AcharyaChanakya/simple-wikipedia huggingface dataset:
In the fictional story "Animal Farm", Benjamin is the oldest animal on Manor Farm, and very cool-tempered. He seldom speaks, except to make some cynical remark. He is the only animal on the farm that never laughs, saying that there was nothing to laugh at when asked about it. Without admitting it, Benjamin is devoted to Boxer, grazing with him in a small padlock near the orchard on Sundays. He was not changed by the rebellion that took place towards the beginning of the novel.
Atari 2600
The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in the United States in October 1977. The Atari 2600 was originally called the Atari Video Computer System (or VCS). The Atari 2600 uses game cartridges which can be swapped in and out to change games, which was a new idea in video games at the time. Over 30 million Atari 2600 consoles were sold.
While Atari designed their console, they code-named it Stella. When released in 1977, they called it the Video Computer System (VCS for short). There was also a version that was sold at Sears called the Sears Video Arcade. It was not called the Atari 2600 until the Atari 5200 released in 1982. The 2600 is called this because that is the part number the company used to tell the difference in versions.
When the Atari 2600 came out, it usually came with two joystick controllers, a pair of paddle controllers, and a game cartridge. There were initially nine games available at launch, featuring "Combat" (packaged with the console), "Air-Sea Battle", "Basic Math", "Blackjack", "Indy 500", "Star Ship", "Street Racer", "Surround", and "Video Olympics". The 2600 originally sold for $199.
The Atari 2600 uses different sets of colors depending on the television used with it:
When the Atari 2600 was released nine games were available. Those games were "Combat" (which came with the console), "Air-Sea Battle", "Basic Math", "Blackjack", "Indy 500", "Star Ship", "Street Racer", "Surround", and "Video Olympics". Later more games came out, including "Pac-Man", "Missile Command" and "Space Invaders". The best-selling Atari 2600 game was "Pac-Man", which sold 7 million copies.
"Combat" was chosen to be included in the box with the Atari 2600. It contained 27 games in one cartridge. Each game involved tanks, bi-planes, or jets.
"Space Invaders" began as an intensely popular Japanese arcade game. In 1980 a version of the game was released for the Atari 2600. The pixelated aliens from this game are still used as a popular symbol for video games today.
"Pac-Man" began as an arcade game developed by Namco. In 1982 a version was released for the Atari 2600. It sold the most copies of any game released for the Atari 2600 (7 million copies). Despite this, the game was not popular with critics and consumers, because of the major differences in gameplay between the 2600 version and the arcade version.
See for a bigger list of games.
In 1980 the Atari 2600 was at the middle of an important development in video games, the beginning of third-party developers for console video games. In 1980 a group of four dissatisfied Atari employees founded the company Activision, who then released four games: "Dragster", "Fishing Derby", "Checkers", and "Boxing". This was an important moment in video game history as now every video game console on the market depends on some third-party game support.
Today those who want to play the games designed for the 2600 do not have to try to find the original console and cartridge as many of the games have been recreated in video game emulators. One such emulator, Stella, will function on most any operating system. After downloading this emulator users can download games from other websites and use this program to play them.
In 1986, a cheaper version of the Atari 2600 was released. Some people called this the Atari 2600 Junior. It was smaller than the original version. This system cost $50.
Master System
The is a video game console made in 1986. It was not very popular in North America and Japan but was very popular in Brazil. One of the most popular game of the Sega Master System was "Sonic the Hedgehog".
, the Master System was still in production in Brazil by Tectoy. This would make it the world's longest-lived console.
In October 1985, the Sega Mark III was released in Japan for ¥15,000.
The console was redesigned as the "Master System", and it was released in North America in 1986 at a price of $200 (). It included a multicart of the games "Hang-On" and "Safari Hunt". By the end of 1986, 125,000 Master System consoles had been sold. This was more than the Atari 7800's 100,000, but it was less than the NES's 1.1 million.
The console was re-released as the Master System in Japan in October 1987 for ¥16,800. It still sold poorly as did the Mark III. Neither model posed a serious challenge to Nintendo in Japan.
Sega released the Mega Drive, a 16-bit video game console, in Japan on October 29, 1988. The last game released for the Mark III/Master System in Japan was "Bomber Raid" in 1989.
By early 1992, Master System production stopped in North America. By that time, between 1.5 million and 2 million units had been sold in the United States.
The Master System was eventually a success in Europe. In Europe, it sold more than the NES by a lot. As late as 1993, the Master System's active installed user base in Europe was 6.25 million units. That was larger than that of the Mega Drive's 5.73 million base that year. Combined with the Mega Drive, Sega had the majority of the console user base in Europe that year.
