I'll be clear: nuclear isn't trivial, I'm completely against stupid designs without backups for backups and a hell of a containment building.
On the other point: keep in mind mutagens and substances in a gas form. mercury is damn nasty. hell it's when they're a gas that it's the biggest problem like Bhopal.
My argument isn't that it's not a problem because there are other bad problems, my argument is that it's not magic. it's not infinitly bad.
There are serious issues concerned but the risks are reasonable in comparison to risks we accept every day in ever faccet of our lives.
Imagine if you will you saw me walking around wheeling a large thick metal sheet on wheels keeping it over my head at all times. You ask me why and I answer "meteors, they could kill me at any time and they would kill me stone dead in a moment" You then point out that I'm ignoring the fact that I'm billions of times more likely to die in a traffic accident and that I'm smoking a cigarette.
Does this lessen the chance of metor strike? of course not but it's important when talking about risk to compare it to the status quo and regular risks.
nuclear has a risk like anything in life and any energy source.
If I talk about a risk in abstract with no connection to anything else it's easy to come up with absoutes, if you only talk about the deaths from flying it's easy to conclude that it's too dangerous to fly but if you compare it to the deaths from driving the same distance then it becomes clear that it's the safer option.
nuclear has a pretty good record in terms of deaths per terawatt even including disasters though feel free to apply a multiplier to the number if you don't believe the numbers the WHO settled on for chernoble. it's a safe bet unless you pick the completely-insane-made-up numbers from greenpeace then it'll still beat coal and oil by a wide margin.
right now nuclear is a mature technology. It could step into coals boots right now and stop the tends of thousands of deaths every year due to coal smog, coal mining accidents and the problems of billions of tons of CO2.
Other sources couldn't realistically provide the energy we need in their current state.
if we replaced every coal plant with a nuclear plant worldwide today we'd probably have only a tiny tiny fraction of the deaths even if every 25 years a Chernobyl happened (which itself is insanely unlikely thanks to the fact that sanely built reactors have containment structures) so lets rephrase as "a fukashima every 25 years".
large sections of the exclusion zone are already being reclaimed so the area will be slowly shrinking over the next few decades.
ok, so it isn't just that you don't believe the majority of experts in a field you yourself are not an expert in.
you also would under no circumstances accept any evidence whatsoever in any form until you're an old age pensioner and even then you probably won't.
you oppose any actions whatsoever to change the status quo in any way even to the extent of simply stopping doing the damge/making the changes we're currently making to the earths atmosphere.
all because while you have no proof that sane intervention to prevent more changes would cause any harm whatsoever you are certain it will on the basis of faith that any interventions of any kind ever are bad.
and also you're unwilling to even define what you would accept decades down the road when you're an OAP.
"no I won't stop driving towards that wall, it could be a mirage and if I turn away now it could make it harder for me to avoid the wall in future once I'm close enough to feel it with my own hands."
the waste is more a political problem than a technical or safety one.
melt it into a glass block, seal that inside a thick steel cask, seal that deep inside a mountain above the water table and it's by a wide margin acceptably safe from a technical point of view.
Politically though nuclear waste is different, it isn't merely 10 times more dangerous than some other mutagen or some other heavy metal, it gets an infinite weighting, one gram of plutonium is more scary politically than a million tons of arsenic, entire tankers full of methyl isocyanate or tankers full of mutagens like ethidium bromide.
if you apply an infinite weighting to nuclear waste then it's a problem but if you consider it just another hazerdous waste which just happens to be more dangerous than most industrual waste then it's perfectly possible to deal with in a sensible manner.
even oxidized heavy metals are still poisonous. hell the arsenic and lead and cadmium in coal fly ash is in the form of dust so it would oxidise extremely fast but it's still poisonous.
DU is about as poisonous as any other heavy metal since it has such an insanely long half life that it doesn't put out any meaningful amount of radiation while it's still bad for you simply as a heavy metal.
And if you didn't know. Uranium and plutonium are heavy metals. They are not just dangerous because they are radioactive, they are also dangerous because they are toxic, just like other heavy metals like arsenic, cobalt, chromium, copper, cadmium, lead et.c. So that kind of radioactive waste is just like "regular non-radioactive poisons and heavy metals", only worse.
