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Fukushima's Fallout Worse Than Thought
gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored in a pool at unit 4 released a significant amount of cesium-137, a long-lived contaminant that has spread across the countryside. It also says that some Xenon-133 may have been released early on in the accident, suggesting that the plant was already damaged before it was hit by a tsunami. Overall, it estimates that Fukushima released about twice as much cesium-137 as the government claims and half as much as Chernobyl."
See, once again we see proof of what happens when government gets in the way with all their environmental regulations, regulations, inspections, etc. If this company had just been left to the free market, clearly they would have made a better effort to maintain their reactors and improve safety features. Once we abolish the EPA, NRC, Dept. of Energy, etc. we won't have to worry about something like this happening in the U.S.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But it's Caesium, not Cesium.
nuclear plant operators downplaying, obscuring, lying etc. I am genuinely shocked!1!!
Wow, I knew that Japanese tends to leave a lot of words out compared to English (Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese is an accessible introduction to this tendency), but I had no idea that it extended to leaving out the verb.
*Implying that regulations prevented the disaster.
We have to keep doing what we are doing, or EVERYONE WILL DIE!!!!@!@!11
Truth is, if regulations had not been so severe, they would have been able to move that spent fuel to a safer location, or, God forbid, reuse it in a breeder reactor to generate energy while disposing of the long term radioactive waste. Instead, extremely heavy regulations made the situation WORSE because they forced the plant to store spent fuel in an insanely dangerous manner--they simply couldn't afford the cost of complying with disposal regulations.
Exactly. Better to have a company lie to us than the government since nobody trusts companies, but too many people trust the government way to fully.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
thats rather significant http://xkcd.com/radiation/
You raise an interesting point. So who exactly are you supposed to trust to provide you with accurate information? I suppose you could go and do it yourself, but then I would have to trust you. And I don't. This means I have to do it myself, also I have to do everything else in the world otherwise it's untrustworthy. That means you're going to have to trust me. Too bad for you.
All this sounds rather impractical. How about we set up groups of people we trust to this for us. Maybe be we voted for or something. A bit like a government or watchdog or something.
But it's Caesium, not Cesium.
No, it's neither Caesium not Cesium, it's Cæsium :-P
Morituri te salutant!
You a regulation of some sort that gives the companies incentive to create safer nuclear power station. From a purely profit perspective, the chance for a big accident are too small to warrant good safety. You need at least something to make that risk tangible enough so that companies automatically choose safer designs.
It's true that the field is over-regulated, or more accurately - that the wrong regulations are in place. There are strict specific rules on reactor safety - some of them might improve safety, some of them are nonsensical, and most of them are not based on scientific evidence or reason. There's nothing to give an incentive for the creation of new safer designs, the use of Thorium reactors, and there's nothing to give an incentive to shut down century-old plants like Fukushima Daiichi that are totally unsafe. Another negative consequence of the current rules it that the construction of a nuclear power plant is too expensive.
So, yes, at a first glance it does seem that if the government got out of the way, things would be much better, in fact it might be so, but that doesn't mean that some regulation isn't beneficial or even required. And yeah, I don't see why I should trust companies driven by increasing their profits should be trusted more than the government. The government is fucking it all up, remove the government, and the companies will start fucking it all up. So, instead of blanket statements calling for less regulation, let's voice our opinion on how the regulation should change.
I, for one, want my regulatory organs to use science when rewarding and penalizing installations for their environmental impacts.
So in spite of early claims to the contrary, it is on the same order of magnitude as Chernobyl after all. Based on the new data, I wonder how large of an area around the facility needs to be abandoned, and for how long...
The problem with the free market is it's driven by money.
The problem with government officials is they're driven by money.
This comes as no surprise. Everything they released to the press showed they were covering up their failures instead of fixing them. It was so obvious even a child could have told us.
I'm going to be 100km away from that plant next year with my whole family. If, over the course of the few weeks holiday I become your radioactive giant IT guy / overlord. I expect you all to welcome me.
I'm not too sure what I'll do with all your base; but thems will belongs to us.
I'll also use my power to right wrongs.
The problem with the free market is it's driven by money.
The problem with government officials is they're driven by money.
The bigger problem with government is that they can just print more money. In the free market, you have to beg, borrow and steal for money. In government, you only have to do that to win an election.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Actually, in a free market world it's pretty easy: If a company causes more damage than it can pay back, all of its officers and employees are enslaved until they earn enough money to pay back the damages. We could even chain the doors shut to keep them from running away.
Oh wait, they wanted big mommy government to save them by allowing them to just walk away from their debts and declare the area a superfund site so everyone else can pay to fix their shit when they screw up something bigger than they are? Tough tits.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Because packing up and shipping radioactive material is far cheaper then having it sit in a pool of water next to where it was extracted right? Companies always do the correct and far more expensive thing.
I dont know about japan, but in the US regulators make them keep the fuel because congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
You have the power to change government.
How do you change a company that you're not directly doing business with, like a nuclear power company? I don't buy anything from Goldman Sachs, so how do I affect them?
The market model is incomplete.
You are welcome on my lawn.
yup, just like every problem, this one only has two dimensions based on on prevailing political ideology. keep it up, i think you're helping.
More importantly, does Japan have wolves?
You can't have a post-apocalyptic naturist utopia without radioactive wolves.
And cute little radioactive wolf puppies.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What a crap. The blind confidence on that godess called 'free market' is driving USA to the pit.
Mankind will always have herdish behavior and ultimately free market fails to prevent common people to avoid dangerous situations. What to say about big companies.
Government control agencies, if not highly bribed, are the only means to enforce some minimum standards of security to competitive markets like energy, where companies will always happily embrace some degree of risk for the profit's sake.
Once you abolish that said agencies you will have wild competition, corporate secrecy with no obligation to report any issues to the public.
You won't even know what is gonna hit you.
In a free marked the "company" will blackmail and exthort its costumers to avoid something like that happening.
In a free marked under strict goverment control, something like what you suggest might happen, if the court system works.
I'm sorry, you were saying?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ina free market world, without governemental intervention (what you call mommy), those damage caused by the company are considered *externalities* and actually do not influence their bottom line, neither would they really be forced to repay for them. Example abound of company getting their profit, then leaving an horror clean up, or if sued and bankrupted, anyway never paying back for clean up. So yeah I find it funny when people praise the free market as solution for pollution (be it radioactive or others). Pollution is an externalities in the case of free market.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have read reports about child labour during the industrial revolution in the area my father came from (the north-east of the Netherlands), before it was abolished. Twelve hour working days, seven days a week, of hard, dangerous work for kids who should be at school, in factories run by people who said they were giving kids enough time to play by giving them one or two 15 minute breaks per day. When I was a kid in the 1960s factories in the area still dumped their waste in nearby canals, one of which ran in front of my grandmother's house. It was covered with a thick, dirty-white layer of foam which smelled like a kitchen sink that hasn't been cleaned for months. My father remembered how boys would set the canal on fire when he was young.
These things weren't stopped by market forces. These things were stopped by goverment regulations, but not until inspections became effective. You just have to look outside of the western world, at the oil mess in the Niger delta, the way batteries and ship wrecks are processed in India, to understand that without a stable goverment and regulations that are being enforced conditions similar to those during the industrial revolution still occur. Western companies behave reasonably well in western countries because they have to.
If you abolish regulations and inspections what you get is not responsible corporations, you get a world where greed is far more important than your salary, your working conditions, your kids' schooling. I don't believe for a moment the west is immune to falling back. It's human nature.
I can't tell whether the OP is joking or not.
Not sure about Japan, but in the US, the government doesn't print our money, the Fed does. Two sides of the same coin anyway.
Probably yes it is cheaper, after you apply the risk factor to the potential costs of a disaster. I know as rational self interested person if I operated a power plant I'd sure as hell want to eliminate the possibility of a company ending disaster by getting that spent fuel someplace mostly safe.
Do I care about the people living around my plant maybe or maybe not but I sure do care about the potential legal liability I face if I harm them; because that hurts me.
This is a case where badly designed regulation distorted the risk to potential cost ratio, which almost certainly did change behavior and in this case had negative consequences. This is what large/strong government proponents need to understand there are always unintended consequences. The onus on getting society to agree to regulation should be on the regulator. Its not good enough to say OMG if something is not done something else terrible might happen, you have to also be able show that you have done the system think and convince me that you have worked through the system thinking and are not creating other new problems; which might not be obvious at first.
If you can't do that than I am going to take well a weak/small government and allowing the market to solve the problems is likely the better approach. The market WILL solve the problem, optimally? perhaps not always but it will solve it and do so fairly.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
They cry "get off my back" when they're making a profit. But they come whining for subsidies when their gambling fails.
Or, in a nutshell, privatize profits, socialize losses.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
U around Chernobyl might be polluting as heavy metal, but they are not dangerous per see to live "beside" as long as you do not ingest them. Heck, you can hold U 235 in your hand as long as you got a latex glove. Pu it depends on the isotope as Pu has a "relatively short" life comapred to U (Pu 239 has got a 24000 years half life). More problematic would be much shorter half life element, but still in the decades and century amount, like Cs 137. Because those are much more radioactive than U and Pu, but still long enough half life to be there for a long time. Much less a problem are isotopes which are highly radioactive, with minutes to a year of half life : by now they have gone thru so many half lives that not much is left (for 1 year half life , 20 years mean 1/(2^20)=less than 1 atoms left out of 1 million initially). So yeah, Cs is a big problem, bigger than U (heck some of which is released in the atmosphere by coal power) and Pu. The other one are more heavy metal pollution than radioactively dangerous , relatively speaking.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Fukushima met or exceeded all government safety regulations. It also survived an earthquake that ranks in the top 5 in the world. Being hit by one of the worst tsunami's on the world right afterwards tho... The tsunami afterwards knocked out the diesel powered system for regulating cooling.
