Slashdot Mirror

Because of those subsidies I mentioned.
Take a look at who gets how much federal funding for each dollar they send to the fed in income tax.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

This article is ridiculous. Yes, he had some good points. He'd have to be absolutely rambling crazy to have NO good points. Much like Nostradamus, only small fractions of his work are ever analyzed at once, and those small fractions are then held to have some significant meaning, which isn't necessarily clear.

The first point this guy makes is terrible...
Immiseration: "Marx claimed that ... real wages would fall, and working conditions would deteriorate."
The article completely ignores the "working conditions would deteriorate" segment of that, and I don't think anyone would say working conditions have deteriorated. If they did, they'd be an idiot. Okay, ignoring that, lets look at the first half of that. He lists a source which itself says that the bottom 90%'s wages have stagnated. Now, for a better source when we look at this we see a vastly different picture. We see that it has declined from its position in 74, but has grown since 84. However, you also need to realize that the method that was used to calculate this, is deeply troublesome and can lead to completely opposite conclusions depending on the basket of goods chosen. Each year that basket gets better, and needs to be adjusted to reflect this. Here is a better article on this.

From there on out, the article only gets worse.

However, I'm sure he's managed to garner a lot of clicks by writing an inflammatory simplistic article, so in their book, mission accomplished.

Building things can be difficult. At least it is for me. My variable power source I built out of a kit does work. The scanner I tried to build from parts never did work. "The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind" http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/book.html is an excellent account of What Can Happen If You Try. This attempted shuttle is just sad. They could build a nice glider with what they have to work with, perhaps. A glider would be a fine thing to have built.

Two great concepts were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 5x06 The Game. Suckdisk, and medical virtualization of the human brain. Now one of these is one step closer to reality!

I still anticipate the actualization of Suckdisk.

It would provide some certainty to where one's own data resides, and that they're not outside the US's jurisdiction.

This isn't something unique to GovCloud; you can (must?) set your s3 buckets/ec2 instances up in a specific availability zone, which determines the location of your data.

Other than the restriction to US persons and the requirement that EC2 instances are launched within a VPC, we didn't make any other changes to our usual operational systems or practices. In other words, the security profile of the existing Regions was already up to the task of protecting important processing and data. In effect, we simply put a gateway at the door -- "Please show your passport or green card before entering."

-AWS Blog

The real tricks with the hydrogen fuel cells are getting a reliable source of hydrogen with a low energy input (it's almost always found in compound with other elements) and storing it at high enough volumes to be really useful without using high pressures or exotic, expensive materials.

I rather prefer the cellulose to biodiesel bacteria, algae, and fungi that are being researched. It seems to be a more useful fuel, and cellulose seems a lot more readily available than loose hydrogen. Biobutanol from cellulose is being researched in Japan, and butanol is a fairly straightforward replacement for at least part of a diesel's fuel. There's a fungus found in a rainforest that converts sugar or cellulose into a number of hydrocarbons and can be urged to make more based on exposure to antibiotic compounds. There's talk of work to genetically engineer something to do this, which likely would be a bacterium like e. coli engineered to produce the same compounds from the same feedstocks. In fact, e. coli is already being used in research to convert cellulose into diesel and kerosene.

The study you site reaches a similar conclusion by looking at sea ice extent over the last 10000 years. They find that polar ice is much less stable than previously thought. They find that 8000 years ago there was likely much less ice than there is today. This is surprising because although we were at the height of the current interglacial at that time, it was not likely much warmer than it is today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

So the two studies reach the same conclusions using different methods. In fact, we are seeing Arctic ice volume plummet, so this also confirms the conclusions of the papers: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/piomas-april-2011.html

There is a bit of a game each year as people speculate how low the arctic sea ice extent will go. The three measures are volume, area, and extent. It looks like we are certainly poised to break the previous record for volume, likely to break it for area, and may possibly break the previous record for extent.

A simple quadratic trend on the available data predicts that we may have an ice free September later this decade: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/piomas-april-2011.html.

Arctic ice minimum volume averaged 16500 km^3 between the late '70s to early 90's. We are now down to below 4500 km^3 and dropping fast.

The arctic ice acts as a buffer against global warming. The sea ice reflects 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space whereas open ocean will absorb about 90%. As the ice melts we could see accelerated global warming.

The good news is that the retreating ice may expose vast new oil resources.

It's perfectly reasonable to give research grants to investigate questions we don't know the answer to. On condition, of course, that the researcher knows what answer they'll find. (Paragraph 3).

