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Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste
Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"
Because they arn't specialists. Postmodernist thought is to blame here. Everyone's little personal truths doesn't equate to reality. Especially when it's something as important as nuclear waste.
Maybe it's because women like Florrie Capp are more responsible than their mates.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How about ones that are qualified to properly dispose of nuclear waste. Presumably, leading engineers and scientists. You know, the ones that could potentially design a place to put the waste into, where by the local envrioment takes as small of an impact as possible. I don't think politicians and random interest groups typically qualify for this task.
Burn Hollywood Burn
What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?
Engineers.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Oh wait a minute, there isn't any!
http://www.gibby.net.au
Lets face it, it's a political issue, not an ecological one. They'd put it in juice boxes if it was cheap and nobody cared.
Steve Jobs, obviously.
Instead of exaggeration by picking out one institute which has done one unusual thing for publicity (which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers) they could have simply headed it "1700 forms distributed to broad cross-section of community seeking public input", but that would probably not pique interest, would it?
Consider the source, mate.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but please. The public is the LAST group you want involved with decisions like this. The vast majority of people have not studied nuclear systems or the waste involved, and should probably not have a say in it. Sure the government's job is to do the will of the people, but the will of the people who don't know anything about the topic at hand should be to defer to those who do.
No it isn't. Bush hasn't even pursued this in public. The last time I even saw this issue in print was while Clinton was still president. If the current party in control of the House, Senate and Presidency want to attach it to an energy bill and get it signed into law there's probably not much stopping them.
Pegging Yucca Mountain to anything Bush has pursued lately is absurd.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Science policy via opinion poll. Yea, just ask Kansas how well that works.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
You know how Nuclear Waste Disposal works...
You can ask the public before hand or watch them bring your plans down later for not asking them.
I grew up in Midland, Michigan, where a battle raged for years to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant. Everyone was sold on it and fine with the plans of Consumers Power and Dow Chemical Company, but the woman at the end of the street, Rosemary Sinclair, a promiment local attorney fought it like a wildcat, bring in the Lone Tree Council, Myron Cherry (from Chicago) etc and fighting until the cost burden broke the back of Consumers.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Clearly they have the wrong people making the decisions. The obvious answer is to reprocess the fuel and pull out the Plutonium which can then be combined with uranium to make mox and stuffed back into reactors where it can be burned.
If the waste is from light water pressurized reactors then the next best thing is to ship it to Canada where we have Candu reactors and we'll burn it for them. Waste from light water reactors is still more radioactive than what the Candu system is designed to run on (natural uranium - 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238) So a Candu can make very good use of it. But it should be reprocessed to remove some of the undesirables.
We need about 75 BIG 1GWe Candu's to support Tar Sands operations but it seems only Total SA has caught on. Why waste 25% or more of the carbon mined producing CO+CO2 as a byproduct of generating the Hydrogen we are desperatly short of when you can just electrolize water? The difference is that by 2015 Tar Sands will be ramping up to about 3.3 million Barrels of Synthetic crude per day. With Nuclear assitance that can be closer to 5 million. By 2015 I expect the world will be in a HUGE energy crisis because I expect world oil production to peak by 2007 and then go into decline. If we have 8 years decline of 3% per year that is a loss of about 20 million barrles per day of world production. (World production is about 82 million barrels per day. USA consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. China is about 7 million and India about 2.5 million barrels per day. Yet I see the press blames China and India for high oil demand and hense high oil prices. Thats the press for you - just a source of distortion.)
If anyone things the oil crisis of the 70's was bad I can say right now that is was a picnic compared to what is comming!
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
The wisdom of this will be very clear long before 2014. By then the short sightness will be felt every summer when the electricty is out and also every winter when the heating oil is short.
IFR technology is proven and it burns all actinides leaving only short lived waste which has industrial uses such as gamma sources and atomic batteries.
In short - none of the so called waste is really waste. It is actually very valuable if used intelligently.
Furthermore it can solve our energy needs for at least 100's if not 1000's of years.
The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say.
Could be worse: Italy recently restored an electoral method that an overwhelming majority of people had voted to get rid of, back in 92: so we have three kind of governments, UK that asks people about their opinion, USA that ignores em, Italia that does the exact opposite of what people wanted.
But did anybody ask the people before going to war in Iraq in any of the three "democracies"?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
If they're asking non-technical people to make technical judgements, then it's daft.
But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Perhaps you mean page 3
Nice weather for penguins...
Sort of ironic. In the backwoods of both Canada and Texas, it is illegal to call yourself, "engineer," without a MEng, PEng, CEng or equivalent. Yet, standing in the centre of London, the only requirement for calling oneself and engineer is a bent spanner and a greasy rag.
WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in Carlsbad, New Mexico was entirely completed during the Clinton era.
It *also* had the same sort of sensationalistic criticism, as people are now attributing only to Bush.