You say that as if it's shocking.Sure they are but you're delusional if you think any heavy metals become harmless when they oxidize.
hell if you really want to be paranoid set up as suggested above and make the the important machines only run EXEs signed with a specific key and be damn careful with what you sign.
right so emissions standards, energy efficiency and trying to curb carbon output is going to kill people now?
If it was one of the more dramatic geoengineering projects being proposed what you're saying would make sense but when it's reasonable measures which just happen to mean that it's more expensive for you to run a 5 ton gas guzzler killing people isn't really an issue.
I think he's making reference to nuclear plant designs which burn the waste from regular plants as fuel like the integral fast reactor.
the research on that was shut down due in large part to anti-nuclear campaigners. Apparently "no nukes are good nukes" to them even in the case of ones which burn nuclear waste.
right so there is literally no evidence that will be acceptable to you until you're elderly. isn't that convenient. And even then you're not willing to define it in any way shape or form.
Any bets that 40 years down the line you'll be insisting that sure while what happened actually fit perfectly with what was predicted it still doesn't cont because your favorite talking head insists that it fits far better with this other model which the coal and oil industry sponsored which shows that everything will go back to normal in just a few more decades. nothing to see. just normal massive fluctuations in the earths climate.
when a hydroelectric damn collapses millions can be left homeless and tens or hundreds of thousands can be left dead and it can take years to repair the damage and rehome those left homeless.
After a regular old industrial accident huge tracts of land can be left unusuable effectively forever when regular non-radioactive poisons and heavy metals leave the land unusable. There's lots of mutagens which aren't radioactive but will still give you cancer and deform your children and which have no halflife. they're forever.
nuclear can be dangerous but fundamentally it's not game changing. slag piles and lead don't just stay with us for centuries, there there forever. So I'll still go with the nuclear and call for safety systems out the wazoo.
just out of interest... have you ever read the geneva convention? like at all?
"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal. "
please. show me records of the tribunals.
no tribunals? well sorry. then the Geneva convention applies in full.
Right, so they're not saying we should do anything, they're just saying that unless we do something bad things. right. great distinction you've got there.
yet you've not answered my question.
what evidence *exactly*. it's a simple question.
the changes we're seeing: more lightening storms, more storms overall and more extreme weather is already fitting the models.
but that's apparently not good enough for you.
so what event. what evidence exactly would be good enough for you. Hell, even a list of candidates would be ok: yearly rainfall and distribution falling outside of certain limits, X number of storm or hurricanes more than would be expected if everything was perfectly OK, average worldwide temerature increasing more than a certain amount (though that would be more waiting till after the damage has been done like only accepting you're driving dangerously when your car is already wrapped around a lamp post)etc etc.
For example, imagine that you choice what to eat based on the last news story that you read on which foods were healthy and which weren't. You'd always be shuffling your diet around as the next new thing was heralded or scorned by someone in the newspaper or on TV. I imagine that would be costly and expose you to a variety of risks and harms that a normal person, who did nothing about their diet, wouldn't even see.
you've got the wrong comparison. Yes it would be insane to listen to every "nutritionist" and hack who think fish oil will make you smart or that bread will give you cancer.
on the other hand if you based your diet on the current best practice as advised by the majority of dieticians(that's the real experts with the real qualifications who don't change their minds every 20 minutes but can sometimes be wrong like any scientists or professionals) then you'd likely have an exceptionally good diet and be more healthy than average.
there are good reasons to wait.
until... what? most of the actual experts are fairly confident that they have the right model now and that it would be best to act now.
but what evidence are you waiting for? What event exactly are you waiting for? The opinions of the experts obviously aren't good enough for you so what is?
The hole might have always been there, but we didn't see it until we looked.... and now it just happens to be shrinking now that CFC's aren't being used as much. Pure coincidence of course.
A prediction was made based on the hypothesis that CFC's were causing the hole and based on that changes were made(CFC's banned and used far less) and the hole shrank fitting with the hypothesis.
Like any test of a hypothesis it's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than your denial Just-Because.
sure it does but the sensible approach would be a series of smaller dams and resevoirs kept mostly empty if your goal were pure flood control.
