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That's a wash because climate activists are peculiarly uninterested in putting technology to work on fixing the problem. They don't support the largest carbon-free energy sources (even hydro, which is still by far the most important renewable worldwide) and they don't support geoengineering to sequester carbon already in the environment. The latest sequestration effort heading for the leftist dumper is a chickpea that has been genetically modified to pull carbon from the air into the soil, where it becomes a long-term stabilant.

From that well-known fascist source, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
https://thebulletin.org/2018/0...

The most modern 3G safe reactor designs out there still have safety problems.

And the economics of the industry has been devastated: A dozen reasons for the economic failure of nuclear power

Nuclear is done, it's more expensive than the alternatives with greater risk for catastrophe. You can drop the whole exasperated genius routine, we're not buying it.

If that is true it's very unfortunate.

You can read about on their own website. They see the major threats to human existence as "unchecked climate change" and "abuse of social media". This is classic mission creep.

Fukushima's site was dug down to make it easier to build. Just up the coast, closer to the epicenter, Onagawa was built higher above the water line, and they even included a basin to maintain an ocean water supply to the safety related pumps for the duration of a tsunami. They escaped the Earthquake and Tsunami largely undamaged. In fact, Onagawa actually served as shelter after the Tsunami.

Forget Nuclear power. It's not going to happen because when you break ground for a new plant thousands of crazy people

Some nuclear-friendly federal regulation and funding could fix that. Research funding into next-gen safer designs? Streamlined permit approvals toward pilot programs? Tax incentives, perhaps to convert aging coal plants? A little DARPA action, enough to encourage universities to offer nuclear engineering degrees again?

When the Soviets were around, propagandizing a nuclear world with nuclear plants that fit on trucks to show off how nuclear they were, the U.S. was red hot to show how nuclear it could be. Now with the Soviets and their propaganda gone, U.S. politicians have no balls for moon-shot beat-the-russians tech stuff.

Or maybe it's not completely gone. The Russians and the Chinese are getting back into nuclear, even in spite of the Russians sitting on shit-tons of fossil fuels. The Chinese want to quickly power up these little islands they're building in the China Sea to claim as their new territory. The Russians want to fill the melting Arctic with flag-flying nuclear ice-breakers to get at all the stuff up there (the U.S. hasn't built an ice-breaker since the late 1970s). Gosh, if we would only elect Congress-people who gave a fuck, we might be able to get in on this while there's something still to get got.

how DO you get to paperless?

This way worked for a large part of human history.

It's not efficient but the way things are going we may get to that point.

In that one week the doomsday clock moved from -3:00 to -2:30. At that rate we'll all be dead in 5 weeks.

Everyone seems to be attacking or defending the clock along thinly-veiled pro/anti-Trump lines. Let's pause for a moment and start a discussion about the underlying state of the world the clock is supposed to represent. To help with this, here's a short list of why the clock moved closer to midnight, taken from the 2017 Clock Statement written by the scientists who made the decision to move the clock:

• The U.S. and Russion remain at odds with each other over Syria, Ukraine, and NATO.
• North Korea conducted 2 nuclear tests.
• Militant attack on 2 Indian bases intensified the Pakistan/India conflict.
• Continued threat of global warming (though good news included flat emissions growth and Paris climate accord).
• Rise in strident nationalism "worldwide".
• Wavering public confidence in democratic institutions.
• Russian deception campaigns "have brought American democracy and Russian intentions into question".
• Donald Trump's comments about expanding US nuclear aresnal.
• Donald Trump's "propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security".
• Donald Trump and his nominees dispute climate change.
• North Korean missile tests (including a claimed upcoming ICBM test).
• Russia is building new missile silos and new submarines.
• U.S. is modernizing its nuclear arsenal.
• China is helping Pakistan build submarine platforms.
• Pakistan and India are both expanding their nuclear arsenal.
• Iran nuclear deal in doubt under Trump administration.
• Various stalled negotiations on nuclear disarmament.
• Little progress on climate change beyond the Paris Accord.
• "Information monocultures, fake news, and the hacking and release of politically sensitive emails...[threaten] the fabric of democracy, which relies on an informed electorate to decide the direction of public policy."
• Hacking has the potential to threaten financial activities, electric power facilities, and personal freedoms/privacy.
• Autonomous machines "open up a new set of risks", esp. weapons that make kill decisions w/o human intervention.
• Advances in synthetic biology (CRISPR) create the potential for new bioweapons.

