Commercial Subsidence Claim Form: Fill & Download for Free

Wait a minute.First of all, the FAA does not have power to raise taxes. The Federal Government does.All flights, commercial and not, private and airline, pay one or multiple forms of federal excise taxes, either on fuel, passengers, cargo or a combination of them.The FAA, that serves all flights, is funded around 90% by this revenue, depending on the fiscal year. Excises raise around $14 billions a year. Take a look at Airport & Airway Trust Fund (AATF) for details.Now, you are claiming that airline traffic is paying more than its fair share of excise taxes given the share of services it receives from the FAA, when compared to private and general aviation, and private aviation is subsidized by airline traffic.That might well be true, but… do you have any quantitative basis for that claim?Have you established a fair service usage metric, measured usage and taxes for airlines and private aviation, and established that airlines pay higher taxes per amount of services than private aviation?Because —no disrespect intended— if you haven’t run the numbers, you quite literally don’t know what you are talking about.

There’s a lot of misinformation online about thorium-fueled nuclear reactors. In particular, there is a widespread narrative that goes something like this:Thorium molten-salt reactors were tested and proven 50 years ago.Compared to uranium-fueled reactor designs, thorium reactors cannot be used to make weapons-grade fissile material for nuclear bombs.The US and Soviet governments rejected thorium reactors largely because they could not be used for manufacturing nuclear weapons.Each of these points is false or at least very misleading. Let’s take a closer look.The Reactor DesignFirst of all, how does a uranium-thorium molten salt reactor (henceforth: MSR) work?In the core of the reactor, uranium-233 (in the form of a molten salt, generally uranium tetrafluoride dissolved in other fluoride compounds) burns to lighter elements in a standard nuclear fuel cycle. When neutrons strike a uranium-233 nucleus, it splits into smaller nuclei, producing energy, and releases two or three more neutrons that go on to hit other uranium atoms and continue the chain reaction.Some of these neutrons escape and collide with thorium-232 atoms in a blanket of molten salt surrounding the core. This process converts the thorium into thorium-233 (half-life 22 minutes), which quickly decays by beta emission into protactinium-233 (half-life 27 days) and then uranium-233. Thus, new fuel is created and can be fed into the core to continue producing power.On paper, this sounds like a relatively simple idea. But like most things about nuclear engineering, actually implementing it is very, very far from “simple.” In real life, that “refuelling & fuel processing” block in the diagram becomes a full on-site chemical plant. The “decay tank” needs to be a sturdy containment vessel able to store dangerous radioactive substances for weeks. And the entire system needs to be able to operate continuously for decades, because it’s hard to restart the reactor if the liquid fuel freezes.Just to illustrate how a seemingly small design problem can easily turn into a major issue in a nuclear reactor, consider the choice of salt. Almost all MSR designs run on fluoride salts, which are really nasty substances that don’t melt until high temperatures are reached and are then extremely corrosive to the reactor’s plumbing system. That’s a serious problem that needs a robust solution, since too much corrosion could lead to a direct leak from the reactor core. But the alternatives are even worse — either they have even higher melting points or they contain other elements that disrupt the fuel cycle.Aside: Here’s an example. Naively, one might suppose that it would be possible to use chlorides instead, which are easy to produce and have relatively low melting points. Unfortunately, natural chlorine absorbs neutrons, making the reactor less efficient and possibly preventing the fuel cycle from working altogether. While there is some active research into chloride-fueled reactors, this and other disadvantages have discouraged most mainstream scientists from pursuing the idea further.Then there’s the problem of picking other salts to add to the fuel mixture. Uranium tetrafluoride doesn’t work by itself because its melting point is too high, so we need to dissolve it in another molten salt so that we can operate the reactor at a practical temperature. It’s not easy to find a suitable solvent; candidates must contain no atoms that absorb neutrons strongly, which mostly limits us to compounds made of a handful of very light elements.Ideally, the solvent should act as a neutron moderator as well. Fission reactions produce highly energetic neutrons that tend to fly past other nuclei rather than interacting with them. Thus, MSR’s need a moderator to slow these neutrons down. Many reactors use water, but water doesn’t work in an MSR because it boils. Graphite is a better choice (as Jeff correctly pointed out in his answer, it was used as the primary moderator in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960’s), but it isn’t a liquid at the necessary temperature. Furthermore, relying solely on graphite tends to make a nuclear reactor less stable with respect to temperature.With all these considerations in mind, MSR