Just as we have throughout human history, we must use the best tools available. In the future, alternatives to nuclear energy may, and likely will, be devised, but for now it's one of the best choices we have. When you come up with something better, do the world a favor and let us know.
The alternatives are already there, we only have to use them. There is another trick that nuclear lobbyists often use to create fear. They create the unpleasant vision of turning off all the convential powerplants and then going after the alternatives which could not replace them at once and therefore would deprive us from our precious electricity. The 'back to the stone age' vision of heating with candles and fire. You're falling for this trick.
Who in hell is proposing to turn off all the other powerplants right now? Nobody. The only thing we have to do is expand the use of alternative energies and conserve -- *gasp* I used the c-word -- and then after a while we might get to a point where we can turn off the first of the conventional powerplants. We can pick the oldest and worst at first.
With naive I meant: How can you conclude from not hearing something about problems that there are no problems?
I am not talking about a major meltdown, I am talking about 'small' and 'allmost' accidents. In Germany those have to be reported to the authorities, and they are, and it turns out, that there is an incident being reported almost every week. Nothing where nuclear material is being released into the wild, but internal hickups of the systems. Now before you start bragging about how great your engineers and scientists are, please back down a bit from your national pride and consider that german engineers don't catch flies with their nostrils. Nuclear lobbyists over here always claim that german nuclear powerplants are among the safest in the world.
perfectly valid and safe technology
I completely disagree.
Risk is often defined as the product of damage potential and incident probability. Damage potential is high with nuclear power, thus you have to reduce incident probability. This is often achieved with multiple layers of redundancy. For a pump station for example you would not use one pump but four. Two in serial and the two groups in parallel. To reduce the risk of systematic failure, example: the pump of one type has a design flaw that makes it break under certain conditions, you would use pumps of different brands.
I know of one case in a nuclear plant, where the backup pumps have been built in in the wrong direction. On paper this subsystem was very safe, in reality we are lucky that the first set of pumps never failed until the flaw was discovered.
The point I am trying to make is that by adding more complexity to a system, you do not neccessarily make it safer. On the contrary, it becomes more difficult to manage, review and maintain.
This leads us to another point. The complexity and cost to operate a nuclear plant and the fact that it operates on material that you could build bombs from, mandates that you have large companies building and operating these plants. So the power is in the hands of big companies.
The damage potential of solar cells are near zilch. Yes, it can drop off your roof and bang you on the head. But apart from that the cells are so much inherently safe, that you can allow anyone to operate them. They don't have any moving parts, thus maintenance is very low.
This is one step into the direction of energy autonomy. And that is the fear of the big energy companies and one of the reasons why they are lobbying a lot against alternative energies, creating fear. "Alternatives are unreliable". That is their mantra they are repeating over and over again. "Nuclear is safe and reliable" is the other. Nuclear is inherently not safe. Period. Nuclear plants are the license to print money. And that money is being spent to produce an image and you're falling for it.
With solar, wind or biogas you also don't need long landlines for the transport, because the electricity is being produced very near the place where it is being consumed. This reduces transport losses.
Here in Germany a discussion started recently because our gas supply from Russia was endangered by a political struggle between Russia and Ukraina. Politians now demand that in order to reduce our dependancy from Russian gas we should prolong the runtimes of our nuclear plants. What do they think where the Uranium comes from? We don't have any. So we would replace one dependancy with the other. I know that the USA have their own supply of Uranium, so this is no argument for your place.
I don't consider coal and gas as a smart direction that we should use, thus I am not answering you comparisons of coal and gas with nuclear. In 2005 more than 8000 workers died in chinese coal mines. 'Nuf said.
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
No. There is no nuclear fission reactor today that produces more energy than it takes to operate it. At least not one that is capable of running more than a couple of seconds. I recently read an interview with one of the leading nuclear fission scientist and he said that we should not expect to see such a reactor before 2060 (no typo, two thousand and sixty).
Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill?
Yes, there are such studies. One of the more recent studies showed that the amount of killed birds is neglible when compared to other causes of bird deaths. This seems to depend on where the turbine is placed. Don't put it on a bird migration highway. Latest figure I read was 0.5 dead birds per year per turbine. http://www.wind-energie.de/uploads/media/HG_Vogels chutz.pdf (Sorry, German).
Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
I would really like to know what exactly those people think about the looks of New Orleans nowadays.
It is so very interresting, that renewable energy systems have to be 100% perfect in every single aspect while all the other energy systems are allowed to have fundamental flaws.
There is no silver bullet for our energy situation.
If I were to live in an area that is endangered by flooding from rising sea levels or in an area where coal is being dug up or if I had to choose whether I had to live near a nuclear plant or near a wind farm, I would definately opt for the wind farm.
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime." Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Check the facts. Will this ever stop?
This brings us to the question on why we would want to save all our artefacts for later generations. We are producing videos, images and audio in an ever increasing speed. Which future person should be interrested in all this. Would not some samples of our stuff completely suffice to document the 'Oil Age'.
Media should be capable of surviving your lifetime or maybe that of your children, after that nobody cares about your stuff. We vanish into dust.
Still, all the above arguments are valid even for a two lifetimes period.
You want more people to use encrypted mail? Make it easy to do.
I wholeheartly agree with you.
Given that I am a poor developer I can not do much on the code side. I always wondered why OpenSource mail programs don't come with a gpg plugin pre-installed and why they don't have a small wizard for importing or generating a keypair.
I have tried to do my share by first making friends and family aware that they are sending their very private love|hate|terror mails thru the world in plain text. In a second step I tried to argue against the dreaded 'I have nothing to hide' argument I mentioned earlier. I always failed. In the discussions I opted to let people decide for their own good or bad.
People astonishingly enough trust the government too. This might even be ok for today, but remember that the NPD, the German NeoNazi Party, had almost 20% in the last elections in Saxonia. Do you trust them when they have their next go in a couple of years? German ISPs are ordered by law to save your internet connection data for eight (!) years.
There is one story of the 2nd world war that should teach us something but that is too little known: The Norwegian Government had a central register of Jews in Norway before the second world war. This government had no intention to harm any Jew, but when the Nazis dropped in they used this register to find end exterminate Jews.
The very few people I exchange encrypted mails with are paranoid geeks.
This clearly could only happen because everybody said: I have nothing to hide, so why use encryption?
Every time I hear that argument I almost explode in a rage and claim that at times the usage of encryption alone will be held evidence that you're a criminal.
These times start NOW.
And by the way, this is YOUR fault you lazy bum.
-jsl
'Check for available update' statistic?
on
Firefox Growth Slowing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wouldn't it be better or augment the pure download numbers if they also ran some statistics over the 'Check for available updates' requests?
Per default this setting is turned on and it is known at which intervals Firefox checks for new updates, thus it should be possible to calculate a ballpark figure on how many people are actually USING Firefox.
None of my Word [keyboard] shortcuts work with OpenOffice, and I don't want to have to relearn a word processor.
And making OpenOffice or a Linux desktop mimic Windows won't help either. You can not mimic 100% and then people will complain that it is not perfectly 100% as they are used to.
They will also not see the point in switching. If it is not 100% as the original then why switch? They will want to use 'the original'. Software being free does not make sense to them, Windows and MS-Office are equally free to them, because no private person is paying for it anyway, mostly it comes pre-installed or they have friends install downloaded copies.
Lately I was absolutely amazed how much my 14 year old cousin associates 'Windows' with 'Computer' and vice versa. He had absolutely no idea that there even is a company called Apple and that there are other operating systems like Linux or *BSD.
Computer is PC and PC is Windows.
This is actually a really bad sign, since one tends to like what you are used to. If you learn on the one OS and get into computers only on this road, than everything else you cross by later will only be 'Not as you know it.'
We hear that argument ever so often, especially in the context of Office programs. People dislike OpenOffice not because it does not do the job for them, but because '...it is not like MS-Office'.
'In Word I can do this and that...'
Using MS Products in schools cements their Monopoly in a way that no other marketing campain could achieve.
I am really waiting for a proxy kind on neural net bayesian filter thingie that filters the news for me.