No, the doomsday clock is very much meaningless. Basically it does nothing except signifies how unhappy the people who run it are with the current political climate.

Close, but not quite right. The Doomsday Clock represents the opinion of a commitee of scholars drawn from scientific and international relations fields about risk of some kind of destabilizing event, such as the use of nuclear weapons. It does not reflect the state of happiness of the board with respect to politics in general, although perhaps inevitably the assessment of global risk and happiness with the political climate are somewhat correlated.

It is true that the assessment of the board is somewhat subjective. But something being a judgment call isn't necessarily the same as "meaningless". It depends on who is doing the judging, which you can weigh for yourself looking at the board bios contained in this year's statement.

I was surprised to find out I actually know one of the board members. Herb Lin and I were both at MIT around the same time. He's not somebody I'd characterize as given to hysterics.

No, the doomsday clock is very much meaningless. Basically it does nothing except signifies how unhappy the people who run it are with the current political climate.

Close, but not quite right. The Doomsday Clock represents the opinion of a commitee of scholars drawn from scientific and international relations fields about risk of some kind of destabilizing event, such as the use of nuclear weapons. It does not reflect the state of happiness of the board with respect to politics in general, although perhaps inevitably the assessment of global risk and happiness with the political climate are somewhat correlated.

It is true that the assessment of the board is somewhat subjective. But something being a judgment call isn't necessarily the same as "meaningless". It depends on who is doing the judging, which you can weigh for yourself looking at the board bios contained in this year's statement.

I was surprised to find out I actually know one of the board members. Herb Lin and I were both at MIT around the same time. He's not somebody I'd characterize as given to hysterics.

The fact that Trump is a dipshit doesn't mean that the rest of us have to lose our minds. Many of my friends on social media have lost all ability to think or reason, and just pass through shoddy unsubstantiated articles as fact, which is sad because that's the problem with the POTUS that they are decrying in the first place. Fight idiocy with well sourced and reasoned explanations, and calm refusal to capitulate with the worst of it. Do not return in kind.

If you look at the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin, you'll see that only two of the 14 members have an atomic science background, and only two more have meaningful nuclear policy experience. This is very different from how it was when it started in 1945. Most of the people there now are environmental and public policy folks. Only 8/14 seem to have PhDs (what many would expect when you say "scientist").

It'd be more accurate to call it the Bulletin of Environmental Policy Scientists. In that lens their determination does make sense, as Trump will be nothing but bad for global warming. However a clock-to-midnight is a poor representation of a threat like that, which takes sustained and difficult work over a long period rather than a reduction of tensions to solve.

Apparently Elon Musk has tried to float the idea of a carbon tax with Trump. While unsuccessful so far, that's probably a bigger impact than the Bulletin will have during this administration.

The position of the clock was not changed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. From the Bulletin's FAQ page:

Were the hands moved during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962? No. They were not moved during the 10-day crisis because too little was known at the time about the circumstances of the standoff or what the outcome would be. In fact, after the crisis, US and Soviet leaders installed a direct telephone line for communication, and within months signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty outlawing underground nuclear weapons testing—the first treaty addressing the nuclear weapons threat. On the basis of these steps, the Bulletin set the clock back from seven minutes to midnight to 12 minutes to midnight in 1963.

http://thebulletin.org/rising-...

âoeThe most reliable estimate of the cost of decommissioning [a nuclear power plant] is 10-15 percent of the construction cost, contrary to some highly inflated estimates ... Modern serious studies of the disposal problem indicate that satisfactory isolation is technologically feasible, even for the long term.â So wrote MIT nuclear engineering professor David Rose in the November 1985 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

How misguided that view seems now, with the advantage of decades of experience. The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommissionâ"or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plantâ"constructed early in the 1960s for $39 millionâ"cost $608 million. The plantâ(TM)s spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in.