designers usually choose to add some amount of lithium and beryllium fluorides to the molten salt mixture. Fluorine, lithium-7, and especially beryllium are all good moderators, and they form a eutectic mixture called FLiBe that remains liquid at relatively low temperatures. But unfortunately, beryllium fluoride happens to be very poisonous to humans.Neither of these problems is insurmountable. We know how to deal with corrosive substances — picking the right alloy for the pipes eliminates most of the problems — and the beryllium can be kept tightly contained. Indeed, in 1968, the famous nuclear physicist Glenn Seaborg publicly announced to the Atomic Energy Commission that a thorium-based reactor had been successfully developed and tested.From a purely scientific perspective, he was right. But engineers know that there’s a huge amount of effort between a good working prototype based on sound science and a safe commercial product. The pipes and containment vessels would have to work perfectly, holding hot, corrosive, radioactive molten salts, for decades, using materials that had never been tested under these conditions before and really could not be fully tested. If anything went wrong — even something far short of a full nuclear meltdown — the result would be an extremely dangerous leak of radioactive and chemically toxic substances.If you were a nuclear engineer, would you be eager to sign off on such a design?ProliferationStill, maybe the advantages of uranium-thorium MSR’s outweigh the risks. Mainstream reactor designs are certainly not without their dangers, yet hundreds of nuclear reactors have been operating safely around the world for many years. If it were possible to build a reactor that could not be used for producing nuclear bombs, the R&D necessary to get it working would almost certainly be worthwhile.Regrettably, uranium-thorium MSR’s do not have this advantage. While they are somewhat less efficient than ordinary uranium reactors at producing weapons-grade material, they can be used for nuclear proliferation too.Thorium advocates argue that the thorium fuel cycle doesn’t work for producing nuclear weapons because, when a thorium-232 atom absorbs a neutron, it sometimes gets converted into uranium-232 rather than uranium-233. Now if you want to build a nuclear bomb, uranium-232 is not exactly your best friend. It produces lots of very-high-energy gamma rays, which tend to damage both workers and electronic control systems. Moreover, it is really hard to separate uranium-232 from uranium-233. There might be ways to deal with this issue, but for the purposes of this answer let’s accept that it is impossible to build a nuclear bomb if a significant fraction of uranium-232 is present.Here’s the trouble: it is possible to avoid producing U-232 altogether. If you remember the description of how the thorium fuel cycle works, the U-233 comes from an intermediate, Pa-233, with a half-life of 27.4 days. Thus, one can still produce weapons-grade U-233 by extracting this protactinium from the thorium blanket (which can be done using relatively straightforward chemical methods) and leaving it aside to decay into U-233. Then we obtain essentially pure weapons-grade nuclear material.Don’t believe me? The US, the USSR, and India have all produced U-233 for nuclear weapons using essentially this exact sequence of reactions, and India even built a working nuclear bomb (Shakti V) using only U-233 produced from thorium, with no added U-235 or Pu-239.HistoryThorium advocates like to claim that the US rejected uranium-thorium MSR’s because they can’t be used for making nuclear bombs. Please apply a bit of critical thinking to this theory. If the US had a working design for a nuclear reactor that could not be used to produce nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have covered it up; we would have rushed to commercialize it! Indeed, the government would probably have subsidized the technology extensively so that we would be able to export reactors overseas without worrying about nuclear proliferation. Throwing away a working thorium reactor design is so obviously contrary to clear US interests that this story just falls flat on its face.I find the US government’s stated reason for rejecting thorium reactors[1] to be much more believable:In considering the MSBR [molten salt breeder reactor] for central station power plant application, it is noted that this concept has several unique and desirable features; at the same time, it is characterized by both complex technological and practical engineering problems which are specific to fluid fueled reactors and for which solutions have not been developed.Other claimed advantagesThere are a few other inaccurate claims about uranium-thorium MSR’s that I thought I’d address as well.Claim: we need thorium reactors because we’re in danger of running out of uranium. Nope, there’s a simple free-market solution to that. If we ever run short of uranium, the price will rise and it will become economical to extract uranium from seawater. The price of uranium is a very low fraction of the cost of operating a nuclear reactor.Claim: uranium-thorium MSR’s produce less radioactive waste. This is misleading for two reasons. First of all, it’s quite possible to build uranium-fueled reactors that destroy almost all of their long-lived radioactive waste (this is not done because disposing of the