If your goal is power generation then you'd keep the dams fairly close to full to get the most power generated. This of course increases the chances of catastrophic failure.
So while it might be fair to say that dams save lives overall actual hydroelectric power generation most certainly has a bodycount which can't be ignored unless you want to be dishonest about the relative risks.
that's a wierd way to look at it. you could also say that if the dam hadn't been build most of those people would probably be living further from the river or there would be better flood defences. And further: a catastrophic failure of a dam releasing the resevoir is going to be far more destructive than some slower yearly flooding. A wall of water is going to kill far far far more than a slowly rising flood.
perhaps oil should get points for all the people who aren't feezing to death because of the increase in temperature in some places.
Anyway, to "the other report on chernoble", no kidding that's it's name.
It announces that fallout fell outside of the main countries looked at and then assumed that fallout in the middle of the ocean is going to cause as much radiation exposure to people as material falling in cities and densely populated areas.
All I can see from your link is the equivilent of 4000-9000? pah! lets multiply that number.
and yet even then. even after the multiplication using figures from a report commissioned by the greens the total deaths from the entire nuclear industry is still outstripped by coal in 2 years flat every 2 years.(http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm) or by a single hydro damn disaster.
And if they weren't digging coal out of the ground those miners might be doing something equally dangerous, if they weren't drilling for oil those oil workers would probably be doing something else. If you take that approach then nothing is dangerous since the people dying might be doing something else similar anyway.
If there's less demand for coal then there would be less people working down the mines, if there were less demand for rooftop installations then there would be less people working up on roofs.
Rooftop solar leads to more death per terawatt than nuclear though between serious (non status symbol big installations) solar plants out in the desert, wind and nuclear it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.
Hydro is damn good as long as you exclude Banqiao.
and everything else is orders of magnitude safer than coal.
even if you count when things go wrong it still looks better than most of the alternatives.
For a parallel. Many people are afraid of flying. Why? it doesn't make a great deal of sense, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than while on the plane unless you live really close to the airport or you're going on a really long flight. It's irrational.
But here's the thing. When there's a plane crash hundreds of people die all at once. When there's a plane crash it makes the news worldwide. When you're on a plane it's someone else in control(the pilot). Even when the plane doesn't crash if something goes wrong everyone hears about it.
Getting to your destination is still safer by plane by a wide margin if you're going long distance. but people are still afraid of it.
Because you don't hear about all the road deaths. They barely make the local news. people don't die in their hundreds in car crashes. they die less than half a dozen at a time. In total vastly more people die on the roads but you only hear about the ones in your local area. And people can convince themselves that they are in total control on the road, they ignore the chance of someone else doing something stupid and driving into them or something unexpected happening.
Nuclear is kind of like that. It kills far less people per terawatt than most other sources even counting Chernobyl. But when anything goes wrong it makes the world news. It can kill lots of people when it goes wrong all at once but in normal operation it's vastly safer. Other sources of power kill in ones or twos and only make the local news. But they kill a lot of people per year. a coal miner here a gas worker there and every now and then someone dies installing panels on their roof.
Plus there's the sexy aspect: radiation is scary and invisible, coal smog is boooring.
If I'm sitting watching the news beside someone who's terrified of flying as a story breaks about a plane crash am I wrong if I simply say "It's still safer than the other options" even if the person who thinks flying is more dangerous is pointing at it and saying "look! look! I told you it isn't safe! Driving everywhere is the far safer way to travel! how can you say that after seeing that disaster!!!"
I'm in favour of nuclear because it's still safer than most of it's competitors.
It would be nice to be in control of your power generation but that's a pipe dream. If you don't live decently close to the equator solar panels on your roof are nothing but an expensive status symbol.
"Distributed" is a nice sounding word but in reality it doesn't make the problems with a flaky little grid based on dirty little community generators go away.
I've read all of them and honestly I'd say that while all of them were great at stories and creating worlds they weren't amazing as writers. They're all fantastic authors but there is a difference.
Some authors are fantastic writers, they can make any story amazing. They can write being a street sweeper or bin man and have the audience hanging on their every word or write about going for lunch and simply make it great fun to read.
Some authors on the other hand are simply wonderful at creating worlds and playing with ideas. How they tell a story can put you off if it's really bad but as long as they're decent writers you'll keep reading for the shining gems that are the worlds or characters of which they allow you to get a glimpse.
