Slashdot Mirror
The Perfect Plate for the Nuclear Family Car
In what must be a dream come true for some, Nevada has approved a License Plate commemorating the Test Site and the connections Nevada enjoys with Nuclear weapons in the United States. The Associated Press article on the subject notes that a lot of people are up in arms about the new design, as Nevada is embroiled in controversy over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. The license features an atom. a mushroom cloud as the background and the equation E=mc2 on the plate.
I was unable to find a picture of the plate on the web (I saw it in my morning paper). I'm sure a picture must be on the web somewhere. I'll leave it to slashdotters to suggest the best personalized lettering for the plate. My entry: DUKNCVR?
CNN has one here.
Shh.
To commemorate this on a license plate is very strange.
Wow, must be a slow news day on the ole /. But hey I'll bite anyway. I'm not surprised that members of the general public are all up in arms about it. My neighbor across the street works for NASA and he's a scientist working on the idea of nuclear propulsion in space. Their real task now is figuring out how to safely and efficiently get such an enormous reactor into space. Anyway his license plate is an MIT plate (my state has plates for almost any university that has an alumni association that can rustle up however many signatures you need) customized as "SPCNUKE" He's always getting honked at, cut off, sworn at and lectured by the obligatory mother with three kids in the grocery store parking lot. Seems everyone thinks that his project is really about one of two things. 1) How to get nuclear weapons into space. Or 2) Failing that, how to dump all our nuclear waste into outerspace.
I've asked if he's ever considered changing the plate and he said no, he kind of likes the reactions he gets from people. (Lack of attention in grade school, perhaps?)
Hey....I always knew there was something just a little bit 'odd' about those folks...
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
When I see one of these plates crusing down the road I probably won't give it a second look, it's just too bad people can't see the larger issue (or more often, the lack of one) sometimes.
(See Nevada License Plates)
On the other hand, you'd have to get the Legislature's approval...
You know, the same weapon you claim has left our country on the edge of destruction is also responsible for keeping our country from destruction in those same 50 years. I very much like my life here in the US and whether you like it or not, nuclear weapons have played a big role in making sure I have that life to enjoy.
Let's see, off the top of my head:
- New Hampshire - Live Free or Die. Luckily this resonates strongly
on both sides of the aisle.
- District of Colubmia - Taxation without Representation. Makes a point, does so with historical relevance, yet the possibility of a DC vote in congress is hated and despised by the majority of congress - who are forced to view it every day
:-)
Excising the Manhattan Project and the Cold War from history is something I'm sure that a certain fraction of the world would like to do. But face it, millions of Japanase civilians and probably a million US serviceman would've died if the conventional war had continued. If Nevada wants to take pride in this, it's fine by me.Its amusing that people are opposed to nuclear waste in outer space...after all, the mass of all nuclear waste in the sun is probably greater than the mass of everything on earth. For that matter, the mass of radioactive materials on earth is probably orders of magnitude greater than all the radioactive materials mined/produced/enhanced by human beings.
Only idiots are fundamentally morally opposed to radioactive material or its production. The only rational basis on which to oppose it is safety. Not that this is a trivial basis =)
I found this page at Nevada's DMV sites. Doesn't have the nuke one, but it has others:
c . icenseplates.ap/story.nevada.license.ap.jpg
http://nevadadmv.state.nv.us/platesmain.htm
Someone else posted the new nuke one:
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2002/ALLPOLITICS/04/26/atomi
The license plate is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder for many people who in the words of one former governor "fear the government in Washington DC more than the one in Moscow." Many people see this as a symbol of the way they have been abused and is not a symbol of pride in any sense!
Believe nothing -- Buddha
Mushroom cloud license plate to be tested
they're as big a part of NV history as big ass bombs
It's not even so much the storage of nuclear waste in the Yucca mountain are that annoys many - but rather the transportation of the material across the U.S.
The current proposals to move said waste involve using barges across many waterways including the Great Lakes.
Not only that, but a new transportation would be starting every four hours, using trucks that haven't even finished the design stage yet, designed each to move at only an average of 20-30 miles an hour, carrying 75 or 125 tons at a time
Not that storing the material in one central area isn't a good idea - but moving it in this manner may be more dangerous than anything we've ever encountered with nuclear material - especially the responsibility is handed over to the private sector.