Maybe an rss reader which recognizes the headlines I click on or offers radio buttons for rating: (*) interresting ( ) neutral ( ) not interresting. It could then drop headlines I am certainly not interrested in or present the good ones more prominent.
I'd also like this agent to index all the web pages I surf and give me a search interface for my browsing history. How often did you find something interresting you forgot to bookmark and you cant remember on which browsers history (home, laptop, work, girlfriends computer) you should search?
It could try to cluster my interrests and skim some selected news sites. If an article fits into the stuff I like it could be presented like: You might want to read this...
And this same agent could periodically check selected web pages for changes and for example check for showing up or vanishing terms or phrases. Example: "Alert me when term 'version 3.4 beta' is not on the page any more OR when term '3.5' shows up on the page."
You ask why I am not programming such a buddy. Because I suck.
What does the angle at which you look at mating rituals have to do with the story?
Ok, maybe 'huge' was a bit exagerated. But it is a _sleeping_ problem. Look at all the electronics which are produced and how their usage time gets shorter and shorter. Lead poisioning is little fun. That's why we have unleaded fuel for a while now.
As for the other issues you mention: Yes! We have a lot to do. So lets straighten our t(h)in whiskers and get to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please see my other post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174013&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=14495764
Just as we have throughout human history, we must use the best tools available. In the future, alternatives to nuclear energy may, and likely will, be devised, but for now it's one of the best choices we have. When you come up with something better, do the world a favor and let us know.
The alternatives are already there, we only have to use them. There is another trick that nuclear lobbyists often use to create fear. They create the unpleasant vision of turning off all the convential powerplants and then going after the alternatives which could not replace them at once and therefore would deprive us from our precious electricity. The 'back to the stone age' vision of heating with candles and fire. You're falling for this trick.
Who in hell is proposing to turn off all the other powerplants right now? Nobody. The only thing we have to do is expand the use of alternative energies and conserve -- *gasp* I used the c-word -- and then after a while we might get to a point where we can turn off the first of the conventional powerplants. We can pick the oldest and worst at first.
-silence
With naive I meant: How can you conclude from not hearing something about problems that there are no problems?
I am not talking about a major meltdown, I am talking about 'small' and 'allmost' accidents. In Germany those have to be reported to the authorities, and they are, and it turns out, that there is an incident being reported almost every week. Nothing where nuclear material is being released into the wild, but internal hickups of the systems.
Now before you start bragging about how great your engineers and scientists are, please back down a bit from your national pride and consider that german engineers don't catch flies with their nostrils. Nuclear lobbyists over here always claim that german nuclear powerplants are among the safest in the world.
perfectly valid and safe technology
I completely disagree.
Risk is often defined as the product of damage potential and incident probability. Damage potential is high with nuclear power, thus you have to reduce incident probability. This is often achieved with multiple layers of redundancy. For a pump station for example you would not use one pump but four. Two in serial and the two groups in parallel. To reduce the risk of systematic failure, example: the pump of one type has a design flaw that makes it break under certain conditions, you would use pumps of different brands.
I know of one case in a nuclear plant, where the backup pumps have been built in in the wrong direction. On paper this subsystem was very safe, in reality we are lucky that the first set of pumps never failed until the flaw was discovered.
The point I am trying to make is that by adding more complexity to a system, you do not neccessarily make it safer. On the contrary, it becomes more difficult to manage, review and maintain.
This leads us to another point. The complexity and cost to operate a nuclear plant and the fact that it operates on material that you could build bombs from, mandates that you have large companies building and operating these plants. So the power is in the hands of big companies.
The damage potential of solar cells are near zilch. Yes, it can drop off your roof and bang you on the head. But apart from that the cells are so much inherently safe, that you can allow anyone to operate them. They don't have any moving parts, thus maintenance is very low.
This is one step into the direction of energy autonomy. And that is the fear of the big energy companies and one of the reasons why they are lobbying a lot against alternative energies, creating fear. "Alternatives are unreliable". That is their mantra they are repeating over and over again. "Nuclear is safe and reliable" is the other. Nuclear is inherently not safe. Period. Nuclear plants are the license to print money. And that money is being spent to produce an image and you're falling for it.