So, taking your sarcastic point: Sure! Lets take what didn't work, and add more of it! Because adding more of what didn't work will make it work!
In all honesty: There will always be unforeseen events. This disaster was caused by two major issues that by themselves causes massive damages and massive loss of life. Having both happen at the same time would be disaster no matter what regulation is in place.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Dunno about your country, but in mine, there's virtually nothing that could drive or otherwise motivate a government official.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
expect that the fed only prints a tiny small fraction of the money, most of it is created by banks.
Ideally, the free press will tell us the truth. We shouldn't trust our governments or the big companies. Unfortunately, they've become the big companies they ought to be reporting on.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The same way you affect the government?
In the 2010 US national elections there were roughly 90,000,000 votes cast. Thus you had a 1/90,000,000 overall 'affect'. Of course that is further dilluted by your affecting only the politics your state sent to Washington.
Goldman Sachs has a market cap of about 52 billion with a share price of $102. So for $500 you could have the same 'affect' on GS as you do on goverment.
In either case you could work to organize others. The Tea Party affected the government and the Sudan Divestment people are doing a good job on companies. That latter example is a good one for a 'control some shares and organize' model.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The free press is a company. And you've already said we can't trust companies to tell the truth.
congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
I think that accurately portrays our political situation. You'd be amazed at how much shit would get done if those yarks stopped fighting over who got to sit in the clown car.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
What do they expect? "Your country is inhabitable"
No this wasn't Arizona from the 50s or from the locals formerly living around Bikini, Madrid, Harrisburg or Chernobyl.
ftfpdf:
"...Precipitation deposited a large fraction of 137CS on land surfaces...The plume was also dispersed quickly over the entire Northern Hemisphere, first reaching North America on 15 March and Europe on 22 March."
After reading this, I wonder what kind of impact Nagasaki/Hiroshima/Chernobyl had globally. It seems to me that until we have a good disaster plan in place we should stop building these friggin things. We need a better a way of dealing with the catastrophes other than just waiting around for it to burn itself out. I really like going outside on nice days and *not* having to sleep under a lead blanket.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Thanks in part to the Robert's Court, if I had a hundreds of million dollars to support politicians, I have the same power over our government as Wall Street and the Koch brothers.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Since part of my job is risk management, allow me to explain how this game works. It's very unethical and very inhuman, so if you have a tender stomach, you might want to stop reading now.
Risk management is about assessing and evaluating risk, then taking measures... or not taking measures. What matters is money. How much does it cost to mitigate or neutralize the risk? How likely is the incident going to happen? How much will it cost if it happens?
An alert reader will notice that there's nothing about the effect of an incident in that question. What about the environmental damage, the damage to human life, the long term effect? How about making an area inhabitable for centuries? All that is summed up under "how much does the incident cost".
And here's where government comes into play and how government dictates just what a company will do with the risk. If they act as they do far too often today, by not holding a company accountable for their actions, the sensible thing for a company is to carry the risk. Or rather, ignore it, since it will be carried by government and population. Again, the sensible thing to do from a risk assessment point is to simply forgo any and all safety and security measures beyond what's necessary to protect the company assets. Unless of course you may expect a bailout if your plant gets too hot to operate, then even that doesn't matter anymore.
Companies do not care about safety beyond what is necessary to protect their assets. They would rather install a full blown security camera and tripwire system to keep you from stealing a single pencil than to invest a hundred bucks to change their smoke filters to keep their chimney from blowing a few metric tons of SOx into the surroundings unless you force them to.
And remember when trying to "force" a company that fines are nothing but a risk assessment factor. If it's cheaper to pay the fine than to heed the law, fines will be paid. If risk, fine and expenses are high enough, creating a shell daughter company that will carry the risk and be promptly sunk in case of an incident is also an option.
Laws are, to a company, just part of their risk management and cost calculation. Unless it's cheaper to follow the law than to break it, it will be ignored.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a Professional in Risk Analysis and Management of various tangible and intangible assets, the person or people controlling the purse strings never see the risk right in front of them. I fight on a daily basis to try to keep my clients informed of the clusterfuck hovering above them and it's hard work, if it wasn't for regulation I'd be out of a job because most companies wouldn't give a shit and not just because of trying to keep expenses low but because they're idiots. I spend so much time covering my ass and ensuring that everything I do or say is properly noted and recorded to ensure they don't blame me when the shit hits the fan that it makes up most of my overhead. The market will solve the problem by killing itself and anything around it in the process and it's not just because of greed, it's because people are idiots. The people in charge of these things in the corporate structure are usually just idiots and the people writing the regulation are usually just lazy or living in academic fantasy land or are in no way, shape or form divorced from conflicts of interest.
Which government regulation did this company violate to cause this accident? None.
If the government would have approved new plants this one could have been safely decommissioned and replaced by something much safer. So in this case it was actually government regulations which kept a horribly out of date reactor online well after its original EOL.
Ummm... How did regulations cause the reactor to be damaged before the disaster? Your rant about regulations makes absolutely no sense...
On the one hand, it says nuclear power is green, carbon-free, let's build more nukes. On the other hand, it says all of the cs137 and sr90 waste from those nukes should sit in unsafe temporary storage sites forever rather than send it to Yucca mountain safe storage in Nevada. If nothing else, TFA should be a reminder that every nuke is cranking out long-lived cs137 and sr90 isotopes every day and they WILL go somewhere...hopefully not into our food chain like Fukishima's did.
These numbers aren't a big change from estimates 5 months ago.
42% of Chernobyl's Cs emission, but much lower land deposition - only 21% of total Cs emissions hit land.
And this is from 3 or 4 separate failures at old ill-prepared sites following a once-in-a-thousand-year quake which hit a chain of volcanic islands which are plagued by quakes.
Emission per failure is nearly a full order of magnitude below Chernobyl.
Total land deposition is also nearly a full order of magnitude below Chernobyl.
The lesson is to improve your game, not loose your cool.
-- Mike Greaves
Actually I don't get easily these kind of news. Does anyone have an easy explanation as in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA)?
What if the government did get off their backs, but the company was also 100% responsible for any damages related to unsafe operation? What happened here would be a death sentence for TEPCO, but becuase of the government involvement, TEPCO will survive its mistakes.
This is a bit disingenous. Cesium quickly goes through the human system and thus isn't really a problem in small quantities.
Fixed that for you.
"..after you apply the risk factor to the potential costs of a disaster."
But private corporation seldom do that, and when they do it's always weighed against the impact on my bonus THAT qtr.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
I'm not anti corporation, but why people scream about getting rid of regulation and ignore the history of corporate activity.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I do know about the US and i do know this is exactly what's going on in the US, that apparently is regulated by "the EPA, NRC, Dept. of Energy"
So what exactly are you guys implying? This only happens in Japan due to greedy corporations? Look around you. Regulatory bodies are not working, they have been infiltrated by people who's interests are solely with the corporations they're supposed to be regulating.
Incorrect. You had your vote,and any vote you swayed.
So corporation can only be changed by people whose bets interests is that they put profit over society?
Yeah, well thought out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Think about the extent to which companies go to avoid being sued. Now allow nuclear power plants to be sued for radiation release (they currently can NOT be sued if they meet regulatory requirements, which Fukushima did). Do you see how this works?
The Govt and TEPCO have been covering everything up from the get go. They are still telling people that it is ok to eat the food. Rice is within acceptable limits people! They should have quarantined everything off and thoroughly tested it before letting any food out of Fukushima/Chiba, but instead they assume innocent until proven guilty. To make matters worse, I believe that testing is largely left up to the Fukushima prefectural government. It is in their best interests (at least short term) to not find any radiation or at least not find amounts high enough to warrant banning produce. From what I understand of the situation, the cheeky bastards have been mixing radioactive produce (rice, milk) with non-radioactive produce so that the radiation level is within "acceptable limits". But I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Hell, they started planting fresh crops of rice in March. There are many ways to stick your head up your ass-this is just one of them.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
Do you trust Consumer Reports?
Under a free market, such ratings and standards organizations would thrive to a much greater extent than they do today, and you could trust them because each organization would always point out the faults in others, forcing them all to be on their best behavior and totally open.
Lawsuit==>bankruptcy, responsible company buys the assets.
Not exactly rocket science (just nuclear science!).
Government is the absolute reason the world is not using thorium reactors, which would have eliminated ANY accidents such as Chernobyl, Fukushima and a potential disaster here at Three Mile Island.
Thorium is THE answer, not conventional nuclear and certainly not solar nor wind.
congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
Not to defend Congress, but we know that isn't the issue. No one wants the waste. Its not Congress, but the states. Yucca, we know now, is a political farse; all the science was bent to serve the politics.
The Admin and the Engineer
If they had really understood what happened during the accident, they would have made a very different "first guess" for the emissions. In fact, their first guess would have been that contaminated air was leaking from the reactor buildings before active venting started. Why?
Because of the hydrogen explosions. Containments are vented through the "smoke" stacks. If there had been no leak of the containment prior, during or after the venting, no hydrogen could have accumulated in the reactor buildings, because it would have left through the stacks. It didn't. Some of the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor buildings or they could not have exploded. This hydrogen came straight from the reactors and was as inextricably mixed with Xenon-133 as the proverbial piss in the water of the swimming pool.
No surprise there at all. It is astonishing that the authors of the paper didn't come to that simple conclusion, namely, that their first guess was naive and their "discovery" was not all that interesting to begin with and hardly worth mentioning.
You have the power to change government.
No, only the leaders. Through many leader changes government organizations generally stay the same, no matter who is in power, and seek only to protect their existence and to grow.
How do you change a company
You sue them and/or give them bad publicitly and effect direct change. See: Greenpeace.
It's far more effective than trying to work through multiple layers to change an organization that will NEVER change in any significant way without disbanding - where companies can and do change all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That is not free market economics. That is fascism/socialism for the rich. People who want free markets are 100% against bailouts, or they don't know what they are talking about.
