they aren't new. Just like IT, everything old is eventually new again, and sometimes it even works. SFRs are the "cloud computing" of nuclear engineering.
For non-nuke noobs, a SFR is just like any other reactor except:
1) The coolant is sodium instead of water, so its hyper flammable and this scares the hell out of everyone involved, so every plant has had excellent safety and production records, well, except for the ones that caught fire.
2) Ditto above water is neutron activated for "a couple seconds" so other than impurities / leakage into the coolant, the coolant is basically radioactively harmless, however sodium does neutron activate and takes a couple days for enough half lifes to pass before its harmless (radioactively). Note I'm talking about the coolant itself not impurities or leakage into the coolant which is unchanged, more or less. So thats a bit freaky. You can draw PWR/BWR primary loop coolant and by they time it flows thru the "just in case" filters its cool enough to dump directly into the sewers. Sodium takes a bit longer and dumping it into the sewers is not exactly encouraged behavior, although I'm sure its terribly entertaining.
3) Other than being flammable and radioactive, sodium is a near ideal coolant. You won't have corrosion issues like hot high pressure water. Endless stories about 20 year old pumps being pulled out of service and appearing to be brand new. Although there were some "hilarious" near disasters with eutectic alloy formation and that was all figured out 40 years ago.
4) Sodium solidifies into a solid lump at room temp. This is kind of an issue for operational concerns. OK time to boot up the reactor, pull the control rods. Oh wait, they're frozen in place. Well then. And once you fix that and get the reactor cooking, the pumps are jammed so you've got to heat them.
5) Vapor pressure at operating temp is basically nil, at least compared to water. So the reactor vessel is more or less unpressurized (well yeah you blow argon over it instead of room air, but ... its just a argon blanket not 1000 psi steam like PWRs / BWRs) So all this fukushima splitting open stuff is not really relevant. Of course if you did split one in half it would be the end of the freaking world...
6) The "overheat leads to high temp chemical reaction with cladding leads to H2 buildup leads to kaboom" aka fukishima is literally chemically impossible. "unplug" a SFR like happened in Japan and basically nothing happens it just inherently calms itself down and eventually will freeze itself solid. Crazy but true. Isn't nuclear engineering cool that way? PWR and BWR to some extent or another will try to blow themselves up if abandoned so you engineer "fail safe" by making them really tough, but an abandoned SFR just kinda sits there all hot at a constant temperature and does nothing. Its kind of boring that way. Until the local fire department decides to hose it down with fire hoses. Sodium doesn't like water very much. Err actually red hot sodium likes water a lot, its just the nearby humans that dislike the fireball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
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Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve. Details are still emerging as the plant is explored, but basically I hope they don't have big earthquakes in South Korea. Leaking radioactive sodium coolant doesn't sound like fun.
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Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve.
As long as the reactor vessel is intact, no leaks, then a SFR will just sit there and do nothing rather than blow up fukushima style. Shut 'er down and walk away safe, like I said..
That is not to say you couldn't design a SFR almost intentionally to be not "walk away safe". I'm sure a moron could implement a drain valve thats only closed when power is applied to it, or a fire sprinker that only shuts off water flow while power is applied, etc. But at a nuclear / thermodynamic / chemistry level SFRs can j
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While liquid sodium is no one's idea of a fun material to work with, there are a couple of things you're not quite accurate on.
The big one is why you think the coolant might be in contact with the control rods.
You also don't mention that the shutdown/restart cycle is much simple due to the relative lack of iodine poisoning, the amount of energy extracted from the fuel is much higher, and the amount of long-lived waste produced is much smaller.
There's also the point that materials and manufacturing have adva
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I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Glad you made it clear that it is only an assumption you have.
The real reason is obvious - South Korea has no native or cheap sources of energy (like natural gas) and has a government sponsored development corporation (KOPEC) to develop and build nuclear power plants, which already supply 45% of the nation's electricity.
In the U.S. nuclear power plants have to compete with cheap natural gas plants, which on straight-up business investment grounds they routinely lose out. To overcome the financial handicap n
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:4, Informative)
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The nuclear regulation in America is very simple. It's just a sheet of paper with one word written on it: NO.
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
Citation needed. I just googled it and all I found was that uranium mining would not be allowed on Federal lands in Arizona, i.e. the Grand Canyon. This is a far cry from the universal ban you claimed or implied.