Scifi certainly has a lot more of the second type of author. Fantasy too. I can think of more than a few writers who created wonderful worlds but were hard to read.
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven all created really wonderful worlds and were all good writers but if you asked them to write a story about taking an everyday bus trip I can't imagine the results would be stellar.
But the 2 aren't mutually exclusive. It's just that the worlds and ideas are often the more important part in SciFi.
it's already limited to companies which can afford billion dollar fabs and much of it is already protected more by trade secrets than patents, if you ever work in a fab you'd be surprised how crazy they are about secrecy. They don't even have security cameras for fear that someone will get hold of the tapes and figure out details of their processes.
That's because how you build your chips is much more valuable than what you actually build. The companies at the cutting edge have to make back their investment on process R&D in 6 months to a year.
but your belief that a laptop would cost millions is baseless and not to put too fine a point on it COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY.
a really top of the line best of the best laptop would cost more but the middle of the road stuff would be cheaper if anything.
The companies involved would also have to bring out new lines of chips far faster as they'd only have the time it takes their competitors to set up fabs for the new chips: much the same as it currently is with new processes.
Copyright pre-dates the time when the things it covered were free to copy: printing presses, typsetters etc were a major investment, a far larger investment than the actual writing of the book in question.
so by your own argument the whole idea of copyright was utterly without merit until some time in the 1970's.
Music still takes significant skill and effort to perform. it is not free to perform in person. but for some inexplicable reason you have to pay royalties for playing a copyrighted piece by hand on an instrument in public.
Performing a play requires a great deal of manual labor yet the theatre has to pay for the rights to perform a copyrighted play.
please. explain why playing a violin in front of a crowd should require you to pay a fee to the first person to copyright what you're playing while preparing a dish and serving it to those same people shouldn't deserve a similar fee.
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I'll be clear: nuclear isn't trivial, I'm completely against stupid designs without backups for backups and a hell of a containment building.
On the other point: keep in mind mutagens and substances in a gas form. mercury is damn nasty. hell it's when they're a gas that it's the biggest problem like Bhopal.
My argument isn't that it's not a problem because there are other bad problems, my argument is that it's not magic. it's not infinitly bad.
There are serious issues concerned but the risks are reasonable in comparison to risks we accept every day in ever faccet of our lives.
Imagine if you will you saw me walking around wheeling a large thick metal sheet on wheels keeping it over my head at all times.
You ask me why and I answer "meteors, they could kill me at any time and they would kill me stone dead in a moment"
You then point out that I'm ignoring the fact that I'm billions of times more likely to die in a traffic accident and that I'm smoking a cigarette.
Does this lessen the chance of metor strike?
of course not but it's important when talking about risk to compare it to the status quo and regular risks.
nuclear has a risk like anything in life and any energy source.
If I talk about a risk in abstract with no connection to anything else it's easy to come up with absoutes, if you only talk about the deaths from flying it's easy to conclude that it's too dangerous to fly but if you compare it to the deaths from driving the same distance then it becomes clear that it's the safer option.
nuclear has a pretty good record in terms of deaths per terawatt even including disasters though feel free to apply a multiplier to the number if you don't believe the numbers the WHO settled on for chernoble. it's a safe bet unless you pick the completely-insane-made-up numbers from greenpeace then it'll still beat coal and oil by a wide margin.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
right now nuclear is a mature technology.
It could step into coals boots right now and stop the tends of thousands of deaths every year due to coal smog, coal mining accidents and the problems of billions of tons of CO2.
Other sources couldn't realistically provide the energy we need in their current state.
if we replaced every coal plant with a nuclear plant worldwide today we'd probably have only a tiny tiny fraction of the deaths even if every 25 years a Chernobyl happened (which itself is insanely unlikely thanks to the fact that sanely built reactors have containment structures) so lets rephrase as "a fukashima every 25 years".
large sections of the exclusion zone are already being reclaimed so the area will be slowly shrinking over the next few decades.
ok, so it isn't just that you don't believe the majority of experts in a field you yourself are not an expert in.
you also would under no circumstances accept any evidence whatsoever in any form until you're an old age pensioner and even then you probably won't.
you oppose any actions whatsoever to change the status quo in any way even to the extent of simply stopping doing the damge/making the changes we're currently making to the earths atmosphere.
all because while you have no proof that sane intervention to prevent more changes would cause any harm whatsoever you are certain it will on the basis of faith that any interventions of any kind ever are bad.
and also you're unwilling to even define what you would accept decades down the road when you're an OAP.
