Your sources seem to be nothing more than opinion pieces with broken links.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-wind-the-best-energy-nuclear-coal-and-ethanol-the-worst-5352/ If Jacobson ranked nuclear bellow tidal and solar for "overall potential to generate electricity" then he's a moron. Jacobsen makes some fairly heroic assumptions ? even charging civilian nuclear power generation with the carbon emissions (and loss of life) of a 50x15-kiloton nuclear war! By contrast, he charges his favored power sources with no "opportunity cost emissions", as though they faced no delays in permitting, environmental reviews, transmission-line construction, and equipment backlogs.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/for-cheap-clean-energy-go-geothermal-study-says/ An MIT study that's much more extensive suggests geothermal is damn risky; loss of water to the formation, loss of heat over time, dry (cold) holes that are non-productive; difficult drilling conditions (hot etc). And, geothermal is rarely near city the user base... so add long transmission lines...
Sure geothermal is great for some things, it may cause small earthquakes but that's not too bad but depending on how you use it it can be more like oil drilling, you extract all the heat from a given area and it takes thousands of years to replenish. I wouldn't complain at seeing a fair investment in geothermal but can it provide what we need? only a little. We need power everywhere, not just where there's pleanty of geothermal near the surface.
By that criteria nuclear power is not a serious energy source
By the grand total subsidies or the subsidies per megawatt? the second is what matters and by that criteria nuclear is very good. You know why solar and wind don't get as much total? because they're no hopers. They get money to placate people who know fuck all about generating power for the grid but want a symbol of how very green their power is.
Studies linked to say both wind and geothermal and cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. Now will you provide links to evidence says nuclear is cleaner?
Did you even read my post?wind+solar cannot be used for more than 20% of the grid. Add in some kind of smart grid and you might, might just push that up to 30% and that's at an insane cost. Geothermal is fantastic for the few places where there's magma near the surface, otherwise drilling a hole 15km deep and keeping it open can be a problem. Plus you use up the heat in a region and you stop getting geothermal power out and you have to drill a new hole.
This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
I know reading is hard but try it some time.
This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
I made the point that is isn't a big problem. The bigger problem is how expensive it is and how short the lifetimes of turbines is. Off shore ones suffer particularly badly. Try again.
So you oppose government funding(subsidies) of nuclear fusion research? Environmentally nuclear is vastly better than all the other serious energy sources. Wind and solar are not serious energy sources as is hinted by how much subsidies they need and unless you want to spend the whole GNP of the US on building solar panels for a few years we're not going to get any serious ammount of energy from it.
Now you may not care about the environment but it is what gives you life
I also hate freedom, America and fluffy kittens. Cut the crap.
And I want externalities [wikipedia.org] accounted, paid, for by those who create them.
ok So if you paint your house pink and knock some off the property value of your neighbours house then you're fine with getting a bill for however many thousand the value of their property dropped?
Guess what. I give a fuck about the environment too but I have the sense to realise that having a little bioreactor in your neighbourhood for you to drop your bucket of crap and garden clippings into isn't going to provide enough energy to run much of anything. Adding "distributed" to the description of a power source does not make it magically practical. Something is still going to need to provide the power to run the aluminium foundries and nuclear is the cleanest, safest long term solution for that.
People like to go "but but but DISTRIBUTED!" or "lets use lots of sources!!!" When you point out that even if you ignore the price and upkeep the basic problem with renewable is that you can't get enough power out of them, there simply isn't enough extractable energy in the waves that hit our shores, the wind that blows over our hills or the rivers that flow down those hills. Lets run through the check lists.
Nuclear: Short: It's cheap, it's predictable, uranium can be obtained in effectively unlimited quantities once the price hits 150 dollars a pound and it becomes economic to extract it from seawater, it's clean, if you provided the entire worlds energy needs from nuclear and reprocessed then the entire high level waste for a year could fit in one swimming pool.(though you wouldn't want to pack it quite this tight)
Nuclear waste isn't some mystical evil that has to be imprisoned for all eternity away from everything that lives. You can burn it up in special reactors or if you want a cheap option just bury it for a thousand years out in the desert and wait for it to decay into something no more dangerous than natural uranium ore. There are lots of alternatives.