Economists seem to be the only people who think that exponential growth can go on forever. Unfortunately physics has a small problem with that.
I've been reading some George Mobus recently. Depressing: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2011/05/will-earth-be-the-stage-for-a-cosmic-tragedy.html
Theoildrum.com is the best source for unbiased information about our energy situation I know. It's no less depressing.

I'm sorry, but Mann, and frankly Jones for that matter, simply aren't reliable sources.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/a_regional_approach_to_the_medieval_warm_period_and_the_little_ice_age.pdf

http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/05/ipcc-and-the-law-dome-graphic/

Look at the graph again in http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Ste2009a.pdf - you'll note the MWP clearly in the upper left of the graphs on page 154. Here it is with it pointed out: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0134849d3d3f970c-pi

Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick.

Granted. The hockey stick is used to support the CAGW theory, and the CAGW theory clearly rests on the hockey stick. The lesser claim of AGW can very well be true, but at such a low level that it makes no catastrophic impact on humanity or the globe.

Speaking of which, do you ascribe to CAGW or just AGW? I'm not sure if I've ever asked you that question straight out.

(And remember, higher levels of taxation lead to lower levels of economic growth, and thus lower revenue generated to the government.)

Only if you're to the right of or at the optimal point on the Laffer curve. The supply-siders kept saying the US was to the right of it, again and again, but two can play that game. In truth, the Laffer curve probably looks like this, a chaotic mess at any significant distance from 0% or 100% taxation.

I've been linking this quite a bit, but I'm pretty sure you just don't have a grasp how much spending we're doing and how fixing taxes alone cannot possibly be the answer.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-family-on-10-billion-a-day.html

Murphry's Law.

And the lower 25% pay hardly any overall taxes and the lower 50% pay 0 or negative federal income taxes.

The lower 15% are paid not to work, and the middle make enough in wages or handouts to survive having to pay for the generational debt passed to them.

The system is broken on both ends and is pressing on the middle. It needs to be fixed. I don't think you realize how much money is being taken in a year.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-family-on-10-billion-a-day.html kind of puts it into perspective.

Really? Apple was NOT the first popular PDA or Tablet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000

You ever heard of the newton?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
http://ouriel.typepad.com/myblog/2007/01/iphone_someone_.html

Apparently you simply don't understand how broke we are and how expensive it is to run the current budget of the government.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-family-on-10-billion-a-day.html

There is also a video of the text somewhere, but it puts into perspective how big and expensive the current government is.

Changing the tax code and slashing government is the way to fix it. But congress will never let that happen

In case any of you didn't get the joke.

"You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end..."
(Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now)

http://riot.typepad.com/the_lucretius_plan/2007/06/the_smell_of_vi.html

http://lavatoryreader.typepad.com/the-lavatory-reader/page/3/

People should get some facts before engaging in these black-and-white discussions.

Taxes on the top 0.01% have fallen dramatically to match those of the top 1%. Does that make sense? Probably not. Is it responsible for our economic problems or debt? Probably not.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/06/ny-times-who.html

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/

Another little fact of interest to this group is where all those "rich people" come from: Silicon Valley and New York. Without those counties, income inequality in the US hasn't increased significantly over the last few decades. Yes, the gap between the rich and the poor that is supposedly condemning us to third world status soon is just the result of the IT revolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/business/21scene.html

Frankly, most of the taxing or spending decisions currently debated in Congress are irrelevant and merely political posturing. Personally, I think they increase the taxes on the top 1% significantly, but it won't make any difference. But at least they can then move on to more important things.

you are right, you will go down in flames from the 'nuclear fanboys'. You deserve it.

We have much more pressing concerns to deal with than this inane bullshit:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/un-study-says-76-trillion-needs-to-be.html

and keep this in mind when you consider your excruciatingly stupid decision:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/20/us-germany-energy-idUSTRE75J42J20110620

And in case you are a 'climate change skeptic' I'd suggest you check the statisics on coal and oil deaths, in relation to nuclear:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html

What an unmitigated, colossal, inconceivably short-minded, pooch screw of a fuckup this flip-flopping is. It's guaranteed to cost lots of lives and billions of dollars.

And the chance of a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami is - in case you are wondering - is pretty much next to NONEXISTANT in Germany.

If you don't like the current brand of nuclear reactors, use that reputed german engineering skill and build LFTRs and IFRs to take their place, don't cower under the utter spinelessness of this decision.

Ed

Yes, power tends to corrupt and it is the nature of all government to become tyrannical. That is not reason to give up but to remain vigilant.