The Master System has had continued success in Brazil. In Brazil, new versions have continued to be released. Tectoy has been manufacturing Master Systems since 1989. These versions include the Master System Compact and the Master System 3. In 2015, it was reported that the Master System sells around 150,000 units per year in Brazil. By 2016, the Master System had sold 8 million units in Brazil. Because Tectoy continued to produce the Master System years for so long, the Master System is considered the longest-lived in the history of video game consoles.
It is estimated that 13 million Master Systems were sold. This does not include recent Brazil sales.
A remote control is a device used to issue commands (controlling it) from a distance to televisions, DVD players, doorbells and so on.
A remote controller does not have a wire and can be held by hand. It has buttons for volume, changing television channels and more.
Infrared or radio signals are used to communicate with the devices. Batteries make remote controls and controllers work. Mostly AAA, AA or coin battery size batteries are used.
Spacewar!
Spacewar! is one of the first known video games. It was released in 1962. It was made by Steve Russell and others. In this game, the player has to shoot the other spaceships while flying around a star. The ships shoot missiles (rockets) which were unaffected (nothing happened) by the gravity. Each ship had only a few missiles and only a little bit of fuel.explode.
Giotto di Bondone
Giotto di Bondone (c.1267–January 8 1337), usually known as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence. He is generally thought of as the first in a line of great artists of the Italian Renaissance.
Giovanni Villani, who lived at the same time as Giotto, wrote that he was the king of painters, who drew all his figures as if they were alive. Villani says that, because he was so clever, the city of Florence gave him a salary.
In the 16th century, the biographer Giorgio Vasari says that Giotto changed painting from the Byzantine style of other artists of his day, and brought to life the great art of painting as it was made by the later Renaissance painters like Leonardo da Vinci. This was because Giotto drew his figures from life, rather than copying the style them from old well-known pictures in the way that the Byzantine artists like Cimabue and Duccio did.
Giotto's greatest work is the decoration of the "Scrovegni Chapel" in Padua, finished around 1305. The building is sometimes called the "Arena Chapel" because it is on the site of an Ancient Roman arena. This fresco series shows the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is thought of as one of the greatest masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.
Although Vasari wrote about Giotto's life, it is not known how many of the stories are true, because Vasari was writing more than 200 years after Giotto died. Only two things are known for certain. It is known that in 1334 Giotto was chosen by the "commune" (town council) of Florence to design the bell tower next to Florence Cathedral which was being built at that time. It is also known for certain that Giotto painted the "Arena Chapel". But no-one can be certain where he was born, who his teacher was, what he looked like, whether he really painted the famous frescos at Assisi or where he was buried when he died.
Giotto was probably born in a hilltop farmhouse, perhaps at Colle di Romagnano or Romignano. He was the son of a well-respected man named Bondone. His name Giotto might have been a nickname from Ambrogiotto (little Ambrose) or Angelotto (little Angelo).
The year of his death is 1337, but the year of his birth (1267) is based on a poem by Antonio Pucci, the town crier of Florence, who said that Giotto was seventy when he died. Some people think that Pucci just used seventy because it fitted the rhyme of his poem, and that perhaps Giotto was a quite different age when he died.
In his "Lives of the Artists", Giorgio Vasari tells the story of how Giotto was a shepherd boy, a merry and intelligent child who was loved by all who knew him. One day the great Florentine painter Cimabue passed by and saw him drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue asked Bondone if he could take the boy as an apprentice. Many art historians think this story is just a legend. They think that Giotto's family was quite rich, and they moved to Florence where Giotto was sent to Cimabue's workshop as an apprentice.
Vasari tells several stories to show how clever Giotto was, and what a sense of humour he had. Vasari writes that when Cimabue was away from the workshop, Giotto painted a fly on the face of the painting that his master was working on. When Cimabue came back, he tried several times to brush the fly off.
Vasari also tells the story that the Pope wanted to see if Giotto would be a good artists to paint some important pictures. The Pope sent a messenger asking Giotto to send him back a small picture. Instead of doing a painting, which would take many days, Giotto drew, in red paint, a circle that was so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a pair of compasses. Giotto told the messenger to give that to the Pope.
Giotto's master, Cimabue, was one of the two most famous painters of Tuscany. He worked in Florence, while the other famous painter, Duccio, worked mainly in Siena. Around 1280, Giotto and Cimabue went to Rome, where there were several fresco painters. The most famous painter in Rome was Pietro Cavallini. The famous sculptor and architect from Florence, Arnolfo di Cambio, was also working in Rome. Giotto would have seen the paintings and sculpture by these different artists. Pietro Cavallini's paintings and Arnolfo's sculpture was far more realistic and three-dimensional than the paintings by Giotto's teacher Cimabue.