---

Look, it's late and I'm tired but I've had this exact conversation many many times. I'm not just "spewing" out random crap.

That plant was suppose to cost 6 million to decommission. Adjusting for inflation, it would have cost 39million (the same as it cost to build it but with inflated dollars so really just a nice coincidence). That's $560 million more than estimated and paid for in utility bills along the way.

---

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The company wants to try out the idea for the first time on the northwest coast of England, at the notorious nuclear dumping ground at Sellafield, which holds the world's largest stock of civilian plutonium. At close to 120 tons, it stores more plutonium from reactors than the U.S. and Russia combined.

While most of the world's civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is.

---

By 2025, Germany is to have no more than 45 percent renewable power. The U.S. should too.
It has a quarter of our population but total US GDP is 16.77 trillion dollars while germany is only 3.77 trillion dollars.
We can do this and almost permanently cap the price of coal and oil.

---

Really we are quibbling.

I think we both agree a smart mix of alternative energy, nuclear energy, and even coal makes sense for the near future (say 2045) and that increasing the percentage of alternative energy will reduce consumption and prices of fossil fuels.

I showed that breeder reactors produce plutonium dioxide which must be secured against terrorists and backed that up with the actual experience of a breeder reactor in England.
I also showed that decommissioning costs for nuclear plants are underestimated by over and order of magnitude.

http://thebulletin.org/rising-...

âoeThe most reliable estimate of the cost of decommissioning [a nuclear power plant] is 10-15 percent of the construction cost, contrary to some highly inflated estimates ... Modern serious studies of the disposal problem indicate that satisfactory isolation is technologically feasible, even for the long term.â So wrote MIT nuclear engineering professor David Rose in the November 1985 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

How misguided that view seems now, with the advantage of decades of experience. The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommissionâ"or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plantâ"constructed early in the 1960s for $39 millionâ"cost $608 million.

So it was estimated to cost $6 million (*inflation adjusted- about $39 million) to decommission and as of 2014, it instead took $608 million dollars.

So.. no... we haven't built the actual cost of decommissioning plants into the bill. We've collected about 5% of what will actually be needed to decomission them. And the difference will either result in a rotting husk that isn't cleaned up or a $560 million dollar bill handed to the tax payers by the nuclear power plant industry (which keeps the profits).

Coal is horrifically uneconomical. At this point. And it's not solar- it's natural gas.

The only place tidal is called a disaster that I can find is in flat out propaganda by the oil industry. Perhaps you have a citation?

Solar is being sold in huge quantities without subsidies to power companies. German power companies bought up 2 years of Nano Solar's new "printed" solar cells that were crazy cheap (an order of magnitude cheaper than solid substrata and much lighter and easier to install).

"Experts" predict that there is a 50% chance that the year 2050 is 27 years away from the year 2016. Also, the world is ending in three minutes.

Nuclear Energy Survives Only on the Basis of Faulty Risk Assessment:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://thebulletin.org/nuclear...

They are talking about the Watts Bar Unit 2

They started building it back in 1973 then took a short lunch break in 1988 resumed work in 2007 and finished in 2015.

Since it was 80% done in 1988 that means at least 80% of the reactor unit is at least 27 years old now.

http://thebulletin.org/watts-b...

http://www.latimes.com/busines...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Still nice to see another plant online shame took 42 years to finish it especially since it was only given a 40 year operating licence.

Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):

Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.

So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.

In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).

Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.

Hansen and company say:

For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years."

Joe Romm argues:

According to the online database of the International Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid! That would be a rate of under three per year.

Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.

Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?

Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:

Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [ ... and so on ... ]

Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.

By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.

And also to Capt. William Bassett - the US version of the man who saved the world.

