The evacuation saved lives in net because it protected people from deadly radiation, but it took lives too, and that is down to the accident.
People sometimes wonder about civil defense decisions not to evacuate in the face of a hurricane. Usually it comes down to anticipated deaths as a result of the evacuation itself. Hospitals and nursing home patients, elderly people who can't drive all can easily fall victim to the vicissitudes of an evacuation. So, shelter-in-place orders go out and instead first responders die in rescue attempts. With a nuclear accident, you know there will be nothing left to return to, so the evacuation order tends not to be so hesitant.
It complicated the evacuation from the radiologically contaminated areas, yes. Nuclear does very poorly during natural disasters. During hurricanes, for instance, after sucking all the resiliency local generation provides out of the system, they shut down for weeks just when a little emergency power would be most welcome. They can't handle floods either.
The evacuation has killed quite a few people. Probably saved more than it killed, but without the accident there would not have been an evacuation under those tough post earthquake conditions. Nuclear power kills, one way or another, it kills.
Arctic sea ice average thickness as fallen below the 2012 thickness at the end of August (same link) and could set a record low sometime in November. I'd say you are skating on thin ice when you are not careful how you put things, particularly when you are making absurd insinuations.
Or, maybe the dreamers just had a hard time keeping a positive attitude and started getting blamey when the technology turned out to be clumsy, dangerous and unworkable.
So, there is no point in building a new reactor until the gas gets scarce and not much point in running the old reactors either. Sounds like Navy retirees can handle all the future regular work. So, going to school for nuclear power would be to study to be a nuclear sanitation engineer. How, exactly, do you get a lot of interest in designing better buggy whips in this situation? Bill Gates is enthusiastic, yes, but since when did Bill and "better" ever fit well together in a sentence?
We use high-resolution H {\alpha} images of 130 planetary nebulae (PNe) to investigate whether there is a preferred orientation for PNe within the Galactic Bulge. The orientations of the full sample have an uniform distribution. However, at a significance level of 0.01, there is evidence for a non-uniform distribution for those planetary nebulae with evident bipolar morphology. If we assume that the bipolar PNe have an unimodal distribution of the polar axis in Galactic coordinates, the mean Galactic position angle is consistent with 90{\deg}, i.e. along the Galactic plane, and the significance level is better than 0.001 (the equivalent of a 3.7{\sigma} significance level for a Gaussian distribution). The shapes of PNe are related to angular momentum of the original star or stellar system, where the long axis of the nebula measures the angular momentum vector. In old, low-mass stars, the angular momentum is largely in binary orbital motion. Consequently, the alignment of bipolar nebulae that we have found indicates that the orbital planes of the binary systems are oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. We propose that strong magnetic fields aligned along the Galactic plane acted during the original star formation process to slow the contraction of the star forming cloud in the direction perpendicular to the plane. This would have produced a propensity for wider binaries with higher angular momentum with orbital axes parallel to the Galactic plane. Our findings provide the first indication of a strong, organized magnetic field along the Galactic plane that impacted on the angular momentum vectors of the resulting stellar population.
I think the article gets one important point rather wrong. Those who take risks tend to be those coming out of the most secure backgrounds. This is pretty much the core observation leading to Plato's Republic. If you grow up at risk, you are less likely to chose risk than if you grow up secure. Now, our response to 9-11 might be too large, but it is not owing to being risk adverse. It is more a function of having a privileged and sheltered decider ready to risk a lot, even our civil liberties, to carry out a family vendetta.
Douglas Adams got it much closer. It was being sheltered and safe that led to the krikkit wars.
A risk category that is growing is the tremendously large screw ups. In the past, we just did not have the capacity to snuff out so many lives at once by mistake. The sinking of the Titanic, the crash of a modern passenger jet, the largely failed evacuation of the twin towers, the highway pileup or the toxic gassing of a whole town from a chemical accident were simply not possible in the past.
All of these have active accident prevention efforts in place when they occur. It is not that risk is not being addressed, it is that the high consequences of a mishap ultimately make blame in adequate proportion impossible. And so the system continues to set up for systematic failure. Airline safety is a pretty good example of how a systematic learning process can help to address this, but consequences still continue to grow. And, as risks get to be global, like nuclear winter, ocean acidification or global warming, the chance to learn from mistakes diminishes because there is no next time in which to be more careful.
In the US, nuclear power is shrinking in generation and fraction of overall generation. Early retirement announcements of five rectors and cancellation of five power uprates recently are basically attributable to market reforms that caused nuclear power to compete and lose against other energy sources. http://slashdot.org/journal/496141/is-indian-point-next-to-close Most of Europe is exiting nuclear power with even France beginning to have reservations. So really only command-and-control economic systems have a way to play with nukes. If you want a nuclear renaissance, Iran, China, Russia and petrostates are where you have to look for it.
