The graphite at Chernobyl oxidized very readily once it got started. Which was the problem. Granted, it did take the unusual conditions of a partial core meltdown to initiate the graphite - oxygen reaction.
Russia has always deliberately used winter as one of its defenses. That, and forcing invaders into logistic nightmares. Ask Napolean, he will tell you.
More to the point, we are one of China's best markets. And we want China to become an even better market for our stuff. This directly serves world peace.
You do not pick fights with your customers. That's one of the most important rules of acquisition.
Reprocessing makes sense... but only if it is done by a military organization. Corporations cannot handle that kind of responsibility; they attract the wrong kind of person to their upper echelons (motivated by self-interest rather than adherence to a code of ethical behavior). Rather than the problems of handling long term spent fuel with one stop gap measure after another, we would have a new and uglier set of problems from putting the handling of weapons grade fissionables into the hands of persons who will not plan beyond next year's bonus pay.
Since placing the isolation of weapons grade fissionables into the hands of any national military would be looked upon as a war mongering threat by other nations, there would need to be some kind of international cadre of persons dedicated to the warrior's code of honor to oversee the thing. Possibly to run the thing from top to bottom. If we look back far enough in our history, we can see that such organizations have worked for hundreds of yeas at a time. So there are effective models to draw on. A kind of Roman Legion blended with bushido and honor bound to work in conjunction with the United Nations and World Court.
But I have serious doubts that this can be made to work in the context of today's corporate cultures and nationalistic pride.
It comes back to the technology being the easy part of the problem. The hard part is the people part. Take the human interface out of nuclear power, and all the rest of problems become simple.
The most stupid thing about the situation is that no one wants to deal with the long term storage of spent fuel when an outdated reactor is decommissioned. Currently that fuel has to stay on site since we are decades away from having adequate long term storage facilities. As long as the plant is functioning, the overheads for the active management of that storage can be buried in the accounting, but when a plant is decommissioned someone then has to openly take the responsibility for those costs (and risks).
Outside of military organizations, we do not have any human institutions that can handle this. To say this another way, in every corporate environment, mentioning any of this sordid mess where stockholders might hear of it is career suicide. So do not expect the nuclear industry to come up with solutions for long term storage. The solution is going to have to be imposed on them by big government. Which means it will be political, but again even mentioning the problem is currently political suicide.
If we could only get rid of all the humans involved with it, nuclear power would be a sweet solution to a lot of problems.
...the number of "posessions" is very small, so is it really worth convening 60 church officials for a week to talk about what he considered to be a small problem?
Of course that is not worth it.
But if you want to begin to mobilize the masses of uneducated and gullible Catholics in every corner of the western world, you need to start somewhere. And a good place to start is by demonizing the Internet, which is the one thing that is doing the most to reduce the number of uneducated Catholics who would be gullible enough to do whatever the Church tells them to do.
This week has seen a couple of dozen killings in Afghanistan because somebody reportedly burned a Koran half a world away. There is no significant difference between an ignorant, gullible Islamist and an ignorant, gullible Catholic. Either can be turned into an explosive terrorist simply by feeding them disinformation about the world. If the Catholic Church is deliberately trying to keep its masses barefoot, pregnant, and in the pews by demonizing the Internet, this is cause for concern.
How are they using the Internet as a scapegoat? A scapegoat for what?
Resurrecting an active belief in Satanism is easier for some old men than accepting the possibility that there might be something intrinsically wrong with an institution they have dedicated their lives to.
That is, a resurgence in Satanic activities is a more acceptable explanation for all the pedophilia and sexual abuse by Catholic priests than the possibility that the Church itself is a sick institution. Instead they can claim their Church has been victimized by Satan and can be purified and able to carry on as it has always done. So, we can expect more persecution of those strange Christian reactionary cults that call themselves Satanist as well as a purging of some Catholic congregations of their more liberal or tolerant members. It probably will not be limited to just that either. If history is an indicator, the institution of the Catholic Church will probably eventually begin inquisitions into pagan and neopagan spirtualities that have no relation to Christianity.
This bears watching. It could get quite serious. For instance, this week has seen religious riots and killings in Afghanistan over the report of the burning of a Koran half the world away. There is nothing intrinsically different between ignorant, gullible Islamists and ignorant, gullible Catholics. If the Catholic Church is beginning a campaign to mobilize its least educated masses, this could be very serious.