Now personally I'm not mad on the above simply because I can imagine people in the future wanting to dig the waste back up again to make it into more useful fuel like we dig up old roman slag piles from their mines to get the useful material they couldn't.
Wind is nice but it's unpredictable and bigger wind farms kill migrating birds.This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
Solar is cute but it's expensive and unpredictable and once it gets serious we can expect some "save the desert" campaigns. It'd be nice to coat the sahara in solar panels but you'd need some sort of international superconducting power grid to make any use of it which would be very very very expensive.
Together they can never provide more than 20% of the grids needs simply for stability reasons. This is pretty much a hard cap, once you get more than that from unpredictable sources rolling blackouts start to become a real problem.
Hydro is nice and predictable but we're already using most of it's available energy and it takes land and screws up things for river life.
Tidal is nice and predictable but destroys coastal ecosystems and there's only a tiny number of places where it could generate decent power.
Fusion is a work in progress but will be expensive and won't be here for decades.
Coal is cheap and easy but dirty, same goes for other fossil fuels and they're gonna run out pretty soon.
Nuclear is the only realistic option long term unless fusion makes some very very big advances soon.
At that scale it's basically all chemical warfare and who can adapt fastest.
Sure any kind of grey goo might get an initial advantage but if it can't evolve itself then the moment it hits a micro-organism it can't quite kill it's fucked.
If it can itself evolve then either you're going to have to come up with some approach to stop individual units from mutating and preying on each other in which case the blob's energy gets spent largely on fighting itself at which point it turns into the same game that bacteria have been playing all this time with limited or no cooperation between nodes/cells in the blob.
Would every cell in the blob have to cooperate or are we talking just creating some kind of self replicating machine like an artificial bacteria?
Yes genetic algorithms are not prefect for everything but for the kind of problems involving many interacting forces/materials/etc faced by micro-organisms it's pretty damn good.
Artistry and skill are not the same thing. Does it take skill to produce a good photo of a painting? Sure. But that's a shortcoming of the tools, the prefect camera would make all those little adjustments for you.
If I made a scanner which took skill to operate or a bitwise copy util that needed extensive training to use that shouldn't automatically make whatever comes out of the tool an original work.
"Do you really think AIG would insure nuclear power with a big premium?" Would any sensible insurance company cover something to the point where is could bankrupt them no matter how unlikely the event in question is?
Navajo
Another person who can't figure out the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. During the cold war the US government wanted material for weapons, the navajo got screwed.
Oh so now you want to say CATO, Forbes, as well as other business, capitalist, or freemarket groups are idiot NIMBYs?
Where did I call them idiot NIMBYs? I was saying they know damn well that any investment they make in such projects could be lost due to idiot politicians who know as much about physics and engineering as the average 5 year old and protesters who know less. which will factor into any risk reward calculation. Where did I call the french government idiot NIMBY's? they made the smart decision with nuclear power.
Sure the nuclear industry gets some special liability legislation but it has it's downsides, if you build a damn on one river and I build a damn on another and my damn collapses killing thousands of people then you are not liable for my fuckup. If we both owned nuclear plants and I fucked up then you'd foot part of my bill.
Solar has it's used, as does wind but for powering the grid they're both terrible, no amount of subsidies or happy thoughts are going to change that. From your own link: "For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and 'clean coal' $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59."
Calling nuclear bad because (counting fusion research) it gets 1.59 per megawatt hour when your own pet uselessness gets 24.34 isn't in the same league as the pot calling the kettle black.
Nuclear is right down there with the "real" energy sources. You know. The ones which produce the sort of power we need to keep our civilisation going.
The grey goo attack already happened 3 billion years ago. We're surrounded by self replicating machines!
Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?
We tend to want organisms which dedicate their energy to doing something for us, they'd be up against organisms which have been adapting to dedicate their energy to helping themselves for millions of generations.
Think your tiny robots, whatever their size, with 0 years of optimisation and designed by a human intellect are going to win against the ants, the mites,the fungi, the amoebas, the bacteria, the viruses and the prions?
To be successful they'd have to be built from common elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen etc and sooner or later something is going to work out how to eat your nanotech and then the grey goo attack is going to end.
They could be avoiding allowing much oxygen into the mix, then the bioengineering algae would be at the advantage as they would be better adapted to the high ethanol levels and lack of oxygen.
