Breeder reactors are not more uneconomical than LWRs unless you treat the cost of safely storing the spent fuel for thousands of years as an externality. And unfortunately, it was necessary to externalize that risk that in the short term to make it economical enough to jump-start the nascent industry. The need to treat some unavoidable costs as an externality exist for almost every industry that is just getting started. Unfortunately, thanks to reduced R&D spending resulting from only minimal nuclear power plant construction, the nuclear energy industry is basically still just getting started.
NIMBY-driven fears caused reduced construction of nuclear plants, which resulted in reduced R&D spending, which slowed improvements to a crawl. Thus, most of the promised improvements to the technology never happened because of NIMBYism. Any hope of it becoming cheap died as a direct result. It really is that simple from an economics perspective.
As for nuclear not being clean or cheap, actually it is. It is just one or the other, and never both at the same time. Breeders are relatively clean, but cost twice as much per kWh. And GE seems to think that they have a breeder design (PRISM) that actually will be cheap. Its compact size makes it cheaper and easier to deploy. Its passive safety design elements make it safe to place one in areas where you would not seriously consider putting in an LWR. And so on. Time will tell whether they're right.
Nuclear power has not failed. It has never actually been given a serious chance. And I can pretty much guarantee that if the U.S. gives up on nuclear power, then other countries that are not terrified of the nuclear bogeyman will eventually start doing the R&D and will bring the costs down and the safety up to the point that people will laugh at all the NIMBYs. And then we'll all be buying most of our power from whatever country had the courage to take the risks.
Nuclear power is only dead because of NIMYism. The moment the anti-nuke crowd's ideas started to gain traction, it was all over. We stopped building reactors, which meant R&D slowed to a crawl because there was no reason to design something that would never get built. Thus, improvements that would otherwise have driven down the cost of nuclear power, improved the safety, improved the efficiency, and reduced the size never happened.
And so we're stuck with technology from the dark ages and forty-year-old reactors that keep getting permission to keep running for decades past their design lifetime. And over time, these are going to get less and less safe, again because of NIMYism. Eventually, they will all be discontinued, and everyone will conclude that nuclear power just isn't feasible, when in reality, we just never really tried.
Meh. The ability to track viewership really does not concern most people. In fact, most people understand that the ability to track viewership is important for ensuring that people can actually get the kinds of content that they like. After all, if nobody knows whether anybody is watching a particular type of show, what's the incentive to continue producing that type of show over some other type of show? And the more expensive the show is to produce, the more important it is to know that there are a lot of people watching to make it worth spending the money, so for things like sci-fi, tracking is absolutely critical.
Mind you, it would be nice to have an incognito mode in Netflix, for when you don't want something to affect your rankings because you think it might suck, but I have a separate profile for that. Beyond that, though, I'm pretty sure the only people who really care about avoiding tracking are watching porn.:-)
The interesting question is not whether a large portion of their existing subscribers would bail with commercials. That goes without saying. Even if they cut the price massively, one of the major reasons for paying for Netflix is the ability to get good content without commercials, and they know this.
Rather, the interesting questions is whether a lower-cost or free ad-subsidized tier would bring in enough additional subscribers to offset the loss from subscribers in the ad-free tier switching to that ad-subsidized tier.
You can't please everyone all the time, and if you try, you will please no one. Human survival and safety should always take priority over any environmental concern. Always. Human comfort can take a back seat to the environment, but never human survival or safety.
Of course, that doesn't mean that PG&E can't solve the line encroachment problem with aggressive trimming (read "topping") of those trees, which is what the environmental groups are asking them to do. The only problem is that aggressive trimming is extremely expensive, because it has to be done repeatedly, whereas removing trees in problematic areas is cheap, because you do it once and then just regularly mow the area to prevent new trees from growing.
Based on that, the most rational response for this request would be for PG&E to say, "If you're willing to pay for ongoing maintenance of these trees and take legal and financial liability for any damage caused by them falling, we will let you do so. Sign this paperwork, and then, within 90 days, provide evidence that you have a ten billion dollar liability policy to cover any damage caused by failing to meet the terms of the agreement." If the environmental groups do these things, they can keep their trees and pay to top them all and keep trimming them annually so that they don't encroach on the power lines. If they don't sign the paperwork, or if a subsequent aerial inspection reveals that they have failed to live up to the terms of the agreement, then PG&E's expert opinion on the best approach should be respected, and the trees should come down.
I think they'll quickly conclude that saving a handful of trees is not worth the cost, which is exactly what PG&E said when they decided to cut them down. But if I'm wrong, then great. Everybody's happy (except for me being unhappy for being wrong; like I said, you can't please everyone all the time).