With solar, wind or biogas you also don't need long landlines for the transport, because the electricity is being produced very near the place where it is being consumed. This reduces transport losses.
Here in Germany a discussion started recently because our gas supply from Russia was endangered by a political struggle between Russia and Ukraina. Politians now demand that in order to reduce our dependancy from Russian gas we should prolong the runtimes of our nuclear plants. What do they think where the Uranium comes from? We don't have any. So we would replace one dependancy with the other.
I know that the USA have their own supply of Uranium, so this is no argument for your place.
I don't consider coal and gas as a smart direction that we should use, thus I am not answering you comparisons of coal and gas with nuclear. In 2005 more than 8000 workers died in chinese coal mines. 'Nuf said.
-silence
Do you really think that anybody would tell you anything when something went wrong with their reactors?
How can you be so naive?
-silence
Yes, you're right. Sorry for that.
-silence
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
s chutz.pdf (Sorry, German).
No. There is no nuclear fission reactor today that produces more energy than it takes to operate it. At least not one that is capable of running more than a couple of seconds. I recently read an interview with one of the leading nuclear fission scientist and he said that we should not expect to see such a reactor before 2060 (no typo, two thousand and sixty).
Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill?
Yes, there are such studies. One of the more recent studies showed that the amount of killed birds is neglible when compared to other causes of bird deaths. This seems to depend on where the turbine is placed. Don't put it on a bird migration highway.
Latest figure I read was 0.5 dead birds per year per turbine. http://www.wind-energie.de/uploads/media/HG_Vogel
Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
I like your humor.
-silence
I would really like to know what exactly those people think about the looks of New Orleans nowadays.
It is so very interresting, that renewable energy systems have to be 100% perfect in every single aspect while all the other energy systems are allowed to have fundamental flaws.
There is no silver bullet for our energy situation.
If I were to live in an area that is endangered by flooding from rising sea levels or in an area where coal is being dug up or if I had to choose whether I had to live near a nuclear plant or near a wind farm, I would definately opt for the wind farm.
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Check the facts. Will this ever stop?
-silence
With a magnet.
Oh wait, you said 'off of the tape' and not 'off the tape'...
This brings us to the question on why we would want to save all our artefacts for later generations. We are producing videos, images and audio in an ever increasing speed. Which future person should be interrested in all this. Would not some samples of our stuff completely suffice to document the 'Oil Age'.
Media should be capable of surviving your lifetime or maybe that of your children, after that nobody cares about your stuff. We vanish into dust.
Still, all the above arguments are valid even for a two lifetimes period.
I think the parent meant only one reader/writer, not only one tape.
You want more people to use encrypted mail? Make it easy to do.
I wholeheartly agree with you.
Given that I am a poor developer I can not do much on the code side. I always wondered why OpenSource mail programs don't come with a gpg plugin pre-installed and why they don't have a small wizard for importing or generating a keypair.
I have tried to do my share by first making friends and family aware that they are sending their very private love|hate|terror mails thru the world in plain text. In a second step I tried to argue against the dreaded 'I have nothing to hide' argument I mentioned earlier.
I always failed. In the discussions I opted to let people decide for their own good or bad.
People astonishingly enough trust the government too. This might even be ok for today, but remember that the NPD, the German NeoNazi Party, had almost 20% in the last elections in Saxonia. Do you trust them when they have their next go in a couple of years?
German ISPs are ordered by law to save your internet connection data for eight (!) years.
There is one story of the 2nd world war that should teach us something but that is too little known: The Norwegian Government had a central register of Jews in Norway before the second world war. This government had no intention to harm any Jew, but when the Nazis dropped in they used this register to find end exterminate Jews.
The very few people I exchange encrypted mails with are paranoid geeks.
*sigh*
-jsl
This clearly could only happen because everybody said: I have nothing to hide, so why use encryption?
Every time I hear that argument I almost explode in a rage and claim that at times the usage of encryption alone will be held evidence that you're a criminal.
These times start NOW.
And by the way, this is YOUR fault you lazy bum.