Every administration that tries to do anything about getting rid of nuclear waste is going to hit resistence by the public, who are going to detest whoever is in charge, whether they ask them nicely or not.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
There is plenty of oil to last for a good while. I suggest a little more research. The tar sands themselves will last a good while and plenty left to drill before it hits the peak.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for developing new energy sources, just not into the scare-mongering "peak oil" crap that isn't close in the near(50 to 100 years) future.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
Of course. We all have sufficient time and money to get bacchalaureats in physics and geology. Not to mention history, political science, economics, sociology, criminology....
So, shall we institute a government in which everyone who's studied a particular topic can vote on the relevant issues?
Dump enough of it into an enclosed space and it gets hot enough to melt itself, and other rocks. Nuclear waste is heavy too. so it should be possible to do as the GP post said, and just let the nuclear waste melt itself a hole the rest of the way.
The biggest problem with your idea though is that we haven't figured out how to get anything that deep yet - and there have been attempts, samples would be interesting.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Perhaps one more thing to nit-pick: the USA is a republic, not a democracy (as in, the people get to have their say by proxy, not by direct voice). The country's founders thought direct democracy was a horrible idea (i.e. mob rule). That's why the President of the US was never to be elected through popular vote (and still isn't). The people don't need to be consulted because the idea is that they elected voices for themselves. If they don't like those voices, then they don't have to support them the next time elections come around. Unlike some other countries, there is no federal referendum in the US.
Yep. Bush and Iraq are bad, and it's old news. But do you remember the times when Bush and Iraq where all good at least only in the US? When all the media was full of articles pointing out how good all this is going to be? How thos was so off back then? How all the important topics where drained by it?
Now, the Bush administration got what it wanted, speaking the war. But they also got more than they wanted, speaking still the war and no sign of it stopping anytime soon. How long is Israel bantering with the Palestines already, and still no real sign of it ever stopping? Expect a similar timescale in Iraq, just that it will be worse. Oh...and the other thing they got more is the backlash of the people and the media. The Bush Administration will be remembered for what he did, will become the synonym for what he did in pretty much the same way as Hitler became it. And figure, Hitler is still the standard example of so many bad things. If you pissed with those references already today...imagin how pissed you will be in 60 years when those referneces still will be made, just as Hitler references are still made today!
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.
I know all you have said, and am re-assured.
In no derogatory way of this manner, You should know how statistics come to fruition and collected for compilation and presentment. None of the information presented was refuted by you -- it contained more measurements as percentile. If someone was watching a televesion monitor 24 hours a day and was later diagnosed with all kinds of disorders in their flesh, they would have prepared near same as I posted above, yet there are guinea pigs for the statistics and they were the people sent in Iraq. People just don't get these illnesses walking around in a desert. If it was a biased study, criticizing the known lesser contaniments (DU), with disregard to the possibility of the misplaced unknown that was among the alleged devices accused of that Iraq dictator, then I would expect it to have flaws. They're only pointing at the DU because that's all they can figure, based on rules of evidence. You can't point at the unknown and not laugh; any many should know that when I say "it came...from...the DEEP" then it is a matter unmeasurable and questionable.
I could as easily agree with your abatement as from the "statistics" I appear to have quoted. Among the alleged complications "Dr. Rokke" appears to be suffering from, ALL are internal but skin postules and the fibromyalgia. As anyone having taken Chemotherapy, we would expect "Dr. Rokke" to lose all or most of his hair, yet an photograph at a biased Rally against DU and War and all that unjoy is intended for the confident posing and public-relations that they appear to want. It's almost as though if there was any DU, then that is the cause for mutating their DNA and activate that "protester gene". The quoted statistics were relevant about "Dr. Rokke", but his fellow 30 or so dead fellow assistants are somewhat a side issue of inclusion; I would like to know what that was about -- old age, same exposure, or the DEEP. That's too high a risk for such greatly educted people to die -- they are the bread and butter of USA. And to look at that picture of "Dr. Rokke", I am reminded that his flesh is old. I'm not qualified to make any excuses as to why he thinks all his complications didn't come from a job in Iraq with deplorable working conditions. Does he collect unemployment, or -- that could be irrelevant
He can't breathe well, has fatigue, his joints and muscles hurt, acne-like blemishes on his skin (perhaps every once in a while); he is either going through another dose of puberty or he came in contract with somthing from the DEEEEEP. From that website, the Force (of their agenda/bias) is strong in that one. As far as I know, statistics are from the DEEP if they are not in affidavit form and sworn to be "true, complete, correct, not misleading, and issued in unlimited commercial liability."
You put forth some good points. It's too bad that moderators are too quick to netralize my post with a wasted mod-point and ignore yours. A rebutted post should not be moderated down, but the rebuttals below it should be moderated above it.
without prejudice