The good news is that PG&E is now a felon and has lost its right to vote. No, wait....:-D
It joins with only 16 other companies in having been found guilty of a felony in the United States, and one of even fewer where executives did not end up in federal prison as a result. This may still happen.
It is also one of, I believe, only two corporations ever convicted of a felony for actions directly resulting in the loss of life. The other, Hoechst AG, was found guilty for having concealed evidence of deaths from its anti-depressant drug, Merital, that would otherwise have prevented it from being approved for sale in the U.S. To be fair, Hoechst AG's former parent company was previously convicted of war crimes in Europe for testing drugs on prisoners of war, and PG&E has a long way to go before it equals that level of horror. But still....
Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.
If there's no profit in providing electrical services then why would anyone bother to invest in it?
Because they need electricity for themselves. 56% of the United States by land area gets its power from electrical co-ops. In principle, there's no reason that number couldn't be 100%.
There's nothing inherently wrong with people making money on this
Except when the desire to make a profit causes you to divert safety money into bonuses and stock dividends. To date, no one has been criminally charged in that incident, in part because the corporate veil in this country is way too strong.
These people need to make money providing electricity or they will be forced to make their money doing something else. There must be a profit or the lights go out. You believe a non-profit could do better? Why?
Because the largest power provider in the United States is a little non-profit called TVA, with almost 5x the generating capacity of PG&E. And their customers (direct or indirect) average 8 to 12 cents per kWh while more than two-thirds of my PG&E residential usage is billed at over 28 cents per kWh. Profit in electrical utility companies is, indeed, a very bad thing.
Question: Why is it THE POWER COMPANY'S job to do LAND MANAGEMENT in areas not directly on their easement?
The Nun's Canyon fire was started by a blown transformer, set off by a nearby tree falling into the easement and hitting the pole it was on.
Off the top of my head I can give you at least half a dozen ways PG&E could have prevented that fire.
Trim the trees. PG&E's easement is almost certainly a lot bigger than you think. They are generally required to trim trees near power lines in such a way that they cannot fall onto lines. They failed to do so.
Use taller poles to ensure that wires and transformers are above the tops of nearby trees, and use sturdier poles to ensure that a falling tree cannot knock down the poles.
Design transformers with adequate cooling so that even in the most severe plausible overcurrent situation, they don't explode in the first place.
Wrap overhead transformers with steel containment vessels to ensure that any fire or sparks do not rain down on the ground below.
Place transformers in underground concrete vaults.
Add periodic ground fault detection and wire breakage detection, so that significant differences in power measurements between adjacent power taps (to people's houses) get detected and result in the power being shut down immediately (e.g. Sicam FSI), along with immediate dispatch to the affected area to put out any fires that might have resulted from it.
Some of these are failure to do routine maintenance; others are failure to perform reasonable grid modernization; still others are potentially design flaws (or failure to do routine maintenance, depending on whether they could reasonably have anticipated the tree height when they installed the poles). Any one of those approaches would have prevented the fire. All of them are within the realm of things that PG&E ought to be doing as a general matter of course.
At last check, the single largest power generation company in North America is a government-owned non-profit corporation called TVA. With about five times the generating capacity of PG&E, its service territory covers nearly the entire state of Tennessee, plus parts of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
Municipal power companies provide electricity for the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Nashville, Memphis, etc. None of these are small towns or small companies by any stretch of the imagination.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that a large percentage of generating capacity is provided by large, for-profit companies, but that's a rather different point.
Given the evidence of statement 1, I heavily disagree there's something wrong with the regulated, for-profit model of utilities. I'd offer further evidence of hypothesis 2 that California had freaking rolling blackouts due to crazily miss-managed de-regulation and Enron ass-hattery in the 2000s. So my guess is that hypothesis 3 is the correct one.
Hypotheses 3 is definitely the correct one. I'm not saying that the CPUC isn't a disaster, nor that their failure to regulate properly hasn't compounded the problem, but PG&E itself IS the problem; they really shouldn't have needed that much babysitting to do their jobs in the first place. Get rid of that, and whatever hundred or so companies take its place will be much easier to regulate, because they won't be too big to fail.
That said, the fact remains that PG&E has a history of asking the CPUC for permission to increase rates to provide funds to improve safety and then deliberately diverting those funds into bonuses and dividends for its shareholders — something that a nonprofit corporation would be incapable of doing. So if PG&E were a non-profit, clearly their service would be safer than it is today. This is pretty much an incontrovertible fact.
And that's why we need to turn PG&E into a nonprofit. It is so big that the only effective way to regulate it — the only way to ensure that it cannot possibly abuse its power to turn a profit for shareholders — is to eliminate the shareholders entirely. And if you break it up, it is just going to re-form again, and in a few decades, you'll be right back where you started. Better to just fix the problem once and for all.