Worse, Russian military doctrine currently describes a limited nuclear strike on conventional military targets as a de-escalation http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation . While in official documents they reserve that terminology for using nuclear weapons to handle direct conventional military attacks on Russia itself, one finds very worrying the level of doublethink where one describes being the first to use nukes as de-escalating a situation.

Depends on the target of the nuke.

Using a nuclear weapon against a nuclear power practically begs retaliation in kind; the worst kind of escalation possible.

However, if some little local warlord wants to play war in a Russian city, his war effort will be quickly de-escalated when Russia drops a nuke on his base camp.

Or another way to say it: Don't bring conventional weapons to a nuke fight.

There's an old curse that seems relevant: "May you live in interesting times." Times are certainly interesting. At this point, it seems like some sort of full-scale war between NATO and Russia is more likely now than it has been any time since the 1980s (granted then it would have been NATO against the USSR but the basic point is the same). Worse, at least historically the military and diplomats spent much of their time making sure that things didn't spiral out of control. Without the Cold War feeling, people may feel less of a need to guard against such issues. Worse, Russian military doctrine currently describes a limited nuclear strike on conventional military targets as a de-escalation http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation . While in official documents they reserve that terminology for using nuclear weapons to handle direct conventional military attacks on Russia itself, one finds very worrying the level of doublethink where one describes being the first to use nukes as de-escalating a situation.

During the Cold War, one popular explanation for the Fermi paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox, the apparent lack of highly advanced civilizations in the universe, was that species end up blowing themselves up. For most of my life, this belief looked almost quaint but it is not looking disturbingly likely. At this point, the evidence for some sort of serious barrier to civilizations emerging substantially is much stronger than it was a few decades ago. The apparent lack of K3 or K2.5 civilizations is at this point substantially robust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale with around 100,000 galaxies searched and almost no sign of any civilization using a substantial fraction of its galactic energy output http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/. With this return to Cold War norms, it looks like we need to not only take seriously that there's a Great Filter, but that the Filter might be nuclear war. That's especially the case because a nuclear war does not need to kill every member of the civilization to completely destroy any hope of a technologically advanced civilization. If not enough natural resources have been consumed by the civilization (e.g. the easily accessible coal and oil) then even if the species survives it may not have the ability to reboot itself to a high tech level since getting to a high tech level may actually require access to these resources (in which case one gets essentially one chance to get to be a high tech civilization).

Let us not forget Coal has a lovely track record as well in this country.

Let us also not forget bikini atoll and all the test sites in Nevada that we've rendered into nuclear wastelands as well.

We also have Treasure Island and many other nuclear wastelands.

Nevermind that the Navy's own Laser Weapon System's performance has actually been rather lacklustre.

No, they are exceptionally competent and successful... at spending large sums of money.

This sounds an awful lot like the scaremongering that was put out surrounding Iraq and its WMDs. We all know how that turned out.

Laser targeting and guidance systems have been about for decades. These days a simple laser pointer can be considered a laser targeting system. It is a massive technological leap to go from milliwatt laser pointers to 150kW directed energy weapons: a technical leap that Iran, and countries like it, simply are not capable of.

The Navy are clearly banking on the fact that Politicians simply will not know the difference and will just allocate more money to Defence Budgets out of misguided fear. Nevermind that the Navy's own Laser Weapon System's performance has actually been rather lacklustre.

Maybe the Directed Energy Weapons program is yet another area of US Military spending that is deemed 'too big to fail'... just like the F35.

Actually, a couple of additional points. If you read his other columns, which I have, you see Gusterson has a theme of dismissing quantitative methods, which are admittedly flawed here. It's interesting, because he decried the fundamental attribution error against Eric Shinseki (correctly in my opinion) but commits the very same error against quantitative methods in both that article and the one linked in the summary. Again, I would argue that he is decrying not a flaw in simple quantitative measurement, but instead a fundamental error in judgement that implies measuring something must necessitate that is measured without error.

And also, I labelled multiple measurements from different sources just as latent measurement models. They are, however they are specifically known as Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model and/or Multitrait-Multimethod SEM. There's a distinction between the two, but they underlay a common goal of utilising different measurement sources to produce a higher ability to distinguish between error sources.

