Slashdot Mirror
Paris Terror Spurs Plan For Military Zones Around Nuclear Plants
mdsolar sends this report from Bloomberg:
Lawmakers in France want to create military zones around its 58 atomic reactors to boost security after this month's Paris terror attacks and almost two dozen mystery drone flights over nuclear plants that have baffled authorities.
"There's a legal void that needs to be plugged," said Claude de Ganay, the opposition member of the National Assembly spearheading legislation to be considered by parliament on Feb. 5. The proposals would classify atomic energy sites as "highly sensitive military zones" under the control of the Ministry of Defense, according to an outline provided by de Ganay.
"There's a legal void that needs to be plugged," said Claude de Ganay, the opposition member of the National Assembly spearheading legislation to be considered by parliament on Feb. 5. The proposals would classify atomic energy sites as "highly sensitive military zones" under the control of the Ministry of Defense, according to an outline provided by de Ganay.
What he's proposing there is domestic war against an undefined enemy. Friendly fire in this case is a dumb ass soldier shooting some critical safety system in the nuclear plant.
Get a grip, and be grown up politicians and not chicken littles.
The same can be said for any measure.
The area around nuclear plants is already highly controlled.
So activists always get stopped within it, they don't make it to the actual nuclear reactor.
Changing that area into a military area just means it becomes illegal to fly over it and allow them to shoot those drones down.
And maybe the activists will get more severe punishments for trying to breach.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Using the military for police is common outside the US. The US doesn't do it because the military is too high strung and trained to kill everything that moves to use as a police force. But elsewhere, it works out much better.
Learn to love Alaska
Fighting local terror is a police task. They are trained for that. They normally don't shoot people, they try to apprehend them. It would be a total disaster if we would think that we are on war with something. True the US is at war with all number of problems, like drugs, terror, violence you name it, but that is not a solving strategy. Beside the will of "security people" we should fight terrorists with good police work and we should address the core issues which trigger people to become terrorists. One key ingredient for radicalization (which is a requirement to become a terrorist of any kind) is a feeling of powerlessness and the feeling of lack of communication. The latter includes that nobody really listens to you. It is not enough when you are allowed to post or say anything, as long as no one is really engaging in a personal discussion (not debate) then there is no real communication in terms of the problems the people have. Also people get frustrated and angry, because what ever they do they are not getting anywhere. For instance in Germany or France it is harder to get an apprenticeship training position if you have a foreign name, especially if it sounds Turkish or Arabic. It is worse with small companies than with bigger ones and it is worse if you are male. In addition your school grades are similar effected (males) when you have a foreign name or if you have a name which is typical associated with low income (e.g. Kevin in Germany).
You should learn to distinguish between Islam, the religion, and their followers called Muslims, and Islam, the ideology, and the Islamists. It is the same different as between normal Christians and those who burn people on crosses. If you are unable to differentiate then you are either frightened by Islam which means you should investigate that religion (not to convert necessarily, but to understand), or you are just a racist moron, then you should reflect on that and try to understand why you started with that strange believe.
A coal plant with ten years worth of coal stockpiled on site, plus a similarly sized ash pond, would be just as juicy a target.
We just don't have the technology to detect the toxins released by that remotely - except in so far as the coal ash is itself startlingly radioactive.
Now it doesn't seem to have been such a good idea to put all those reactors on the border of the country, where people can cross over without presenting any papers. (Schengen)
For lots of them, drones can be easily operated from neighboring countries.
"...millions of muslims in their country?"
It's a small thing called 'Constitution'. Also, half of Africa speaks French for some reason you can't remember, I'm sure.
The real enemy of France is the government
It is the government of France which has allowed unabated invasion of the Moslems into the country
Most of those Moslem that immigrated to France are from former French colonies, what is to say that they are from countries that France invaded first.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
You have no understanding of the modern U.S. military. They spend a lot of effort just on understanding the social dynamics of any conflict zone. If they thought killing everything in sight was a wise idea, Afghanistan and Iraq would be barren wastelands where nothing would life. The inhabitants seem to have every intention of turning them into wastelands. Maybe you got the two groups confused.
It doesn't make Islamic neo-colonialism right.
You should learn to distinguish between Islam, the religion, and their followers called Muslims, and Islam, the ideology, and the Islamists.
You can't do that. There is no difference between a people and their religion, because without worshippers a religion dies. And you can't separate the fundamentalist Muslims from the "ordinary" Muslims because their religion promotes theocracy. It's against any laws not based on their religion. Where Muslims dominate government, law becomes Sharia sooner or later. That is not a world in which you and I will be permitted to believe whatever we want to believe, and if we insist upon it, one in which we will not be permitted to exist.
This is not about race. I will freely admit I am prejudiced against religion and the religious, though, for a variety of reasons adequately addressed in the summary portion of the movie Religulous, predominantly bullshit magical thinking which leads to a host of ill effects.
If you are unable to differentiate then you are either frightened by Islam which means you should investigate that religion (not to convert necessarily, but to understand)
Been there, done that. Slightly more scary than Christianity, which is one of the greatest evils the world has ever known.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A coal plant with ten years worth of coal stockpiled on site, plus a similarly sized ash pond, would be just as juicy a target.