Actually, the real flaw was letting them be in charge of infrastructure, which is the part that caused the fires.
True, but PG&E is almost exclusively an infrastructure company to begin with. They only own a token amount of generating capacity proportional to what they provide. As of 2014, almost 70% of their power was provided by somebody other than PG&E, and I'd imagine that number will be even higher when their one nuclear plant (Diablo Canyon) shuts down in a few years.
They have almost as big a service area as TVA, but about one-fifth the generating capacity, or without Diablo Canyon, more like one-seventh. They are not really a generating company in any meaningful sense. They're a wire and pipe provider.
Break PGE up into the grid (which is kept by the state) and a whole bunch of individual power generating companies (possibly even one for each facility!) and run the system that way.
Agreed. Just be aware that the state wouldn't be selling off very much by splitting off the power generation companies; they almost might as well just buy the whole company at that point.
I think you missed some of the context. I was talking about the Camp Fire, which was reportedly caused by high tension distribution lines. These typically run in a complete fire break, with absolutely nothing taller than grass allowed to grow under them. Trees cannot realistically impinge upon those except after one of the lines or its mounting fails and the line either dead-shorts to ground (through the tower) or snaps and goes open. Either of these conditions is readily detectable, and should result in an instant shutdown and immediate dispatch of a team to inspect it (and report any fire soon enough to put it out while it is still controllable).
Also, fire breaks really probably ought to be watered so that the grass doesn't die, and continued use of 100-year-old steel towers without regular inspection for rust is probably a bad idea, but those are probably issues for another day.
It is essentially a government owned corporation. So what you are saying is the government should jail the government.
What the heck are you talking about? PG&E is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with symbol PCG. It is not, nor has it ever been owned by any government.
I mean, maybe some government pension fund might own some PG&E stock or something, but that still makes it no more owned by the government than Apple or Google or Facebook.
As long as the management is not punished for any misdeed by the company, there is ZERO motivation for the company to improve its behavior.
FTFY. What is missing is accountability. In this case, IMO, the right way to hold them accountable is to throw about half the management chain in jail for the next three decades, fire the rest, liquidate the assets, and dissolve the company.
PG&E should have been dissolved after Anderson back in 1993 (a.k.a. the Erin Brockovich lawsuit). It should have been dissolved after the 1997 fires. It should have been dissolved again in its 2001 bankruptcy. And again after the 2010 San Bruno pipeline disaster. For a company that starts so many fires and kills so many people through gross criminal negligence, the only plausible answer is to metaphorically kill it with fire.
Just take a look at this helpful link someone provided me, PG&E with uninsulated conductors in the middle of a forest!
Insulation shouldn't even be needed. These systems should detect the loss of connection to the other end and cut power in milliseconds, long before the other end of the wire can even hit anything on the ground. I remember reading articles about that at least 30 years ago.
It's time to consider to bury the power lines. Something they do here in Sweden more and more.
This. And while they're at it, move all the big gas distribution pipelines above the ground, so when they leak, somebody will notice the smell long before it can build up a giant pocket of flammable gas and explode.
Of California's fucked-in-the-head regulatory environment.
This has NOTHING to do with climate change.
They're basically required to service areas that will never be profitable, below their costs of delivery, can't spin off unprofitable business segments, they're not allowed to charge more to cover their costs, etc.
Uh, no. Most states have regulations requiring universal access to power, and most states have cheaper power than California, yet only a few states seem to burn down twice a year because of poorly maintained equipment. PG&E turned a $1.65 Billion profit in 2017. How did they do it? By making public safety an externality and hoping for the best. Don't blame this on government regulation. The real flaw was letting any for-profit corporation provide power service in the first place. Government regulation just failed to completely mitigate the damage caused by using entirely the wrong business structure.
They reaped what they sowed. Period.
Meanwhile, state and federal regulations basically conspire against them. Changes in land management dramatically increase the chances of fire in any given area. And they're made liable for any fires in the area of their equipment, whether it was actually their equipment or not...
But in practice, it is approximately always their fault, thanks to grossly inadequate maintenance of trees near power lines and grossly inadequate equipment maintenance, which makes that whole argument completely moot.
Meanwhile, California's idiot density is going up year over year as people with an actual functional brain flee the state. They've had wildfires in California for HOW LONG? Yet, every year we've got idiots starting fires and moving into areas that abut to the aforementioned badly managed forested land and building WOOD HOUSES, while ignoring sensible rules for building in fire-prone areas.