On the delayed plants, Duke changed the plans, so review had to start over again. Also, there is a new requirement to study seismicity, but given how much money was lost on Humboldt Bay owing to a failure to study that, the question should really be: Why is that a new requirement?
One of the really crazy things about sequestration was that the NRC was not exempted. Their funding comes the industry and they need to be fully funded to oversee safety. Likely, they are missing safety issues and violations now owing to inadequate staffing. This is one of the few areas where I agree with Rod Adams. Sequestration should not have been applied to the NRC.
A very large number of workers died, about 20%. The broader exposure will likely bring about between 30,000 and 60,000 excess cancer deaths, some in countries that never got any electricity from Chernobyl ever. http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary
Just trying to understand why you are so misinformed. What do you actually know about biofuels? Do they work in Brazil for example? What do you know about Lovins' position on biofuels? Does he favor making fuel from corn or corn stocks?
You make an obviously false statement and support it with a link to an idiot. What else is one to think of your technical acumen?
Efficiency matters because the huge cooling requirements limit sites for nuclear. And already, global warming is shutting down nuclear plants just when electricity is most needed to protect health. Nuclear power can't scale and will be trimmed back by climate change including losing all tidal zone sites.
If you are interested in costs, Amory Lovins' book "Reinventing Fire" goes into great detail. http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire Large scale renewables with new transmission turns out to be the cheapest approach. He still prefers smaller scale methods owing to their robustness to large scale disruption. Nuclear is the most expensive option.
Remember that they kill off whistle-blowers in the nuclear industry. Just mention the name Silkwood and chuckle and no one is going to say anything. The example of Tommy Hook helps with the intimidation.
Slashdot Mirror
The evacuation saved lives in net because it protected people from deadly radiation, but it took lives too, and that is down to the accident.
People sometimes wonder about civil defense decisions not to evacuate in the face of a hurricane. Usually it comes down to anticipated deaths as a result of the evacuation itself. Hospitals and nursing home patients, elderly people who can't drive all can easily fall victim to the vicissitudes of an evacuation. So, shelter-in-place orders go out and instead first responders die in rescue attempts. With a nuclear accident, you know there will be nothing left to return to, so the evacuation order tends not to be so hesitant.
It complicated the evacuation from the radiologically contaminated areas, yes. Nuclear does very poorly during natural disasters. During hurricanes, for instance, after sucking all the resiliency local generation provides out of the system, they shut down for weeks just when a little emergency power would be most welcome. They can't handle floods either.
The evacuation has killed quite a few people. Probably saved more than it killed, but without the accident there would not have been an evacuation under those tough post earthquake conditions. Nuclear power kills, one way or another, it kills.
I'll start taking you seriously when you admit nukes are too expensive. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly
Arctic sea ice extent is still falling, not increasing. Best to wait until mid-October to be sure it is on the rebound. http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Arctic sea ice volume may have turned around already. We won't know until the calculations are released around the end of September. http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
Arctic sea ice average thickness as fallen below the 2012 thickness at the end of August (same link) and could set a record low sometime in November. I'd say you are skating on thin ice when you are not careful how you put things, particularly when you are making absurd insinuations.
Or, maybe the dreamers just had a hard time keeping a positive attitude and started getting blamey when the technology turned out to be clumsy, dangerous and unworkable.
So, there is no point in building a new reactor until the gas gets scarce and not much point in running the old reactors either. Sounds like Navy retirees can handle all the future regular work. So, going to school for nuclear power would be to study to be a nuclear sanitation engineer. How, exactly, do you get a lot of interest in designing better buggy whips in this situation? Bill Gates is enthusiastic, yes, but since when did Bill and "better" ever fit well together in a sentence?
Here is the preprint: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013arXiv1307.5711R
We use high-resolution H {\alpha} images of 130 planetary nebulae (PNe) to investigate whether there is a preferred orientation for PNe within the Galactic Bulge. The orientations of the full sample have an uniform distribution. However, at a significance level of 0.01, there is evidence for a non-uniform distribution for those planetary nebulae with evident bipolar morphology. If we assume that the bipolar PNe have an unimodal distribution of the polar axis in Galactic coordinates, the mean Galactic position angle is consistent with 90{\deg}, i.e. along the Galactic plane, and the significance level is better than 0.001 (the equivalent of a 3.7{\sigma} significance level for a Gaussian distribution). The shapes of PNe are related to angular momentum of the original star or stellar system, where the long axis of the nebula measures the angular momentum vector. In old, low-mass stars, the angular momentum is largely in binary orbital motion. Consequently, the alignment of bipolar nebulae that we have found indicates that the orbital planes of the binary systems are oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. We propose that strong magnetic fields aligned along the Galactic plane acted during the original star formation process to slow the contraction of the star forming cloud in the direction perpendicular to the plane. This would have produced a propensity for wider binaries with higher angular momentum with orbital axes parallel to the Galactic plane. Our findings provide the first indication of a strong, organized magnetic field along the Galactic plane that impacted on the angular momentum vectors of the resulting stellar population.