Well, yea you can say that but then when a semi carrying this stuff explodes in a toxic disaster on i-95 will we then blame the non-regulation? Truth is, we should all but abandon nuclear. It is quite apparent it has the potential to great and nearly permanent damage. We as humans have no business playing with that type of fire. We have the intelligence but not the wisdom... at least not societally. Especially when considering the scale (there lots of reactors) and the tumultuous earth we live on.
Actually, yes they were. The "reports" you read about were about government run orphanage workhouses which treated children like slaves. Non-government run facilities that used child labor had much better conditions. They had also largely disappeared by the time child labor was abolished, simply because capital had grown to the extent that a single member of the family was able to support their entire family with just his labor, freeing the wife to stay at home and improve their living conditions, and freeing the children to go to school, allowing them to get a BETTER job later.
What is it about freedom that makes people want to tell lies about how terrible it is, even as every other system collapses around their ears?
Uh, you do know that the Federal Reserve system is made up of big banks?
Which is why the corporate form should be abolished, as it would be under a free market (the corporate veil and the inability to sue shareholders is a protection afforded to corporations by the government).
what "free market"?, we don't have a free market nor capitalism in the USA. We have welfare for corporations, plutocracy, oligarchy, fascism...but no free market nor capitalism
This is the tragedy of the commons to the fullest. Until a way is found to make companies not to behave like this, all the 99% protests are completely meaningless. Corporations will find a way on how to shift risk & responsability & costs on to general population to gain short term profits.
And keep in mind- when we are talking about financial institutions like banks, the "commons" is our future. They will screw up long term prosperity of the entire world for short term profit. That is why crises happen every ~10 years.
Question is, how do we change this?
--Coder
I think the real, deeper fallacy is the idea that we can find a way to prevent accidents from ever happening again, if we can just figure out which thing to do differently.
Not all stock comes with voting rights in corporate governance. In fact, I'm almost certain that the Goldman Sachs stock you're talking about does not give you voting rights.
That reminds me: The bad burrito I ate last night has "affected" my digestive system.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And let's not forget that a government was running Chernobyl... Any large, self-directing groups of people have the potential for evil. The larger they get, the worse it becomes. Companies, Governments and Religions are all in the same boat with people being the primary flaw.
You have the illusion of power to change government.
There, fixed that for ya.
Before you answer with "You can vote", choosing between two different colors of embezzlers isn't really "changing the government". Yeah, the name changes, but the outcome is always the same.
Nonsense.
Bankruptcyt==> company changes its name, moves corporate headquarters, sheds all liability - continues as before. Previous corporate shell abandoned. Public gets finger.
It's been an energy and mining and manufacturing industry strategy since the 19th century.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, it did not survive the not-very-unforeseen event. That bit has been open knowledge for months. Reactor 1 (at least) breached before the tsunami. It's in TFA.
And getting all huffy about a 'top 5 earthquake' makes little sense. It was well within modern guidelines for a likely event. It's just that TEPCO (and the Japanese regulators) didn't bother to update risk assessments, preferring to keep their heads buried sobas not to upset the balance sheets.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
OK, I'm thinking. I'm thinking "regulatory capture", and "political action committees", and "unlimited campaign contributions". Yep, got it.
OK, that can't actually happen in our current reality. Because the nuclear power plants are owned by the same companies that own the government, and they are permitted, nay, encouraged to write legislation to prevent this. You try to stop this, and all you'll get is a horse's head in your bed and an IRS audit.
I sure do. The government enlists private corporations to build and run nuclear power plants by using taxpayer dollars (since nuclear fission plants are not economically viable in a free market, but the government wants them for war and science purposes) and the private corporations purchase legislation that allows them to obviate risk. It's all very, very clear.
In a well regulated free market, terrestrial fission plants would not exist, because there aren't enough customers willing to pay for the decommissioning costs they would have to charge up front. In a laissez-faire market, of course, the plants would never be decommissioned, because there's no profit in it. The people who built them would just design them to fail after they died, and in the absence of regulation that would work... for them.
It's marked funny but I'll respond since it raises a good point. If the company could just build a breeder reactor to use up most of the fuel we wouldn't have the problem.
Global warming is an easy one with a lot of concerned people spreading the science; but look at how it has become a total political mess that the tobacco industry could only dream of. Without a lot of work on your own or a movement to promote the facts it just looks like another political mess where the answer is not clear; when it fact, it likely is not a difficult problem once the truth filters out.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I think the rods at reactor 4 were recently removed from the reactor. You need to let the short lived isotopes decay and let the rods cool down before you transport them long distances. They need active cooling which would be dangerous and challenging in a truck or rail car. Your point may apply to long term storage but not to this case where the rods were still in need of aggressive cooling.
@de_machina
You are making the assumption that nuclear power plants would nut be profitable under free market conditions. You further make the assumptions that materials inside of nuclear power plants are not valuable, and would not make up the cost of decommissioning, and likely turn a profit.
But you are right on about everything else. We can't do anything with fascism. We have to ditch this fascist economics system or we will all be doomed. You seem to indicate a preference for socialist policy, but your assumptions for such policies are unsound. We could, of course, find out fairly quickly if they are true or not by at least temporarily lifting the ban on new nuclear plant development and nixing all subsidies on the industry.
Nope. US regulators make them keep the fuel because there is no reprocessing facility - and there is unlikely to be one for decades, if ever. This makes a storage facility necessary.
Good grief yes. Deregulators drive me crazy. As if regulations didn't exist precisely because someone screwed up big enough to make us say: 'ok, now we have to regulate that so we don't have someone do that again.' As soon as you deregulate, you get 'that' again, whatever that was.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Do you see how this works?
Why, yes, in fact, I do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_litigation
Empirical fact: lawsuit risk did not stop BP from making poor decisions that resulted in environmental catastrophe.
And then there's there is the fact that the fundamental error in judgement was made by the people most at risk: engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result.
Yet for some reason anti-scientific, anti-empirical idiots endlessly repeat the refrain that it "just makes sense" that "the market will take care of it." As someone above noted: people are idiots. And in the modern world, idiots can do a huge amount of damage. Public oversight is the only way of reducing some risks, however imperfect it may be.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Do you trust consumer reports? They are bought and paid for by the reviewees. If you want a positive review, you send them money, and they 'round up' a bunch of your competitors and tell everyone how you beat them. Seriously, look around at how many 'but but .. consumer reports said this would be good' reviews there are all over the place.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Doing back-of-the-envelope math on older data, the risk near the plant is about as bad as living near a coal plant, with ~10% rise in cancer between 3-20 km away (the evacuated zone). Closer than 3km away is worse, and there are pockets of high radiation, but based on health impact we should also be evacuating the area immediately around coal plants out to 15 km at least.
It's the same thing that happened with the BP spill in the gulf. Save a few millions here or there, never mind the added risk of paying billions and potentially bankrupting the company down the road. That is only something that "might happen", while the routine costs is something that "will happen". That's why there needs to be regulation.
I have also always been amazed at the amount of centralization in food distribution. Instead of having small processing plants serving local markets, they go an concentrate all the distribution through these huge plants, which means that when there is any case of contamination they have to do these immense recalls which probably costs more the the overhead incurred by localized plants (which would also mean less transportation costs). Any damages due to the harm done by the contaminated food would also be much greater. But again that potential "disaster" cost never weighs in when operations are planned, and the result is ever greater centralization of something that should more than most things be distributed.
I can totally see what your mean about your clients not seeing the risks.
Evidently what we don't "all know" is that the government banned onsite waste reprocessing thereby creating a need to store used fuel and then promising the companies that they (the government) would "take care of it". We all know how that turned out.
You have the power to change government.
How do you change a company that you're not directly doing business with, like a nuclear power company? I don't buy anything from Goldman Sachs, so how do I affect them?
The market model is incomplete.
Perhaps if you could demonstrate that power by electing a non-corrupt bunch of people with IQ levels at least as high as expected of lemmings, then I'd believe you. Because right now the power you speak of exists only in theory, not in practice, which makes your point completely moot.
A victory for Straw Men everywhere!
Nuclear Reactor = Typical Business!
Those "government organizations" only stay the same because you keep electing cowardly leaders.
When by and large only cowardly leaders run... mostly they don't because they are drawn to business, yet another reason why businesses can ACTUALLY change.
You understand that not everything that is unethical or immoral is also illegal.
Hence bad publicity as a motivated factor, as I ALREADY pointed out in my example.
Also, virtually unlimited corporate PR and advertising money can easily defeat your efforts to "give them bad publicity".
See: Bank of America. See: BP
I "see" that everyone hates them quite a bit. Many people I know will not buy gas from BP to this day. That is example FAIL.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The whole point of a corporation in the first place is to shield the owners from personal liability for the failure of the particular enterprise in question. The liability of the owners (as owners) is limited to their investment, and the owners can direct the corporation to take risks that are effectively infinite. In the event of a catastrophe the owners only lose what they invested, while others pay the much larger bill to fix things and make them right. As I see it, the regulations are needed, otherwise every potentially disastrous activity would be spun off into another new sacrificial corporation, with the upside potential going to the owner and the downside potential to someone else.
Dude, there are almost no breeder reactors out there because they are very difficult to operate. There are currently no breeder reactors in Japan, that actually do any productive work. The one in Monju is still being tested after extensive repairs (it had a sodium leak and fire more than 15 years ago).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I guess I will be filtering out certain ethnic types, not that I am prejudiced, just precautious...
However, a larger issue with the storage facility is that for some odd reason, people do not want nuclear waste in their back yard and do not want nuclear waste traveling on our fine infrastructure through their communities. They are not fooled by politician assurances that "nothing can go wrong".