It's worth noting that California has made a bunch of big changes to their building code over the past couple of decades, like requiring fire sprinklers in the attics of all new residential construction, bans on untreated shake roofs, etc., and as a result, in most of the burned areas, newer construction was often left untouched while older structures nearby burned to the ground. The problem is not people moving in. The problem is that a huge number of older buildings built before the newer, tougher building codes kicked in have not been brought up to code, and there are neither laws requiring that to happen nor funds available to help with the cost of doing so.
Read or don't. PG&E has never paid a fine for something it was not responsible for, not now, not ever.
Yeah. The real problem is that they are simply responsible for so darn much negligence. Their main problem isn't getting charged for damage not caused by negligence, but rather that they are constantly, consistently negligent, and they end up paying for damage that they could have easily avoided if they had put safety over profits instead of the other way around.
This. PG&E does bare minimum maintenance. Our power goes out about once a year for the better part of a day, entirely at random, along with an area that is a couple of miles on each side, containing several thousand homes. That's not in the mountains or in some hard-to-reach place. It's in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
PG&E is grossly incompetent. Even if you ignore their equipment malfunctions causing wildfires in 2017 AND 2018 and somehow blame that on global warming, there's also the San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes. There's certainly no global warming involved there. They simply don't maintain their equipment until something breaks. And this means things break. A lot.
Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.
This is their second bankruptcy this century. The first, though largely caused by the California energy crisis, was certainly not helped by a $2 million judgement against them in 1997 for failing to trim trees near power lines, resulting in a devastating wildfire in Nevada back in 1994. For them to have pretty much the same situation in 2017 is almost unconscionable. Yet judging from the frequent power outages in mountainous parts of the Bay Area, IMO, there's no reason to believe that they have learned their lesson and are maintaining trees adequately even to this day. The 2018 Camp Fire was just the additional straw thrown down on top of the camel posthumously.
Clearly, this company has failed. We should let it fail. Deny them Chapter 11. Cancel the stock. Make them file Chapter 7 and sell off the pieces. That's the only way things get better. Or at a bare minimum, order a complete replacement of all the company's leadership as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. If we keep letting the same people make the same bad decisions, how can we possibly expect different results?
A brand new cassette is only on par with perhaps 22KHz, 8-bit audio.
That's not really true unless you're talking about a low-end cassette deck. With better decks, audio cassettes can reproduce frequencies up to anywhere from 16 kHz to 20 kHz, depending on the type of tape (metal vs. rust).
And on high-end gear, cassette tapes can provide about 72 dB of usable dynamic range, which is about 12 bits, not 8, though most commercial music these days has only about 3 dB of dynamic range anyway, so I'm not sure the difference matters.:-D
To be fair, though, cassettes are still subpar when compared with any digital formats that aren't from the 1980s.
This has nothing to do with the LIDAR that is currently in use on self-driving cars. This is entirely different (and fundamentally unsafe) new tech.
Current-generation LIDAR uses low-power (5 mW-ish) lasers in the short end of the near infrared spectrum (905 nm), which can be detected by normal cameras and do not cause them harm. The light frequency is within the detection range of cameras, and they produce about the same amount of output per unit of area as the sun. Pointing at the sun for seconds at a time can harm your camera, but you won't get damage from shooting a single momentary shot where the sun happens to be in view. In much the same way, typical LIDAR does not damage cameras unless the LIDAR is badly malfunctioning and the beam stops moving while pointing at the camera.
What caused this damage, reportedly, was a high-power (1W-ish) laser in the longer end of the near-infrared spectrum (1550 nm). At 200x the power of typical LIDAR, the safe exposure time for a camera drops from seconds to milliseconds. That means in normal use, these lasers can damage cameras.
Eye safety is just one part of the safety discussion, and by focusing only on that when deciding their power output limits, these hardware manufacturers have failed in their duty to protect the public. If they cannot bring their power down enough to avoid causing damage to cameras, then their hardware is fundamentally unsafe for use on roads. After all, a lot of vehicles use cameras to perform safety-critical tasks. Worse, even ignoring the liability issues, the majority of cars on the road today have at least one (backup) camera, which means if they really do damage cameras that easily, then the sheer magnitude of the economic harm that these LIDAR systems could do if broadly deployed is unimaginable.
I don't get why these 1550 nm LIDAR systems are being made. What advantage am I missing? They are arguably quite unsafe, and they still don't do as well as 905 nm LIDAR in bad weather (rain, fog) because of higher attenuation. Why do these even exist?
I hate Verizon and refuse to get service from them. But one of the anti-spam measures commonly touted is to simply add a per-message fee [wikipedia.org] which is small enough not to bother regular users (who send only a few thousand text messages a month), but big enough to cripple spammers (who send a few million text messages a month).