No.
Nukes were and are produced by government owned national labs*. Not by gunsmiths-turned-megacorps.
Nukes = nuclear bombs.
Nukes != yellowcake.
No. Private citizens or corporations cannot lawfully buy nukes. Or import them from Russia.

*Now operated by private contractors to whom the govt. pays a management fee: http://thebulletin.org/us-nucl...

The govt. still owns the labs.

Scientists have said oil would run in in ~2038. http://www.imeche.org/knowledg... (closest link I could find to this in 1 Google)

So without the anhydrous ammonia injections, crops like corn will only produce ~10% of what they do (think 1970s bumper crops). Not that it matters as we will not be able to move the food to the people.

If 10+ billion people don't have any food, the problem is self solving.

But wait, alternative energy will save us! http://thebulletin.org/reality.... Nope. Besides with people like the Koch's paying to brainwash the public, how much lag does that put on developing alternative fuels?

So when someone says "In 2050 X will happen!" just slap them in a then junk as they are just making stuff up. In 2050 your family line will be dead (Oh, you are one of the Long Island Humunguses? Well then old bean, your family should be just fine).

When someone goes on and on and on about having babies... It is possible they are planning to kill so many people that no one will remember Stalin or Hitler or the Black Plague.

But what if we stop having babies right now?
Well in 20 years we would be down 1 billion people if the world stopped having babies this instant.. that will not do the trick.

So sit back, grab a bucket of popcorn, case of beer, and a comfy chair.

It is because they are a far-left, anti-capitalist and anti-development org funded largely be George Soros, and they believe we should all (well, most of us anyway) go back to living in caves to save resources for the ruling elite.

Kindly enlighten us with your evidence that George Soros funds the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Because I can't seem to find any.

As for the actual past and present sponsors of the BAS, well ZOMG, now there's a festering pile of hard-bitten commie hacks (not.)

When things are good, does the clock ever move back?

Yes.

It's called a black swan event: it has never happened, so it seems unthinkable that it would happen. That said, although it's unlikely to occur in any given year, the chance is not zero – and in the case of nuclear war, it only has to happen once. What risk of extinction would be acceptable to you? 1% per year? 0.1%? There has been a disturbing number of close calls during the last half century. We are only still alive, according to the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Lee Butler, "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

By the way, here's the actual article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Not sure why it wasn't in the summary.

It's called a black swan event: it has never happened, so it seems unthinkable that it would happen. That said, although it's unlikely to occur in any given year, the chance is not zero – and in the case of nuclear war, it only has to happen once. What risk of extinction would be acceptable to you? 1% per year? 0.1%? There has been a disturbing number of close calls during the last half century. We are only still alive, according to the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Lee Butler, "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

By the way, here's the actual article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Not sure why it wasn't in the summary.

Iraq still had engineering and medical schools after it was liberated. The Bush administration facilitated partnerships between Iraqi institutions and those in the US and Europe, ending Iraq's isolation from the international community and helped its efforts to rebuild after the long night of Saddam's rule.

http://www.thebulletin.org/web...
An education in occupation
By Hugh Gusterson
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
2 February 2012
Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries -- the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.

Who, exactly, says there has been no warming in the last 20 years and is calling this a "warming hiatus?

The link "water is much more of an issue" is broken (the "www." portion should be dropped). This link works: water is much more of an issue.

While fusion can greatly reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation, it is still possible. There has to be accounting protocols in place for any weapon-grade material produced.

Source: The bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Texas didn't enact the Affordable Care Act, and they have (I think) the lowest rate of people with health insurance in the country. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, said that it was a government responsibility to provide for health care. Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, so those ideas were around when the Constitution was written. You don't need the germ theory of disease to see that diseases spread. I don't know where free market types get the idea that people who can't pay for health insurance should be left to suffer; maybe from Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand. Or Thomas Malthus.

The article http://thebulletin.org/who%E2%... said

If the first question asked in most American emergency rooms concerns insurance status, the uninsured and illegal aliens will likely continue to delay seeking treatment....