From Rome, Giotto's teacher Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the "Upper Church" of the newly-built Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. Through the 19th century,and for much of the 20th century it was believed that Giotto had also painted a famous series of frescos in the "Upper Church". These pictures show the "Life of St. Francis". From 1912, some art historians who studied these frescos more closely, decided that they were the work of several different artists (probably four), probably from Rome, and that probably none of the pictures were by Giotto. Nowadays, most art historians agree with this, but some books and some websites continue to say that these paintings are by Giotto. All the papers that belonged to the monastery were destroyed by Napoleon's soldiers, so there is no record of which artist was paid to do the job.
Vasari wrote that Giotto's earliest works were for the Dominican Friars at the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. These paintings include a fresco of the Annunciation and the enormous suspended "Crucifix" which is about 5 metres high painted in about 1290 In 1312, a rich Florentine gentleman called Ricuccio Pucci left money in his will so that a lamp could be kept burning before the crucifix "by the illustrious painter Giotto".
In 1287, when he was about 20, Giotto married Ricevuta di Lapo del Pela, known as "Ciuta". The couple had many children, perhaps eight. One of the sons, Francesco, became a painter. Giotto's fame as a painter spread. He was called to work in Rome, Padua, and Rimini, where his "Crucifix" can be seen in the Church of St Francis. Giotto became rich enough to buy land in the wealthy city of Florence. This probably means that he was the master of a large workshop.
Giotto's most famous works are the fresco paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. These were painted sometime between 1303 and 1310. The Scrovegni Chapel is often called the "Arena Chapel" because it is on the site of an Roman arena.
Giotto was "commissioned" (given the work) by a rich Paduan man called Enrico degli Scrovegni. Enrico built the chapel and had it painted as a place to pray for the soul of his dead father. It was next to a very old palace that Enrico was restoring to live in. The palace has gone now, but the chapel is still standing. The outside of the building is very plain, pinkish-red bricks.
The inside of the chapel is also very simple. It is long, with a chancel at one end where a priest can say the mass, an arched roof and windows down one side. The walls have been painted with three tiers (layers) of pictures. The "theme" (the main idea) in the pictures is God's Salvation of people through Jesus Christ.
In the usual way for churches of that date, the wall above the main door has a large painting of the "Last Judgement". At the other end of the building, on either side of the chancel archway are paintings of the Annunciation. One side shows the Virgin Mary and the other side show the Angel Gabriel who is bringing her the message that she will have a son, Jesus.
Around the walls, starting at the top layer, are scenes which tell the life of the Virgin Mary. Under them, in two layers, are the stories of the life of Jesus. There are 37 scenes altogether.
Giotto's master Cimabue painted in a Medieval style. But Giotto's paintings look quite different. The writer Giorgio Vasari says that Giotto brought about a complete change in painting, with a more natural style. Giotto would have seen the paintings of Pietro Cavallini and some Ancient Roman sculpture, on his visit to Rome. He also saw the sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio who worked in Florence. The style of these sculptured figures was solid and natural, not "elongated" (made longer) like most Medieval sculptured and painted figures.
The figures that Giotto painted are solid and three-dimensional. They have anatomy, faces and actions that look very natural, because they have been drawn from looking at real people. The clothes of the figures are not arranged to form a beautiful pattern, like the clothes in Cimabue's paintings. They fit the figures and hang in a natural way like real clothes. This more natural way of showing people was started by Pietro Cavallini, but Giotto took the new ideas much further.
In the paintings around the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, each scene looks like a shallow stage with actors on it. There are always some buildings or landscape such as a rocky hill, so that the viewer can see where the action is happening. The figures in each scene are carefully arranged so that the viewer can imagine that they are right there, taking part in the action.
The figures are not just shown with natural bodies, clothing and action. Giotto is a brilliant story-teller, because he shows the emotions of the characters in each painting, in both their faces and their "gestures" (body movement).
A famous English critic of the 1800s, John Ruskin, said that while Giotto painted the Madonna and St. Joseph and the Christ Child, he also painted them to look like an ordinary "Mamma, Papa and Baby."
Giotto had pupils who copied his style. Many other artists were influence by him. These painters include Guariento, Giusto de' Menabuoi, Jacopo Avanzi, and Altichiero. In the next hundred years, there were many churches and chapels painted with scenes like the ones that Gitto painted. The Scrovegni Chapel paintings were so famous that many other artists, such as Michelangelo, who lived 200 years later, made drawing or copies of them.