True spammers will find a way around the fee, or they will spam using some other mechanism. The only people a fee actually hurts are legitimate businesses that actually need to send out a lot of text messages — particularly if your business is providing a service that does not cost money.
The way you prevent spam has nothing to do with the checking the quantity of messages and everything to do with checking the first derivative of the number of messages. If you are always sending out a lot of messages, you likely aren't a spammer. If you suddenly go from sending out zero messages to sending out a lot of messages, you likely are.
For example, gmail sends out an insane number of email messages every day, but it is not a spammer. But someone suddenly going from no emails sent to even.001% of gmail's outbound traffic almost certainly is.
Real, legitimate growth is organic, and behaves like organic growth. Spam growth is artificial, and suddenly jumps as they acquire a new database of destination addresses/phone numbers.
There are exceptions to this, but they are very rare, to such a degree that they can likely be readily handled by human intervention on a one-off basis, even for a large outfit like Verizon.
Slashdot Mirror
Breeder reactors are not more uneconomical than LWRs unless you treat the cost of safely storing the spent fuel for thousands of years as an externality. And unfortunately, it was necessary to externalize that risk that in the short term to make it economical enough to jump-start the nascent industry. The need to treat some unavoidable costs as an externality exist for almost every industry that is just getting started. Unfortunately, thanks to reduced R&D spending resulting from only minimal nuclear power plant construction, the nuclear energy industry is basically still just getting started.
NIMBY-driven fears caused reduced construction of nuclear plants, which resulted in reduced R&D spending, which slowed improvements to a crawl. Thus, most of the promised improvements to the technology never happened because of NIMBYism. Any hope of it becoming cheap died as a direct result. It really is that simple from an economics perspective.
As for nuclear not being clean or cheap, actually it is. It is just one or the other, and never both at the same time. Breeders are relatively clean, but cost twice as much per kWh. And GE seems to think that they have a breeder design (PRISM) that actually will be cheap. Its compact size makes it cheaper and easier to deploy. Its passive safety design elements make it safe to place one in areas where you would not seriously consider putting in an LWR. And so on. Time will tell whether they're right.
Nuclear power has not failed. It has never actually been given a serious chance. And I can pretty much guarantee that if the U.S. gives up on nuclear power, then other countries that are not terrified of the nuclear bogeyman will eventually start doing the R&D and will bring the costs down and the safety up to the point that people will laugh at all the NIMBYs. And then we'll all be buying most of our power from whatever country had the courage to take the risks.
Nuclear power is only dead because of NIMYism. The moment the anti-nuke crowd's ideas started to gain traction, it was all over. We stopped building reactors, which meant R&D slowed to a crawl because there was no reason to design something that would never get built. Thus, improvements that would otherwise have driven down the cost of nuclear power, improved the safety, improved the efficiency, and reduced the size never happened.
And so we're stuck with technology from the dark ages and forty-year-old reactors that keep getting permission to keep running for decades past their design lifetime. And over time, these are going to get less and less safe, again because of NIMYism. Eventually, they will all be discontinued, and everyone will conclude that nuclear power just isn't feasible, when in reality, we just never really tried.
Meh. The ability to track viewership really does not concern most people. In fact, most people understand that the ability to track viewership is important for ensuring that people can actually get the kinds of content that they like. After all, if nobody knows whether anybody is watching a particular type of show, what's the incentive to continue producing that type of show over some other type of show? And the more expensive the show is to produce, the more important it is to know that there are a lot of people watching to make it worth spending the money, so for things like sci-fi, tracking is absolutely critical.
Mind you, it would be nice to have an incognito mode in Netflix, for when you don't want something to affect your rankings because you think it might suck, but I have a separate profile for that. Beyond that, though, I'm pretty sure the only people who really care about avoiding tracking are watching porn. :-)
The interesting question is not whether a large portion of their existing subscribers would bail with commercials. That goes without saying. Even if they cut the price massively, one of the major reasons for paying for Netflix is the ability to get good content without commercials, and they know this.
Rather, the interesting questions is whether a lower-cost or free ad-subsidized tier would bring in enough additional subscribers to offset the loss from subscribers in the ad-free tier switching to that ad-subsidized tier.
You can't please everyone all the time, and if you try, you will please no one. Human survival and safety should always take priority over any environmental concern. Always. Human comfort can take a back seat to the environment, but never human survival or safety.
Of course, that doesn't mean that PG&E can't solve the line encroachment problem with aggressive trimming (read "topping") of those trees, which is what the environmental groups are asking them to do. The only problem is that aggressive trimming is extremely expensive, because it has to be done repeatedly, whereas removing trees in problematic areas is cheap, because you do it once and then just regularly mow the area to prevent new trees from growing.