Subsidies is where you piss money away into a big hole so you can pretend that something that isn't economical really is economical. Loans are where you loan someone money so they can do something which takes large capital investment and then they pay it back to you with interest over time. Solar panels need subsidies so that people can pretend that they're economical. Nuclear plants need loans because they are economical, it's just that the chances of some politicians bowing to the pressure from idiot NIMBY's and killing the construction or making expensive changes to the requirements half way through are so high and the amounts of money so large it's more practical to get the loans from the government.
a) Spent nuclear fuel rods, clad or declad, from commercial electricity generating reactors; average radioactivity being more than 2.5 million curies per cubic meter. b) Semi-liquid sludge from nuclear bomb fabrication waste processing residue - average radioactivity being about 3500 curies per cubic meter.
All this waste contains five shorter lived and longer lived radionuclides of main concern. The shorter lived are strontium-90 whose half life, t1/2, is 28.5 years, and cesium-137 whose half life, t1/2, is 30 years. See Ref. 1 for the half-life values used in this study. The radioactivity of these shorter lived nuclides is approximately 95% of the total radioactivity of the nuclides of concern. Total hazardous life for these shorter lived nuclides is considered to be between 600 years and 1000 years depending upon one's point of view.
The longer lived isotopes are plutonium-239 whose t1/2 is 24,110 years, plutonium-240 whose t1/2 is 6,540 years, and curium-245 whose t1/2 is 8,500 years. Plutonium-238 whose t1/2is 88 years will have essentially disappeared after several thousand years, so in storage terms of the longer lived elements this isotope is not of concern as long as it will have been successfully contained for the next several thousand years. As for the life of these longer lived materials, the NRC considers 10,000 years as the storage time required; however, some people consider a lifetime as long as 100,000 years to 500,000 years as more appropriate.
Sr-90 is a beta emitter, and the radiation won't penetrate the glass capsule. C-137 is a beta and gamma emitter, with 75% the energy released as beta, and the rest as 33keV and 662keV gamma.
1 cubic meter of waste: 2.5 million curies % radiation in short-lived Sr-90/C-137 isotopes: appx 95% % radiation capable of penetrating capsule: appx 13% World population: 6.70 Billion Average mass of a human: 70kg Time for complete digestion: 24hr
1 Ci = 37GBq 1 rad = 0.01J/kg of absorbed radiation 1 rem = rule of thumb is 1 rad, but it's actually a lot more complicated Q for gamma, external = 1 Q for alpha, external = 0 Q for beta, external = 0 1 Sv = Q x 100rem 1keV = 1.60217646 × 10-16 joules Density of fuel rods: 11.0g/cc
Volume of fuel per capsule: 1.6mg/11.0g/cc= 0.145nm squared
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 1m squared: 2.5MCi *.95 *.13 = 308kCi = 1.14*10^16 Bq "Dangerous" radiation emitted from 0.145nm squared: 1.14*10^16Bq/6.7G/3=567kBq/meal % of gamma rays striking human body absorbed by human body: appx 15% Radiation absorbed by the body: 85kBq Energy absorbed: 85kBq X (33keV/Bq+662keV/Bq)/2 * 1.60217646*10^-16J/keV * 24*60*60s= 41mJ. Energy absorbed per kg: 41mJ/70kg/0.01J/kg = 0.6mrad Radiation exposure: 0.6mrem per meal Radiation exposure: 639mrem per year, or appx 255SWW.
Has anyone suggested simply eating it? It would unfortunately then collect and concentrate in sewage treatment plants and septic tanks, and so would defeat the purpose, but I'm curious...
12,000 metric tons of high-level waste (mostly spent reactor fuel rods) is produced worldwide each year. If that waste was let age for a few years like fine whiskey, split up into tiny 1.6mg portions encapsulated in glass, and then one fed to every person in the world with each meal.
workings posted on request since I'm too lazy to edit out the tags
we could quite literally eat all the nuclear waste generated worldwide and barely double our annual exposure to natural radiation. Not that I'd advocate this, but jesus christ, there's nothing wrong with burying it all in a hole in the ground!
Alternately, I could just go around the nation beating people with spent fuel rods until they gain some perspective in the matter.
I couldn't be arsed removing all the [super] tags in the math that accompanied this but if anyone wants I'll post the original.