"no I won't stop driving towards that wall, it could be a mirage and if I turn away now it could make it harder for me to avoid the wall in future once I'm close enough to feel it with my own hands."
wow. I mean wow. just wow.
the waste is more a political problem than a technical or safety one.
melt it into a glass block, seal that inside a thick steel cask, seal that deep inside a mountain above the water table and it's by a wide margin acceptably safe from a technical point of view.
Politically though nuclear waste is different, it isn't merely 10 times more dangerous than some other mutagen or some other heavy metal, it gets an infinite weighting, one gram of plutonium is more scary politically than a million tons of arsenic, entire tankers full of methyl isocyanate or tankers full of mutagens like ethidium bromide.
if you apply an infinite weighting to nuclear waste then it's a problem but if you consider it just another hazerdous waste which just happens to be more dangerous than most industrual waste then it's perfectly possible to deal with in a sensible manner.
the asteroids though are just as likely to hit the atmosphere over water.
even oxidized heavy metals are still poisonous.
hell the arsenic and lead and cadmium in coal fly ash is in the form of dust so it would oxidise extremely fast but it's still poisonous.
DU is about as poisonous as any other heavy metal since it has such an insanely long half life that it doesn't put out any meaningful amount of radiation while it's still bad for you simply as a heavy metal.
And if you didn't know. Uranium and plutonium are heavy metals. They are not just dangerous because they are radioactive, they are also dangerous because they are toxic, just like other heavy metals like arsenic, cobalt, chromium, copper, cadmium, lead et.c. So that kind of radioactive waste is just like "regular non-radioactive poisons and heavy metals", only worse.
You say that as if it's shocking.Sure they are but you're delusional if you think any heavy metals become harmless when they oxidize.
without autorun.
hell if you really want to be paranoid set up as suggested above and make the the important machines only run EXEs signed with a specific key and be damn careful with what you sign.
If a Tunguska sized event happened over the middle of london or washington DC we'd be wishing it had happened over some remote nuclear plant instead.
hell if one had happened during the cold war over a city it probably would have started world war 3.
some things are unlikely enough and catastrophic enough that we'd all be fucked no matter what energy source we use.
right so emissions standards, energy efficiency and trying to curb carbon output is going to kill people now?
If it was one of the more dramatic geoengineering projects being proposed what you're saying would make sense but when it's reasonable measures which just happen to mean that it's more expensive for you to run a 5 ton gas guzzler killing people isn't really an issue.
I think he's making reference to nuclear plant designs which burn the waste from regular plants as fuel like the integral fast reactor.
the research on that was shut down due in large part to anti-nuclear campaigners. Apparently "no nukes are good nukes" to them even in the case of ones which burn nuclear waste.
right so there is literally no evidence that will be acceptable to you until you're elderly.
isn't that convenient.
And even then you're not willing to define it in any way shape or form.
Any bets that 40 years down the line you'll be insisting that sure while what happened actually fit perfectly with what was predicted it still doesn't cont because your favorite talking head insists that it fits far better
with this other model which the coal and oil industry sponsored which shows that everything will go back to normal in just a few more decades. nothing to see. just normal massive fluctuations in the earths climate.
when a hydroelectric damn collapses millions can be left homeless and tens or hundreds of thousands can be left dead and it can take years to repair the damage and rehome those left homeless.
After a regular old industrial accident huge tracts of land can be left unusuable effectively forever when regular non-radioactive poisons and heavy metals leave the land unusable.
There's lots of mutagens which aren't radioactive but will still give you cancer and deform your children and which have no halflife. they're forever.
nuclear can be dangerous but fundamentally it's not game changing.
slag piles and lead don't just stay with us for centuries, there there forever.
So I'll still go with the nuclear and call for safety systems out the wazoo.
it's a risk but it's still a lesser risk.