Were you born this way, or did it take a lot of slashdotting to lose your mind so completely?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right. Because there's no way an Islamic terror mob could overwhelm inadequately light defenses (cough Benghazi cough).
Interesting bit of logic there, because defenses aren't perfect you shouldn't have any ?
Tell me you aren't a citizen, Please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
and
http://www.arng.army.mil/about...
the national guard is technically state run, state sanctioned militia vs the main branches, which are federal.
they pretty much act as one, but that is an important distinction
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
when was the last time christians were activly seeking out people of other faiths and burning them at the stake? Can we stop with the false equivalence here?? I mean you want to argue that muslims and islamists are different and then you reach back 500 years in time to make a comparo?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Tell me you aren't a citizen, Please.
I wish I weren't. I learned in school that the constitution prohibited using soldiers against the citizenry, but obviously that was a lie. The troops can be used to execute the laws of the nation. Just another reason to leave this country, if I ever become wealthy enough. Poor people can't just leave, the state wants half your stuff.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
they pretty much act as one, but that is an important distinction
In court, sure. In the real world, no it isn't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
afaik, the governor of a state can call in the guard. he cant do that with the army itself. That is the big distinction. I get the point you are making, im just pointing out its not quite so clear cut even though they do work as a defacto 1 team unit
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I seem to recall something called the "Moral Majority" that was quite influential in the USA not so long ago.
Yes, someone mobilizes them politically every few years and then we all regret it shortly thereafter.
Relatively speaking, even things like widespread Blue Laws aren't that far back in the US rear view mirror.
Yes, that kind of thing scares me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The USA etc. would not be in the Middle East for oil (stirring up resistance) if we had a nuclear-based economy (including hot or cold fusion, too). So, if everyone had built (safer) nukes in the 1950s and later, our global geo-politics might have been much different. The USA would have never aligned itself with Saudi Arabia, propping up a repressive regime (to get oil profits, especially for Bush-related families), and stirring up a lot of resistance (most of the 9/11/2001 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and unhappy with their own country as far as the USA's involvement in it).
In James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear", his fictional Chironian society, based on nuclear fusion, is a society with an abundance world view, where there are a lot less crazy conflicts from people butting into other people's lives in order to gain "profits" and material wealth. In theory, a big shift to (better) nuclear in the 1960s could have produced such a society here -- if "too cheap to meter" had come true through better research and a focus on nuclear plants designed to produce energy safely and not be part of a nuclear weapons program. For example, there is the Thorium cycle which is somewhat safer, but the USA did not pursue that as it is harder to make bombs out of that.
I discuss another version of that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?"
Still, your point remains insightful, and people have been saying similar things for decades. That is why, for now, I think solar and other renewables are the way to go. Much more decentralization is made possible by the current form of renewable compared to the current form of nuclear energy (big plants). Decentralization is much more compatible with distributed wealth (and a smaller rich/poor divide) which seems essential for a democracy. And with solar energy following an almost Moore's law like drop in price for a certain level of performance, it is finally reaching grid parity, and with new high speed printing technologies, as well as maybe paint-on versions and such, solar will likely be dirt cheap in another two decades. The storage issue is also being solved by better batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and such.
However, if we had "Mr. Fusion" (like if Rossi's "cold fusion" LENR eCat or similar really worked), then I might feel differently given some downsides to scaling-up solar (like blocking light for green plant growth).
Still, back to current reality -- France is now admitting the risks first hand of the current approach to nuclear energy -- that you essentially need a police state to go with conventional nuclear energy because the risks of a meltdown cause by terrorists is just to high. Chernobl shows what is possible -- and that was in a remote area. mage such a melt down in the middle of Western Europe. Horrible. But that "cost" from the risk of intentional terror attacks was not factored into the original political calculations of whether to build big nuclear plants. -- even though people raised it at the time and since!
However, even with fairly conventional nuclear, there are other alternatives like Hyperion/Gen4 which are small nuclear "batteries" which could power a town and be trucked back and forth to a factory for replenishment every thirty years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Gen4 Energy, Inc (formerly Hyperion Power Generation, Inc.[1]) is a privately held corporation formed to construct and sell several designs of relatively small (70 MW thermal, 25 MW electric) nuclear reactors, which they claim will be modular, inexpensive, inher
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Typo: "mage such a" should be "Imagine such a"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I make an analogy so that you can understand what kind of difference that is. Yes you have to go back in time for such things in Christianity. You do not have to go that far back on the topic of racism. While a certain amount of being proud of your own nation is ok, it can also be something like in Nazi Germany, pre WW2 Japan, Franco Spain, etc. My point is about the difference and distance between the believes both groups. My statement is not about Christianity today or anything of that dip shit.