Personally I don't really think spending the nations total GDP for years to come on endless fields of solar panels or varients is going to be a good investment.
Especially when you could achieve much better results with nuclear for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost.
You get a much higher concentration of "nucular is the ultimate evil and anything else is better" idiots at green party conventions and their opinions tend to get reflected in the policies of the various "green" political parties in europe and america. I have met greens who don't hate nuclear but not many...
There are risks but "frying people" is certainly not one of them thanks to our friends/enemies the laws of physics.
The long-term effects of beaming power through the ionosphere? now that's an unknown which needs to be studied. If you don't want people to facepalm and get that "oh gods not this crap again" look when you talk try reading up on the subject first.
On slashdot? It's the guilty-upon-accusation bit that bothers people here more. It's the "Every kind of P2P is people violating copyrights" idea that idiot politicians have that bothers people here on slashdot.
I don't care if 90% of the people using a certain protocol are using it to swap the latest transformers movie because I'm part of the 10% using it for legitimate purposes. Should I be denied my right to disseminate information because of that 90%?
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
Thing is it doesn't just kill P2P when saturated. Sure I'm fine with my TCP torrent getting lower priority than a UDP VOIP call but that isn't what happens. No what happens is that the ISP kills or throttles to death anything that looks like a torrent because they designed their network poorly and have found that changing usage patterns are costing them more when it comes time to pay for their upstream connection.
You really think the people who push for this haven't thought about the risks?
"and attempt to understand the risks"
Just because you know sweet fuck all about the tech and have thus given no thought to the problems does not mean that others have not spent a great deal of time thinking about the possible problems and risks.
gods sake. If they wanted to cut down on the number of overdrafts they'd just not allow them at all or only allow them after you apply for them. It's not that hard to deny a transaction rather than charging 40 dollars because your paycheck hasn't cleared yet and you're a dollar into the red after using the ATM or the fee for using the ATM pushed you into the red. Hell how hard would a "this transaction will push you into overdraft. continue? Y/N" prompt be?
It's on a par with loan sharking. It exploits the poor. It most certainly is not to discourage people from getting overdrafts. It looks more like it's designed to try to make sure people inadvertently go into overdraft.
For the same reason most of the world doesn't listen to fools like you when writing legislation to deal with loansharks.
Because it exploits the poor. Because it stinks of corruption and weak regulators. Because "Caveat emptor" is an idiots approach to consumer protection.
It's as much about personal responsibility as situations involving young women and dark alleys.
You know what? I've never paid a fee for trying to withdraw more than I have in part because retards like you didn't get to write the laws on the matter here.
The example transaction is exactly what happens if I try to withdraw more than I have. You're getting fucked up the ass by banks in the US and you know why? Because of idiots like the above poster who make excuses for them and their scams.
Here's the thing. The kind of people who push for this crap genuinely believe that child porn is a big issue, that it's worth losing all those nice freedoms we have to get rid of it (or at least try as you might as well piss into the wind for all the good it will do) and that anyone who objects is some kind of pervert who is afraid of losing their child porn.
There are people who genuinely believe that a police state is a good thing because "only criminals have anything to fear from a police state"
There are people who genuinely believe that censorship is a good thing because they certainly don't want to be seeing... well just about anything since these are the kinds of nutters who write letters to the editor of your local newspaper.
How about this as an even better solution if they don't want you to go into overdraft: I put my card in the ATM. I type in my pin. I request 20. I only have 10 in my account. A message pops up telling me I don't have the funds. It ain't that hard.
They let people go into overdraft easily because fee's are profitable. Interest on loans isn't profitable enough for some banks.
Slashdot Mirror
Prove it.
Government-2006 energy review
http://www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews_100.htm
Also I take it you couldn't re arsed reading this when I linked to it earlier.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
read it.
for the love of god read it.
Your sources seem to be nothing more than opinion pieces with broken links.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-wind-the-best-energy-nuclear-coal-and-ethanol-the-worst-5352/
If Jacobson ranked nuclear bellow tidal and solar for "overall potential to generate electricity" then he's a moron.