Only if it's expensive. if it's cheap then they'll spy on you if it's a slow day and they're bored.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/12/sprint-fed-customer-gps-data-to-leos-over-8-million-times.ars
just out of interest ... have you ever read the geneva convention? like at all?
"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal. "
please.
show me records of the tribunals.
no tribunals?
well sorry.
then the Geneva convention applies in full.
Right, so they're not saying we should do anything, they're just saying that unless we do something bad things.
right.
great distinction you've got there.
yet you've not answered my question.
what evidence *exactly*.
it's a simple question.
the changes we're seeing: more lightening storms, more storms overall and more extreme weather is already fitting the models.
but that's apparently not good enough for you.
so what event.
what evidence exactly would be good enough for you.
Hell, even a list of candidates would be ok: yearly rainfall and distribution falling outside of certain limits, X number of storm or hurricanes more than would be expected if everything was perfectly OK, average worldwide temerature increasing more than a certain amount (though that would be more waiting till after the damage has been done like only accepting you're driving dangerously when your car is already wrapped around a lamp post)etc etc.
For example, imagine that you choice what to eat based on the last news story that you read on which foods were healthy and which weren't. You'd always be shuffling your diet around as the next new thing was heralded or scorned by someone in the newspaper or on TV. I imagine that would be costly and expose you to a variety of risks and harms that a normal person, who did nothing about their diet, wouldn't even see.
you've got the wrong comparison.
Yes it would be insane to listen to every "nutritionist" and hack who think fish oil will make you smart or that bread will give you cancer.
on the other hand if you based your diet on the current best practice as advised by the majority of dieticians(that's the real experts with the real qualifications who don't change their minds every 20 minutes but can sometimes be wrong like any scientists or professionals) then you'd likely have an exceptionally good diet and be more healthy than average.
there are good reasons to wait.
until... what? most of the actual experts are fairly confident that they have the right model now and that it would be best to act now.
but what evidence are you waiting for?
What event exactly are you waiting for?
The opinions of the experts obviously aren't good enough for you so what is?
The hole might have always been there, but we didn't see it until we looked.... and now it just happens to be shrinking now that CFC's aren't being used as much.
Pure coincidence of course.
A prediction was made based on the hypothesis that CFC's were causing the hole and based on that changes were made(CFC's banned and used far less) and the hole shrank fitting with the hypothesis.
Like any test of a hypothesis it's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than your denial Just-Because.
sure it does but the sensible approach would be a series of smaller dams and resevoirs kept mostly empty if your goal were pure flood control.
If your goal is power generation then you'd keep the dams fairly close to full to get the most power generated.
This of course increases the chances of catastrophic failure.
So while it might be fair to say that dams save lives overall actual hydroelectric power generation most certainly has a bodycount which can't be ignored unless you want to be dishonest about the relative risks.
that's a wierd way to look at it.
you could also say that if the dam hadn't been build most of those people would probably be living further from the river or there would be better flood defences.
And further: a catastrophic failure of a dam releasing the resevoir is going to be far more destructive than some slower yearly flooding.
A wall of water is going to kill far far far more than a slowly rising flood.
perhaps oil should get points for all the people who aren't feezing to death because of the increase in temperature in some places.
Anyway, to "the other report on chernoble", no kidding that's it's name.
It announces that fallout fell outside of the main countries looked at and then assumed that fallout in the middle of the ocean is going to cause as much radiation exposure to people as material falling in cities and densely populated areas.
All I can see from your link is the equivilent of 4000-9000? pah! lets multiply that number.
and yet even then. even after the multiplication using figures from a report commissioned by the greens the total deaths from the entire nuclear industry is still outstripped by coal in 2 years flat every 2 years.(http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm)
or by a single hydro damn disaster.
"surely they'd be doing something very similar"
And if they weren't digging coal out of the ground those miners might be doing something equally dangerous, if they weren't drilling for oil those oil workers would probably be doing something else.
If you take that approach then nothing is dangerous since the people dying might be doing something else similar anyway.
If there's less demand for coal then there would be less people working down the mines, if there were less demand for rooftop installations then there would be less people working up on roofs.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Rooftop solar leads to more death per terawatt than nuclear though between serious (non status symbol big installations) solar plants out in the desert, wind and nuclear it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.