Capitalism is not merely good in theory. Even approximations of capitalism usually fare better than other systems. In reality, economic freedom strongly correlates with overall prosperity.

http://ideasmatter.typepad.com/ideas-matter/2011/06/economic-freedom.html
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2010/01/20/haitis_avoidable_death_toll/page/full/

Can your children tell the size of squares?:
    http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html
Which one is bigger? Now which one does the media talk the most about? Does that make any sense?

FWIW, even rooftop solar kills more people per terawatt-hour than nuclear. We know mdsolar has seen those stats, as he's been pointed to them many times. Yet he only posts stories about nuclear, while ignoring the coal and oil elephants. Why? Because he can profit more from overhyped fear than actual statistics. IOW, FUD in place of science. Regular readers have grown tired of this.

"Recall that only a week ago they used a SWAT team on defaulted student loan"

"Well, the idiot media reported it that way, but you heard it on the interoobs, so it must be true!!!!1!"

"More On Dept. Of Education Search Warrant Executed At Kenneth Wright's Stockton Home"

link

If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.

Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.

The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick.

Not quite true. People normally have quite long lives if there is adequate clean water and the facilities to dispose of waste properly (this translate to good hygiene), of course a good medical service does go a long way in extending life but the first two are more important. Actually the industrial revolution lowered the average human life expectancy because of pandemics, excessive pollution and unsafe drinking water, but there were profits to make and who cares about the unwashed masses when you live comfortably. Fortunately in society today especially in first world counties there is nothing like a vote looser when your own middle class which normally can be very powerful is suffering health issues.

Actually the graph does not quite tell the whole truth since if you have say 100 people on the planet living to say 5000 years and the rest of the population only living to say 25 years (the graph) then the average age is still 25 years. Ok that was extreme but say you have a civilization that that has clean water and good sanitation and the average life expectancy was say 80 years but the rest of the known world had a life expectancy of say 25 years then the overall live expectancy of the world would still be about 25 years.

If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.

Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.

The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick.

If you want to see a pessimist, check out George Mobus at http://questioneverything.typepad.com./

Facebook has had an IPv6 server running for some time. And Amazon support IPv6 for AWS, so I'd be surprised if they do not have at least an unpublicised test server running for their main site.

James Randi is a liar, pseudo-skeptic, and wanker who pretends to be a skeptic. Why anyone would trust a magician over a REAL scientist is beyond me.

If you think it's a question of trusting a person, you've clearly failed to understand what the discussion is about. I don't trust Randi any more than I trust anyone else; I trust the scientific method.

I'd say the handling of Project Alpha clearly shows that Randi has a better understanding of the scientific method than do many "real scientists", but it's irrelevant anyway since the real question is whether the methodology behind the JREF tests is sufficiently rigid to provide controls against frauds and charlatans while not being overbearing for any 'legitimate' applicants. And the answer is a unequivocal "yes"; the participants take an active role in designing the experiments, and agree to the terms prior to commencing the testing. Then, when they fail, they whine and moan about how unfair Randi is.

You can read all about the details here...
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm
and
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/12/the_challenge.html

You're joking, right? :) You couldn't possibly take those 'rebuttals' seriously. Nobody is THAT stupid.

James Randi is a liar, pseudo-skeptic, and wanker who pretends to be a skeptic. Why anyone would trust a magician over a REAL scientist is beyond me.

You can read all about the details here...
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm
and
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/12/the_challenge.html

Bad day for scientific research? No. It's set back of limited duration.
Is GM food "bad"? Dunno, jury's still out on that and it really depends which camp you want to listen to.
Is the licensing and patenting of GM crops bad? Oh hell yes. The goal of "crop lock-in" is real, demonstrated and rather scary IMO.
Would this be a good time to discuss licensing or policies to halt this type of corporate behavior? Definitely. In fact it's so long overdue we may have passed the tipping point five years ago.

For your consideration:
Haitian rice
Monsanto Lawsuit / canola
Monsanto Lawsuit / soybeans
Patented disease
University gene patents

I think that this imbroglio underscores the need to limit or do away with gene patents, as there is little chance that the men in white coats (or the ones in black suits that pay them) will stop their tinkering, and I'm not sure that it needs to stop.

While that fact is interesting and unexpected, it only applies until something goes wrong.

While everything is going right, nuclear power is quite safe.

While everything is going right, coal power still kills 24,000 people in the USA alone every year. And that's not even mentioning things like the 48 tons of mercury released into the air and water every year by perfectly functioning coal plants in which nothing has gone wrong.

Even Greenpeace only puts the death toll from Chernobyl at 200,000 from 1990 to 2004, less than two thirds of what American Coal accomplished over the same time, and they didn't even have an accident to blame. That's just business as usual.