Jacobsen makes some fairly heroic assumptions ? even charging civilian nuclear power generation with the carbon emissions (and loss of life) of a 50x15-kiloton nuclear war! By contrast, he charges his favored power sources with no "opportunity cost emissions", as though they faced no delays in permitting, environmental reviews, transmission-line construction, and equipment backlogs.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/for-cheap-clean-energy-go-geothermal-study-says/
An MIT study that's much more extensive suggests geothermal is damn risky; loss of water to the formation, loss of heat over time, dry (cold) holes that are non-productive; difficult drilling conditions (hot etc). And, geothermal is rarely near city the user base... so add long transmission lines...
Sure geothermal is great for some things, it may cause small earthquakes but that's not too bad but depending on how you use it it can be more like oil drilling, you extract all the heat from a given area and it takes thousands of years to replenish.
I wouldn't complain at seeing a fair investment in geothermal but can it provide what we need? only a little.
We need power everywhere, not just where there's pleanty of geothermal near the surface.
By that criteria nuclear power is not a serious energy source
By the grand total subsidies or the subsidies per megawatt? the second is what matters and by that criteria nuclear is very good. You know why solar and wind don't get as much total? because they're no hopers. They get money to placate people who know fuck all about generating power for the grid but want a symbol of how very green their power is.
Studies linked to say both wind and geothermal and cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. Now will you provide links to evidence says nuclear is cleaner?
Did you even read my post?wind+solar cannot be used for more than 20% of the grid. Add in some kind of smart grid and you might, might just push that up to 30% and that's at an insane cost.
Geothermal is fantastic for the few places where there's magma near the surface, otherwise drilling a hole 15km deep and keeping it open can be a problem.
Plus you use up the heat in a region and you stop getting geothermal power out and you have to drill a new hole.
This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
I know reading is hard but try it some time.
This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
I made the point that is isn't a big problem.
The bigger problem is how expensive it is and how short the lifetimes of turbines is.
Off shore ones suffer particularly badly.
Try again.
A Solar Grand Plan
So you oppose government funding(subsidies) of nuclear fusion research?
Environmentally nuclear is vastly better than all the other serious energy sources.
Wind and solar are not serious energy sources as is hinted by how much subsidies they need and unless you want to spend the whole GNP of the US on building solar panels for a few years we're not going to get any serious ammount of energy from it.
Now you may not care about the environment but it is what gives you life
I also hate freedom, America and fluffy kittens.
Cut the crap.
And I want externalities [wikipedia.org] accounted, paid, for by those who create them.
ok
So if you paint your house pink and knock some off the property value of your neighbours house then you're fine with getting a bill for however many thousand the value of their property dropped?
Guess what.
I give a fuck about the environment too but I have the sense to realise that having a little bioreactor in your neighbourhood for you to drop your bucket of crap and garden clippings into isn't going to provide enough energy to run much of anything.
Adding "distributed" to the description of a power source does not make it magically practical.
Something is still going to need to provide the power to run the aluminium foundries and nuclear is the cleanest, safest long term solution for that.
People like to go "but but but DISTRIBUTED!" or "lets use lots of sources!!!"
When you point out that even if you ignore the price and upkeep the basic problem with renewable is that you can't get enough power out of them, there simply isn't enough extractable energy in the waves that hit our shores, the wind that blows over our hills or the rivers that flow down those hills.
Lets run through the check lists.
Nuclear:
Short: It's cheap, it's predictable, uranium can be obtained in effectively unlimited quantities once the price hits 150 dollars a pound and it becomes economic to extract it from seawater, it's clean, if you provided the entire worlds energy needs from nuclear and reprocessed then the entire high level waste for a year could fit in one swimming pool.(though you wouldn't want to pack it quite this tight)
Nuclear waste isn't some mystical evil that has to be imprisoned for all eternity away from everything that lives. You can burn it up in special reactors or if you want a cheap option just bury it for a thousand years out in the desert and wait for it to decay into something no more dangerous than natural uranium ore.
There are lots of alternatives.
Now personally I'm not mad on the above simply because I can imagine people in the future wanting to dig the waste back up again to make it into more useful fuel like we dig up old roman slag piles from their mines to get the useful material they couldn't.
Wind is nice but it's unpredictable and bigger wind farms kill migrating birds.This isn't that bad a problem since lots of things kill birds but it's also expensive to maintain. Offshore wind farms suffer from the salt water and need a lot of maintenance.