From 1306 to 1311 Giotto was in Assisi, painting frescoes in the "Lower Church". The paintings are about "The Life of Christ", "the Teachings of the Franciscan Friars" and "The Lives of the Saints".
In 1311 Giotto returned to Florence. In 1313 He went to Rome to design a mosaic for the façade (front) of the old St. Peter's Basilica. This was destroyed when the building was demolished.
From 1314 until 1327 Giotto lived in Florence. At this time he pianted the famous altarpiece for the Ognissanti Church (Church of All Saints). This large tempera painting is called the "Ognissanti Madonna". It is now in the Uffizi where it is exhibited beside Cimabue's "Santa Trinita Madonna" and Duccio's "Rucellai Madonna". Giotto also painted a very large "Crucifix" to hang in Ognissanti Church.
The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti wrote that in 1318 Giotto began to paint four Chapels at the Church of Santa Croce. The chapels were paid for by four different rich families and were given their names. Giotto painted the "Life of St. Francis" in the Bardi Chapel. He painted the "Life of St. John the Baptist" and the "Life of St. John the Evangelist" in the Peruzzi Chapel. He painted "Stories of the Virgin Mary" in the Tosinghi Spinelli Chapel and "Stories of the Apostles" in the Giugni Chapel. The Giugni Chapel has been destroyed. The Peruzzi Chapel was very famous during Renaissance times. More than 150 years later, Michelangelo came to studied Giotto's paintings.
In the 1320s Giotto painted two large altarpieces. The first was the Stefaneschi Triptych, which is now in the Vatican Museum. (A triptych is a painting on three panels. Some triptychs are very small and can be folded up and carried around, but this triptych is a large altarpiece.) The second altarpiece is called the Baroncelli Polyptych. (A polyptych has lots of parts, big and small. They are usually made as great big altarpieces for important churches, and have big, carved gold frames.)
Giotto travelled around and did paintings in Rome, Naples and Bologna. He always took a group of students with him. Nowadays, many of the frescos that he painted in these cities have been destroyed by damp, by earthquakes, by war and by people demolishing the church to build a new one. Because Giotto was very famous, people always liked to believe that he painted the fresco in their church. Many frescos are probably by Giotto's students.
In 1334 Giotto was in Florence where the magnificent new Florence Cathedral was being built. Giotto was made the chief architect and was given the job of designing a huge tower to hold the cathedral bells. It is called Giotto's Bell Tower and was designed and begun by him on July 18 1334, but it was not completed to his design.
As he grew old, Giotto became friends with two writers, Giovanni Boccaccio and Sacchetti, who both thought that he was such an entertaining and famous person that they wrote about him in their stories. The most famous writer of that time, Dante, also wrote about him in his book "The Divine Comedy". Dante said that Giotto was the greatest painter in the world, even greater than his famous master, Cimabue.
Giotto died in January of 1337. Vasari wrote that Giotto was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence, on the left of the entrance and with the spot marked by a white marble plaque.
In the 1970s, some bones were discovered underneath the paving near at a spot described by Vasari. In 2000 the bones were examined by experts.
The bones were those of a very short man, just over four feet tall. In a fresco in the Church of Santa Croce, there is a figure of a man who is a dwarf (a person who is very short). People at that church have always said that the dwarf was Giotto himself. The bones that were found at the cathedral support this story. Also, the bones had lots of unusual chemicals in them, such as arsenic and lead, which were found in the artist's paints. After the bones had been examined, they were buried with great honour, because many people believed that they were the remains of the great artist. Not everybody believes this.
Moura Photovoltaic Power Station
The Moura Photovoltaic Power Station is in the municipality of Moura, in the interior region of Alentejo, Portugal. It will have an installed capacity of 62 MWp. The first stage of construction should be finished in 2008 and the second and final stage is scheduled for 2010. Together with the construction of the power station, a solar panel factory is currently being built and there are plans for a research lab dedicated to solar energy.
The brainchild of Prof Mario Baptista Coelho, the founding partner of Renatura and a Professor of Geostrategy of Natural Resources at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, Moura was the first step in proving the feasibility of Very-Large Scale Photovoltaic Plants.
Originally conceptualized in 1999, Moura is a stepping stone in addressing the CO2 issue by way of Solar Energy.
Now fully operational and grid-connected, Moura is currently operated by Acciona, which purchased the project in 2007.
Coped with Moura is the Sunflower Sustainability Project, as in integrated package of the paradigm of sustainability and Zero-Carbon Communities (www.sunflower-project.net).
