Some acres in Libya (population density: 3.6/km^2) and a few deep-sea cables ought to do the trick (in the not-so-far future). Of course, they'll have to get rid of Gaddafi first, which is proving to be quite the challenge.
According to Tepco's own documents, reactor 1 experienced problems with its cooling system immediately after the earthquake and before the tsunami struck.
So your (implicit) assertion that the reactor survived the earthquake is a myth. Granted, the problems would be much less severe than they are right now, but that is no excuse to allow facts fall off the wayside.
I don't think I feel strongly enough about that to grant either form of the supposition that public in Facebook is equivalent to public. Facebook is not a public utility. I deleted my account, as can anyone else (provided you follow their rather arcane instructions). And I don't want Google to have some kind of "information imminent domain" right that makes it OK for them to anonymously spider sites that require login from everyone else. Google is also not a public utility.
I feel differently, once it's on Facebook, it's essentially in the public record. My reasoning is that deleting your account only stops someone from scraping your (previously available) information in the future. Before you deleted your account anyone could have accessed your data, thus you have already lost control over it.
One might make the distinction between information viewable to "Facebook strangers", i.e. the public part of Facebook, and information shared with your friends. The problem with that argument is that Facebook in the past has on its own accord changed the distinction between the public and private parts of Facebook. More and more data has become publicly viewable, leading me to the conclusion that Facebook wants that information public. But they also want to restrict accessibility. That's a contradiction, it seems.
All of your objections are naught once you realize that the government has to be accountable to the electorate and therefore an easy-to-use mechanism for disclosing public information in a timely matter is part of the government's job.
IOW, they should be able to piggy-back on the infrastructure that is already in place to disseminate that information.
My university not only supports Linux and OS X, but has tutorials complete with screenshots for many versions: Ubuntu, Redhat, and Suse for Linux and Leopard and Snow Leopard for OS X.
It does so for 3 different networks and 4 different ways to connect: eduroam, 80211.X, OpenVPN and SSL-VPN.
The problem is that all that documentation is horrendously organized. There is no single page that lists all the possibilities and certificate files you need and as you peruse the site to fix your connection problem, you find other ways to connect. Though, once you get it up and running everything works like a charm.
sticky.pirate provided the relevant keyword down-thread: Homomorphic encryption. I remember my friend briefly mentioning the discovery of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme, i.e. one that allows you to perform the equivalence of both addition and multiplication on the plaintext without decrypting the ciphertext, a major breakthrough at the time.
The usefulness of such a scheme for the medical industry should be obvious. The problem then was that the current schemes are too slow to be practical.
Org-Mode files are plain text, but there is extensive support for inline tables/spreadsheets and images and even code blocks. For example, you can keep data from an experiment in a table, do some analysis for which one would normally use Excel, and then plot and display a graph based on the data in one document. That takes care of a lot of files right there, because many tasks can be incorporated into the org file organically.
Another great feature is the Org-Agenda which defaults do displaying date-based information (what is due or scheduled for today), but can be used to create filters (stored searches if you will) across any kind of data in all your org files.
I guess it takes a certain hacker mentality, but the great thing about Org-Mode is that it allows you to organize your files and system organically to exactly suit your needs as you discover them. Of course, the major disadvantage is that you have to buy into using Emacs.
Your hypothetical scenario ignores the simple fact that the prices of "high-end" Mac hardware have been going down since forever. Macs are part of a PC market that is thoroughly commoditized and even Apple does not have the power to change that.
You seem to fail to appreciate that both the Hindenburg disaster and a plane crash today resulted in loss of life and property. The Fukushima disaster is a tremendous problem for Japan.
Point out to me exactly where I indicated anything of the sort?
Because you keep going on about the technical differences between Chernobyl and Fukushima whereas I'm much more concerned about the similar effect the accidents have on the environment and society.
When politicians and experts announced that Chernobyl could not happen in the West, how do you think the general public understood that message? That Western reactors were immune to a specific type of failure mode as witnessed in Chernobyl? No, they took it that Western reactors are immune to all type of failures, and that is simply not true as Fukushima has now proven. It doesn't matter whether they deceived themselves or were manipulated, these are just the realities. It also doesn't matter that new designs are supposedly safe, because as I've said, even these have to be maintained and regulated, so the possibility of human failure with catastrophic consequences remains.