waste by other means is more economical). Secondly, this completely ignores all the other toxic substances — beryllium compounds, fluorine, and so on — that are used in an MSR. Radioactive waste is bad, but we understand the dangers and can deal with them. It’s not so scary that we should ignore all other dangers just so we can produce slightly less of it.ConclusionUranium-thorium MSR’s were rejected for valid technical reasons, not because of politics or some kind of military-industrial complex conspiracy. Although the technical roadblocks are not insurmountable, the advantages of a uranium-thorium MSR are much less significant than advocates claim. Thus, developing MSR’s wasn’t worthwhile in the 1970’s and probably still doesn’t make sense today.Edit: While the reaction to this answer has generally been overwhelmingly (and rather unexpectedly) positive, I seem to have ruffled a few feathers as well. So I thought I’d add something to discuss a few of the most significant objections brought up in the comments and other answers. Several of these points are legitimate and I would encourage you to read the other answers to hear the other side of the story.Jeff Barry correctly pointed out that the MSRE used a graphite moderator. In the original version of this answer, I claimed that graphite doesn’t work at all in an MSR, which overstates the case. I have edited my answer to correct this. I’ve written a more detailed response to his answer in this comment.A few people have mentioned Moltex, a British company developing a chloride-fueled MSR. Moltex has taken a brute-force approach to the Cl-35 neutron absorption problem: they’re basically throwing a large amount of plutonium into the reactor to ensure that there are always enough neutrons to keep the chain reaction going. If this works and doesn’t make the reactor too expensive, then the corrosion problem is solved; all they need to do is add a bit of zirconium metal to scavenge loose chlorine atoms. On the whole, Moltex seems to have some great ideas and I hope they succeed. I do suspect they may be underestimating their costs a bit, but we’ll see how things go.Ed Caruthers asked whether we’ve done any work to test alloys for use in a future MSR. That’s a great question and I’ve responded here.Several people (for example, Glenn Gross) argued that we should have spent more money researching MSR’s. Maybe, but we already have several other perfectly good commercial reactor designs, and I’m not convinced that the amount of effort needed to get an MSR working will be worth it. There are plenty of other priorities for scientific research.Another point that was brought up repeatedly is that MSR’s can’t explode because they operate at atmospheric pressure. I think there’s a legitimate case that MSR’s could be made safer than current nuclear reactors — but only if we can solve the materials problems.Overall, I stand by what I’ve written, but I also want to thank everyone for the spirited debate. I hope the discussion has shed a little more light on the issues involved.Footnotes[1] http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/WASH-1222.pdf

Caution: Pls be objective while reading this. I still know that I would be trolled. I’m no expert on the politics of JNU. But we all can understand basic numbers & information that JNU has on its website & other public media. Trouble however is that this data is extremely unorganized, as if nobody cares to know about it. At-least that is what I observed. You can draw your own inferences. I’ve tried to compile some critical information at one place which poses certain questions.The student strength & courses: What do they teach at JNU.Let’s go one step at a time. Do you know how many courses are there at JNU & what is the student strength? Here is how it looks.Now we see that there are a total of ~8000 students at JNU. Of this, the lion’s share of 57% students is of social sciences, language, literature & arts (4578 students) & International studies 15% ( 1210 students). So between the two categories, we have 72% of the campus covered.There is another interesting statistic here. Almost 55% of the total student strength i.e. 4359 students are doing M.Phil. or Ph.D. At any campus across the world, the strength of students declines as we move from under-grad courses to post grad & there are very few who pursue doctorate level courses. This is also driven by financial compulsions as people need to get back to the earning workforce fast & get on to a career track. I couldn’t find specific information about why did JNU chose to have such high strength of M.Phil. & doctoral level students. Anyways we’ll use this number once again to derive some conclusions so keep this in mind.Cost of running such University: Just how much does government spends on JNU?Look at the Profit & Loss account of JNU for 2018. This is from the 600 page annual report, & this one page which should possibly be the first section on any annual report, is hiddnen somwhere in the middle. Probably this was not very important in the overall scheme of things. So what do we observe here :So JNU spends about Rs 556 crores per year on its functioning. This is aside of the fixed assets it has, the huge land base, the infra & building it owns which was built on government money at some point. I see that some depreciation is accounted for.So what is the cost per student at JNU ? We can