Jérémie (Kréyòl: "Jeremi") is a city in southwest Haiti. It is the capital city of the Grand'Anse "Département".
Jérémie is also called the "City of Poets" because of the many writers, poets, and historians that were born or live there, such as Etzer Vilaire and Émile Roumer. The father of the French writer Alexandre Dumas, père, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born at Madère, near Jérémie.
The town was founded in 1756 when the country was the French colony of "Saint-Domingue". It was built where there was a small fishing town called "Trou-Jérémie".
The city is on the north coast of the Southern Peninsula, on a small bay. It is among low mountains (Bordes, Rochasse and Caracol) and almost isolated from the rest of the country, about 280 km south of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. To the southeast of the city is the River Grande-Anse.
It is also the chief town of an "arrondissement" (a part of a department) with the same name. The "arrondissement" has five "communes" (a "commune" is like a municipality): Jérémie, Abricots, Bonbon, Chambellan and Moron.
Jeremie is an important Haitian port; bananas are send to other countries from this port.
There are several interesting places to visit and see in Jérémie and near the city. Some of them are:
Three Mile Island accident
The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28th, 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. It was "the single most important event in the fifty-year history of nuclear power regulation in the United States". Many people have seen the event as a turning point for the nuclear power industry in the United States.
The Three Mile Island power station is near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The accident resulted in a partial core meltdown in Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant. Unit 2's pressurized water reactor was of 900 MWe capacity.
The chain of events that led to the crisis at the TMI plant included several minor equipment failures that operator errors drastically compounded, resulting in a major accident. The Three Mile Island accident is largely seen as a failure of crisis management. According to one reviewer of the book:
Reactor operators were not trained to deal with accident conditions, and the NRC had not established effective communication with utilities. Moreover, once the accident occurred, the lines of authority proved to be ill defined. The public received conflicting reports that caused needless panic and evacuations. It was these systemic weaknesses in the regulatory system that allowed gifted people to make the mistakes they did.
Large portions of the TMI-2 reactor core melted, though the fact that a partial meltdown had occurred did not become clear until 1985. The greatest source of concern during the TMI crisis was a hydrogen bubble that formed in the top of the pressure vessel which held the core:
Although opinions differed, some reactor experts feared that over time the hydrogen bubble might become flammable or, less likely, explosive by combining with free oxygen in the vessel. If the bubble burned or exploded, it could rupture the pressure vessel and force the damaged reactor core into the containment building. The loss of the vessel would not make a breach of containment inevitable, but it would increase the risk of a disastrous release of radiation.
In the end, the Three Mile Island accident, though it "caused a grave crisis, did not produce a public health disaster". In the face of a core meltdown, the pressure vessel held and there was no breach of the plant's containment structure. Only "tiny amounts of the most dangerous forms of volatile radiation escaped to the atmosphere". The TMI-2 cleanup took 11 years and cost about US$1 billion.
J. Samuel Walker suggests that the TMI accident incited widespread criticism of nuclear power technology, the nuclear industry, and the NRC. Critics faulted the industry and the NRC for their poor performance both before and after the accident. The international attention garnered by the crisis redoubled the determination of, and enhanced the credibility of, the anti-nuclear movement. Arguably, the United States nuclear industry has never recovered.
Walker reports that studies looking for long-term radiation effects resulting from the accident have reached conflicting conclusions, but it seems that any increase in cancers is slight enough to have occurred by chance.
Windscale fire
The Windscale fire was a devastating fire in Britain's first nuclear reactor at Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957. The fire spread radioactive fallout over hundreds of miles. Some of the most dangerous contamination was kept secret, and its effects only came to light years later. At the back of the reactor, ruptured fuel cartridges containing uranium are still jammed in the fire damaged core, awaiting safe removal. Official estimates are that up to a hundred people may have died from the contamination. The cleanup cost over a hundred million pounds. The Windscale fire was the first fire in any nuclear facility.
Alan can be any of the following:
The Tokaimura nuclear accident was a serious nuclear radiation accident in Japan. It took place at a uranium-reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, Japan, on 30 September 1999. The accident occurred in a very small fuel preparation plant operated by JCO.
The direct cause of the accident was workers putting uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank. The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not designed to prevent such accidents to happen. As a result, three workers were exposed to neutron radiation doses in excess of allowable limits. Two of these workers later died.
Many emergency workers and nearby residents were hospitalized and hundreds of thousands of others were forced to remain indoors for 24 hours.