Planes still keep falling out of the sky, even if it happens for different reasons than the Hindenburg accident. And nobody is claiming otherwise. The same is not true with nuclear power plants. These are divided into failed designs where we know or have seen that accidents can occur and then there are designs that are "safe", meaning immune to all types of accidents, regardless how well they are maintained. That is an extraordinary claim, which requires proof. Given the inherent risks in nuclear energy, which we all can see for ourselves, it is very understandable that many people do not want to assume the risks to test these claims.
Now, I don't want to get into a huge debate about the relative environmental impact of coal vs nuclear energy - coal really doesn't come out winning, but hey, at least it doesn't have that "scary" radiation word attached to it.
Nobody in Germany who is serious about phasing out nuclear energy is proposing to replace it with coal. That's just a straw man you keep pushing.
The future is obvious - a base load of nuclear stations (instead of coal and gas), backed by renewable sources for peak power (wind, solar, tidal, hydro etc).
We'll just have to agree to disagree there. I do not believe in nuclear energy, not only because I think we can generate our needs 100% through renewables (along with a conversation effort), but also because I simply don't like it. Its whole reason d'être is to make nuclear weapons more acceptable and it's very much intertwined with the nuclear weapons industry. Google "atoms for peace". That's why, to this day, the IAEA has the power to censor the WHO with regards to health effects of all things radioactive. I find that simply unacceptable.
If you can't even acknowledge that the similarities between the two accidents are about as similar as the Hindenburg disaster and the crash of a modern airliner, then I'm not even sure it's worth debating it with you (which I'm more than happy to do).
You seem to fail to appreciate that both the Hindenburg disaster and a plane crash today resulted in loss of life and property. The Fukushima disaster is a tremendous problem for Japan. It has already hindered the rescue effort after the tsunami in the affected areas, not to mention the resources it will bind in the future that are much needed for the reconstruction effort. Currently, there is a 20-mile evacuation zone that might turn out to be permanent for the foreseeable future. The ongoing exposure of nuclear cooling water into the ocean WILL have an effect in the area, even if most of it is diluted in the large Pacific Ocean. (I'm concerned about effects like such on the wild life in Bavaria, which still has to be checked before human consumption 25 years after Chernobyl. Of course, such a thing was "impossible" if we believed the politicians then.)
You seem to be interested in the variation at the top, but the whole debate whether Fukushima is a 6 or a 7 on the IAEA scale is boring to me. The fact is that Fukushima is huge fuck-up and will impose a tremendous (and so far unknowable) cost on Japan at a time when it has already been hit by a huge disaster.
So screw your love for nuclear energy. It is a tremendously complex technology with catastrophic consequences when (not if) things go wrong. Even new, supposedly "safe" designs need to be maintained, so there's always a chance for human error or worse negligence. It's just not worth to assume that risk.
You're going in circles. I've already established that the nuclear industry was at the negotiation table where the concensus was reached. They signed their names under the agreement, so they can't claim now that they did not agree with what was decided.
And simply signing it to bide their time (as you or others have suggested) is not in their interest either. (1) I simply don't find it believable, because the nuclear industry is quite strong itself and has powerful allies. (2) It means they didn't act in good faith, thus the government will have less incentive to negotiate with them in the future. (3) In any case, as a strategy it didn't work, because the nuclear industry tried to renege on the reached deal in 2009/2010 (with a complicit government) and it turned out to be a disaster to all parties involved.
There is significant wind capacity in Germany's south because of previous opposition from the ruling parties. Then there's the North Sea where you can build off-shore wind parks. I also think there should be a solar installation on every roof. The status quo is a giant waste of real estate. Oh and you can use hydro without dams. Google "Stromboje", it is a concept tried out in Austria for quite some time now.
That can only happen if there is a serious power inbalance. I'm not saying that the government and the nuclear industry are equals (of course not, because politics has primacy), but the nuclear industry has significant clout and strong allies. Sorry, I just can't see how they were "crushed".