calculate. Rs 556 crore / 8000 students gives us Rs 6.95 lac per student annually. Although the university calculations somewhere quote this number as Rs 2.33 lac per student (Rs 170 crore/7304), this calculation is seriously flawed. The real numbers have to divide the entire university expenses by the number of students. There can be no university withoput students so all expenses eventually have to come from student body & other income.Even if we exclude “other income” & count only the govt subsidy & grants, we have a total expense of Rs 352 crore over 8000 students. We can safely assume that each student consumes Rs 4.4 lacs of government subsidy at JNU every year. Shocking how public money can be misused at scale. What talent are we producing at this high cost subsidy ? This is competing with IITs & IIMs fee.Research, publications & patents at JNUNow the students would say that JNU is an academics focused institution & it should not be compared with commercial institutions. Fair point. I tried to dig in the kind of work & research papers JNU publishes. You would be surprised that for an institution which claims to be the center of academics on social sciences, the claims on the website seem pretty sketchy. Read for yourself as I quote from the website:Publications : The faculty of the University has been regularly publishing many research journal articles, books; contributed chapters in books; presented papers in national and international conferences/workshops and delivered several lectures outside the University.Research: JNU has been promoting research by students and faculty. Faculty members have been able to attract competitive research grants from many national and international funding agencies. Currently, more than 300 research projects are running in the University. Research grants are also received from DST, DBT, ICMR, CSIR, UGC, ICSSR, ICHR, ICCR, Ministries, European Union, European Commission, Ford Foundation, Welcome Trust etc. In addition to research projects, faculty members are also encouraged to undertake consultancy projects. University has also set up an Advanced Instrumentation Research facility where state of the art equipment have been installed to meet the requirements of many science schools/special centers. University has also set up an Intellectual Property Management (IPM) Cell to facilitate filing of patents and technology transfers.As you can see, there is no specific mention of any numbers or concrete claims on research & publications, no names of journals or publications worth mentioning. Perhaps JNU doesn’t need to publish this info as nobody cares to read this. At-least not the students who study there or want to join JNU.But there should be some patents at-least ? All that we find for patents is the below information:Patents by faculty:• R. Bhatnagar (2001-2002). A Process for the Preparation of Non-Toxic Anthrax Vaccine. Indian patent (1222/Del/2001) accepted. International PCT application (PCT/IN2002/00048; WO-03-048390A1, June 12, 2003) published. R. Bhatnagar (2001). A process for constitutively preparing anthrax protective antigen. Indian patent (1127/Del/2001) accepted. R. Bhatnagar (2001). An Anthrax Protective Antigen. Indian patent (1074/Del/2002) accepted.• Aparna Dixit (2007). Anti-diabetic recombinant protein. Indian patent and International PCT applications filed. Aparna Dixit (2007). Recombinant vaccine against Aeromonas hydrophila. Indian Patent application filed.• R. Bhatnagar (2008). An immunodominant B cell epitope based protein vaccine against Anthrax. Indian Patent application (2947/DEL/2008) filed. R. Bhatnagar (2008). A pharmaceutical composition of vaccine against Rabies…..its preparation thereof. Indian Patent (1449/DEL/2008) and International PCT (PCT/IN2008/000578) applications filed.• K. J. Mukherjee (2006). A process for getting high yields of xylanases (patent application filed). K.J. Mukherjee (1999). A process for getting high yields of streptokinase. K.J. Mukherjee (2002). Process technology for production of human alpha interferon in E.coli Application No. 212080 (1276/Del/2002) Indian Patent Accepted.• Santosh K. Kar, (2006). Method for Identification and/or Diagnosis of REM Sleep Loss from Blood Samples. Indian Patent. Date of Issue: 24 Oct 2006.So barring some 4 names of Mr. Bhatnagar, Ms. Dixit, Mr Kar & Mr. Mukherjee, there are no patents by any other faculty. Number of patents by students ??? Try searching….I did not find any results. So much for the 57% students doing doctorate level courses.You want to know the best claims about the research JNU publishes ? You’ll find that in the placement brochure (yes they have one, although very superficial & doesn’t disclose any statistics about past placements). Here is what you’ll see in the name of research at JNU:Some inferences from the data above:1) With 4360 students in M.Phil. & Ph.D. courses, there are hardly 1000 research “articles” published in Journals. The university doesn’t name any notable journals while making such claims. This implies that there is just ONE “article” published for every 4.5 students each year. This when there are 600 plus Ph.D. s granted annually. Would you consider this any worthwhile research work ? May be JNU has more “liberal” standards for us to understand this.2) There is huge participation in international conferences. So about 2000 international conferences are