Based on that, the most rational response for this request would be for PG&E to say, "If you're willing to pay for ongoing maintenance of these trees and take legal and financial liability for any damage caused by them falling, we will let you do so. Sign this paperwork, and then, within 90 days, provide evidence that you have a ten billion dollar liability policy to cover any damage caused by failing to meet the terms of the agreement." If the environmental groups do these things, they can keep their trees and pay to top them all and keep trimming them annually so that they don't encroach on the power lines. If they don't sign the paperwork, or if a subsequent aerial inspection reveals that they have failed to live up to the terms of the agreement, then PG&E's expert opinion on the best approach should be respected, and the trees should come down.
I think they'll quickly conclude that saving a handful of trees is not worth the cost, which is exactly what PG&E said when they decided to cut them down. But if I'm wrong, then great. Everybody's happy (except for me being unhappy for being wrong; like I said, you can't please everyone all the time).
The good news is that PG&E is now a felon and has lost its right to vote. No, wait.... :-D
It joins with only 16 other companies in having been found guilty of a felony in the United States, and one of even fewer where executives did not end up in federal prison as a result. This may still happen.
It is also one of, I believe, only two corporations ever convicted of a felony for actions directly resulting in the loss of life. The other, Hoechst AG, was found guilty for having concealed evidence of deaths from its anti-depressant drug, Merital, that would otherwise have prevented it from being approved for sale in the U.S. To be fair, Hoechst AG's former parent company was previously convicted of war crimes in Europe for testing drugs on prisoners of war, and PG&E has a long way to go before it equals that level of horror. But still....
The corporation certainly wouldn't have diverted safety funds into bonuses and stock dividends, because there would be no stockholders.
I mean yes, ostensibly a nonprofit could still divert safety funds into bonuses, but it would likely cost them their nonprofit status.
Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.
If there's no profit in providing electrical services then why would anyone bother to invest in it?
Because they need electricity for themselves. 56% of the United States by land area gets its power from electrical co-ops. In principle, there's no reason that number couldn't be 100%.
There's nothing inherently wrong with people making money on this
Except when the desire to make a profit causes you to divert safety money into bonuses and stock dividends. To date, no one has been criminally charged in that incident, in part because the corporate veil in this country is way too strong.
These people need to make money providing electricity or they will be forced to make their money doing something else. There must be a profit or the lights go out. You believe a non-profit could do better? Why?
Because the largest power provider in the United States is a little non-profit called TVA, with almost 5x the generating capacity of PG&E. And their customers (direct or indirect) average 8 to 12 cents per kWh while more than two-thirds of my PG&E residential usage is billed at over 28 cents per kWh. Profit in electrical utility companies is, indeed, a very bad thing.
Question: Why is it THE POWER COMPANY'S job to do LAND MANAGEMENT in areas not directly on their easement?
The Nun's Canyon fire was started by a blown transformer, set off by a nearby tree falling into the easement and hitting the pole it was on.
Off the top of my head I can give you at least half a dozen ways PG&E could have prevented that fire.
Some of these are failure to do routine maintenance; others are failure to perform reasonable grid modernization; still others are potentially design flaws (or failure to do routine maintenance, depending on whether they could reasonably have anticipated the tree height when they installed the poles). Any one of those approaches would have prevented the fire. All of them are within the realm of things that PG&E ought to be doing as a general matter of course.
And that's why it is their job.
No, you made that part up. I certainly did not say it.
That's not even remotely true. Some real facts:
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that a large percentage of generating capacity is provided by large, for-profit companies, but that's a rather different point.
Hypotheses 3 is definitely the correct one. I'm not saying that the CPUC isn't a disaster, nor that their failure to regulate properly hasn't compounded the problem, but PG&E itself IS the problem; they really shouldn't have needed that much babysitting to do their jobs in the first place. Get rid of that, and whatever hundred or so companies take its place will be much easier to regulate, because they won't be too big to fail.
That said, the fact remains that PG&E has a history of asking the CPUC for permission to increase rates to provide funds to improve safety and then deliberately diverting those funds into bonuses and dividends for its shareholders — something that a nonprofit corporation would be incapable of doing. So if PG&E were a non-profit, clearly their service would be safer than it is today. This is pretty much an incontrovertible fact.
And that's why we need to turn PG&E into a nonprofit. It is so big that the only effective way to regulate it — the only way to ensure that it cannot possibly abuse its power to turn a profit for shareholders — is to eliminate the shareholders entirely. And if you break it up, it is just going to re-form again, and in a few decades, you'll be right back where you started. Better to just fix the problem once and for all.