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:4, Insightful)
MS sniping aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:MS sniping aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sniping aside, I'd be more interested in someone making a bid to develop a practical Thorium based MSR. This SFR reactor is supposedly an advanced gen IV design. How safe are these things considered to be?
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Nuclear is certainly one of the energy sources we need to expand. We shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that one or two sources will solve all our problems.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe he achieved re-unification while we weren't looking, and now it's on to the next project over there.
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This is not 4chan.
Occasionally.
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Thorium (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thorium (Score:5, Funny)
So we can grow sweet potato like produce that will turn us into aggressive, violent, homophobic, psychopathic "protectors" one we grow past breeding age?
Re:Thorium (Score:4, Funny)
No, those plants won't grow properly in our biosphere. Thank goodness too because I really wasn't looking forward to having a beak. Although I wouldn't mind the awesome physique.
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Bill Gates is a Rock Star. (Score:5, Insightful)
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A lot of people would just sit on their fortunes (Warren Buffet) or piss it away on political bullshit (Koch brothers). I know a lot of the crowd here is anti-Microsoft, but it's nice to see Bill Gates doing something with his hoard and something halfway-geeky to boot!
Yeah The Oracle from Omaha should give away large chunks of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Oh wait . . . [givingpledge.org]
Re:Bill Gates is a Rock Star. (Score:4, Informative)
Warren Buffet pledged most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.
I believe you are thinking of the late Steve Jobs.
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Warren Buffett is giving 10% of his wealth to the Gates Foundation every year, and has done other philanthropic work. He's never had plans to give it to his children. And he's done a pretty decent job of managing his wealth without harming the average workers at his companies.
Nuclear Power is unnecessary. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Cost is a factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed; I've had people point out 'Japan's running just fine having shut down ALL their nuclear plants!'. Just recently I read an article* that pointed out that the cost of the oil and natural gas to replace their nuclear plants pushed Japan into a trade deficit for the first time in decades. Now, it didn't have a mention of cost, and the global downturn probably plays a factor, but I found an estimate of $100M/day [thehindu.com], 4.5M barrels of oil. Since Oil is pretty price-inflexible, that 4.5M barrels of oil is coming out of the rest of the world - raising the price of our gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products.
LNG imports [reuters.com]: increased 18% in volume, 52% in value, to $67B. Cost to the Japanese: $23B USD equivalent.
Not the most impartial site, but it quotes $55B [world-nuclear-news.org] in additional fossil fuel imports. It actually says the shutdowns were a bigger cause than all the damage from the Earthquake & Tsunami.
For those worried about global warming - Green energy isn't ramping up to replace the nuclear power lost anytime soon, and it's led to a substantial increase in Japan's CO2 emissions. Right now Japanese consumers oppose turning the plants back on; but last I heard they're also not seeing an increase in their electric bill yet.
Finally, to DMJC - How well do you think SST Plants will do during an Alaskan Winter? Beware the 'one true power' fallacy. My goal is 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, etc...)
*Dead tree publication, Stars & Stripes, Aug 13,2012, 'Fukushima disaster studies call for regulatory reform'.
Re:Cost is a factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Last report I saw said that Japan's carbon emissions are up 17% over last year and that includes a period when many of their nuclear reactors were still running. TEPCO has announced a 9% increase in domestic electricity prices starting in September this year, to cover the cost of the coal and oil imports needed to generate electricity that was previously produced by the nuclear stations.
Two Japanese reactors at Ohi restarted recently, generating about 2.4GW baseload, that is day and night. Another reactor in Shikoku might restart before winter but the rest are still shut down and will be until the panic is over.
My "one true power" goal would be 150% nuclear with the extra power being used to produce liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 for mobile and transport needs.
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RE: extra power being used to produce liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 for mobile and transport needs.
You can't do that! /S
The arctic would freeze and we'd miss out on wicked storms like Katrina.
Shipping lanes in the Arctic are about to open up and hopefully some wars will occur because right-of-way, etc. Wars and storm cleanup are highly profitable.
Re:Cost is a factor (Score:5, Insightful)
The point about Japan is that people were saying we would go back to the stone age without nuclear, but that didn't happen. In fact there has been a bit of a boost due to people buying new energy efficient appliances to help reduce power consumption. Remember that threat of rolling blackouts this summer? It was removed because people met the challenges, all without reverting to an agrarian society or even reducing their quality of life in any measurable way.