Ryan Fenton
One could probably make a case that gasoline-powered automobiles have had much more devastating negative effects on the world than nuclear weapons and nuclear energy put together: pollution, global warming, urban decay, and so on. If you buy that argument, then it's denigrating to nuclear testing to depict it on an auto license plate.
I'm a huge licene plate fan...here in Ohio...I've assisted with several license plate projects.
/. crowd, I submit an article, written last year, in which I half seriously proposed another plate for the great state of Ohio. Any Ohioans out there wishing to help me...please send me an email.
For the amusement of the
___________________
Every time I see a bumper sticker or a t-shirt that says, "Don't mess with Texas" I find myself snickering. It's not that I do not like Texans, on the contrary, I've met a bunch of them, and they are quite an independent lot. (A Texan I know, in protest of his local school taxes, intends to pay his property tax in person with 63,000 nickels. It's that type of ballsy bravado that does Texas, and America for that matter, proud.) Regrettably, most Texans these days are just as milquetoasty as people from any other state.
But Texans do make a good marketing campaign. The Alamo has become a fantastic tourist trap in spite of being a horrific military failure. We Ohioans have much to learn about marketing our own state.
A great example of this is our license plates. Finally, with the introduction of the new Bicentennial Plate on October 1, we can actually put a halfway nice looking license plate on our cars. However, it is still encumbered by the "Birthplace of Aviation" slogan. The problem is, another state claims to be the birthplace of aviation, and they're doing a better job marketing it. (The North Carolina plate is a more elegant salute to the Wright Brothers than our half-ass'd slogan.) Unfortunately, the slogan on the plates is state law, and will require action by the state legislature to change (and that is akin to an act of God.)
Perhaps we should go into our history books and find something of consequence to feature on a special plate--something which encapsulates Ohio, its people and its history. You wouldn't need to look far, because Lancaster's own Gen. William T. Sherman blessed Ohio history with the type of achievement over which other states regularly drool.
In November 1864, he burned Atlanta down.
In commemoration of this event, work should begin immediately on a special license plate devoted to this incident in history.
First, we must find an appropriate tagline and graphic. If we choose a graphic that's, say, a little building burning, then a good tagline may be "Sherman burning Atlanta --Nov. 1864." I guess the plate could be devoted to General Sherman himself, with a little picture of him and the tagline "Gen. Sherman--the man who burned down Atlanta."
I am however much more in love with a tagline saying, "Don't mess with Ohio or we'll burn down Atlanta...again." (Consider the new tagline a swipe not at Georgia, but at Texas--I mean, what have they ever burned down?) I think that nicely summarizes this feat in Ohio history, in addition to describing the feistiness that Ohioans should be known for. (Admittedly burning Atlanta down today would require a lot of work--its metropolitan area now extends into Tennessee and Florida.)
There is precedence for acridity on license plates. New Hampshire started it all with "Live Free or Die"--homage to our Revolutionary roots. Washington DC's new plates are emblazoned with "No Taxation without Representation"--another commemoration of America's Revolutionary history, not to mention the District's unique political situation. Even "Birthplace of Aviation" is a passive-aggressive swipe at North Carolina. Not all Ohioans may wish to have the Sherman plate; some may wish to drive south of Covington, Kentucky. But for those who do, I don't see why "Don't mess with Ohio or we'll burn down Atlanta...again" cannot be issued to the proud Ohioan interested in memorializing our state, and our nation's, history.
To the critics who say that license plates are meant only for vehicle identification purposes, my response is that special plates are doing an adequate job identifying vehicles. However, they are a medium for so much more. Pennsylvania's ex-Governor Tom Ridge said that license plates are moving billboards for a state. Ohio must learn to leverage this advertising space in its favor in order to establish a unique state identity. The new Bicentennial plate is a start.
A petition must be circulated to collect 1000 names, addresses and current plate numbers of individuals willing to buy the plate when it is introduced. Contact me if you're interested in helping get the petition started.
Here in Michigan the license plate used to say "Winter Wonderland". A constant reminder as to how our weather sucks. To me this would be like Florida having a plate that said "Hurricane Target"
http://www.kubuntu.org/