Parent post suggests a mechanism that would improve nuclear power plant safety:
Require everyone who signs off on a nuclear power design, step in construction, maintenance process. or operating procedure to also become a member of the First Responder Pool [FRP]
Create an international Pool Police Force [PPF] that assumes extraordinary powers whenever a nuclear incident happens
Whenever there is an incident, dress up the FRP in bunny suits and send them in to do the clean-up, after giving them a good last meal.
PPF assures that previous step is done.
That might inject a little more of the missing accountability into these situations.
Hmm. There really is no good reason why this should not be implemented immediately and retroactively. It isn't like we have a shortage of people who are willing to collect big bucks for pushing atoms around on paper.
The USA is a long, long way away from having shovel ready plans for building the transmogrifying breeder reactors, or the interim storage and transportation facilities they need. What parent post is talking about is a pipe dream. Pipe dreams solve no problems. In this case they are part of the problem.
We need shovel-ready plans for this infrastructure, not more cheerleaders yelling "Go Nuclear!" from the sidelines. The discussion is noisy enough already.
And yet Yucca Mountain has been designed to hold only a fraction of the long term waste that already exists in the USA, and is mostly stored in the ever-expanding temporary cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
Yucca Mountain is a kind of security theater. It certainly is no solution. The sorry truth is that no one yet has a proven solution (although France and China may be close).
The USA can do nuclear power safely. But the USA hasn't got the beginnings of a clue about how to handle the byproducts in a safe way.
Off point somewhat, but this will come back on topic at the bottom:
When the liquid sodium cooled Fermi reactor near Detroit, MI, failed in 1966, the contaminated and radioactive sodium was temporarily stored in containers on a dock in Lake Eerie. It was kept there for many years. The last I heard, there was concern that the contaminants were from the partial meltdown and included long lived radioactive isotopes. This was a fast breeder reactor.
Of course everyone involved had taken high school chemistry and knew what would happen if a 55 gallon drum of metallic sodium cracked and fell into the bay.
My question is what ever happened to that sodium? Did someone figure out a way to safely spirit it off to a dry salt cave? Or is it still on that dock?
My basic point is that arguing about the safety of nuclear power plants is not where today's discussions should be going. What we need to consider is arguments for and against the various ways of handling post-production byproducts of nuclear power. And we should not be thinking about building more plants until there are shovel ready plans on the table for dealing with the transportation, storage, and final transmogrification of these byproducts.
It appears that the Japanese nuclear facilities did withstand the quake and the tsunami intact.
What they did not survive was their own safety shutdown procedures, since as soon as they were all taken off line, there was no longer sufficient electric power to operate the cooling pumps.
A 6.0 quake without a tsunami would have also destroyed these reactors if it had taken out the power transmission lines. In retrospect, the design failure was in the shutdown procedure, that was designed around an all too simple model of what could possibly go wrong.
I don't have an adequate car analogy for this. But I can offer a Boy Scout analogy: As most Boy Scouts know, dynamite will burn and not explode in a fire. But a prudent Boy Scout will not build his camp fire with sticks of dynamite. The risks of an uncontrolled positive feedback acceleration are too great.
While I agree with parent post's apparent position that nuclear power is safe, it is quite obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the nuclear power industry as a whole that in the last 50 years, there has been no significant improvement in the highly risky ways that nuclear post-production material is handled.
Don't talk to me about how safe nuclear power is; I agree with that. Talk to me about shovel ready plans to build the transportation, storage, and transmogrification infrastructure needed to handle the spent fuel and worn out radioactive structures.
Also, try to wrap your head around the fact that the Japanese nuclear plant survived both the quake and the tsunami. What that facility did not survive was its own shutdown. If just one of the reactors could have been kept operational, there would have been power on site for keeping all the cooling pumps going.
Congresscritters is congresscritters. Do not expect too much from them.
I do wish that the more vocal advocates of nuclear power would get beyond yelling "we can and should make better, safer reactors" and start talking rationally about what it will take to create a nuclear power industry that will handle its waste properly. I know that could be done, but I also know it won't be done by continuing to shout "four legs good, two legs BETTER!"
Nuclear sheep: the proponents that radioactive wastelands are caused by.
I would not go as far as Lovins does, but I do favor a broadly distributed energy source over a highly centralized one. If a significant part of the base load was provided by neighborhood sized micro reactors, that would alter the politics of power management in a very favorable way.
That said, I'd be comfortable with a nuclear power industry that appropriately handled its own waste. That probably means some kind of breeder reactor would be involved.
I appreciate the reasonable tone of parent post's critique of my earlier post. I do intend to keep an eye on the points the author brought up. I am not opposed to nuclear power, but I am opposed to dangerous foolishness.