I don't see Syria as connected to 9-11, do you?
I think the article gets one important point rather wrong. Those who take risks tend to be those coming out of the most secure backgrounds. This is pretty much the core observation leading to Plato's Republic. If you grow up at risk, you are less likely to chose risk than if you grow up secure. Now, our response to 9-11 might be too large, but it is not owing to being risk adverse. It is more a function of having a privileged and sheltered decider ready to risk a lot, even our civil liberties, to carry out a family vendetta.
Douglas Adams got it much closer. It was being sheltered and safe that led to the krikkit wars.
Why can't the next x million fix that problem? With enough mallets, winning at wack-a-mole is trivial.
A risk category that is growing is the tremendously large screw ups. In the past, we just did not have the capacity to snuff out so many lives at once by mistake. The sinking of the Titanic, the crash of a modern passenger jet, the largely failed evacuation of the twin towers, the highway pileup or the toxic gassing of a whole town from a chemical accident were simply not possible in the past.
All of these have active accident prevention efforts in place when they occur. It is not that risk is not being addressed, it is that the high consequences of a mishap ultimately make blame in adequate proportion impossible. And so the system continues to set up for systematic failure. Airline safety is a pretty good example of how a systematic learning process can help to address this, but consequences still continue to grow. And, as risks get to be global, like nuclear winter, ocean acidification or global warming, the chance to learn from mistakes diminishes because there is no next time in which to be more careful.
In the US, nuclear power is shrinking in generation and fraction of overall generation. Early retirement announcements of five rectors and cancellation of five power uprates recently are basically attributable to market reforms that caused nuclear power to compete and lose against other energy sources. http://slashdot.org/journal/496141/is-indian-point-next-to-close Most of Europe is exiting nuclear power with even France beginning to have reservations. So really only command-and-control economic systems have a way to play with nukes. If you want a nuclear renaissance, Iran, China, Russia and petrostates are where you have to look for it.
Don't drive on my ancestor you nuclear freak!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories#1952_NRX-incident Protecting humanity's habitat for over 60 years.
On the delayed plants, Duke changed the plans, so review had to start over again. Also, there is a new requirement to study seismicity, but given how much money was lost on Humboldt Bay owing to a failure to study that, the question should really be: Why is that a new requirement?
One of the really crazy things about sequestration was that the NRC was not exempted. Their funding comes the industry and they need to be fully funded to oversee safety. Likely, they are missing safety issues and violations now owing to inadequate staffing. This is one of the few areas where I agree with Rod Adams. Sequestration should not have been applied to the NRC.
So, in a comment to a report that demonstrates a U.N. whitewash on Fukushima http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/06/05/2054237/japans-radiation-disaster-toll-none-dead-none-sick this anonymous coward claims there was no whitewash on Chernobyl. Perhaps there is a larger perspective here.
A very large number of workers died, about 20%. The broader exposure will likely bring about between 30,000 and 60,000 excess cancer deaths, some in countries that never got any electricity from Chernobyl ever. http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/14/1858811/is-70-renewable-power-possible-portugal-just-did-it-for-3-months/ Clueless you seem.
Just trying to understand why you are so misinformed. What do you actually know about biofuels? Do they work in Brazil for example? What do you know about Lovins' position on biofuels? Does he favor making fuel from corn or corn stocks?
You make an obviously false statement and support it with a link to an idiot. What else is one to think of your technical acumen?
Efficiency matters because the huge cooling requirements limit sites for nuclear. And already, global warming is shutting down nuclear plants just when electricity is most needed to protect health. Nuclear power can't scale and will be trimmed back by climate change including losing all tidal zone sites.
His work is probably just too technical for you. That's why you get taken in by blowhards Tucker.
If you are interested in costs, Amory Lovins' book "Reinventing Fire" goes into great detail. http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire Large scale renewables with new transmission turns out to be the cheapest approach. He still prefers smaller scale methods owing to their robustness to large scale disruption. Nuclear is the most expensive option.
Remember that they kill off whistle-blowers in the nuclear industry. Just mention the name Silkwood and chuckle and no one is going to say anything. The example of Tommy Hook helps with the intimidation.