What government is claiming that ships don't sink or planes don't crash? Please tell me, so I can stay clear of them in the future.
OTOH, after Chernobyl most Western governments claimed that such a thing could NEVER happen in the West, because our technology and safety measures are SO much better than those of these (godless, communist) Soviets. And then Fukushima proved them wrong.
Any energy company that disagrees will get clobbered either through regulation or harmed by bad publicity. They can't appear to disagree.
That's not how political negotiation works. I believe in the primacy of politics over economic actors, so I have no problem with the government telling industry to either sit down and negotiate in good faith or face being regulated without their input taken into consideration. The energy companies agreed to sit down and then negotiated over the outcome. Many of their demands were part of the reached agreement, so I really can't see the tyranny.
We'll see if they still agree when a much friendlier administration comes in and allows new plant construction once again.
That's what's happened in 2009 (no new construction, but longer lifetimes of existing plants), and the current administration got severely burned by it (loss of many major regional elections and one party is fighting to stay relevant). After Fukushima, there is no political party in Germany that is in favor of nuclear energy.
Mea culpa, I confused the net difference between export and import with total capacity.
I found conflicting sources for total capacity. This article (in German) says that total capacity is 90 GW of which 20 GW are produced by nuclear plants. (That jives with a roughly 25% share.) The highest requirement is in the winter with 80 GW. So shutting down all nuclear reactors would result in an undercapacity, but less than the 20% you've come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's Italy going to get their power?
Some acres in Libya (population density: 3.6/km^2) and a few deep-sea cables ought to do the trick (in the not-so-far future). Of course, they'll have to get rid of Gaddafi first, which is proving to be quite the challenge.
Don't worry, once Germany figures out how to be 100% renewable [1], we'll happily sell our technology to everybody in the world [2].
[1] Not supposed to sound sarcastic.
[2] Or, judging by history, we'll invent it and somebody else will commercialize it.
According to Tepco's own documents, reactor 1 experienced problems with its cooling system immediately after the earthquake and before the tsunami struck.
Source: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110517p2a00m0na008000c.html
So your (implicit) assertion that the reactor survived the earthquake is a myth. Granted, the problems would be much less severe than they are right now, but that is no excuse to allow facts fall off the wayside.
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
I don't think I feel strongly enough about that to grant either form of the supposition that public in Facebook is equivalent to public. Facebook is not a public utility. I deleted my account, as can anyone else (provided you follow their rather arcane instructions). And I don't want Google to have some kind of "information imminent domain" right that makes it OK for them to anonymously spider sites that require login from everyone else. Google is also not a public utility.
I feel differently, once it's on Facebook, it's essentially in the public record. My reasoning is that deleting your account only stops someone from scraping your (previously available) information in the future. Before you deleted your account anyone could have accessed your data, thus you have already lost control over it.
One might make the distinction between information viewable to "Facebook strangers", i.e. the public part of Facebook, and information shared with your friends. The problem with that argument is that Facebook in the past has on its own accord changed the distinction between the public and private parts of Facebook. More and more data has become publicly viewable, leading me to the conclusion that Facebook wants that information public. But they also want to restrict accessibility. That's a contradiction, it seems.
All of your objections are naught once you realize that the government has to be accountable to the electorate and therefore an easy-to-use mechanism for disclosing public information in a timely matter is part of the government's job.
IOW, they should be able to piggy-back on the infrastructure that is already in place to disseminate that information.
My university not only supports Linux and OS X, but has tutorials complete with screenshots for many versions: Ubuntu, Redhat, and Suse for Linux and Leopard and Snow Leopard for OS X.
It does so for 3 different networks and 4 different ways to connect: eduroam, 80211.X, OpenVPN and SSL-VPN.
The problem is that all that documentation is horrendously organized. There is no single page that lists all the possibilities and certificate files you need and as you peruse the site to fix your connection problem, you find other ways to connect. Though, once you get it up and running everything works like a charm.
sticky.pirate provided the relevant keyword down-thread: Homomorphic encryption. I remember my friend briefly mentioning the discovery of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme, i.e. one that allows you to perform the equivalence of both addition and multiplication on the plaintext without decrypting the ciphertext, a major breakthrough at the time.