True, but PG&E is almost exclusively an infrastructure company to begin with. They only own a token amount of generating capacity proportional to what they provide. As of 2014, almost 70% of their power was provided by somebody other than PG&E, and I'd imagine that number will be even higher when their one nuclear plant (Diablo Canyon) shuts down in a few years.
They have almost as big a service area as TVA, but about one-fifth the generating capacity, or without Diablo Canyon, more like one-seventh. They are not really a generating company in any meaningful sense. They're a wire and pipe provider.
Agreed. Just be aware that the state wouldn't be selling off very much by splitting off the power generation companies; they almost might as well just buy the whole company at that point.
I think you missed some of the context. I was talking about the Camp Fire, which was reportedly caused by high tension distribution lines. These typically run in a complete fire break, with absolutely nothing taller than grass allowed to grow under them. Trees cannot realistically impinge upon those except after one of the lines or its mounting fails and the line either dead-shorts to ground (through the tower) or snaps and goes open. Either of these conditions is readily detectable, and should result in an instant shutdown and immediate dispatch of a team to inspect it (and report any fire soon enough to put it out while it is still controllable).
Also, fire breaks really probably ought to be watered so that the grass doesn't die, and continued use of 100-year-old steel towers without regular inspection for rust is probably a bad idea, but those are probably issues for another day.
What the heck are you talking about? PG&E is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with symbol PCG. It is not, nor has it ever been owned by any government.
I mean, maybe some government pension fund might own some PG&E stock or something, but that still makes it no more owned by the government than Apple or Google or Facebook.
They do have nuclear reactors on the beach, though. Give it time.
FTFY. What is missing is accountability. In this case, IMO, the right way to hold them accountable is to throw about half the management chain in jail for the next three decades, fire the rest, liquidate the assets, and dissolve the company.
PG&E should have been dissolved after Anderson back in 1993 (a.k.a. the Erin Brockovich lawsuit). It should have been dissolved after the 1997 fires. It should have been dissolved again in its 2001 bankruptcy. And again after the 2010 San Bruno pipeline disaster. For a company that starts so many fires and kills so many people through gross criminal negligence, the only plausible answer is to metaphorically kill it with fire.
Insulation shouldn't even be needed. These systems should detect the loss of connection to the other end and cut power in milliseconds, long before the other end of the wire can even hit anything on the ground. I remember reading articles about that at least 30 years ago.
This. And while they're at it, move all the big gas distribution pipelines above the ground, so when they leak, somebody will notice the smell long before it can build up a giant pocket of flammable gas and explode.
Of California's fucked-in-the-head regulatory environment. This has NOTHING to do with climate change.
They're basically required to service areas that will never be profitable, below their costs of delivery, can't spin off unprofitable business segments, they're not allowed to charge more to cover their costs, etc.
Uh, no. Most states have regulations requiring universal access to power, and most states have cheaper power than California, yet only a few states seem to burn down twice a year because of poorly maintained equipment. PG&E turned a $1.65 Billion profit in 2017. How did they do it? By making public safety an externality and hoping for the best. Don't blame this on government regulation. The real flaw was letting any for-profit corporation provide power service in the first place. Government regulation just failed to completely mitigate the damage caused by using entirely the wrong business structure.
They reaped what they sowed. Period.
Meanwhile, state and federal regulations basically conspire against them. Changes in land management dramatically increase the chances of fire in any given area. And they're made liable for any fires in the area of their equipment, whether it was actually their equipment or not...
But in practice, it is approximately always their fault, thanks to grossly inadequate maintenance of trees near power lines and grossly inadequate equipment maintenance, which makes that whole argument completely moot.
Meanwhile, California's idiot density is going up year over year as people with an actual functional brain flee the state. They've had wildfires in California for HOW LONG? Yet, every year we've got idiots starting fires and moving into areas that abut to the aforementioned badly managed forested land and building WOOD HOUSES, while ignoring sensible rules for building in fire-prone areas.
It's worth noting that California has made a bunch of big changes to their building code over the past couple of decades, like requiring fire sprinklers in the attics of all new residential construction, bans on untreated shake roofs, etc., and as a result, in most of the burned areas, newer construction was often left untouched while older structures nearby burned to the ground. The problem is not people moving in. The problem is that a huge number of older buildings built before the newer, tougher building codes kicked in have not been brought up to code, and there are neither laws requiring that to happen nor funds available to help with the cost of doing so.
Yeah. The real problem is that they are simply responsible for so darn much negligence. Their main problem isn't getting charged for damage not caused by negligence, but rather that they are constantly, consistently negligent, and they end up paying for damage that they could have easily avoided if they had put safety over profits instead of the other way around.