From what little I know of thorium reactor theory, it does sound very promising. But I believe at this point it is just promise; I don't believe there are plans to build any power plants using the thorium cycle.
We also need to develop commercial breeding reactors, if it is possible to do so, to handle the incredible amount of nuclear waste that we are already generating. Feel-good waste management theatrics like Yucca Mountain just aren't going to do it; we've got to find a way to close the loop, or figure out how to ship the stuff out of the biosphere.
The history of nuclear power in the US Navy is exemplary, but I think it actually supports my point that current nuclear power plant technology is inherently unsafe because of the human factor. The US Navy has 250+ years of developing ways to make sure that persons with sound judgment and appropriate knowledge and skills are in control of lethal equipment at all times. But those ways do not work in civilian situations. Maybe we need to develop a paramilitary Atom Force as a spin-off from the Navy that would staff all nuclear facilities.
'...extreme haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one's own competence or capabilities....' [wikipedia's definition]
And later, under the heading Modern Usage, '...as "pride that blinds", as it often causes someone accused of hubris to act in foolish ways that belie common sense....' [same source]
Yep. It still means what I thought it means. My usage is appropriate. Someone might argue that it is incorrect in this case, but that would be a judgment each reader should make for themself.
To reiterate: the kind of breeder reactors parent post is harping about are not old technology. They are little more than fairy tales. Prototypes are not technology; they are nothing more than the platforms for getting the earliest mistakes over with.
I get a little tired of all the nuclear power fanbois who want everyone to test the depth of the water with both feet. Their hubris is more irritating than the ignorance of the Greenist Reiigion nuts who oppose any kind of nuclear development.
Untill you've got those breeder reactors up and running, the stuff remains nuclear waste. Outside of France and probably China, there is absolutely no hope that the nuclear waste problem will go away in your lifetime. Maybe in your kids' lifetime, but only if you start working on the problem now, instead of spewing nonsense fairy tales about how good things could be.
The underlying problems with nuclear fission power are two-fold, and parent post touches on one of them.
As parent post implies, one major problem is that humans are involved, and humans make mistakes. They make mistakes in following procedures; they make mistakes in writing procedures. They screw up when implementing blueprints; they mess up when doing design. They can royally fuck up when choosing design specifications, as parent post describes. Humans are imperfect beings that cannot do anything for any length of time with the elegance that controlling fission requires.
The other major problem is that current fission reactors are designed such that there are altogether too many modes of failure that lead to positive feedback situations. It is self-evident that if you leave any of today's light water nuclear reactors alone, it will eventually destroy the local environment in one way or another. Under good conditions, managing one is like pedaling a circus bicycle, backwards, on a high wire, without a net.
Other than those two problems, nuclear fission is perfectly safe.
These problems with fission power cannot be solved with engineering or more teaching of the hard sciences. They have to do with the way the human factor interacts with the physics, and particularly they have to do with the hubris of some engineers and scientists who think that because they have figured out a way that something can be done, it could actually be done by humans. They fail to recognize that the core ingredient of their constructions-- their collective wisdom-- is itself flawed by their human nature. Or rather, some of them think-- and this is the ultimate hubris-- that they can somehow develop a process that will let them replace a lack of wisdom with an abundance of cleverness.
Hubris is nasty stuff. Much worse than entropy, really.
One of the things that seems to be happening here is that USA Federal case law is beginning to define the difference between privacy, with its constitutional protections, and anonymity, which for all practical purposes only came into existence with the rise of the Internet. That is, before the Internet, there really was no effective way to publish anything to a large audience without leaving a trail that would expose the author's identity to anyone who cared to do the leg work.
So this anonymity thing is a new thing under the law. The judge here is saying that anonymity has no constitutional protection; if there are technical ways of removing the anonymous mask without violating protected privacy rights, it is legal to do so; and that what the prosecutors in this case are proposing would meet that test.
My personal feelings are that Wikilieaks and similar vigilante mechanisms have done much more good than harm, so far. However this is an unstable situation: the vigilantes are essentially a mob of the elite early adopters, but as others begin to pick up the skills, the mob grows bigger, loses its elitism, and becomes a monster enforcing the tyranny of the majority. We need to have the law find ways to work in the digital territories such that it can do its job of protecting the rights of individual mavericks from being trampled by the witless majority. Much as I may not like the immediate fallout from this judge's actions, splitting the concept of anonymity away from privacy may be a good early baby step toward a reasonable future.
