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Soaring, Cryptography, and Nuclear Weapons
Martin Hellman sends in a pointer to his essay that uses analogies from cryptography and the sport of soaring in an attempt to draw people in to thinking about the risks of nuclear weapons. Quoting: "... I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home." Hellman is best known as co-inventor (with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, and has worked for over twenty-five years to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He is also a glider pilot with over 2,600 logged hours. Hellman adds, "Readers needing a break can go to some photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains taken from my glider."
The thing is, if you all don't have nuclear weapons, and I covertly do, I win.
This is my sig.
"...I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home."
Yeah...I would love to see how he produced that "risk analysis" statement. I guess, since nuclear reactors are virtually not dangerous at all with todays technology, it can be said that something that is only a little dangerous (relying on nuclear weapons for security, which has worked for almost 60 years) can be a thousand times as dangerous, because 1000 * 0 = 0.
pro-israel or anti-israel
pro-usa or anti-usa
you should be against iranian proliferation
there's this weird alien line of thought out there that goes like this: "if the usa has nukes, why shouldn't iran?"
what that thought represents is tribal nationalistic thinking trumping common sense
common sense holds that NO ONE should have nukes. so proliferation is bad, for whomever. the most logical approach to iranian proliferation then is this: "i am against iran having nukes, AND i am against the usa having nukes"
but this whole "i support iran having nukes, to balance out the usa" is a level of stupidity beneath respect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them; if your possession of them is truly "covert," you don't win a damn thing. Even Israel's nuclear program was an open secret for years because it allowed them to gain the effects of deterrence without openly proclaiming that they had a nuclear arsenal. But nobody seriously believed they didn't have one.
My understanding is that the ridiculously thick containment structure around the TMI reactor (the lack of which is one of Chernobyl's unforgivable flaws) would have saved the day anyway. And things have improved since then, my point was merely that it wasn't bad even to begin with.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's funny, nuclear plants don't even make my list. On my list are things like planes, train stations, embassies and other government buildings, cafes, malls, and busses.
While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Do you recall that TMI happened BEFORE Chernobyl, and sparked a quite thorough redesign of reactors to make them safer, and GenIV reactors, if we ever get around to building them, would be safer yet?
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
First, the stuff is safer than coal - a lot of the pollution from coal actually ends up in the environment. Besides that, I(and many other nuclear proponents) figure we'll be going after that high level waste in less than a hundred years to use it as fuel again. Other options include breeder reactors and reprocessing using modern methods to reduce the amount of waste, and the lifespan of the waste, substantially.
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so? I don't think that is factored into the cost of electricity from a nuclear plant, is it?
How long until the Mercury released by Coal plants exits out of the environment? How long until the CO2 is sequestered again?
And yes - it is factored in. The federal government told the nuclear power plant operators: You WILL pay us $X per megawatt/hour produced. We WILL dispose of the waste. There's lawsuits going on about that one.
I don't read AC A human right
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
One of the brightest moments for McCain in the debates (for me obviously) was when he said he supported nuclear fuel reprocessing. Obama isn't against nuclear in principle; I hope he will be open to the idea of reprocessing instead of letting the red herring issue of nuclear proliferation that caused Carter (a nuclear physicist!) to ban breeder reactors.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
That's because of tremendous ignorance about even the basics of radiation, such as the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity. And that while high levels of radiation are of course very bad, something with a half life of ten thousand years isn't necessarily more poisonous than something that isn't radioactive at all. Oh and of course there's the general fear-mongering of all things radioactive since the dawn of the atomic age, perpetuated by Hollywood myths where even in the distant future any nuclear reactor is a single leaky coolant pipe away from nuclear detonation.
Whereas inhaling the byproducts of coal power plants has been an American tradition for over a century. So nobody thinks about how bad it really is.
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