This. PG&E does bare minimum maintenance. Our power goes out about once a year for the better part of a day, entirely at random, along with an area that is a couple of miles on each side, containing several thousand homes. That's not in the mountains or in some hard-to-reach place. It's in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
PG&E is grossly incompetent. Even if you ignore their equipment malfunctions causing wildfires in 2017 AND 2018 and somehow blame that on global warming, there's also the San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes. There's certainly no global warming involved there. They simply don't maintain their equipment until something breaks. And this means things break. A lot.
Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.
This is their second bankruptcy this century. The first, though largely caused by the California energy crisis, was certainly not helped by a $2 million judgement against them in 1997 for failing to trim trees near power lines, resulting in a devastating wildfire in Nevada back in 1994. For them to have pretty much the same situation in 2017 is almost unconscionable. Yet judging from the frequent power outages in mountainous parts of the Bay Area, IMO, there's no reason to believe that they have learned their lesson and are maintaining trees adequately even to this day. The 2018 Camp Fire was just the additional straw thrown down on top of the camel posthumously.
Clearly, this company has failed. We should let it fail. Deny them Chapter 11. Cancel the stock. Make them file Chapter 7 and sell off the pieces. That's the only way things get better. Or at a bare minimum, order a complete replacement of all the company's leadership as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. If we keep letting the same people make the same bad decisions, how can we possibly expect different results?
That's not really true unless you're talking about a low-end cassette deck. With better decks, audio cassettes can reproduce frequencies up to anywhere from 16 kHz to 20 kHz, depending on the type of tape (metal vs. rust).
And on high-end gear, cassette tapes can provide about 72 dB of usable dynamic range, which is about 12 bits, not 8, though most commercial music these days has only about 3 dB of dynamic range anyway, so I'm not sure the difference matters. :-D
To be fair, though, cassettes are still subpar when compared with any digital formats that aren't from the 1980s.
This has nothing to do with the LIDAR that is currently in use on self-driving cars. This is entirely different (and fundamentally unsafe) new tech.
Current-generation LIDAR uses low-power (5 mW-ish) lasers in the short end of the near infrared spectrum (905 nm), which can be detected by normal cameras and do not cause them harm. The light frequency is within the detection range of cameras, and they produce about the same amount of output per unit of area as the sun. Pointing at the sun for seconds at a time can harm your camera, but you won't get damage from shooting a single momentary shot where the sun happens to be in view. In much the same way, typical LIDAR does not damage cameras unless the LIDAR is badly malfunctioning and the beam stops moving while pointing at the camera.
What caused this damage, reportedly, was a high-power (1W-ish) laser in the longer end of the near-infrared spectrum (1550 nm). At 200x the power of typical LIDAR, the safe exposure time for a camera drops from seconds to milliseconds. That means in normal use, these lasers can damage cameras.
Eye safety is just one part of the safety discussion, and by focusing only on that when deciding their power output limits, these hardware manufacturers have failed in their duty to protect the public. If they cannot bring their power down enough to avoid causing damage to cameras, then their hardware is fundamentally unsafe for use on roads. After all, a lot of vehicles use cameras to perform safety-critical tasks. Worse, even ignoring the liability issues, the majority of cars on the road today have at least one (backup) camera, which means if they really do damage cameras that easily, then the sheer magnitude of the economic harm that these LIDAR systems could do if broadly deployed is unimaginable.
I don't get why these 1550 nm LIDAR systems are being made. What advantage am I missing? They are arguably quite unsafe, and they still don't do as well as 905 nm LIDAR in bad weather (rain, fog) because of higher attenuation. Why do these even exist?
People who wanted to be able to say that they taped over a recording of Britney Spears, Twenty One Pilots, or Guns N' Roses.
True spammers will find a way around the fee, or they will spam using some other mechanism. The only people a fee actually hurts are legitimate businesses that actually need to send out a lot of text messages — particularly if your business is providing a service that does not cost money.
The way you prevent spam has nothing to do with the checking the quantity of messages and everything to do with checking the first derivative of the number of messages. If you are always sending out a lot of messages, you likely aren't a spammer. If you suddenly go from sending out zero messages to sending out a lot of messages, you likely are.
For example, gmail sends out an insane number of email messages every day, but it is not a spammer. But someone suddenly going from no emails sent to even .001% of gmail's outbound traffic almost certainly is.
Real, legitimate growth is organic, and behaves like organic growth. Spam growth is artificial, and suddenly jumps as they acquire a new database of destination addresses/phone numbers.
There are exceptions to this, but they are very rare, to such a degree that they can likely be readily handled by human intervention on a one-off basis, even for a large outfit like Verizon.
It's all Verizon's fault — poor network performance, global warming, terror attacks around the world, the Trump presidency... all of it.