The usefulness of such a scheme for the medical industry should be obvious. The problem then was that the current schemes are too slow to be practical.
There are encryption schemes that are transparent to algorithms, i.e. you can perform analysis on the encrypted data without decrypting it first.
At least that's what a friend of mine said who's getting a Ph.D. doing medicine-related computer science.
Org-Mode files are plain text, but there is extensive support for inline tables/spreadsheets and images and even code blocks. For example, you can keep data from an experiment in a table, do some analysis for which one would normally use Excel, and then plot and display a graph based on the data in one document. That takes care of a lot of files right there, because many tasks can be incorporated into the org file organically.
Another great feature is the Org-Agenda which defaults do displaying date-based information (what is due or scheduled for today), but can be used to create filters (stored searches if you will) across any kind of data in all your org files.
I guess it takes a certain hacker mentality, but the great thing about Org-Mode is that it allows you to organize your files and system organically to exactly suit your needs as you discover them. Of course, the major disadvantage is that you have to buy into using Emacs.
Your hypothetical scenario ignores the simple fact that the prices of "high-end" Mac hardware have been going down since forever. Macs are part of a PC market that is thoroughly commoditized and even Apple does not have the power to change that.
Emacs Org-Mode. I've learned a little Emacs syntax just to use that package after I've being a Vim user for over 15 years.
A government-sanctioned commission just put out a report two weeks ago that said as much. Google "Atomausstieg-Ethikkommission".
You seem to fail to appreciate that both the Hindenburg disaster and a plane crash today resulted in loss of life and property. The Fukushima disaster is a tremendous problem for Japan.
Point out to me exactly where I indicated anything of the sort?
Because you keep going on about the technical differences between Chernobyl and Fukushima whereas I'm much more concerned about the similar effect the accidents have on the environment and society.
When politicians and experts announced that Chernobyl could not happen in the West, how do you think the general public understood that message? That Western reactors were immune to a specific type of failure mode as witnessed in Chernobyl? No, they took it that Western reactors are immune to all type of failures, and that is simply not true as Fukushima has now proven. It doesn't matter whether they deceived themselves or were manipulated, these are just the realities. It also doesn't matter that new designs are supposedly safe, because as I've said, even these have to be maintained and regulated, so the possibility of human failure with catastrophic consequences remains.
Planes still keep falling out of the sky, even if it happens for different reasons than the Hindenburg accident. And nobody is claiming otherwise. The same is not true with nuclear power plants. These are divided into failed designs where we know or have seen that accidents can occur and then there are designs that are "safe", meaning immune to all types of accidents, regardless how well they are maintained. That is an extraordinary claim, which requires proof. Given the inherent risks in nuclear energy, which we all can see for ourselves, it is very understandable that many people do not want to assume the risks to test these claims.
Now, I don't want to get into a huge debate about the relative environmental impact of coal vs nuclear energy - coal really doesn't come out winning, but hey, at least it doesn't have that "scary" radiation word attached to it.
Nobody in Germany who is serious about phasing out nuclear energy is proposing to replace it with coal. That's just a straw man you keep pushing.
The future is obvious - a base load of nuclear stations (instead of coal and gas), backed by renewable sources for peak power (wind, solar, tidal, hydro etc).
We'll just have to agree to disagree there. I do not believe in nuclear energy, not only because I think we can generate our needs 100% through renewables (along with a conversation effort), but also because I simply don't like it. Its whole reason d'être is to make nuclear weapons more acceptable and it's very much intertwined with the nuclear weapons industry. Google "atoms for peace". That's why, to this day, the IAEA has the power to censor the WHO with regards to health effects of all things radioactive. I find that simply unacceptable.
If you can't even acknowledge that the similarities between the two accidents are about as similar as the Hindenburg disaster and the crash of a modern airliner, then I'm not even sure it's worth debating it with you (which I'm more than happy to do).