Slashdot Mirror
The graphite at Chernobyl oxidized very readily once it got started. Which was the problem. Granted, it did take the unusual conditions of a partial core meltdown to initiate the graphite - oxygen reaction.
It is believed to be impervious to waterboarding. Whereas most steels begin to rust after a few dips.
The last time you should have gotten a teat stuck in your mouth just because you knew how to squawk was before you could even talk, let alone write.
Slashdot has pointed out something for you that you may not have found on your own for a good long time. Be grateful for the heads up.
Now go do the friggin research yourself. And think about posting the links here, in return for getting an early advisory about the subject.
Russia has always deliberately used winter as one of its defenses. That, and forcing invaders into logistic nightmares. Ask Napolean, he will tell you.
More to the point, we are one of China's best markets. And we want China to become an even better market for our stuff. This directly serves world peace.
You do not pick fights with your customers. That's one of the most important rules of acquisition.
Reprocessing makes sense... but only if it is done by a military organization. Corporations cannot handle that kind of responsibility; they attract the wrong kind of person to their upper echelons (motivated by self-interest rather than adherence to a code of ethical behavior). Rather than the problems of handling long term spent fuel with one stop gap measure after another, we would have a new and uglier set of problems from putting the handling of weapons grade fissionables into the hands of persons who will not plan beyond next year's bonus pay.
Since placing the isolation of weapons grade fissionables into the hands of any national military would be looked upon as a war mongering threat by other nations, there would need to be some kind of international cadre of persons dedicated to the warrior's code of honor to oversee the thing. Possibly to run the thing from top to bottom. If we look back far enough in our history, we can see that such organizations have worked for hundreds of yeas at a time. So there are effective models to draw on. A kind of Roman Legion blended with bushido and honor bound to work in conjunction with the United Nations and World Court.
But I have serious doubts that this can be made to work in the context of today's corporate cultures and nationalistic pride.
It comes back to the technology being the easy part of the problem. The hard part is the people part. Take the human interface out of nuclear power, and all the rest of problems become simple.
The most stupid thing about the situation is that no one wants to deal with the long term storage of spent fuel when an outdated reactor is decommissioned. Currently that fuel has to stay on site since we are decades away from having adequate long term storage facilities. As long as the plant is functioning, the overheads for the active management of that storage can be buried in the accounting, but when a plant is decommissioned someone then has to openly take the responsibility for those costs (and risks).
Outside of military organizations, we do not have any human institutions that can handle this. To say this another way, in every corporate environment, mentioning any of this sordid mess where stockholders might hear of it is career suicide. So do not expect the nuclear industry to come up with solutions for long term storage. The solution is going to have to be imposed on them by big government. Which means it will be political, but again even mentioning the problem is currently political suicide.
If we could only get rid of all the humans involved with it, nuclear power would be a sweet solution to a lot of problems.
...the number of "posessions" is very small, so is it really worth convening 60 church officials for a week to talk about what he considered to be a small problem?
Of course that is not worth it.
But if you want to begin to mobilize the masses of uneducated and gullible Catholics in every corner of the western world, you need to start somewhere. And a good place to start is by demonizing the Internet, which is the one thing that is doing the most to reduce the number of uneducated Catholics who would be gullible enough to do whatever the Church tells them to do.
This week has seen a couple of dozen killings in Afghanistan because somebody reportedly burned a Koran half a world away. There is no significant difference between an ignorant, gullible Islamist and an ignorant, gullible Catholic. Either can be turned into an explosive terrorist simply by feeding them disinformation about the world. If the Catholic Church is deliberately trying to keep its masses barefoot, pregnant, and in the pews by demonizing the Internet, this is cause for concern.
How are they using the Internet as a scapegoat? A scapegoat for what?
Resurrecting an active belief in Satanism is easier for some old men than accepting the possibility that there might be something intrinsically wrong with an institution they have dedicated their lives to.
That is, a resurgence in Satanic activities is a more acceptable explanation for all the pedophilia and sexual abuse by Catholic priests than the possibility that the Church itself is a sick institution. Instead they can claim their Church has been victimized by Satan and can be purified and able to carry on as it has always done. So, we can expect more persecution of those strange Christian reactionary cults that call themselves Satanist as well as a purging of some Catholic congregations of their more liberal or tolerant members. It probably will not be limited to just that either. If history is an indicator, the institution of the Catholic Church will probably eventually begin inquisitions into pagan and neopagan spirtualities that have no relation to Christianity.