Solar is cute but it's expensive and unpredictable and once it gets serious we can expect some "save the desert" campaigns. It'd be nice to coat the sahara in solar panels but you'd need some sort of international superconducting power grid to make any use of it which would be very very very expensive.
Together they can never provide more than 20% of the grids needs simply for stability reasons. This is pretty much a hard cap, once you get more than that from unpredictable sources rolling blackouts start to become a real problem.
Hydro is nice and predictable but we're already using most of it's available energy and it takes land and screws up things for river life.
Tidal is nice and predictable but destroys coastal ecosystems and there's only a tiny number of places where it could generate decent power.
Fusion is a work in progress but will be expensive and won't be here for decades.
Coal is cheap and easy but dirty, same goes for other fossil fuels and they're gonna run out pretty soon.
Nuclear is the only realistic option long term unless fusion makes some very very big advances soon.
So you're saying people watch space launches in the hope of seeing some flaming chunks of human flesh?
Want to be an astronaut? You might get blown up.
That isn't the same thing as saying "lets set fire to people for fun"
something is still going to eat your nanotech.
At that scale it's basically all chemical warfare and who can adapt fastest.
Sure any kind of grey goo might get an initial advantage but if it can't evolve itself then the moment it hits a micro-organism it can't quite kill it's fucked.
If it can itself evolve then either you're going to have to come up with some approach to stop individual units from mutating and preying on each other in which case the blob's energy gets spent largely on fighting itself at which point it turns into the same game that bacteria have been playing all this time with limited or no cooperation between nodes/cells in the blob.
Would every cell in the blob have to cooperate or are we talking just creating some kind of self replicating machine like an artificial bacteria?
Yes genetic algorithms are not prefect for everything but for the kind of problems involving many interacting forces/materials/etc faced by micro-organisms it's pretty damn good.
Fuck off.
I've never stolen a car or broken into one but I have every fucking right to walk through a car park.
You don't like it?
Piss off and keep your precious penis substitute locked in your garage.
Artistry and skill are not the same thing.
Does it take skill to produce a good photo of a painting?
Sure.
But that's a shortcoming of the tools, the prefect camera would make all those little adjustments for you.
If I made a scanner which took skill to operate or a bitwise copy util that needed extensive training to use that shouldn't automatically make whatever comes out of the tool an original work.
"Do you really think AIG would insure nuclear power with a big premium?"
Would any sensible insurance company cover something to the point where is could bankrupt them no matter how unlikely the event in question is?
Navajo
Another person who can't figure out the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
During the cold war the US government wanted material for weapons, the navajo got screwed.
Oh so now you want to say CATO, Forbes, as well as other business, capitalist, or freemarket groups are idiot NIMBYs?
Where did I call them idiot NIMBYs?
I was saying they know damn well that any investment they make in such projects could be lost due to idiot politicians who know as much about physics and engineering as the average 5 year old and protesters who know less.
which will factor into any risk reward calculation.
Where did I call the french government idiot NIMBY's? they made the smart decision with nuclear power.
Sure the nuclear industry gets some special liability legislation but it has it's downsides, if you build a damn on one river and I build a damn on another and my damn collapses killing thousands of people then you are not liable for my fuckup.
If we both owned nuclear plants and I fucked up then you'd foot part of my bill.
Solar has it's used, as does wind but for powering the grid they're both terrible, no amount of subsidies or happy thoughts are going to change that.
From your own link:
"For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and 'clean coal' $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59."
Calling nuclear bad because (counting fusion research) it gets 1.59 per megawatt hour when your own pet uselessness gets 24.34 isn't in the same league as the pot calling the kettle black.
Nuclear is right down there with the "real" energy sources. You know. The ones which produce the sort of power we need to keep our civilisation going.
He's saying it's unusual. Which can be true.
The grey goo attack already happened 3 billion years ago. We're surrounded by self replicating machines!
Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?
We tend to want organisms which dedicate their energy to doing something for us, they'd be up against organisms which have been adapting to dedicate their energy to helping themselves for millions of generations.
Think your tiny robots, whatever their size, with 0 years of optimisation and designed by a human intellect are going to win against the ants, the mites,the fungi, the amoebas, the bacteria, the viruses and the prions?