The predominantly Bosniak area of Central Podrinje (the region around Srebrenica) had a primary strategic importance to Serbs, as without it there would be no territorial integrity within their new political entity of Republika Srpska.[31] They thus proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks from Bosniak ethnic territories in Eastern Bosnia and Central Podrinje. In the words of the ICTY judgement:
Doesnt seem so much religious reasons as it does social/political reasons.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Call it an "enhanced security zone" staffed by well-trained, well-armed civilians with broad arrest- and secret-court prosecutorial powers which report to a newly-created cabinet level post. How do you say "Department of homeland nuclear security" in French?
--
Disclaimer: This is supposed to be funny. Anything that amounts to a huge government power-grab at the expense of its citizens' and legal residents' basic freedoms whether it's called a military force or a "civilian" force scares me and it should scare you as well.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Every time the National Guard is called in to put down disturbance, that's a violation of the constitution which does not permit the military to be used against the citizenry.
The state governments are not subject to the same rules as the federal government. And the National Guard are elements of the US military that belong to the states.
I guess we should stop using hydroelectric dams as well because those are vulnerable to terrorist attacks too.
Lets say you've a memory more than a week and you remember Fukushima and Chernobyl and then want to protest Nuclear Energy for safety reasons, and/or you want different green energy.
Now you're arrested, and no safety of civilian courts. FUN!
The US should also have a sizable military force surrounding our reactors. It is one way that terrorists could cause major harm that persists for centuries. Some of the terror loonies are sick enough to try to put a reactor into meltdown. And the retaliation from the US against nations known to harbor terrorists would be severe and perhaps nuclear in nature. My premiss is that terrorism can only harm Islam and followers of Islam. They probably know that but reason that there is a line in the sand that will trigger retaliation and as long as their attacks are low grade they can continue using terror tactics. That may be a very foolish belief as the US or Israel can get a bit crazy at times and any hostile actions may be received and great retaliation applied. One example is the US invasion of Iraq as Iraq was not the source of the 9/11 attacks nor did they have stockpiles of weapons of mass distruction. Who knows what nation we might crush if a reactor was sabotaged in the US?
"It doesn't make Islamic neo-colonialism right."
They just came home to 'the old country'.
Where Muslims dominate government, law becomes Sharia sooner or later. That is not a world in which you and I will be permitted to believe whatever we want to believe, and if we insist upon it, one in which we will not be permitted to exist.
Perhaps you missed the bit of history where Spain was controlled by Muslims for nearly eight hundred years with Jews and Christians living freely and being left to practice their own religion, and then they were kicked out and the Christian leaders that replaced them forced the Jews out under penalty of death if they did not convert or leave?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm not even going to try to calculate the size of the ash pond, but here's what we have for the mountain of coalâ¦
I used the Embalse nuclear plant as a baseline, because it was the first thing I found on Wikipedia.
A coal-fired power plant producing the same 2109 MWt output would burn 2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year, for a fuel stockpile on site of 24,636,209,400 kilograms. If you prefer tons, Wolfram says that's 27,160,000. - 27 megatons and change. Since uranium in the core is the form it is used in, we shall assume this is powdered coal magically prevented from blowing away, perhaps with a water mist, or plastic sheeting.
The specific energy of coal is 24 MJ/kg; of TNT, a mere 4.6 - a 5.2-fold difference.
Allowing for this, the coal pile contains 141 megatons worth of energy.
While it might be infeasible to efficiently detonate this mountain of coal, odds are once a fire starts, it would be impossible to put out, forming a firestorm effect which may aerosolize enough powdered coal to cause a thermobaric explosion.
Even failing that, the result would approximate a particularly bad coal seam fire, and the surface area involved in combustion, as well as the open-air nature of the fire, would expose the local population to a manmade âoeevil windâ - substantial portions of the coal's mass would be released in the form of CO2 and other combustion gases, asphyxiating anyone unfortunate to be downwind of it. Assuming only 10 million tons of the coal is released in the form of CO2, the result is 3.932 cubic kilometers of heavier-than-air gas rushing downhill from the fire. This will not be released all at once, but instead will sustain the event, perhaps long enough to kill even the vegetation that isn't incinerated by the firestorm or simple radiant heat from an unexpectedly well-behaved fire that doesn't spark secondary blazes - which is a rather likely eventuality.
Granted that storing ten years of coal on-site at a powerplant is vanishingly unlikely, but when apples-to-apples comparisons are made the law of large numbers suggests that any calamity at a fuel dump of this magnitude - of any kind - is likely to be severe, if not a mass-casualty event.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania#Mine_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazuku
My math, for verification:
27 kJ / gram for bituminous coal
0.027 mJ/g
80620 kJ / gram for uranium
80.62 mJ/g
2109 MWt for the Embalse nuclear power plant
2986 times denser power
3.154Ã--107 seconds per year
31,540,000
2109/.027 = 78,111 grams per second
78111*31540000
2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year
P.S.: You're an ass.
Right. Because there's no way an Islamic terror mob could overwhelm inadequately light defenses (cough Benghazi cough).
Interesting bit of logic there, because defenses aren't perfect you shouldn't have any ?
No, the opposite.
The person I was replying to seemed to think that there was no point in making the areas around reactors into military zones. Not me.