So, yeah, go Coal. Let's put an end to those dangerous nuclear plants and return to safe, clean power.

I agree with you on the premise that quantum effects can't be automatically ruled out in a final (or even partial) explanation for brain function and consciousness. But a direct comparison between neuron count and transistor count makes no sense. The devil is in the details, and there is a lot of power in the architecture of (or lack thereof) the brain. The brain is massively connected and parallel, and we have nothing that comes close to the architecture of the brain. In other words, there is a lot to deal with before we even get to the quantum side of things.

Check out work on the connectome (a mapping of connections of neurons in the brain): Human Connectome Project

And check out this 3 dimensional cross section of actual neurons. It's the cube in the top center of the picture. The complexity of connections between even just a few neurons is immense. Each color is a different neuron: brain slice. Now scale that up to 100 billion, and make sense of it....

Point is, more anti-Obama crap, same as the anti-Bush crap but from another direction.

Originally from here - http://socyberty.com/issues/white-house-insider-obama-hesitated-panetta-issued-order-to-kill-osama-bin-laden/4/

Then here - http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/skulking-towards-bin-laden-obama-overridden-by-military-and-intel-officials-in-takeout-of-obl.html

It's been bouncing around since at least the 4th of May - http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105040021 and the original author is known to make up stories for pageviews in the past.

http://ulster-man.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105040021

Do you have those scripts posted anywhere? Sounds like it would be useful to have with the AT&T caps starting

Why not, right? http://jeff55.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/tracking-bandwidth-usage-on-att-uverse.html

I do believe that stuffed with Chorizo and respectfully consigned to air burial is the corpse disposal method you're looking for. I'm all for the spirit of your post, but it would be a waste of good bacon.

Your sarcasm is ill deserved.

Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.

Meanwhile, all other forms of cost-effective power generation are much more dangerous, killing far more people than nuclear technology, even including nuclear bombs! For example, the worst dam failure of all time, the Banqiao Dam killed 171K people, about the same number that were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people. For comparison, that's about 0.5% of the deaths attributed to coal mining per year. The United States coal mining industry alone has about the same number of deaths per year as the total deaths due to nuclear power, ever. That number by the way is 40 people. That's like... 3 per decade.

Also, people generally forget that accidents aren't the only source of deaths related to power generation. The United States has gone to war multiple times to protect their interests in oil, leading to several hundred thousand more deaths.

For some reason, people are terrified of the safest form of power generation that is in common use, but have no problem with the US military using Uranium bullets to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.

Actions in a market with an already established leader and have to compete on merits are much different from greenfield markets where you want to be the market leader.

Yes, I do like Amazon more then my comment implies, but I am highly skeptical about how DRM and ebooks will play out. By the time Amazon started selling DRM-free mp3s, it was already certain that that was the only winning strategy. Not so yet with DRM ebooks.

I don't think Amazon is evil, but then again I don't think Microsoft is (or was) evil. They are both just trying to do their best to maximize their market share and stock price, which is the legal obligation of a publicly traded company.

No matter your feelings on the issue, you must read Seth Godin's post about market forces:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/04/the-free-market.html

DO NOT look at the Star newspaper it's like looking at the national inquirer....

the people who broke the news where UK channel 4

see this link for the story

http://www.channel4.com/news/britains-nuclear-subs-potentially-vulnerable-to-accidents

the document seems flattened but is here
http://robedwards.typepad.com/files/declassified-report-to-mod-defence-board.pdf/a

anyone actually able to copy and paste from it ?

why does the MOD use microsoft word for these type of things is beyond me...

regards

John Jones

p.s. do you think china et. al. have the same problems...

+ this.

If you've ever read the original (it's free on Gutenberg, I recommend it - or just go follow Dracula Blogged in realtime), it reads very much like a Michael Crichton thriller. The heroes are a bunch of geeks (secretary, doctor, real estate agent) who use turn-of-the-20th-century high-tech devices like Edison dictaphones to collate information and solve the puzzle. In fact, information (knowledge vs superstition) is one of the big themes of the book. Mina Harker's l33t secretarial skills plus the heroes reverse-engineering her telepathic connection to Dracula are what crack the mystery.

It's very proto-cyberpunk, really, and if someone were to do it properly today, it would need to preserve that high-tech flavour, instead of the (enngh) retro-Gothic Victorian psychosexual mess that Francis Ford Coppola gave us.

Wheaton has a pretty active blog in the link below:
WWdN: In Exile
He posts a lot about role-playing games and has become a spokesman for the hobby.