Policy makers should understand that having a large fraction of the US population uninsured poses a national security threat during deadly epidemics such as Ebola. If changing to a single-payer national system is, for political reasons, out of the question, then, at the very least, the Affordable Care Act must be fully implemented in all states. In addition, as it now stands, the CDC must wait until a state invites it to conduct epidemiologic investigations, and national disease surveillance depends on states voluntarily submitting data. This is a ridiculous and dangerous state of medical affairs.

[Stover] Economists and energy experts shy away from issues of equity and morality, but climate change and environmental justice are inseparable: It's impossible to talk intelligently about climate without discussing how to distribute limited energy resources.

Just what I needed today, someone who uses 'friendly UN language' in an earnest attempt to empower me to speak intelligently about climate. To do so I need to add the term environmental justice to my vocabulary. There is another pill to swallow too, the implied mandate that someone must decide how to distribute limited energy resources.

I piss in the general direction of anyone who would impose such a nebulous definition of justice and attempt to frame un-settled science in some gilded moral context... but especially anyone who (clumsily) declares that energy resources are limited.

I will try to explain why I think those ideas are not merely wrong or bad but in light current events, actually deserving of contempt.

First, why any idea may deserve contempt is simply this --- 'we' as a modern society are facing an existential threat. It arises not from a crisis of 'sin' or 'shortage' or even 'hubris', it is just our failure to get off our asses to do something that needs to be done. This is a people-crisis. What needs to be done is different things to different folks, but at present very few practical solutions are being pursued on a time table that befits the threat. Things you could stand up to yourself and say, this could work,

Energy resources are NOT limited. They have never been nor will they ever be. The only thing in short supply at the moment is our own resolve and progress to unlock more or better ones. If people say, "I'm talking about x" then let them talk about x without you but keep one hand on your wallet. If they go on to suggest that additional governance or taxation is necessary for x, press them to pose whether everyone on the planet would adopt this scheme, and get them thinking about what we might do to those who don't go along.

All paths towards global taxation (such as so-called 'carbon credits') or enforced conservation of energy sources lead to war. ALL OF THEM. Everything that has been discussed from Club of Rome to Kyoto to Obama's tactic of declaring CO2 an EPA-regulated poison is a failure in progress. That is --- unless war or control is what you're really after. Hint hint. As a (struggling) American and (modern) human, I feel contempt for things that lead into war. Because war sucks.

I piss in the general direction of anyone who asks me to reduce my "per capita energy usage" for any reason, or even suggests that it might be a solution for anything. This is because the whole idea that anyone on Earth could (or should) make do with less is --- you guessed it --- a path to war.

That is because when you plea to the modern world at large to consume less energy, you are asking people to die. They must die to make your 'models' work. They must die because they fight to the death to avoid your government-imposed child limits (gwarsh, who'da thunk it?) They must die because you are importing their oil and feel the need to install friendly governments. They must die because they insist on breaking your rules, rules that must lead to war to keep the rest of the world in line.

Why do *I* feel rising contempt in general? Because after years of discourse on energy, I feel that a great many people --- while enjoying the gigawatt fruit to its fullest --- are just sitting on their asses. And posing 'solutions' that (ultimately) lead us all to WAR. (It still sucks!)

And they have the GALL to tell me to end my 'recreation

Fukushima Daiichi's problems began forty years ago when they removed the natural 35 meter bluff that use to be there.

The plant is on a bluff which was originally 35 meters above sea level. During construction, however, TEPCO lowered the height of the bluff by 25 meters. One reason for lowering the bluff was to allow the base of the reactors to be constructed on solid bedrock in order to mitigate the threat posed by earthquakes. Another reason was the lowered height would keep the running costs of the seawater pumps low. TEPCO's analysis of the tsunami risk when planning the site's construction determined that the lower elevation was safe because the sea wall would provide adequate protection for the maximum tsunami assumed by the design basis. However, the lower site elevation did increase the vulnerability for a tsunami larger than anticipated in design.