This bears watching. It could get quite serious. For instance, this week has seen religious riots and killings in Afghanistan over the report of the burning of a Koran half the world away. There is nothing intrinsically different between ignorant, gullible Islamists and ignorant, gullible Catholics. If the Catholic Church is beginning a campaign to mobilize its least educated masses, this could be very serious.
Parent post suggests a mechanism that would improve nuclear power plant safety:
That might inject a little more of the missing accountability into these situations.
Hmm. There really is no good reason why this should not be implemented immediately and retroactively. It isn't like we have a shortage of people who are willing to collect big bucks for pushing atoms around on paper.
The USA is a long, long way away from having shovel ready plans for building the transmogrifying breeder reactors, or the interim storage and transportation facilities they need. What parent post is talking about is a pipe dream. Pipe dreams solve no problems. In this case they are part of the problem.
We need shovel-ready plans for this infrastructure, not more cheerleaders yelling "Go Nuclear!" from the sidelines. The discussion is noisy enough already.
And yet Yucca Mountain has been designed to hold only a fraction of the long term waste that already exists in the USA, and is mostly stored in the ever-expanding temporary cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
Yucca Mountain is a kind of security theater. It certainly is no solution. The sorry truth is that no one yet has a proven solution (although France and China may be close).
The USA can do nuclear power safely. But the USA hasn't got the beginnings of a clue about how to handle the byproducts in a safe way.
Off point somewhat, but this will come back on topic at the bottom:
When the liquid sodium cooled Fermi reactor near Detroit, MI, failed in 1966, the contaminated and radioactive sodium was temporarily stored in containers on a dock in Lake Eerie. It was kept there for many years. The last I heard, there was concern that the contaminants were from the partial meltdown and included long lived radioactive isotopes. This was a fast breeder reactor.
Of course everyone involved had taken high school chemistry and knew what would happen if a 55 gallon drum of metallic sodium cracked and fell into the bay.
My question is what ever happened to that sodium? Did someone figure out a way to safely spirit it off to a dry salt cave? Or is it still on that dock?
My basic point is that arguing about the safety of nuclear power plants is not where today's discussions should be going. What we need to consider is arguments for and against the various ways of handling post-production byproducts of nuclear power. And we should not be thinking about building more plants until there are shovel ready plans on the table for dealing with the transportation, storage, and final transmogrification of these byproducts.
It appears that the Japanese nuclear facilities did withstand the quake and the tsunami intact.
What they did not survive was their own safety shutdown procedures, since as soon as they were all taken off line, there was no longer sufficient electric power to operate the cooling pumps.
A 6.0 quake without a tsunami would have also destroyed these reactors if it had taken out the power transmission lines. In retrospect, the design failure was in the shutdown procedure, that was designed around an all too simple model of what could possibly go wrong.
I don't have an adequate car analogy for this. But I can offer a Boy Scout analogy: As most Boy Scouts know, dynamite will burn and not explode in a fire. But a prudent Boy Scout will not build his camp fire with sticks of dynamite. The risks of an uncontrolled positive feedback acceleration are too great.
While I agree with parent post's apparent position that nuclear power is safe, it is quite obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the nuclear power industry as a whole that in the last 50 years, there has been no significant improvement in the highly risky ways that nuclear post-production material is handled.
Don't talk to me about how safe nuclear power is; I agree with that. Talk to me about shovel ready plans to build the transportation, storage, and transmogrification infrastructure needed to handle the spent fuel and worn out radioactive structures.
Also, try to wrap your head around the fact that the Japanese nuclear plant survived both the quake and the tsunami. What that facility did not survive was its own shutdown. If just one of the reactors could have been kept operational, there would have been power on site for keeping all the cooling pumps going.
What a stupid, stupid design.
Congresscritters is congresscritters. Do not expect too much from them.
I do wish that the more vocal advocates of nuclear power would get beyond yelling "we can and should make better, safer reactors" and start talking rationally about what it will take to create a nuclear power industry that will handle its waste properly. I know that could be done, but I also know it won't be done by continuing to shout "four legs good, two legs BETTER!"
Nuclear sheep: the proponents that radioactive wastelands are caused by.
I would not go as far as Lovins does, but I do favor a broadly distributed energy source over a highly centralized one. If a significant part of the base load was provided by neighborhood sized micro reactors, that would alter the politics of power management in a very favorable way.
That said, I'd be comfortable with a nuclear power industry that appropriately handled its own waste. That probably means some kind of breeder reactor would be involved.