The bottom line is that nuclear power is not economical when you take into account the full life cycle of costs. (In fact, it's not economical today to even build a nuclear reactor.) Massive government direct subsidies and insurance have been required to build the current reactors and even these are not enough to stimulate more reactors. Private investors have figured out the game. Even with government guarantees and subsidies, nuclear power is not economic and they will not risk their investment. Nuclear power is dead. Stick a fork in it.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Cancer rates in the USA (for both genders! Standard display in this app is male-only) vary between about 40% (Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Alaska etc.) and 52% (Delaware, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maine etc.)
For the record: New England should be evacuated immediately and nobody allowed back in, except for brief periods in protective clothing.
We'd also need to remove all subsidies on all forms of energy production, and force the producers to pay for the externalities (such as pollution, and the cost of adapting our infrastructure to global warming). At that point nuclear power starts looking like a bargain.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So from a self interested agents perspective you want everything to fail at once or not at all. Sounds like task for Martingale!
The spent fuel pool in Unit 4 was inspected with a cam and there where no evidence of damage. Also, from the analysis of the water in the pools, they found out that there was minimum or low damage in the fuel arrays in the spent fuel pool of units 2 and 4. The fire in unit 4 came from a connection to unit 3 that after blowing up made the hydrogen gas accumulate in the then still intact building of unit 4 instead of releasing it directly to the atmosphere trough the destroyed building of unit 3. In effect, the building of unit 4 became a chimney for the damaged core of unit 3. That would explain the coincidence with the spraying of water in unit 4 with the decreased amounts of radiation releases, since at the same time, the spent fuel pool of unit 3 was doused by fire trucks and helicopters, and they became able to inject more water to unit 3.
That said, is about time that the previous managers of TEPCO, at least the ones responsible from 2002 to march 2011 be facing a trial, since they already did know that Fukushima Daiichi had inadequate tsunami countermeasures and they didn't act. The station was flooded because the large equipment door in the turbine building in front of unit 4 was unable to bear the brunt of the impact of the wave hitting the power plant. If the power plant have had an improved sea way at least 10 meters high like the risk models called out, even if the tsunami on the end managed to flood the power plant, the auxiliary equipment would have survived in a condition to be repaired quickly instead of being washed away.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
When you made a mistake you paid for it, sometimes with your life and the lives of others. Then you and/or the survivors learned from the mistake. This is the free market.
Now you all sit back and think government regulation will protect when in fact the government regulators become captured by the industry they regulate and then they don't regulate. So, we pay a bunch of money for the gov. to do nothing.
Get your head out of your rectum.
Your assessment is correct. Here is what one company in California did.
Back in the 1980s (or 70s) a power company in California was upgrading some of its old transformers. When the old transformers were made, we didn't know about the dangers of PCB and thus the transformers used PCB as a coolant. The PCB tainted cooling oil had to be disposed in the proper way according to EPA rules. The company decided it was far cheaper to dump the PCB tainted coolant by putting it in barrels and dumping it in the ocean. It would cost far less than treating it properly. The only problem was that the dumping was illegal. The lower level employees wouldn't do the dumping without specific orders from the corporate board.
The corporate board discussed the matter and decided that even if caught doing the dumping, the fine would be less than the cost of treating the PCB properly. So the PCB tainted cooling oil was dumped. End of story? NO! The dumping was discovered by the authorities and a fine was assessed. The corporate board thought paying the fine was just "a cost of doing business". Fortunately, they overlooked one thing... The law also allowed criminal penalties. The minutes of the board meeting were subpoenaed and all members of the board that voted in favor of the dumping went to jail.
Moral of the story... Business will only do the right thing if they can save money. Sometimes, jail time is appropriate. Maybe criminal penalties that can be imposed on the company itself are appropriate.
Fission might very well be feasible in a well regulated free market, if "well regulated" is defined to include regulation of negative externalitites.
Today, coal, oil-, and gas-burning plants are allowed to skate on the very public cost of raw materials (i.e. drilling subsidies, wars) and on the real costs of emissions and disposal. If all of those costs could be quantified (a hard problem I know), and then billed to the industries, consumers would feel the real cost of energy. At that point they would automatically and subconsciously take steps to become more efficient... and nuclear power would probably be a contender.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
That reminds me: The bad burrito I ate last night has "affected" my digestive system.
When you ate that burrito, you should of known that it wanted to remove regulation.
The problem is that we have empirical evidence that making improvements to the tsunami countermeasures did work, Tokai no. 2 survived the tsunami almost unscathed because after being aware that their seawall was not high enough they improved it. Onagawa NPS despite being the one closer to the epicenter of all NPS's it did survive. Fukushima Daiichi failed not because of lack of technical competence, it failed because the incompetence of the management.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
You had me until "do so fairly". it will most assuredly NOT do so "fairly". it will do so in a way which maximizes benefit to the capital source in charge of the project. "Fair" doesn't even enter into the discussion, and that is why we are not all small government libertarians.
If you can store it somewhere that would kill everyone around it, but those people don't purchase your product and don't have the legal ability/capital available to prove the case and prosecute you, then the problem is solved from a perspective that is absolutely fine from the point of view of the "free market". but it definitely is not "fair". "Fair" is determined by people, not economic forces.
That is not free market economics. That is fascism/socialism for the rich. People who want free markets are 100% against bailouts, or they don't know what they are talking about.
sounds like only true scotsmen 'want free markets' then, eh? must be old adam smith's genes ;-)
less facetiously: 'free market' is a contested concept, endlessly debated by economists of rival schools and variously implemented by politicians of rival persuasions. it is not an empirical fact - as you should be the first to recognise as you seem to be arguing for a degree of laissez-faire government neutrality which has not obviously existed anywhere in history. at the end of the day, anyone (such as yourself) who claims that a contested concept is only meaningful as they personally understand it... well... doesn't know what they're talking about. ...and the less said about your glib fascist/socialist conflation the better. again - i'm not sure you're really in any position to tell people they 'don't know what they're talking about', here...
And this is generally how you can solve this problem. People in such positions are usually so used to a certain lifestyle that threatening a month of jail time is worth more than threatening millions in penalties. But you also have to make sure they can't avoid being held responsible. Here's something that happened around these areas a few decades ago.
In the days before the internet, porn magazines sold well. Especially if they skirted close to what the law allowed. Back in those days, that was... well, pretty much nothing beyond showing a few hints of what's going on. Of course, mags that not only skirted around those laws but leaped over them without even as much as ignoring them sold like hotcake. Problem, if the fed found out about them and found them to be "illegal", you'd go to jail.
So what did our pornographers do? They created daughter enterprises and literally hired bums as CEOs. For the right price, you get someone who is going to sit in jail for you for a year. These people got what would today be a five to six digit amount of money, and probably more than they could possibly earn during their entire lifetime if they "just" worked. And yes, that was in it. Easily.
Think it would be hard to find someone today who'd take the risk of going to jail for a year in exchange for a six digit amount of money?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is another important revelation that all of the "in crowd" already knew "as it was happening", yet the Japanese ignored it. That includes people on the ground.
Our results indicate that 137Cs emissions peaked on 14â"15 March but were generally high from 12 until 19 March, when they suddenly dropped by orders of magnitude exactly when spraying of water on the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 started. This indicates that emissions were not only coming from the damaged reactor cores, but also from the spent-fuel pool of unit 4
When they were saying that radiation was coming out of Unit 3 and everyone was freaking out about plutonium on TV, there was a fire in Unit 4 that was dismissed as "non radioactive in origin" even as there was a spike of radiation.
Well kids, as most nuclear people around here suspected, the radiation was from unit 4 and the fire was hydrogen fire in the spent fuel tanks. This actually makes me quite mad - all they had after tsunami, is get someone there and check the status of the water levels (there is no radiation if rods are under water). Maybe get a hose from some portable pump so water level is replenished if there was a leak. They ignored that, for days, and there we have it.
Personally, I would not be surprised if most of the long lived contamination of surrounding areas originated in Unit 4 spent fuel tank. Most of the long lived contaminants in running reactors are trapped in water, which is much less of a problem than airborne.
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
I'm reminded of an episode of "Homicide" on Spike, where a wife killed her husband because her very conservative the church disapproved of murder. So, between divorcing him and being publicly shamed, or secretly killing him and maybe getting away with it, she chose the most appealing choice from a selfish system: kill him and try and get away with it.
I've talked about this before with people, that it's a form of extension from the Prisoner's Dilemma... the best individual choice is the one that people will regularly choose, even though everyone else making that choice will make the world a distopian nightmare.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I always find it interesting how people tend to polarize at extreme ends in any kind of debate, with very, very few people -- or at least, very, very few vocal people -- in the middle. It's kind of like an inverse bell curve.
How that applies to the current discussion: I agree that there are significant problems with free market economies. People are inherently greedy, some more so than others, but at our core, all of us are most concerned with self-interest. People are also inherently short-sighted. Since corporations are nothing more than groups of people working together for a common goal (shared greed and shared self-interest), it stands to reason that corporations will display the exact same shortcomings that are inherent in the people who run those corporations. In other words, corporations will *also* tend towards greed and self-interest.
Unfortunately, those problems are not limited solely to individuals and corporations. Governments are also groups of people working together for a common goal, and consequently also inherit those same, ugly characteristics. Politicians, like CxOs, make decisions based upon short-term "profit" -- "what will win the *next* election?"...even if that means you'll have a bigger mess to clean up later.
So yeah, capitalism has it's problems, but so does EVERY other system composed of human beings, including governments. Perhaps I shoudl say "*especially* including governments", since governments, by definition, have the unique ability to coerce their "customers" into paying for their services.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
The main problem here (outside of stupid regulations) is regulatory capture. I don't see how to avoid stupid regulations, but regulators should, after they retire, be forbidden to work for, or accept any remuneration from, any entity that they have previously regulated. And if they run for office, they should be forbidden from accepting any campaign contributions from those entities.