Not considered in the above would be the simple yet modestly more costly possibility of obviating the need for a sea wall by preserving the bluff and setting the reactors back, using modestly sized canals to cycle the sea water to and fro. That, naturally, wasn't the cheapest conceivable option, so it didn't survive the bean counters. Instead, they removed 25 meters of foothill, a feature that was originally 2.5 times the height of the tsunami before they fucked it up. The whole `bedrock' smokescreen is easily dismissed for the lie that it is; they could have reached bedrock from a setback design with no more difficulty.

This was done for one reason; grading the beach provided cheaper access to the ultimate heat sink, sea water. Less construction cost, less pumping, less maintenance, etc. This isn't lost on the perpetrators either. They know they're at fault and they knew it at the time, whatever lies they tell today notwithstanding.

This isn't speculation, either. Fukushima Daini did not get submerged, did not melt down and did not contaminate the land and the sea. Why? Primarily because it was built at higher elevation, which is about the only significant difference between these sites.

TEPCO bean counters. End of story.

It isn't as if it hasn't happened before: in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus that escaped the lab and created a pandemic, killing thousands of people.

Lasrick, you dumb motherfucker.

The actual quote, which you linked to but obviously misread, states:

Such situations are not confined to the United States; China’s poor track record for laboratory containment means that it was "appallingly irresponsible" (in Lord May’s words) for a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.

Link.

The Chinese researchers didn't CAUSE the 2009 pandemic. In the paragraph above, "that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives" refers to the H1N1 virus, not to the hybrid which they created. Try some basic research yourself before you post something so inflammatory and egregiously wrong. Where the hell are the editors? Oh, wait, never mind ....

Slashdot editors - please fix the submitter's grotesque misreading of the linked article in the summary! Creating fictional outbreaks of lab viruses leading to thousands of deaths should be left to bad movies, not 'news' sites. Which isn't to say, of course, that there aren't genuine risks to consider. High level containment of various viruses in China and elsewhere has been breached on a number of occasions in the last few decades, sometimes with fatal consequences, e.g.:

http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...

"... there have already been three escapes from BSL-4 containment since 1990: a Marburg virus laboratory-acquired infection at the Vector facility in the Soviet Union in 1990, a foot and mouth disease virus escape from the Pirbright facility in England, and a SARS virus laboratory-acquired infection from a BSL-4-rated biosafety cabinet in a Taiwan laboratory."

http://thebulletin.org/threate...

"SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing."

Luckily, none of these incidents involved 'gain of function' strains, but the potential for a catastrophic incident is certainly there.

Slashdot editors - please fix the submitter's grotesque misreading of the linked article in the summary! Creating fictional outbreaks of lab viruses leading to thousands of deaths should be left to bad movies, not 'news' sites. Which isn't to say, of course, that there aren't genuine risks to consider. High level containment of various viruses in China and elsewhere has been breached on a number of occasions in the last few decades, sometimes with fatal consequences, e.g.:

http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...

"... there have already been three escapes from BSL-4 containment since 1990: a Marburg virus laboratory-acquired infection at the Vector facility in the Soviet Union in 1990, a foot and mouth disease virus escape from the Pirbright facility in England, and a SARS virus laboratory-acquired infection from a BSL-4-rated biosafety cabinet in a Taiwan laboratory."

http://thebulletin.org/threate...

"SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing."

Luckily, none of these incidents involved 'gain of function' strains, but the potential for a catastrophic incident is certainly there.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

http://thebulletin.org/making-...

Madness...as if Ebola was not enough.

http://thebulletin.org/iron-do...

The second link after your quote is to an article in the Bulletin written by George N. Lewis and Postol. Apparently, the National Academy of Sciences wrote a report that claimed boost-phase missile defense systems wouldn't work against Iran and North Korea. Lewis and Postol argue that the assessment is incorrect and that the missile defense system is actually more effective than stated (although it also says the report overstates many other things like radar range). Note that we're talking about a missile defense system, not rocket defense systems like the Iron Dome.

The nature of this particular question seems very naive. I suppose that you haven't been shot at much!