The three workers who worked at the uranium-reprocessing facility were Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara, and Yutaka Yokokawa. Two of them died of radiation poisoning. Hisashi Ouchi, aged 35, died 12 weeks after the accident. He had lost most of his skin, and was kept alive for 83 days, according to his parents and wife will. Ouchi was closest to the tank when the accident occurred. He ended up as the first victim of this nuclear accident. Seven months after the accident, Masato Shinohara died, aged 40.
Ouchi was reported to have received 17 sieverts (sv) of radiation, Shinohara 10 sv and Yokokawa 3 sv; 8 sieverts is considered a fatal dose, and 50 milli sieverts is the maximum limit of annual dose allowed for Japanese nuclear workers.
Another 83 workers were subjected to higher radiation than normal.
Nuclear accidents in Japan
Nuclear accidents in Japan include the following major cases:
Nuclear energy policy
Nuclear energy policy is a national and international policy concerning some or all aspects of nuclear energy, such as mining for nuclear fuel, extraction and processing of nuclear fuel from the ore, electricity generation by nuclear power, enriching and storing spent nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel reprocessing. Since nuclear energy and nuclear weapons technologies are closely related, military aspirations can act as a factor in energy policy decisions. The fear of nuclear proliferation influences some international nuclear energy policies.
The use of nuclear energy is limited to a relatively small number of countries in the world. As of 2007, only 31 countries, or 16% of the 191 United Nations Member States, operated nuclear power plants. Countries that rely most on nuclear energy were France (with 75% of its electricity generated by nuclear power stations), Lithuania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Sweden, Ukraine and South Korea. The largest producer of nuclear capacity was the USA with 28% of worldwide capacity, followed by France (18%) and Japan (12%). In 2000, there were 438 commercial nuclear generating units throughout the world, with a total capacity of about 351 gigawatts.
Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors. Italy voted to keep their country non-nuclear. Switzerland and Spain have banned the construction of new reactors. As of 2013, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power. Germany and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power. Globally, more nuclear power reactors have closed than opened in recent years.
After the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, China, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Malaysia, Thailand, United Kingdom, and the Philippines are reviewing their nuclear power programs. Indonesia and Vietnam still plan to build nuclear power plants. Countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, North Korea, and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power.
Australia produces no nuclear power. Plans to review whether the country should develop nuclear power were abandoned after Kevin Rudd, who opposed the move, was elected prime minister in 2007.
As of 2006, Finland's nuclear power program has four nuclear reactors. The first of these came into operation in 1977. They now provide 27% of Finland's electricity.
The third Olkiluoto reactor will be the new European Pressurized Reactor. Scheduled to go on line in 2011, it will have a power output of 1600 MWe.
Construction of Olkiluoto 3 started in August 2005. Two and a half years later the project is "over two years behind schedule and at least 50% over budget, the loss for the provider being estimated at €1.5 billion".
After the oil crisis of the early 1970s, the French government decided in 1974 to move towards self-sufficiency in electricity production, primarily through the construction of nuclear power stations. France today produces around 78.1% of its electricity through nuclear power. Because France produces an overall electricity surplus, it exports nuclear-produced energy. Some of this goes to countries which are ostensibly against the use of nuclear energy, such as Germany. The Board of Electricité de France (Électricité de France or EDF) has approved construction of a 1630 MWe European Pressurized Reactor or EPR at Flamanville, Normandy. Construction is expected to begin in late 2007, with completion in 2012.
In the 1970s, an anti-nuclear movement in France, consisting of citizens' groups and political action committees, emerged. There were many large anti-nuclear protests and demonstrations. More recently, targeted campaigns have been conducted, mainly by Greenpeace, and Sortir du nucléaire (France) has called for an official safety inspection of the Areva facilities.
In 2000, the German government, consisting of a coalition including the Green party Alliance '90/The Greens officially announced its intention to phase out nuclear power in Germany. Jürgen Trittin, the Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, reached an agreement with energy companies on the gradual shut down of the country's nineteen nuclear power plants and a cessation of civil usage of nuclear power by 2020. Legislation was enacted in the Nuclear Exit Law. The power plants in Stade and Obrigheim were turned off on November 14, 2003, and May 11, 2005, respectively. Dismantling of the plants is scheduled to begin in 2007. But the Nuclear Exit Law did not ban enrichment stations - one in Gronau has received permission to extend operations. There have been concerns over the safety of the phase-out, particularly in terms of the transport of nuclear waste. In 2005 Angela Merkel won the German federal election in 2005 with the CDU party. She has subsequently announced to re-negotiate with energy companies the time limit for a shut down of nuclear power stations. But as part of her pact with the SPD, with whom the CDU form a coalition, the phase-out policy has for now been retained.