That's not perfect. In fact it's nearly minimal. But it would improve things.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Again, as I've mentioned elsewhere in that thread, nothing you said here is unique to corporations. Allow me to provide a government anecdote to illustrate my point:
Back in the day, the city of Chicago accepted Federal funds to build and maintain an airport known as Meigs Field. Meigs Field provided General Aviation (GA) access to downtown Chicago for business and personal aircraft until the '90s when Mayor Daley decided that it would be more profitable for the city to tear up the airport and develop that land for other purposes. The Feds took the city of Chicago to court for violating a contract that said that the city would accept Federal funds for the airport in exchange for continuing to maintain and operate the airport for some period of time, and the courts decided in the Feds' favor: the city of Chicago broke the terms of the contract, and would have to pay a penalty ($150,000-$200,000 IIRC) per month -- or maybe it was per quarter or per year, I don't recall exactly -- until the airport was operational again, or until the contract term was up. Meigs Field is still just a memory, despite the "penalty" because the current development of that land brings in more revenue than the penalty takes away, even after factoring in the loss of airport revenue. In other words, the "penalty" levied against the city of Chicago is no more than just another operating cost. In this case, as you said, it was more lucrative for the city of Chicago to break the law than it was to keep the law, and therefore the law was ignored. Unlike in your explanation, however, the law was ignored by a municipal government rather than by a corporation.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I love these discussions because it is so convenient to ignore the impact (???) on society from the hundreds of open air nuclear blasts that us old farts grew up with. I was quite surprised to see maps showing that where I grew up got regularly dusted from the nuclear war on the US Southwest in the 1950s and 60s. And lets not forget good old background radiation from the uranium in the soil and the cosmic rays zipping through us. Or the regular doses of x-rays that we get trying to go anywhere these days from security scanners and elsewhere. Yes, we have done a poor job of learning from our mistakes. But the hysterical folk who currently seem to have the floor rend their garments over the losses from Fukishima and Chernobyl and conveniently ignore all the other dustings and exposures we have all enjoyed. A lot of people died getting technology (cars, airplanes, steel construction, electricity and so forth) to the current state -- and despite the popular press, nuclear is a lot safer than coal. And holding our collective breath until we turn blue will not solve the technical issues of nuclear power that we need to in order to use it more extensively.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because you aren't. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the managers and boards of directors, who are liable under law, are rarely held to their liability. The stockholders generally never have either knowledge or control of what the corporation is doing. They are, officially, the owners, but unless they hold more than 20% of the stock in the corporation it's reasonable that they not be held liable. And if they do hold that much of the stock, then they aren't as invulnerable as you assert...in theory. In practice they are held liable even less often than are the managers.
What's extremely interesting is that many managers who make company killing decisions are then immediately hired at higher rates into a better job. One has to wonder why.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What you say is true for externalized negatives - things whose costs are not immediately borne by the company benefiting. Pollution is probably the prime example. Externalized negatives create a tragedy of the commons situation, where the company or individual reaps the positives but society bears the negatives. In these cases, regulation is necessary to either internalize the negative, or to create artificial negatives (fines, jail time) proportional to the cost of the negative to society.
But not all situations are a tragedy of the commons. In fact they're more the exception rather than the rule. If there is no tragedy of the commons (or a prisoner's dilemma - there may be others, I'm always searching for more), then the best outcome is typically achieved when there is no regulation. Regulating in these cases simply distorts market forces and leads to a non-optimal allocation of resources (e.g. corn ethanol subsidies leading to the bulk of the U.S. ethanol being derived from corn, even though corn is not the best crop to be converting into ethanol).
So sometimes regulation is the answer, and sometimes deregulation is the answer. The problem is that some people wrongly believe that regulation is always needed, while others wrongly believe that regulation is never needed. There is no hard and fast rule that regulation = good, or regulation = bad. You have to analyze each situation and apply regulation only if needed.
Not sense they rated the '84 vette as unacceptable because it's a bad economy car.
They are clueless and agenda driven.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As long as they aren't talking about Apple products, yes.
Under a well regulated free market, yes. If there is a total absence of regulation (laissez-faire taken to Ayn Rand's most ridiculous extreme) then companies would just murder anyone who printed unbiased product reviews. You can see this principle in action in the existing unregulated markets in Central and South America. Without regulations designed to provide a free and fair marketplace, Murder Inc. always wins, because hit men are cheaper than factories.
I've read your posts before, so I think you already understand this - we may disagree about which regulations are actually necessary, but we both know that a certain number of laws are a requirement of free trade. At the very least, some kind of contract law must be enforced and conspiracy to murder must be punished.
If you want a free and fair marketplace, and not just complete anarchy, it's important to recognize the requirement for regulation.
Three things are being implied:
1) Without regulations it would be worse.
2) Regulatory capture means that regulations are tilted in favor of the corporations that run the plants, but they're still better than none.
3) Enforcement of the regulations that exist are lax.
So yes, it could happen in the US. There are several equivalent plants in the US with equivalent problems. One of them is up for having it's license renewed to produce more power than it has been producing. This is beyond the initially specified "safe limits". And the plant is already beyond it's designed life. Due to regulatory capture it will probably get the approval it is seeking. This is malfeasance, but that's not likely to stop them. Because just like the company management, the regulators aren't held to task when they don't properly perform their jobs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No one has ever had to evacuate a city - and stay out of it for years - because the solar panels broke.
(Is there an echo in here?)
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Unfortunately American politicians are engaged in rewriting all bodies of law to favor known amoral actors, not to restrict them. But I do agree with you.
I think we'd see another technological revolution if we stopped distorting the market by actively encouraging these "negative externalities" of which you speak. Fission would probably fall by the wayside along with fossil fuels, and we'd run on biofuels or cold fusion or something.
Gaseous hydrogen (H2) is among the smallest of molecules. It is so small it can leak out of welds and seals which are otherwise watertight and airtight, and yes, xenon-tight. That is why hydrogen can escape a reactor which is otherwise not leaking, to cause hydrogen explosions. The presence of hydrogen gas outside the reactor does not in itself mean containment has been breached. (This is also one of the reasons why pure hydrogen makes a really crappy fuel - it is considerably more difficult to store and distribute than a liquid like petroleum.)
What they are hinting at is that containment was breached before any of the explosions, possibly by the quake itself. Not enough for the reactors to lose a noticeable amount of pressure, but enough for larger molecules like xenon to escape.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
lololol, it's funny that you would think they would bother going that far out. At most if they dumped it off the coast, it would be at the very start of international waters (12 miles), although since that requires a functional boat (boats are holes in the water that you throw money into) more than likely, they would drive it a few miles and dump it in a local park. (Simpson's reference.)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
In these situations, the authorities must do some "digging" into the business relationships to get at the actual culprits. So many people say "think of the innocent workers that will lose their jobs" if a corporate "death penalty" is imposed. Their solution to this dilemma is to do nothing!
What I propose is that the corporate shield barring lawsuits should be lifted. This would allow anyone who held stock in the culprit corporation to be sued. Of course, this lifting of the corporate shield would apply only to the culprit corporation. This surely would make stockholders think twice before allowing the corporate board to "run wild". The workers who lost their jobs could file a class action lawsuit against the stockholders and operators. Maybe such a lawsuit could be automatic and the lawyers could be publicly provided. This would deter greedy lawyers from taking the majority of the settlement. This would take care of the workers. The rest of the companies assets could then go on auction to offset the publics costs. Maybe I am overlooking things (I probably am!) but this could be the first step into putting responsibility back into the corporate picture. Other suggestions or comments would certainly be welcomed. I do not want to imply that I and I alone am thinking about how this problem might be rectified.
From the Wikipedia link: "many claims are expected to be met administratively from the fund set up for that purpose under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990"
The Oil Pollution Act set up funds to prevent civil liability for spills. It capped BP's maximum liability for the spill at $75M. So I ask, what lawsuit risk? The government already set up a system such that BP knew exactly what it was liable for - a total risk of $75M.
But we need those regulators, right? I mean, they obviously kept the spill from happening, or at least knew it was going to occur... U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
No, the reality is regulatory capture. The only people with enough expertise to oversee something as complex as oil drilling are largely people who have worked in the industry, who have friends in the industry, and often benefit financially from the very companies they have to regulate. BP gets a pass, regardless of how many regulations are on the books, because the guy that's regulating went to college and worked for 15 years with the guy he's trying to regulate.
But really, keep calling people that disagree with you anti-science, or anti-evidence. It makes it easy to tell you're being partisan instead of rational.
"engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result."
I think it's pretty likely the risky decisions were made by the BP project managers who were under pressure from the business because the well was already running late and very much over budget, and not the well hands who would be the first ones to be horribly burned in a gas blowout.
Admittedly I'm just working from currently available information. There has never been an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission plant - every single one has required government subsidies, taxpayer-subsidized protection from risk, government-assured forced sales of power to citizens who would have preferred to buy power from non-nuclear sources, etc. etc. etc.
In a market that allowed competition, there would be non-nuclear options. It has been abundantly demonstrated that when non-nuclear options are available, people prefer them. This would drive the selling price of nuclear power down, not up, which would make them even less economically viable than they are now.
Hmmm. Well, yes, I am assuming that waste will not be freely sold to the highest bidder, since it would be highly potent war materiel. You do have a point there; it depends on exactly how free you want your free market to be. If you allow the sale of dirty bombs and their precursors, then yes large amounts of high level waste are extremely valuable and their sale would reduce decommissioning costs dramatically. Otherwise, not so much; existing research reactors can already produce all the nuclear materials we need (for medicine, detectors, etc.) inexpensively.
See, this is where Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich can have a meeting of minds (I like 'em both, personally) despite their extreme differences.
There is no such ban. One was recently built near me, in fact, and this page says there are 20 more in the works. The US government has been offering extremely attractive subsidies since 2005 to offset public distaste for nuclear power. The fact that people do not want them does not matter; our government continues to privatize profit and socialize risks by forcing the US taxpayer to not only subsidize these plants but also to buy the power they produce. In a free market, there would be no need for nuclear power; biogas would drive it off the market by being more desirable to informed consumers (and also cheaper, in the long run).