To be successful they'd have to be built from common elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen etc and sooner or later something is going to work out how to eat your nanotech and then the grey goo attack is going to end.
They could be avoiding allowing much oxygen into the mix, then the bioengineering algae would be at the advantage as they would be better adapted to the high ethanol levels and lack of oxygen.
There's a difference between subsidies and loans.
Subsidies is where you piss money away into a big hole so you can pretend that something that isn't economical really is economical.
Loans are where you loan someone money so they can do something which takes large capital investment and then they pay it back to you with interest over time.
Solar panels need subsidies so that people can pretend that they're economical.
Nuclear plants need loans because they are economical, it's just that the chances of some politicians bowing to the pressure from idiot NIMBY's and killing the construction or making expensive changes to the requirements half way through are so high and the amounts of money so large it's more practical to get the loans from the government.
Fuck it, someone will want the workings.
a) Spent nuclear fuel rods, clad or declad, from commercial electricity generating reactors; average radioactivity being more than 2.5 million curies per cubic meter.
b) Semi-liquid sludge from nuclear bomb fabrication waste processing residue - average radioactivity being about 3500 curies per cubic meter.
All this waste contains five shorter lived and longer lived radionuclides of main concern. The shorter lived are strontium-90 whose half life, t1/2, is 28.5 years, and cesium-137 whose half life, t1/2, is 30 years. See Ref. 1 for the half-life values used in this study. The radioactivity of these shorter lived nuclides is approximately 95% of the total radioactivity of the nuclides of concern. Total hazardous life for these shorter lived nuclides is considered to be between 600 years and 1000 years depending upon one's point of view.
The longer lived isotopes are plutonium-239 whose t1/2 is 24,110 years, plutonium-240 whose t1/2 is 6,540 years, and curium-245 whose t1/2 is 8,500 years. Plutonium-238 whose t1/2is 88 years will have essentially disappeared after several thousand years, so in storage terms of the longer lived elements this isotope is not of concern as long as it will have been successfully contained for the next several thousand years. As for the life of these longer lived materials, the NRC considers 10,000 years as the storage time required; however, some people consider a lifetime as long as 100,000 years to 500,000 years as more appropriate.
Sr-90 is a beta emitter, and the radiation won't penetrate the glass capsule.
C-137 is a beta and gamma emitter, with 75% the energy released as beta, and the rest as 33keV and 662keV gamma.
1 cubic meter of waste: 2.5 million curies
% radiation in short-lived Sr-90/C-137 isotopes: appx 95%
% radiation capable of penetrating capsule: appx 13%
World population: 6.70 Billion
Average mass of a human: 70kg
Time for complete digestion: 24hr
1 Ci = 37GBq
1 rad = 0.01J/kg of absorbed radiation
1 rem = rule of thumb is 1 rad, but it's actually a lot more complicated
Q for gamma, external = 1
Q for alpha, external = 0
Q for beta, external = 0
1 Sv = Q x 100rem
1keV = 1.60217646 × 10-16 joules
Density of fuel rods: 11.0g/cc
Volume of fuel per capsule: 1.6mg/11.0g/cc= 0.145nm squared
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 1m squared: 2.5MCi * .95 * .13 = 308kCi = 1.14*10^16 Bq
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 0.145nm squared: 1.14*10^16Bq/6.7G/3=567kBq/meal
% of gamma rays striking human body absorbed by human body: appx 15%
Radiation absorbed by the body: 85kBq
Energy absorbed: 85kBq X (33keV/Bq+662keV/Bq)/2 * 1.60217646*10^-16J/keV * 24*60*60s= 41mJ.
Energy absorbed per kg: 41mJ/70kg/0.01J/kg = 0.6mrad
Radiation exposure: 0.6mrem per meal
Radiation exposure: 639mrem per year, or appx 255SWW.
Has anyone suggested simply eating it? It would unfortunately then collect and concentrate in sewage treatment plants and septic tanks, and so would defeat the purpose, but I'm curious...
12,000 metric tons of high-level waste (mostly spent reactor fuel rods) is produced worldwide each year. If that waste was let age for a few years like fine whiskey, split up into tiny 1.6mg portions encapsulated in glass, and then one fed to every person in the world with each meal.
workings posted on request since I'm too lazy to edit out the tags
we could quite literally eat all the nuclear waste generated worldwide and barely double our annual exposure to natural radiation. Not that I'd advocate this, but jesus christ, there's nothing wrong with burying it all in a hole in the ground!