In November 2008, a shipment of radioactive waste from German nuclear plants arrived at a storage site near Gorleben after being delayed by large protests from nuclear activists. More than 15,000 people took part in the protests which involved blocking trucks with sit-down demonstrations and blocking the route with tractors. The demonstrations were partly a response to conservative calls for a rethink of the planned phaseout of nuclear power stations.
Japan has 55 reactors of total capacity 47,577 MWe (49,580 MWe gross) on line, with 2 reactors (2,285 MWe) under construction and 12 reactors (16,045 MWe) planned. Nuclear energy accounts for about 30% of Japan's total electricity production, from 47.5 GWe of capacity (net). There are plans to increase this to 37% in 2009 and 41% in 2014.
On 16 July 2007 a severe earthquake hit the region where Tokyo Electric's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is located. The plant with seven units is the largest single nuclear power station in the world. All of the reactors were shut down and are expected to remain closed for damage verification and repairs for at least one year.
During the Fukushima nuclear disaster there was a failure of cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, and a nuclear emergency was declared. This was the first time a nuclear emergency had been declared in Japan, and 140,000 residents within 20 km of the plant were moved out. Explosions and a fire resulted in dangerous levels of radiation, resulting in a stock market collapse and panic-buying in supermarkets.
Shippingport power plant was the first commercial nuclear power plant built in the United States in 1958. After the growth of nuclear power in the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by 2000. But by the end of the 1970s, it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly so dramatically, and more than 120 reactor orders were ultimately cancelled.
As of 2007 in the United States, there are 104 (69 pressurized water reactors and 35 boiling water reactors) commercial nuclear generating units licensed to operate, producing a total of 97,400 megawatts (electric), which is approximately 20% of the nation's total electric energy consumption. The United States is the world's largest supplier of commercial nuclear power.
The Three Mile Island accident has been the most serious accident experienced by the U.S. nuclear industry. Other accidents include those at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant, which has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States since 1979, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Several US nuclear power plants closed well before their design lifetimes, including Rancho Seco in 1989 in California, San Onofre Unit 1 in 1992 in California (units 2 and 3 are still operating), Zion Nuclear Power Station in 1998 in Illinois and Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in 1992 in Oregon. Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant in California closed in 1976, 13 years after geologists discovered it was built on a fault (the Little Salmon Fault). Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant never operated commercially as an authorized Emergency Evacuation Plan could not be agreed on due to the political climate after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.
Many plants have recently received 20-year extensions to their licensed lifetimes.
Nuclear accident
The most serious nuclear accident has been the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Other serious nuclear accidents include Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, Three Mile Island accident, the Windscale fire, Mayak accident, and the SL-1 accident. In the period to 2007, 63 major nuclear accidents have occurred at nuclear power plants. Twenty-nine of these have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and 71 percent of all nuclear accidents (45 out of 63) occurred in the United States.
On 11 March 2011, the Magnitude 9.0 devastating Sendai earthquake and tsunami took place in Japan. As a result, "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant", "Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant", "Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant" and "Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant stations" consisting of eleven (11) reactors were automatically shut down following the earthquake.
At Fukushima Daiichi and Daini tsunami waves went over seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems. This loss of power caused severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi and leakage of radiation. Over 200,000 people have been evacuated. Seismic recordings at six assessed nuclear power plant facilities indicated the plants had been exposed to "peak ground accelerations" of 0.037–0.383 "g" and "peak ground velocities" of 6.18–52.62 cm/sec.
One year after the accident, the official death toll related to the Fukushima accident has been five: one caused by the earthquake, another one had a heart attack, two people drowned, and a last person died in October for unreported causes. None of the deaths have been caused by radiation.
The Chernobyl disaster was a major accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986, with an explosion at the plant and later radioactive contamination of the surrounding area. It is so far the worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power. A plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland and eastern North America. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly damaged, forcing the people in charge to have to evacuate and resettle more than 336,000 people. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus, according to official post-Soviet data.
The accident made many people worried about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry. As a result, plans for more nuclear plants were put on hold and the Soviet government, who were not very open with its data, had to make public more of its data. The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have had to spend a lot of money and time on decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. Nobody knows how many people died because of this accident. This is because the Soviets covered up information, did not fully complete lists, and did not let doctors list "radiation" as the reason why some people died. Most of the expected long-term deaths, such as that from cancer, have not yet happened and it is hard to say that Chernobyl was the full reason for their deaths.
At Fukushima I and II tsunami waves overtopped seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems, leading to severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima I and leakage of radiation.