I remember that even months after most Japanese reactors were offline there was a story on /. about more European countries deciding to go nuclear free. Some comment about them going back to the stone age was modded +5 informative. Well, that guy and everyone who modded him up has been proven wrong. I'm not saying it hasn't had an affect on Japan, a big affect, but it wasn't the cataclysmic disaster many predicted.
Now, given a decade or two to slowly reduce dependency and move to non-nuclear sources like other countries are I'd argue that not only will there be little or no pain, there will be huge gains as well. Japan in particular is blessed with more than enough renewable energy for the entire country, it just needs to be tapped and the nuclear industry is very powerful.
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Re:Nuclear Power is unnecessary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me a single Solar Salt Thermal plant running in production. Or even one that is almost in production, running anywhere near the power capacities of even these 'little' nuclear power plants. (let alone the Gigawatts of some of the big boys)
BTW, your "only 400 billion" is a bit crazy.. The US has around 100 Reactors producing about 1/3 of our nations power. At an average replacement cost of about $2billion (each) last I heard. So for that same money, you could move 2/3 of the US to nuclear.. and the land mass used to generate it would be significantly smaller.
There is no single solution, and I wish people would stop claiming there is.. Moving all of any country to any single power source is plain foolishness.. its going to take a mix of wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, wave power, etc to properly diversify and meet the power needs.
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We have actually dismantled several.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning [wikipedia.org]
They are expensive, but currently, that is because of the cost of the lawsuits, and delayed start of construction, more than the cost of actually building the plant.
Re:Nuclear Power is unnecessary. (Score:4, Informative)
I have never claimed thorium reactors are running in production, much less that an entire country could switch over to it as its sole means of energy production.
However, the Canadian CANDU reactors are designed to run on several kinds of fuel, including thorium. I don't know if they are using it now, but it is designed. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm [nuclearfaq.ca]
But I guess I'm the idot :)
Wow, I'm backing up claims I never made with less than a min of googling!
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Living off things built in the past: (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes it does use hydro. But try to site a new dam for a hydroelectric power plant.
I find it hypocritical for the environmental movement to cite hydro-electric as an example of successful renewable energy in support of non hydro renewables when they've historically fought any new dams tooth and nail.
and of course it will be patented (Score:3)
intellectual ventures is involved. in a few years we'll be paying a licensing fee as part of our bill
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Begs the question.... (Score:4, Funny)
"We raise your patent for 'a small button on the device front, that allows the user to turn it on', with two 8Kg blocks of plutonium-239, which we shall now hand to your lawyers as one big block, whilst running away very, very, quickly..... ".
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"...and just so that we all know what we're talking about, I've brought some of this stuff with me. Two bars, ladies and gentlemen, of weapons-grade plutonium. A lethal dose at 20 yards! Get it while it's hot!" -- Jedburgh, Edge of Darkness.
Funny that, I always thought that Grogan (the villain) looked like Bill Gates.
What does it say about me... (Score:2)
doesn't the windows Eula say not for use in nuke's (Score:3)
doesn't the windows Eula say not for use in nuke plants?
Which Korea? (Score:2)
Because North Korea is the best Korea
Traveling Wave Reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a really cool idea if you can get it to work. It breeds fuel right before it burns it. So you can load the thing once and have it run for 50 years without refueling. It's nice because you don't have to have move large amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium around.
is this real? or does MS need another gov deal? (Score:3)
Anyone know if Korea is looking to require Open Source in some part of the government? If not, everybody should make the threat when it comes time to upgrade windows...
Toilet? (Score:3)
Is this related to Bill Gates' plan to re-invent the toilet?
And they can use robot guards ! (Score:2)
They can use robot guards [bbc.co.uk], presumably running Windows, to guard the site
Ted talk (Score:4, Informative)
Korea gets the boobie prize (Score:3)
So after all the US companies rejected the idea as unworkable science fiction, and then the Japanese did, and then the Chinese did, Korea is the next sucker up to bat.
Good luck with that.
Traveling wave reactor criticism (Score:5, Informative)
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Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy - well no, come to think of it, I don't hate them anymore, they're like the nasty grandmother who's gotten old and invalid and you feel vaguely sorry for now - but quite frankly they've gotten good at making stable operating systems.
Old BSOD statements are getting really old and stale now...
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Re:I think I was happier when (Score:4, Funny)
The only billionaire evil scientists existed in the works of Stan Lee
So Lex Luthor ruined you on the idea?
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Got the Republicans two more Senators (the original motivation for splitting Dakota, but it's not as solidly Republican as it was a century + ago).