I appreciate the reasonable tone of parent post's critique of my earlier post. I do intend to keep an eye on the points the author brought up. I am not opposed to nuclear power, but I am opposed to dangerous foolishness.
From what little I know of thorium reactor theory, it does sound very promising. But I believe at this point it is just promise; I don't believe there are plans to build any power plants using the thorium cycle.
We also need to develop commercial breeding reactors, if it is possible to do so, to handle the incredible amount of nuclear waste that we are already generating. Feel-good waste management theatrics like Yucca Mountain just aren't going to do it; we've got to find a way to close the loop, or figure out how to ship the stuff out of the biosphere.
The history of nuclear power in the US Navy is exemplary, but I think it actually supports my point that current nuclear power plant technology is inherently unsafe because of the human factor. The US Navy has 250+ years of developing ways to make sure that persons with sound judgment and appropriate knowledge and skills are in control of lethal equipment at all times. But those ways do not work in civilian situations. Maybe we need to develop a paramilitary Atom Force as a spin-off from the Navy that would staff all nuclear facilities.
Yep. It still means what I thought it means. My usage is appropriate. Someone might argue that it is incorrect in this case, but that would be a judgment each reader should make for themself.
Thanks for playing.
To reiterate: the kind of breeder reactors parent post is harping about are not old technology. They are little more than fairy tales. Prototypes are not technology; they are nothing more than the platforms for getting the earliest mistakes over with.
I get a little tired of all the nuclear power fanbois who want everyone to test the depth of the water with both feet. Their hubris is more irritating than the ignorance of the Greenist Reiigion nuts who oppose any kind of nuclear development.
Untill you've got those breeder reactors up and running, the stuff remains nuclear waste. Outside of France and probably China, there is absolutely no hope that the nuclear waste problem will go away in your lifetime. Maybe in your kids' lifetime, but only if you start working on the problem now, instead of spewing nonsense fairy tales about how good things could be.
That depends on how you cook the books.
The cost of nuclear power waste management is still a big unknown. Since we haven't even begun to develop that industry yet.
No, the expense is mostly driven by waste management.
The underlying problems with nuclear fission power are two-fold, and parent post touches on one of them.
As parent post implies, one major problem is that humans are involved, and humans make mistakes. They make mistakes in following procedures; they make mistakes in writing procedures. They screw up when implementing blueprints; they mess up when doing design. They can royally fuck up when choosing design specifications, as parent post describes. Humans are imperfect beings that cannot do anything for any length of time with the elegance that controlling fission requires.
The other major problem is that current fission reactors are designed such that there are altogether too many modes of failure that lead to positive feedback situations. It is self-evident that if you leave any of today's light water nuclear reactors alone, it will eventually destroy the local environment in one way or another. Under good conditions, managing one is like pedaling a circus bicycle, backwards, on a high wire, without a net.
Other than those two problems, nuclear fission is perfectly safe.
These problems with fission power cannot be solved with engineering or more teaching of the hard sciences. They have to do with the way the human factor interacts with the physics, and particularly they have to do with the hubris of some engineers and scientists who think that because they have figured out a way that something can be done, it could actually be done by humans. They fail to recognize that the core ingredient of their constructions-- their collective wisdom-- is itself flawed by their human nature. Or rather, some of them think-- and this is the ultimate hubris-- that they can somehow develop a process that will let them replace a lack of wisdom with an abundance of cleverness.
Hubris is nasty stuff. Much worse than entropy, really.
One of the things that seems to be happening here is that USA Federal case law is beginning to define the difference between privacy, with its constitutional protections, and anonymity, which for all practical purposes only came into existence with the rise of the Internet. That is, before the Internet, there really was no effective way to publish anything to a large audience without leaving a trail that would expose the author's identity to anyone who cared to do the leg work.
So this anonymity thing is a new thing under the law. The judge here is saying that anonymity has no constitutional protection; if there are technical ways of removing the anonymous mask without violating protected privacy rights, it is legal to do so; and that what the prosecutors in this case are proposing would meet that test.
My personal feelings are that Wikilieaks and similar vigilante mechanisms have done much more good than harm, so far. However this is an unstable situation: the vigilantes are essentially a mob of the elite early adopters, but as others begin to pick up the skills, the mob grows bigger, loses its elitism, and becomes a monster enforcing the tyranny of the majority. We need to have the law find ways to work in the digital territories such that it can do its job of protecting the rights of individual mavericks from being trampled by the witless majority. Much as I may not like the immediate fallout from this judge's actions, splitting the concept of anonymity away from privacy may be a good early baby step toward a reasonable future.