But I think I know why the banksters and their allies love nuclear power. Nuclear power can't be distributed among the people like other forms of electricity generation, and while you can't really get away with using the military to protect the profits of coal-burning power plants, you can definitely have your government lackeys send soldiers with M16s to guard centralized nuke plants. Nuclear plants are a huge military liability that no general in his right mind would want on friendly soil, but so what? The military is controlled by civilian politicians who are easily bought. Nuclear power is yet another way for entrenched powers to stay entrenched without ever having to be smarter, faster, stronger, or in any other way better than their competition.
Nonetheless, this is where you and I meet, philosophically. We have differing solutions in mind but we're both willing to get rid of subsidies to private industry (I'm also willing to push cost externalities back on to commerce and industry by force) and see what happens. It won't be worse than leaving the banksters in charge!
I'm trying to reconcile this statement with your signature. Care to elaborate?
Just to emphasize this. I ran a business dealing with mitigating pollution. Our biggest clients were petroleum companies. We cost a lot to bring in as we were highly trained engineers and scientists in the field and were only called after they had tried the typical consulting and internal avenues to solve the problem. If it cost more for the company to pay the fine than fly us wherever we need to go globally and pay for our services, the companies would just pay the fine. The sad thing is that the solution was, often as not, an adjustment to the operation of the system to optimize the process (not always).
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Government regulations are a funny thing. We somehow end up with exactly the wrong number of them. More regulations will make us safer than we are now, but fewer regulations will also make us safer.
Everybody agrees that this needs to change, but we can never agree on which direction is the right one. We end up just staying where we are, which is a dangerous place to be.
I'm not referring to all industries, of course, but this certainly seems to apply to some, especially nuclear power.
I feel your pain, man. I've encountered the same kind of indifference with respect to other areas of practice such as information security and computing infrastructure. If it's not actually on fire, right this minute, it's at the bottom of the agenda. Any consulting professional working in these areas is bound to feel profoundly frustrated at times. It's a tough way to make a living, and it's dissatisfying to know how far what you're engaged to do falls short of what you be doing.
So, as a thinking person, I've spent the past ten years or so wondering about the causes. I see that organizations are not acting in rational self-interest, and often aren't even interested in learning about what that might look like. As you say, it seems idiotic.
Then a few years ago I started dating a woman who's a professional organizer. Within her field, she's regarded as a model of success, though if you want to know the truth, there's not a lot of money in it. But there is insight into human nature.
Here's what I've learned, at least about professional organizing. Her organizational clients are pretty good in general. They might be small businesses which have grown too quickly to stay apace, for example. Their issues are usually straightforward and recognized. Her private clients, on the other hand, are people who are chronically not organized. They're hoarders, or they have no self-control, or they're indecisive. You get the idea. They may have fantastic life skills in other areas, one such skill being the ability to ask for help, but she meets these people usually only at the point of crisis. So my girlfriend, for a fee, gets to not only clean up the mess but provide a first-responder sort of psychological counselling. Fine. It's a business model.
The problem for people like you and me is that we can deliver very little value that late in the cycle. We may not be dealing with outright dysfunctional thinking, but I think that even ordinary human psychology can be problematic. Businesspeople, in general, tend to be aggressive and to hear what they want to hear. Understandably, they don't want to be distracted from the goal by a lot of nuance and complexity and tradeoffs. It does no good to call them idiots, but the fact is that it's hard to engage with them unless you have something that they actively want. Usually, that involves removing a pain point that exists now, not some hypothetical time in the future. It's too bad, really, such a waste. But that's the way it is.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Under the free market, there would also be no consequence for the damage in the first place.. not really a solution to the problem implied above.
In fact, I'm almost certain that the Goldman Sachs stock you're talking about does not give you voting rights.
You just dunning-krugered yourself. Me, I am quite certain that you are wrong and that GS common stock entitles you to vote. (Of course, a 1 in 100mn voting share won't help you a lot - each GS employee has at least hundred times as much...)
We're not talking about some amount of hydrogen creeping through seals by osmosis. We're talking about the pressure inside the containment being high enough to create a gap in the sealing of the lid on the containment (that has to be opened when you change the fuel rods in the reactor) through which the gas could escape - including copious amounts of water vapor. The size of the molecules plays no role here.
Perhaps it's because the regulators were bought off by the same guys they were suppose to police?
Honestly, I'll never under you anti-regulation wingnuts. What you spout is analogous to doing away with the police because various departments are corrupt. The solution is to scour out conflict of interest and corruption, NOT let the crooks run free.
But, you know, that would imply /hard work/ and not simple talking points.
I truly really want to know what "socialism for the rich" means. I get the "fascism for the rich" but socialism ? Really ? Truly ?
What? Breeder reactors aren't filling Japan with magical fast-breeding goodness?
Next you'll be telling me the Chinese don't have any working thorium reactors either!
Oh, what a world, what a world... you're crushing the dreame, man. I can hear ten thousand basement-dwelling troglodytes crying.
As a Professional in Risk Analysis and Management of various tangible and intangible assets, the person or people controlling the purse strings never see the risk right in front of them. I fight on a daily basis to try to keep my clients informed of the clusterfuck hovering above them and it's hard work, if it wasn't for regulation I'd be out of a job because most companies wouldn't give a shit and not just because of trying to keep expenses low but because they're idiots. I spend so much time covering my ass and ensuring that everything I do or say is properly noted and recorded to ensure they don't blame me when the shit hits the fan that it makes up most of my overhead. The market will solve the problem by killing itself and anything around it in the process and it's not just because of greed, it's because people are idiots. The people in charge of these things in the corporate structure are usually just idiots and the people writing the regulation are usually just lazy or living in academic fantasy land or are in no way, shape or form divorced from conflicts of interest.
So basically: Because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything!
As usual, 'regulation' is being falsely treated as a scalar value.
Over-regulation is not the problem. Under-regulation is not the problem. Idiotic-regulation is the problem. Well engineered regulations can be very effective at solving problems; well 'politic-ed' compromises between incompatible interests are little better than chance.
The only thing that forces you to choose between two different colors of embezzlers is your lack of imagination.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Corporation death? What did the corporation do? The corporation is the shell for people who want to avoid accountability. Hold them accountable and the problem is solved. And I don't mean the stock holders. They usually don't even get informed what their company actually does. Or do you think some oil corporation's stock holders will be informed if "their" company dumps waste off the drill rig in the sea?
Hold the people who actually issue orders that violate the law accountable. And yes, that means that some CEO might go to jail. I know, unthinkable, but we just might have to think outside of the box for a change.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Any organization works, it needn't be a corporation. As long as money is the only possible penalty, it will be a cost/benefit calculation.
Seriously, if money was the only deterrent against murder, you think some people would start calculating whether killing their spouse is cheaper than divorce? Hitman would be just another profession. Pay my fines and some more money as salary, and I'll kill whoever you want gone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The fact that the regulators didn't do their jobs is not an argument against regulation, it's an argument in favor of transparency and severe punishment for regulators who get in bed with those whom they are supposed to be regulating. Bill Hickock didn't clean up Dodge City by throwing up his hands and saying "Too hell with it, ya'll can just police yourselves!."
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If you guessed multi-national conglomerates, you win! Yes, that probably includes your local paper, and most of the radio stations you hear.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If Vermont can do it, the rest of the country can do it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> Truth is, if regulations had not been so severe, they would have been able to move that spent fuel to a safer location, or, God forbid, reuse it in a breeder reactor
Japan doesn't have any breeder reactors. However, it does (or did) have spent fuel sent to the UK for reprocessing into MOx fuel.
There may not be very many fast breeder reactors in the world, but there are a bunch of CANDU heavy-water-moderated reactors that are quite flexible in terms of their fuel cycle. They can run on natural uranium, from "spent" LWR fuel, from mixed uranium/plutonium, etc. When running on uranium they will breed some of the U-238 into reactor-grade plutonium.
I'm thinking of Hollywood accounting... So you'll destroy the little company in charge of the security of the given plant. Big deal.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
If you don't know anything about a subject, perhaps you should remain silent on it? There are plenty of consequences, from boycotts, to lawsuits, to asset forfeiture (only applies to an anarchic society). Most libertarians don't argue for anarchic societies, so you have the government's court system to extract monetary damages and to pursue legal challenges (with pollution being a form of assault and/or vandalism).
They should have both knowledge and control. Shareholders turning a blind eye while profiting most certainly is part of the problem.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
reuse it in a breeder reactor
Why yes, they would simply have gone to their friendly neighbor breeder reactor, run by leprechauns on unicorn powder!
Socialism is redistribution of wealth. Normal socialism takes from the rich and gives to the poor until everyone is poor (except those doing the distributing). Fascism/socialism for the rich distributes everyone's money to the rich/people doing the distributing. Pretty much the same thing.
We'd also need to remove the free ride from insurance that nuclear energy currently benefits from, at which points it becomes totally unviable.
Lol, you think you can just string random words together and make it stick, Coward?
By definition, a free market is one devoid of government interference. If someone argues for more government interference, they are not making a free market argument. You might as well tell your mother that she is using the "no true scotsman" fallacy when she tells you to clean your room, and then wax intellectual about the meaning of the word "clean". There are differing degrees of cleanliness, sure, but you can't argue that the open sewer that is our economy is in any way "clean", or that people dumping more shit into it are "pro-cleanliness".
I only saw that there were proposals for new reactors (in your link). None have been approved, nor have any new ones been approved for a very long time.
Also, please note that just because nuclear plants receive subsidies does not mean they are not economically viable, especially after the cost of regulatory compliance is lifted. If there are genuinely cheaper alternatives to nuclear power, great. I'm all for it.