It's a semantic question to determine if your numbers for "shot at city" and "into city" are referring to the same thing, or to different things.

The [200] number comes from a few sources.

It sounds like, from what you say, the only number comparison that gives a meaningful idea of IronDome effectiveness is "count of audible intercepts" vs "count of audible impacts". All other numbers are incomensurable.

[You have heard+felt 4-5 rockets hit the ground] and [have heard] above 150 [aerial intercepts] by now

Those are the key numbers. You indicated that you believe that all of the aerial intercepts were of rockets that were going to head into your city. And you believe that the 4-5 rockets on the ground were in the city (which we can assume IronDome also tried to hit). Therefore, from your numbers, and based on your beliefs, you think IronDome is able to hit 97% of rockets.

You also indicated that you think your hearing of aerial intercepts isn't as effective as your hearing of ground impacts. Therefore the number might be higher than 97%.

The Israeli army says the number is slightly lower than 90%, so your numbers are in the same ballpark - http://thebulletin.org/iron-do...

In the frustrating interview with NPR, the expert said "5% or lower". But it wasn't clear, and Siegel didn't think to ask, whether this was referring to the chance of stopping a rocket that they intended to stop (which is what you're measuring), or to the chance that a single interceptor would stop a single rocket. I can't tell whether IronDome fires multiple intercepts per incoming rocket or just one.

According to another post [slashdot.org] this plutonium could not be used to make a bomb, and the explanation makes sense to me. So even if they change the constitution they won't be making any bombs, at least not with this plutonium.

This story rang some bells with me, and yes, it does appear to be the same case already reported on Slashdot (the figure given in the linked article there was also 640kg).

That time, however, the slant was on the Chinese being concerned that the Japanese may have been "stockpiling" this missing plutonium for weapons.

Which begs the question as to why, if it couldn't be used to make an atomic bomb?

There are two different kinds of robots with different threats.

The first is robots that humans have programmed to kill other humans. This is rapidly moving from science fiction to actuallity. See for example http://thebulletin.org/us-kill... Imagine country X sends out their robots to kill all humans that are not X, and country Y sends out their robots to kill all humans that are not Y. There might not be many humans left alive when the last robot stops shooting.

The second is kind is robots that think (and choose goals) for themselves. While these are probably not very likely to decide to kill all the humans, they might not care very much about us, and they almost certainly are not going to obey humans forever (would you obey someone who thinks vastly slower than yourself?). Even if they are fairly benign, there will probably be a lot of friction between the sentient robots and the humans just because we think differently. Think how much disagreement there is over mostly scientific problems like evolution and green house gases, and humans on both sides have generally the same kind of brains.

So I figure at best humans and robots will have lots of arguing, and at worst humans and robots will cause mutually assured destruction.

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Really? Why? They are an anti-nuclear, anti-science political lobby organization, and always have been.

Yeah, those former Manhattan Project scientists and engineers sure hated science.

Yeah, and check out the caliber of their Science and Security Board. They've got the author of "The Physics of Star Trek"!

Seriously, James Hansen is on their board also, which is a bit of a surprise. He's staunchly pro-nuclear power.

I'm not opposed to nuclear because in theory it's a perfect energy source. In practice, however, it's built and maintained by humans, so it's not safe. Even a perfect nuclear plant wouldn't be earthquake proof, etc.

This is a fine example of a sentiment that seems wise and reasonable but is actually completely divorced from reality. By any practical standard, nuclear power has a very good track record-- it also has a few of dramatically well-publicized failures that people fixate on, even though it's average is really pretty good.

The "human factor" that you and a few others are going on about is very interesting. Maybe we should learn how to deal with human factors one of these days, since we're human and all.

This is an interesting case study for you: Onagawa: the japanese nuclear power plant that didn't melt down.

And as for GMOs... well you folks might actually want to read Brand's book: Whole Earth Discipline

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Really? Why? They are an anti-nuclear, anti-science political lobby organization, and always have been.

Yeah, those former Manhattan Project scientists and engineers sure hated science.