attended every year. Again, not sure what materializes in those conferences. Certainly not the research papers or patents.Is the fee hike Justified ? Why punish the meritorious students?Firstly, in view of the data above, it doesn’t appear that there is much focus on output or getting laurels for the nation at JNU. There is absolutely no data point to believe that is the case.Now, let’s look at the “fee” the students pay to study at the university.Let me clarify. The numbers you are looking at are not in thousands or lacs. These are what they are in INR. So Rs 240 is the entire tuition fee paid by JNU student. Aside, they pay a generous Rs 6 for library & Rs 40 as refundable security deposit. How was a university allowed to run with this fee structure & without any hike for decades is itself a research paper in the making. Of-course, nobody at JNU would have time to research on this. IIT Delhi which is located close by charges about Rs 2.25 plus lac annually & IIMs charge about Rs 5 to 10 lac per year. We don’t see any strikes at those places. Students know they need to jump into the job market, start their earning life & also repay the student loan that they carry. JNU is free of any such thoughts or troubles. Probably the reason why students have much time left to create new troubles of their own. Ideology or idle mind, you decide.Is the fee hike justified at JNU ?I don’t want to conclude any political thoughts here. But the data from official sources of the university help us infer a lot of ideas. JNU is a perfect example of bad socialism. If you give something for free, people have no incentive to work & earn. Why would anyone at JNU be in a hurry to find jobs or even publish research. In a nation where we’re are hardly able to educate our children thru primary schools, JNU stands tall as an example of socialist elitism at its best. This must stop. The students may have all the time for doctoral courses, the nation is certainly running out of patience & money to pay for these scholars.Surprised that this social reform idea never came out from the university that claims to be the biggest study centre on social sciences ? Irony died a quite death !!Feel free to mail or write to me on twitterHonest - Unbiased - Simplified, as alwaysEdit on comments raised by some students in defense.Some students have raised questions or tried to defend the protests. Let me try to address some of these questions:Defense 1: There is a corruption of thousands of crores in public distribution system, so why target few hundred crore of JNU subsidy?I think this is amusing argument. So both should stop. Firstly, this is an unfair comparison. National PDS system budget has to be compared with the national/state subsidy on ALL universities in India. I’m sure that amount also will run into thousands of crores. It is a complete wastage of resources in India for privileged few. Classic socialism downside where state resources are cornered by a powerful few.Defense 2: JNU will have less patents as it is focused on social sciences. But it has contribution in social sector. It has provided various luminaries to the nation & many IAS officers. This is JNU contribution to society.I’m surprised by this argument. Joining a govt service is not a contribution to the society. And they will join IAS with or without JNU. People join for their own good. This is just like saying - politicians are in politics for public welfare. Well, the country understands these arguments better now. Also how do we measure the “social work” of JNU. When research papers are hardly anything to talk about & nation still grappling with poverty, there has to be some metric to measure contribution vs subsidy. And this also applies to all institutes where fee is subsidized.Finally, some students indicate that during M.Phil., they “contribute towards the research work by their professors & thus earn their education”. Well, has any one of them asked the professors what “research” they do because there are handful of papers published ? At least tell the country this when you protest. The idealism of “right to education” is hollow self-centered logic. This won’t fly. And social sciences study at Rs 4.5 lac per student ? This would put global schools to shame !!Defense 3: When PSU banks can lend money to industrialists & write off lacs of crores, why is JNU being targeted?Again a self-defeating logic. PSUs & nationalized banks are relics of the past. Many of them are dying a gradual death. Many exist since politics needs a free checkbook to write loans to loved ones in the name of socialism. So students want free education & politics wants free non-refundable loans. Common folks also want govt jobs and just sit on it till retirement. Not to mention the corruption. The country goes to dogs.This socialism of the 70s is dead. Not because politicians have become saints. But because govts have run out of budgets. Ask Air India, PSU bank employees & others. Did someone tell you that the Soviet Union has collapsed ? And that China is the most ruthless form of capitalism that you can have in the world. How about a research paper on that ?ReferencesIIM Fees Structure for MBA and SeatsUniversity of Delhi Courses & Fee Structure 2019-20Welcome to Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityWelcome to Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityWelcome to Jawaharlal Nehru University