You seem to fail to appreciate that both the Hindenburg disaster and a plane crash today resulted in loss of life and property. The Fukushima disaster is a tremendous problem for Japan. It has already hindered the rescue effort after the tsunami in the affected areas, not to mention the resources it will bind in the future that are much needed for the reconstruction effort. Currently, there is a 20-mile evacuation zone that might turn out to be permanent for the foreseeable future. The ongoing exposure of nuclear cooling water into the ocean WILL have an effect in the area, even if most of it is diluted in the large Pacific Ocean. (I'm concerned about effects like such on the wild life in Bavaria, which still has to be checked before human consumption 25 years after Chernobyl. Of course, such a thing was "impossible" if we believed the politicians then.)
You seem to be interested in the variation at the top, but the whole debate whether Fukushima is a 6 or a 7 on the IAEA scale is boring to me. The fact is that Fukushima is huge fuck-up and will impose a tremendous (and so far unknowable) cost on Japan at a time when it has already been hit by a huge disaster.
So screw your love for nuclear energy. It is a tremendously complex technology with catastrophic consequences when (not if) things go wrong. Even new, supposedly "safe" designs need to be maintained, so there's always a chance for human error or worse negligence. It's just not worth to assume that risk.
You're going in circles. I've already established that the nuclear industry was at the negotiation table where the concensus was reached. They signed their names under the agreement, so they can't claim now that they did not agree with what was decided.
And simply signing it to bide their time (as you or others have suggested) is not in their interest either. (1) I simply don't find it believable, because the nuclear industry is quite strong itself and has powerful allies. (2) It means they didn't act in good faith, thus the government will have less incentive to negotiate with them in the future. (3) In any case, as a strategy it didn't work, because the nuclear industry tried to renege on the reached deal in 2009/2010 (with a complicit government) and it turned out to be a disaster to all parties involved.
There is significant wind capacity in Germany's south because of previous opposition from the ruling parties. Then there's the North Sea where you can build off-shore wind parks. I also think there should be a solar installation on every roof. The status quo is a giant waste of real estate. Oh and you can use hydro without dams. Google "Stromboje", it is a concept tried out in Austria for quite some time now.
Thanks for playing.
That can only happen if there is a serious power inbalance. I'm not saying that the government and the nuclear industry are equals (of course not, because politics has primacy), but the nuclear industry has significant clout and strong allies. Sorry, I just can't see how they were "crushed".
What government is claiming that ships don't sink or planes don't crash? Please tell me, so I can stay clear of them in the future.
OTOH, after Chernobyl most Western governments claimed that such a thing could NEVER happen in the West, because our technology and safety measures are SO much better than those of these (godless, communist) Soviets. And then Fukushima proved them wrong.
Interspecies gene transfer occurs naturally as well, e.g. through viruses.
Organic farming can feed the world's population (and then some) using the current agricultural land base. Source: http://www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2007/july/19783.htm
Any energy company that disagrees will get clobbered either through regulation or harmed by bad publicity. They can't appear to disagree.
That's not how political negotiation works. I believe in the primacy of politics over economic actors, so I have no problem with the government telling industry to either sit down and negotiate in good faith or face being regulated without their input taken into consideration. The energy companies agreed to sit down and then negotiated over the outcome. Many of their demands were part of the reached agreement, so I really can't see the tyranny.
We'll see if they still agree when a much friendlier administration comes in and allows new plant construction once again.
That's what's happened in 2009 (no new construction, but longer lifetimes of existing plants), and the current administration got severely burned by it (loss of many major regional elections and one party is fighting to stay relevant). After Fukushima, there is no political party in Germany that is in favor of nuclear energy.
And if we had a "consensus" to turn you in to glue, that would be ok with you?
That wouldn't be a consensus because I disagree.
Sometimes consensus is a form of tyranny.
How can it be tyranny when all relevant parties (including the energy companies) agree to it?
Some of these 13 are back online by now. And in the winter there is a higher demand, so the shutdown would not have been possible then.
Mea culpa, I confused the net difference between export and import with total capacity.
I found conflicting sources for total capacity. This article (in German) says that total capacity is 90 GW of which 20 GW are produced by nuclear plants. (That jives with a roughly 25% share.) The highest requirement is in the winter with 80 GW. So shutting down all nuclear reactors would result in an undercapacity, but less than the 20% you've come up with.