Wind and solar, while definitely on the rise, will never completely replace base load power generation such as nuclear plants. Nuclear power plants can only be satisfactorily replaced by other base power sources such as coal-fired or natural gas-fired. Of the mentioned, nuclear is by far the cleanest and safest method of generating power.

I would like to repeat that statement, maybe it does penetrate the thick skull of ignorant people: Nuclear is the cleanest and safest base-load power generation by a HUGE margin.

Wind and solar, while definitely on the rise, will never completely replace base load power generation such as nuclear plants. Nuclear power plants can only be satisfactorily replaced by other base power sources such as coal-fired or natural gas-fired. Of the mentioned, nuclear is by far the cleanest and safest method of generating power.

I would like to repeat that statement, maybe it does penetrate the thick skull of ignorant people: Nuclear is the cleanest and safest base-load power generation by a HUGE margin.

Here's a recipe if you want to try it yourself

By the way Google the word "diffraction limit" some time, and try and figure out a fancy way around that one

Metamaterials, superlenses ...?

Laffer Curve by OECD

Do you have any particular reason for thinking education has gone downhill? Judging by SAT scores, average SAT math scores have gone up a bit while verbal skills have gone down somewhat over the last 40 years. That's actually good, considering a larger percentage of all students take the SAT than 40 years ago, bringing down the average score.

somebody posted this in a previous story, but since ya asked...
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html

Coal releases more radiation in an average year then a nuke plant, releases more small particulate matter that causes lung disease, releases CO2 that correlates with global warming, and has killed far more more miners then have ever been killed by all nuclear power incidents combined.

Here's Seth Godin's simple post of the number of deaths per terrawatt hour of different generating technology:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html

I work in computer security, and do risk assessment for a living, so I recognize the biases on this issue as similar to those in my day job. Coal related deaths are slow and silent(usually, though think of the number of mining related incidents you've heard of in the past year), nuke plant accidents are big, noisy, and unusual. Our biases are to be afraid of big noisy unusual things like nuke plants and terrorists, while ignoring the obvious things that are actually likely to kill us like auto accidents, heart disease, and to a much smaller extent, coal generation.

I live about 11 miles from a nuke plant, which happens to be the largest spent fuel holding facility in the nation. I bought this house knowing that, and and if there was a coal plant that far away I probably wouldn't have bought this house.

I'm totally in favor of them building 2 more nuke plants close to me as is planned. I'm also in favor of review of the safety systems of the older plants. Nuclear safety designes have gotten much better than they were in the 80s when construction stopped.

That's the trouble. Nuclear plants are held to a massively high standard of "safe" already.

Did you know, for example, that Coal kills 4,000 (not a typo) more people per wattHour than Nuclear does? But its a slow, boring kind of killed, like the 40,000+ who die every year in automobile accidents in the US alone, not the fun exciting kind of killed that you get every couple of years when an airliner crashes and kills 200 folk halfway around the globe, making national news.

To have a meaningful discussion you need to compare nuclear safety to other power-generation mechanisms (more people fall off roofs installing solar panels and die every year than have been killed by nuclear power generation disasters). And then scale them to account for the power generated. Once you do so, you realize just how unsafe many of the alternatives actually are.

The interesting thing is to follow up your numbers (you don't give a citation and nor does this seth guy). Looking at them, we see that he includes a low figure for Chernobyl deaths (4000) and even then discounts those saying "cause and effect becomes more tenuous" whilst completely failing to take into account other studies. Now, as this article points out it's incredibly hard to work out which numbers are correct, but even the WHO which put out the 4000 death number has since published a correction which says that there have been more than 9000 deaths. Numbers of deaths go up to a million in other studies of varied credibility.

My fundamental conclusion has to be that we have yet another nuclear safety "expert" who's telling us that it's safe, but turns out to have no clue what he's talking about. Numbers of deaths go up to a million, and studies like that seem to be deeply dubious too, but I'm really not going to accept these numbers without a big bit more clarity. The worst thing about this is the open admission by the IAEA that "the total of 4,000 deaths was highlighted to counter much higher figures" - in other words they set out to manipulate perception.

Going on from there; I agree with your point about visible public death being more worrying than hidden death. If the death rate in planes was anything like the rate in cars they would be banned. However, there's another bias factor in here. The small nuclear incidents are not really so worrying. What is worrying is outlier major events. We seem to have come close to a reactor melt down; the reactor containment failed but still we have been lucky. If cooling had failed for longer what might have happened? I see lots of assurances that nothing. These come from the same people who tell us that exposure to beta decay and gamma rays is the same as exposure to UV light (see recent articles in the Register)