And yes, there really aren't many possible systems that could be worse than what we have now. I'm reminded of a SOuth Park episode where Mr. Garrison invents a new form of rapid transit because he was tired of dealing with crappy bailed out airlines. Even though it required a butt plug, among other gross things, everyone agreed it was still better than flying. That is pretty much the point we are at now.
Fukushima was not management incompetence, it was downright criminal negligence as far as I can tell.
If companies murdered people who gave them negative reviews, then it wouldn't be a free market, as those companies would have taken up the role of government in the systematic initiation of aggressive force.
Further, you gravely misunderstand Rand if you think that her system would allow murder by companies. She was FOR GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF THE AIRWAVES AND PATENTS for fuck's sake. She was not the anarchist you claim her to have been.
Although I myself am an anarcho-capitalist, I would certainly accept a libertarian or Randian society as "good enough". That is the nice thing about free markets, they don't need to be implemented in an ideologically pure manner to work, unlike other "extremist" policies. That is the reason we have continued to have economic and technological advance since the end of the free market era in 1913. Unfortunately, the sliding scale of the "mixed" economic system has gone too far away from freedom, such that we are drowning, and people don't even know which way is up any more, and wind up trying to swim deeper in their haste to destroy the system.
And this is generally how you can solve this problem
It's not even that simple because businesses might as well leave the dirty work to existing criminal organizations which are obviously not going to be deterred by jail penalties.
It turns out that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps neutralize the radiation, like the carbon rods in a reactor!
If the government would have approved new plants
Why of course, TEPCO was so eager to scrape off their existing plants and replace them with brand new ones, only the evil regulators prevented them to!
Man, living in your fantasy world must be so comfortable!
Citation needed.
Well yes of course, in fact if they could just build a fusion reactor they would indeed solve the problem for good. However there's a little issue here -> "if".
They are not nuclear power plants; they are nuclear warhead material production plants. Industry could be producing nuclear power in plants not at risk of radiation leaks, but they would not produce materials the military wants. Google thorium cycle.
This is a good point. The bureaucratic tail wags the governmental dog. The governments have created eternal monsters which have become invulnerable to change and control. This is as true for the various so-called democracies and republics as it is for the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes; as it was for the USSR. Everywhere there exists only one form of yolk on the people. Vast, self perpetuating, self serving, evil, corrupt, bureaucracies with the mere surface trappings of various forms of governments supposedly in charge, but in reality cardboard cutouts in macabre dioramas such as Congress and the White House.
Those of us who struggle to expose it and fix it before it is too late do not gain traction. Therefore there will be only one final recourse, and when it comes, it is going to reach out and touch the whole putrid, degenerate structure. Heads will topple to the ground in a continuous roar like surf on the beach. And not one left will regret that day.
That worked really well in Bhopal, didn't it. Union Carbide really suffered after that one!
The boycotts, the lawsuits, the asset forfeiture. I'm sure everybody involved with Union Carbide feels very punished.
Hold the people who actually issue orders that violate the law accountable. And yes, that means that some CEO might go to jail. I know, unthinkable, but we just might have to think outside of the box for a change.
That's not enough. You have to hold the people who follow the orders accountable, too. None of that "they were just following orders" nonsense, ever. Split up the responsibility however you like, share it, double it and share that, whatever. But everyone who knew it was going on and did their part in it anyway gets in trouble, or it's going to keep happening. It'll keep happening anyway, but when everyone is at risk, it'll be a lot harder to find people on both ends of the equation who think they'll never get caught.
Also, we have got to start actually taking away the entirety of ill-gotten gains whenever they are calculable, and then some.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What free press is that ? The "free press" that takes billions from Big Pharma, yet does very little in the way of exposing the rampant medical fraud in the US ? The "free press" is owned by advertisers and corporations. The "free press" is more centralized now then ever. The "free press" works with business to screw us all.
Or with no regulation, they would have dumped the fuel in a nearby ditch, had no sea wall at all, and plans to install a backup generator "one day".
Agreed that some of the regulations are badly designed, but the solution is not to throw them all out, it's to fix them.
Of course, if the moratorium on reprocessing imposed by executive order were lifted, the 'waste' would be seen as a valuable resource and cared for accordingly. When finally processed, the much smaller amount of actual waste would be more manageable (and shorter lived).
The problem with doing NO bailouts is that as usual, its not the haves living miles away from the superfund site that suffer, it's the have-nots next door.
Unfortunately, that acts as a sort of foot in the door. From there, under the table money and such lead to bailouts to make sure the executive bonus checks clear.
The ability to sue AT ALL is also afforded by the government.
Breeder reactors are in other countries, it's the issue of Regulation that is stopping them. Hence regulation is making our waste problem worse. I live within 50 miles of two reactors on Lake Michigan. I hate that there are casks of spent fuel rods stored along the lakes. But I do trust the engineers so I'd be alright with them handling a better reactor.
all the science was bent to serve the politics
Science isn't really the issue, it is a lack of trust in those running the facility. It isn't just nuclear, it is any potentially hazardous industry.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is a case where badly designed regulation distorted the risk to potential cost ratio, which almost certainly did change behavior and in this case had negative consequences.
No, this is a case which proves that nuclear power stations should not be run on a commercial basis. Fuck letting "the market" decide. Safety will always be second to profit. Same thing as BP.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Breeder reactors are in other countries
Not sure about the exact number but from my understanding there are currently exactly one such reactor producing electricity for commercial use throughout the world.
From this article optimistically named "It's time to give up on breeder reactors" from the International Panel on Fissile Materials:
After more than 60 years and $100 billion in research and development spending, the vision of plutonium-fueled fast breeders remains as far from reality as ever.
Doesn't exactly look to me like the magic silver bullet people refer them to as.
Think about the extent to which companies go to avoid being sued. Now allow nuclear power plants to be sued for radiation release (they currently can NOT be sued if they meet regulatory requirements, which Fukushima did). Do you see how this works?
I see that it works very badly. With things like radiation release, prevention is better than cure. An unquantifiable possible future risk of geting sued won't stop organisations whose primary aim is making a profit.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"No surprise there at all. It is astonishing that the authors of the paper didn't come to that simple conclusion, namely, that their first guess was naive and their "discovery" was not all that interesting to begin with and hardly worth mentioning."
It's pretty normal in science to start with a simple model and develop it to see what evidence forces you to incorporate further complications. This is not because the scientists doing the work are naive, but because they want to ensure that no more complexity is added to the model than is necessary. Yes, the result in this case is not surprising, but the way it was done is more along the lines of "Could a simplified model with emissions beginning at the point of the hydrogen explosions account for the observations?" The short answer appears to be "no", and that is interesting, because it strongly suggests the emissions began well before the observed explosions.
The difference between what you are describing and what was done is that while it might be reasonable to expect the emissions happened earlier, they tried a model without it, and it didn't match the data. That's more valuable as a scientific approach than making the assumption from the start and never checking whether it was really a necessity.
It is true that researchers start with simple assumptions. But they must also make sure their assumptions are not too simple. Especially not if those lead to the conclusion that is basically an allegation of the government/TEPCO/whoever having hidden a release of radioactivity as in "This seems to indicate that contaminated air was leaking from the containment as pressure was building up, even before active venting started."
What they should have done, is to abandon their original starting assumptions and explain why they did so. (The paper has some 60 pages, there's enough room for that.) And I'm quite sure they would have done this, but of course, this would have required them to actually understand the accident mechanisms in the first place and not merely model the atmospheric transport mechanisms, which they obviously couldn't be bothered to do. This is all the more important since initial assumptions influence the result of their simulations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam - 171 000 deaths. Tjernobyl eat your heart out.
Several workers have died 'mysteriously', but they didn't attribute it to the radiation...........and probably never will
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
Actually, in a free market world it's pretty easy: If a company causes more damage than it can pay back, all of its officers and employees are enslaved until they earn enough money to pay back the damages. We could even chain the doors shut to keep them from running away.
Why are you going after the employees when they were just doing what they were told? Ultimately its the shareholders who decide how a business is run by the people they vote onto the board. This is the problem.
If I want to keep something at arms length from myself then I incorporate a new limited company to do it. I then set up a few other companies to site between me and that company such that it is very hard to find out that I actually own it. Registering at least of of the companies in the Cayman Islands is always a good trick, then maybe one in Antigua, one in Switzerland, etc. This is the standard way of hiding your ownership of something while still maintaining 100% control.
Another option if you have a company or business that is quite large (like a company that owns nuclear power plants) is to partially float them on the stock market. This can be done in a number of ways depending on if you want to keep absolute control or not. Often you do not so you do not have ultimate responsibility if things go tits up. In this case you float the company while keeping a sizeable minority share, this is especially good if you are also a major customer of the company in question (like a power distribution company / wholesaler). You can then rely on the other shareholders to keep electing people you suggest to the board (you are also a shareholder remember, so you can suggest people) solely to keep you happy and hence keep the profits rolling in and their dividends being paid.
If things go wrong with the plant, then you just burn the company who owns the plant, but the power distribution company is not directly liable, even though they may have built the plant in the first place. This is a corner stone of how our modern capitalist system of risk management works. It allows certain liablities to end and the subsidiary company while the parent company is protected from sinking with it if things go too wrong. Not a great plan to deal with day to day risk, but to protect from rare, one off risks (like magnitude 9 earthquakes nearby) it is a valuable insurance policy. This all stems from the fact that a limited company prevents the shareholders from being held liable for the debts of the business they hold shares in.
Of course I know nothing about who actually owned the power plant in this case, but your post was not about specific cases and this is a good (albeit made up) example.
I dont read
Our legacy? During the charcoal for iron ore smelting time, entire mountaintops were denuded of trees. This is not an exaggeration. The forest service noted that a person could stand on top of the mountains above Greenwood Furnace, and not see a tree. The mountains were left to regenerate without help. They did, but with decidedly low quality trees. Loss? Aside from a lot of soil loss, the new trees are mostly useful only for chipping, a significant downgrading in the amount of money that could be made in the future.