Alternately, I could just go around the nation beating people with spent fuel rods until they gain some perspective in the matter.
I couldn't be arsed removing all the [super] tags in the math that accompanied this but if anyone wants I'll post the original.
Read this:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
Personally I don't really think spending the nations total GDP for years to come on endless fields of solar panels or varients is going to be a good investment.
Especially when you could achieve much better results with nuclear for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost.
You get a much higher concentration of "nucular is the ultimate evil and anything else is better" idiots at green party conventions and their opinions tend to get reflected in the policies of the various "green" political parties in europe and america.
I have met greens who don't hate nuclear but not many...
There are risks but "frying people" is certainly not one of them thanks to our friends/enemies the laws of physics.
The long-term effects of beaming power through the ionosphere?
now that's an unknown which needs to be studied.
If you don't want people to facepalm and get that "oh gods not this crap again" look when you talk try reading up on the subject first.
On slashdot? It's the guilty-upon-accusation bit that bothers people here more.
It's the "Every kind of P2P is people violating copyrights" idea that idiot politicians have that bothers people here on slashdot.
I don't care if 90% of the people using a certain protocol are using it to swap the latest transformers movie because I'm part of the 10% using it for legitimate purposes.
Should I be denied my right to disseminate information because of that 90%?
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
Thing is it doesn't just kill P2P when saturated. Sure I'm fine with my TCP torrent getting lower priority than a UDP VOIP call but that isn't what happens. No what happens is that the ISP kills or throttles to death anything that looks like a torrent because they designed their network poorly and have found that changing usage patterns are costing them more when it comes time to pay for their upstream connection.
You really think the people who push for this haven't thought about the risks?
"and attempt to understand the risks"
Just because you know sweet fuck all about the tech and have thus given no thought to the problems does not mean that others have not spent a great deal of time thinking about the possible problems and risks.
gods sake.
If they wanted to cut down on the number of overdrafts they'd just not allow them at all or only allow them after you apply for them.
It's not that hard to deny a transaction rather than charging 40 dollars because your paycheck hasn't cleared yet and you're a dollar into the red after using the ATM or the fee for using the ATM pushed you into the red.
Hell how hard would a "this transaction will push you into overdraft. continue? Y/N" prompt be?
It's on a par with loan sharking.
It exploits the poor.
It most certainly is not to discourage people from getting overdrafts.
It looks more like it's designed to try to make sure people inadvertently go into overdraft.
For the same reason most of the world doesn't listen to fools like you when writing legislation to deal with loansharks.
Because it exploits the poor.
Because it stinks of corruption and weak regulators.
Because "Caveat emptor" is an idiots approach to consumer protection.
It's as much about personal responsibility as situations involving young women and dark alleys.
You know what?
I've never paid a fee for trying to withdraw more than I have in part because retards like you didn't get to write the laws on the matter here.
The example transaction is exactly what happens if I try to withdraw more than I have.
You're getting fucked up the ass by banks in the US and you know why?
Because of idiots like the above poster who make excuses for them and their scams.
since many banks charge the same fee no matter if you go $1 or $100 into overdraft.
NO
Here's the thing.
The kind of people who push for this crap genuinely believe that child porn is a big issue, that it's worth losing all those nice freedoms we have to get rid of it (or at least try as you might as well piss into the wind for all the good it will do) and that anyone who objects is some kind of pervert who is afraid of losing their child porn.
There are people who genuinely believe that a police state is a good thing because "only criminals have anything to fear from a police state"
There are people who genuinely believe that censorship is a good thing because they certainly don't want to be seeing... well just about anything since these are the kinds of nutters who write letters to the editor of your local newspaper.
banks could not function if everyone routinely over-drafted their accounts
Sure they could, overdrafts tend to be tiny compared to the amount many have in savings.
How about this as an even better solution if they don't want you to go into overdraft:
I put my card in the ATM.
I type in my pin.
I request 20.
I only have 10 in my account.
A message pops up telling me I don't have the funds.
It ain't that hard.
They let people go into overdraft easily because fee's are profitable.
Interest on loans isn't profitable enough for some banks.