-jsl
Wouldn't it be better or augment the pure download numbers if they also ran some statistics over the 'Check for available updates' requests?
Per default this setting is turned on and it is known at which intervals Firefox checks for new updates, thus it should be possible to calculate a ballpark figure on how many people are actually USING Firefox.
None of my Word [keyboard] shortcuts work with OpenOffice, and I don't want to have to relearn a word processor.
And making OpenOffice or a Linux desktop mimic Windows won't help either. You can not mimic 100% and then people will complain that it is not perfectly 100% as they are used to.
They will also not see the point in switching. If it is not 100% as the original then why switch? They will want to use 'the original'. Software being free does not make sense to them, Windows and MS-Office are equally free to them, because no private person is paying for it anyway, mostly it comes pre-installed or they have friends install downloaded copies.
sad...
-jsl
Lately I was absolutely amazed how much my 14 year old cousin associates 'Windows' with 'Computer' and vice versa. He had absolutely no idea that there even is a company called Apple and that there are other operating systems like Linux or *BSD.
Computer is PC and PC is Windows.
This is actually a really bad sign, since one tends to like what you are used to. If you learn on the one OS and get into computers only on this road, than everything else you cross by later will only be 'Not as you know it.'
We hear that argument ever so often, especially in the context of Office programs. People dislike OpenOffice not because it does not do the job for them, but because '...it is not like MS-Office'.
'In Word I can do this and that...'
Using MS Products in schools cements their Monopoly in a way that no other marketing campain could achieve.
-jsl
Mac OS why?
-jsl
Long term DOS, Windows, OS/2, Linux, Ultrix, Solaris, FreeBSD user. Switched when the Mac mini became available.
I don't regret. On the contrary.
All OSes I know suck, osx sucks less.
-jsl
Why are they not using their botnets to DDOS the phishing sites and spammers?
I mean, then MS security vulnerabilities would suddenly make sense.
-silence
Can't the slashcode hackers code a filter that adds a coralized URL with a nice red C icon right next to the original URL?
Or the other way round, where the link is coralized and the original URL is preserved in a small o Icon link?
-silence
The technology is already there. It is still experimental or beta, but the more people support it, the faster it will grow mature.
Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system
-silence
And yet another reason why ROT13 is inferior to double ROT13: inconvenience.
"Ruhr" is a river in western Germany which has a large industrial area around it the Ruhrgebiet.
"Pumpen" is pumps.
They sell industrial pumps. Makes perfect sense for a German.
I guess 7200rpm drives will produce significantly more heat. This might be a problem.
-silence
I am really waiting for a proxy kind on neural net bayesian filter thingie that filters the news for me.
Maybe an rss reader which recognizes the headlines I click on or offers radio buttons for rating: (*) interresting ( ) neutral ( ) not interresting.
It could then drop headlines I am certainly not interrested in or present the good ones more prominent.
I'd also like this agent to index all the web pages I surf and give me a search interface for my browsing history. How often did you find something interresting you forgot to bookmark and you cant remember on which browsers history (home, laptop, work, girlfriends computer) you should search?
It could try to cluster my interrests and skim some selected news sites. If an article fits into the stuff I like it could be presented like: You might want to read this...
And this same agent could periodically check selected web pages for changes and for example check for showing up or vanishing terms or phrases. Example: "Alert me when term 'version 3.4 beta' is not on the page any more OR when term '3.5' shows up on the page."
You ask why I am not programming such a buddy. Because I suck.
-silence
Heat. Paint is a shitty conductor of heat
Should not be a problem for satellites, but in general I guess you're right.
Maybe some kind of silicone paint that only sticks to metal? Silicone is a good heat conductor compared to 'normal' paint.
-jsl
fucking perspective
What does the angle at which you look at mating rituals have to do with the story?
Ok, maybe 'huge' was a bit exagerated. But it is a _sleeping_ problem. Look at all the electronics which are produced and how their usage time gets shorter and shorter. Lead poisioning is little fun. That's why we have unleaded fuel for a while now.
As for the other issues you mention: Yes! We have a lot to do. So lets straighten our t(h)in whiskers and get to it.
-s