On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 nuclear power plant on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg suffered a partial core meltdown.
The Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in American commercial nuclear power generating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community.
The accident unfolded over the course of five tense days, as a number of agencies at local, state and federal level tried to diagnose the problem and decide whether or not the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the population. The full details of the accident were not discovered until much later. In the end, the reactor was brought under control. Although approximately 25,000 people lived within five miles of the island at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident... is approximately one". But the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also furthered a major decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology and, until the Chernobyl disaster seven years later, it was considered the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station is a nuclear power plant with a single reactor located on the southwest shore of Lake Erie near Oak Harbor, Ohio. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Davis-Besse has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States since 1979.
The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown in January 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal by a maintenance team of a single reactor control rod. The event is the only reported fatal reactor accident in the United States.
On October 10, 1957, the graphite core of a British nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area. The event, known as the Windscale fire, was considered the world's worst nuclear accident until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
The fire itself released an estimated 20,000 curies (700 |terabecquerels) of radioactive material into the nearby countryside. Of particular concern was the radioactive isotope iodine-131, which has a half-life of only 8 days but is taken up by the human body and stored in the thyroid. As a result, consumption of iodine-131 often leads to cancer of the thyroid.
No one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but there was concern that milk might be dangerously contaminated. Milk from about 500 km² of nearby countryside was destroyed (diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea) for about a month.
Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plants 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia. Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents, with a serious accident occurring in 1957.
The 1957 Kyshtym disaster occurred when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules), which released some 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radiation. Subsequently, at least 200 people died of radiation sickness, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.
Nuclear reactors become easy targets during military conflict and, over the past three decades, have been repeatedly attacked:
Radiation is harmful to health and there have been many accidents caused by radiation:
Parallel port
The parallel port (also known as a printer port or Centronics port) is a type of interface found on computers for connecting various peripherals. A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface. It was a de facto industry standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined a bi-directional version of the port.
The parallel port interface was originally known as the Parallel Printer Adapter on IBM PC-compatible computers. It was primarily designed to operate a line printer that used IBM's 8-bit extended ASCII character set to print text, but could also be used to adapt other peripherals. Graphical printers, along with a host of other devices, have been designed to communicate with the system.
In the 21st century, the parallel port interface is seeing decreasing use because of the rise of Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, along with network printing using Ethernet.
Plastic surgery is a surgery that is done to change the way a person's body looks or works. Some plastic surgeries can change both. Work can be done on someone's bones, cartilage, muscles, fat, and skin.
The two most common forms of plastic surgery are reconstruction (fixing body parts that have been damaged) and cosmetic (changing size shape or color of body parts to make them look better). An example of reconstructive plastic surgery is fixing a part of the body that has been burned. An example of cosmetic plastic surgery is a surgery called a "face-lift": pulling the skin of the face tight so that the client looks younger.
The Nürburgring, known as simply "the Ring" by enthusiasts, is the name of a famous motorsport race track in Nürburg, Germany, built in the 1920s around the village and medieval castle of Nürburg in the Eifel, which is about 70 kilometres south of Cologne, 100 kilometres northwest of Mainz, and 120 kilometres northwest of Frankfurt.
Originally, the track featured four track configurations: the long "Gesamtstrecke" ("Whole Course"), which included the 22.810 km "Nordschleife" ("Northern Loop"), and the 7.747 km "Südschleife" ("Southern Loop"). There also was a 2.281 km warm-up loop called "Zielschleife" ("Finish Loop") or better known as "Betonschleife", around the pit area.
Between 1982 and 1983 the start-finish area was demolished to create a new "GP-Strecke", and this is currently used for all major and international racing events.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi (born 19 June 1945 in Yangon, Burma) is a human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and State Counsellor of Myanmar.
Suu Kyi was not able to be president. Instead, she became the State Counsellor of Myanmar.
She brought some democracy to her country with nonviolence.
She is the leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma and a famous prisoner. She has been under house arrest several times. Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize in 1990, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992, she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize.
She is sometimes called "Daw Aung San Suu Kyi". Daw is not part of her name, but a title for older women. This name shows respect for her.
On 1 February 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and removed from power by the military during a coup d'état. The military declared the November 2020 Myanmar general election results fraudulent. On February 3, she was charged with violating Myanmar's import laws On February 16, Myanmar police filed a second criminal charge against her, this time for violating the country's Natural Disaster Law.
Aung San Suu Kyi was the third child in her family. Her name "Aung San" comes from her father, who is also named Aung San; "Kyi" comes from her mother; and "Suu" comes from her grandmother.