North of us is the coal region. Many rivers run red from the pyritic leachate. They've been dead a long time form the acid runoff. Before they were required to reclaim the land, it just sat in the condition they left it when they had extracted the coal. That land is completely useless now, and an ongoing source of pollution. Costs: Real Estate made worthless, and a sportfishing industry eliminated.
Even now, in our area, there was a recent problem in which a highway was being built, and the Pyritic rock that decomposes to become acid leachate was found. The company tried to hide it, but their practice of dumping the rocks into a nearby gulch, just made a teabag for the leachate to sit around, then come out with rainfall. The local stream started running red, and local wells were poisoned. Amazingly enough, they tried to blame it on regulation. If there were no regulations, they'd do what differently? They completely ignored the regulations that existed. That equals a no regulation system, not over regulation If you are trying to argue that they wouldn't have tried to hide what they did because of regulations, then explain the proper level of regulation that would have prevented the problem. You can't. Anyhow, we now have a few miles of mountainside covered with plastic netting and limestone chunks to attempt to mitigate the acid drainage.
A company is completely and totally beholden to the stockholders. Anything else is irrelevant. Compliance with regulation is expensive, and is not going to make the stockholders happy. So it is in their short term personal interest to have as little regulation as possible, to maximize their profit. If they can walk away from an open pit they can make a lot more profit. And my area is the reason that regulations exist. We have seen exactly what they will do if left alone. The short term personal interests will accept someone else's land being destroyed, water poisoned, and even ill health or death.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Everyone is going to die anyway, it's just part of life -- or rather caused by life. Unless you found something that could make you very rich!
If you are invested in a retirement plan, then you probably own stock in some corporation or other. Probably several of them. You likely don't even know which corporations you do own stock in. So you are asserting that because of this ownership you are culpable for whatever those corporations do?
N.B.: I agree that this isn't true until you're vested. It is, however, true under many retirement plans afterwards. You can even, if you choose, select which stocks to invest in. This, however, is generally an unwise action, as you don't have enough knowledge.
P.S.: Under your theory, if I understand it correctly, if one invests (acquires partial ownership) in a fund that invests in a stock, the responsibility is transitive. If not, how is this different that having a portfolio management company invest in stocks for you? That's where most of the diffuse stock ownership resides. The problem is with the management, not the owners...except in a few exceptional cases.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
TL;DR version - this post is chock full of links, from a grab-bag of right-wing, left-wing, and non-partisan sources. If you only have time to read one, read the Cato Institute one. It clearly lays out the economics of nuclear power in toto, unlike all the other links that are merely documentation of individual points.
OK. Now, despite propaganda from pro-nuclear right-wing pundits, there simply is no ban on nuclear power plants in the USA. If there was such a ban, there would have to be some regulation or policy to say so, and there isn't. New reactors are on the way, according to the NRC licensing authorities.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-map.html
You can argue that the Clinton administration's refusal to relicense unsafe plants and active discouragement of subsidies was a de facto ban on new nuclear power sources, and I would tend to agree with that. But that argument only applies to the duration of Clinton's presidency.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+new+nuclear+plants
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0425-06.htm
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Price-Anderson, incidentally, is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025).
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1304068:
This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future. Allowing politically connected players to break lawful contracts with impunity is not only philosophically anti-Libertarian, it's anti-Socialist, too - I'd call it fascism.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1336416:
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of rev
Yet for some reason anti-scientific, anti-empirical idiots endlessly repeat the refrain that it "just makes sense" that "the market will take care of it." As someone above noted: people are idiots. And in the modern world, idiots can do a huge amount of damage. Public oversight is the only way of reducing some risks, however imperfect it may be.
Because the idiots are correct - they just don't understand how it works, which might be a little frightening for them.
Let's say we are in a free market nirvana. No regulations, and the market takes care of things.....
I set myself up as a Doctor. In a totally free market, I can just call myself a doctor, and set up practice.
90 percent of my patients die, because I don't believe in washing my hands.
The free market effects happen, and people eventually stop coming to me for treatment. I go out of business. The free market in action.
Sound too extreme?
Okay, I set up a business making cars. One has the unfortunate tendency to catch fire. Despite my best efforts to keep it quiet, eventually enough people know about this, and I go out of business. Once again, the free market at work.
But of course that doesn't matter a whole lot to those who were killed, or their families. We've come too far to expect any pure system like that to work.
So while I say that the free market works, to say that the free market would have kept Fukushima safe as opposed to regulations is either insanity or stupidity.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
since governments, by definition, have the unique ability to coerce their "customers" into paying for their services.
Actually, you'll find that coercion exists in every localised monopoly, not just government - checked your broadband ISP's terms and conditions lately? did they let you negotiate about those or just tell you "if you don't like it, move to another country, er, IP address"? But even more to the point, coercion exists in every business deal where there is an inequality of power, which is almost all of them. If you don't understand that, I'm not sure how you can begin to understand American industry. Do you have some kind of happy illusion that all industrialists everywhere are filled with love and peace and sharing and only wish to live morally and uprightly by a strict internal code of ethics, while "government" is filled with ignorant jackbooted thugs? But corporate boardrooms are little pocket governments of their sprawling global fiefdoms, and then the top CxOs walk out of private industry jobs and into "government" positions, so they're also in many cases the very same people.
Government is the exercise of power. Everyone has power, some more than others. Ergo, "government" is an inescapable feature of human life. It seems hard to be more confused about a thing than this belief that government is some kind of alien straitjacket dumped on us from the sky. No, it grew right here.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I almost expanded my argument, anticipating a counter-argument along these lines. However, since I have a tendency to wax pedantic, I thought I'd leave the argument where I did. Since you bit, though... :)
"Coercion" as I am using the term, and "coercion" as you are using the term aren't quite the same thing. Yes, where there is a monopoly on a product or service, there is an element of coercion in that you can either do business with the monopoly or go without. In some cases, "going without" may not be much of a choice. For example, at my old house, there was exactly one electric utility to choose from. Can you live without electricity? Well...people did so for thousands of years. Can you live without electricity in Anchorage, Alaska, in a residential neighborhood on a lot so small that you can't store enough firewood to last all winter? Not so much. Nevertheless, there is still a choice: you can do business with the electric utility or not. The government will not come arrest you if you refuse to buy the electric utility's services. However, if I decide not to pay my taxes (i.e., "buy" the government's "services"), I will be arrested, and my possessions will be auctioned off to pay my back taxes. Clearly, one of these scenarios involves a much greater degree of coercion than the other. You could argue that, as long as I am a citizen of the United States, I am partaking of the government's services, and therefore, failure to pay taxes would be rather like getting an account with the electric utility, but then refusing to pay the electric bill when it came due. That's a valid point, but even that would be a civil matter rather than a criminal one, whereas failing to pay your taxes is, in fact, a crime.
Other than that, yes, I pretty much agree with you, and I have to admit, I'm a little surprised that you felt the need to describe industry and government in so much detail, since basically my point above was that *every* organization made up of people will tend to display the same patterns of greed, selfishness and short-shortsightedness GGP was identifying in the free market. I was merely pointing out that those problems are not unique to corporations; I wasn't saying that they *only* exist in government.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
The responsibility doesn't have to be transitive, there merely needs to be an initiative for investors to protect their investment. I'm not suggesting removing limited liability, losing their investments without company killers of the nuclear fallout kind would go a long way. Fines and class action settlements that don't cover the profits generated half of the time from whatever dirty business clearly aren't working but as it stands hardly anyone will back a court putting a corporation at a real risk. The logic seems to be that shareholders shouldn't be punished even to the extent of their investments, not if the company isn't just one giant scam anyway. I think that's the wrong approach.
As far as downstream investors go, not much changes: go with the best return, they keep your holdings honest for you (disclaimer: this might be as crappy as ever for retirement plans, but shouldn't be significantly worse).
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Actually, yes they were. The "reports" you read about were about government run orphanage workhouses which treated children like slaves. Non-government run facilities that used child labor had much better conditions. They had also largely disappeared by the time child labor was abolished, simply because capital had grown to the extent that a single member of the family was able to support their entire family with just his labor, freeing the wife to stay at home and improve their living conditions, and freeing the children to go to school, allowing them to get a BETTER job later.
What is it about freedom that makes people want to tell lies about how terrible it is, even as every other system collapses around their ears?
The reports I remember reading were not about government run orphanage workhouses but about private companies. I'm not lying. Perhaps you are?
I think it's pretty likely...
And you would be wrong. There was a very good article in Slate or the NYT or the like a few months ago that detailed the decision making process, and basically the guys on the spot some of whom actually died in the explosion were the ones who marked the most important test as a "pass" when to an outside observer it looked clearly like a "fail".
What seems pretty likely to you is not a replacement for empiricism. I used to think like you did, then I looked at the facts and realized what an idiot I was being. There's nothing to stop you from doing the same thing.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The free market effects happen, and people eventually stop coming to me for treatment. I go out of business. The free market in action
Why on Earth do you think people would stop coming to you for treatment?
Because they can what, do statistics? Because they have some mechanism for knowing how many of your patients survive?
"Alternative medicine" is billion-dollar industry that is characterized by the use of techniques that cannot be clinically proven to work.
What you are talking about is not the free market: it's a fantasy, trivially falsifiable if you would just get out of your head and look around you at the world as it actually exists.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I do think however, that you might think That I actually think such a system might be a good thing. No, the above system is ridiculous, I just cite it as an example of pure free marketry, something that might be applicable to pizza shops, but not to any case involving skills and lives.
It just fails at that level.
Like I've said before, the free market should remain as free as possible, but not ever pure, as that is detrimental, and my example was an illustration of the ridiculous end game of that system. Some regulations are needed.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.