Hydro is damn good as long as you exclude Banqiao.
and everything else is orders of magnitude safer than coal.
even if you count when things go wrong it still looks better than most of the alternatives.
For a parallel.
Many people are afraid of flying.
Why? it doesn't make a great deal of sense, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than while on the plane unless you live really close to the airport or you're going on a really long flight.
It's irrational.
But here's the thing.
When there's a plane crash hundreds of people die all at once.
When there's a plane crash it makes the news worldwide.
When you're on a plane it's someone else in control(the pilot).
Even when the plane doesn't crash if something goes wrong everyone hears about it.
Getting to your destination is still safer by plane by a wide margin if you're going long distance.
but people are still afraid of it.
Because you don't hear about all the road deaths.
They barely make the local news.
people don't die in their hundreds in car crashes.
they die less than half a dozen at a time.
In total vastly more people die on the roads but you only hear about the ones in your local area.
And people can convince themselves that they are in total control on the road, they ignore the chance of someone else doing something stupid and driving into them or something unexpected happening.
Nuclear is kind of like that.
It kills far less people per terawatt than most other sources even counting Chernobyl.
But when anything goes wrong it makes the world news.
It can kill lots of people when it goes wrong all at once but in normal operation it's vastly safer.
Other sources of power kill in ones or twos and only make the local news.
But they kill a lot of people per year.
a coal miner here a gas worker there and every now and then someone dies installing panels on their roof.
Plus there's the sexy aspect: radiation is scary and invisible, coal smog is boooring.
If I'm sitting watching the news beside someone who's terrified of flying as a story breaks about a plane crash am I wrong if I simply say
"It's still safer than the other options"
even if the person who thinks flying is more dangerous is pointing at it and saying
"look! look! I told you it isn't safe! Driving everywhere is the far safer way to travel! how can you say that after seeing that disaster!!!"
I'm in favour of nuclear because it's still safer than most of it's competitors.
It would be nice to be in control of your power generation but that's a pipe dream. If you don't live decently close to the equator solar panels on your roof are nothing but an expensive status symbol.
"Distributed" is a nice sounding word but in reality it doesn't make the problems with a flaky little grid based on dirty little community generators go away.
I've read all of them and honestly I'd say that while all of them were great at stories and creating worlds they weren't amazing as writers.
They're all fantastic authors but there is a difference.
Some authors are fantastic writers, they can make any story amazing.
They can write being a street sweeper or bin man and have the audience hanging on their every word or write about going for lunch and simply make it great fun to read.
Some authors on the other hand are simply wonderful at creating worlds and playing with ideas.
How they tell a story can put you off if it's really bad but as long as they're decent writers you'll keep reading for the shining gems that are the worlds or characters of which they allow you to get a glimpse.
Scifi certainly has a lot more of the second type of author.
Fantasy too.
I can think of more than a few writers who created wonderful worlds but were hard to read.
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven all created really wonderful worlds and were all good writers but if you asked them to write a story about taking an everyday bus trip I can't imagine the results would be stellar.
But the 2 aren't mutually exclusive.
It's just that the worlds and ideas are often the more important part in SciFi.
I liked the first 2 books but the third one... it just seemed to turn into bitter stabbing at the church.
I like a few side swipes but the story of the amber spyglass actually suffered for it.
it's already limited to companies which can afford billion dollar fabs and much of it is already protected more by trade secrets than patents, if you ever work in a fab you'd be surprised how crazy they are about secrecy.
They don't even have security cameras for fear that someone will get hold of the tapes and figure out details of their processes.
That's because how you build your chips is much more valuable than what you actually build. The companies at the cutting edge have to make back their investment on process R&D in 6 months to a year.
but your belief that a laptop would cost millions is baseless and not to put too fine a point on it COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY.
a really top of the line best of the best laptop would cost more but the middle of the road stuff would be cheaper if anything.
The companies involved would also have to bring out new lines of chips far faster as they'd only have the time it takes their competitors to set up fabs for the new chips: much the same as it currently is with new processes.
Copyright pre-dates the time when the things it covered were free to copy: printing presses, typsetters etc were a major investment, a far larger investment than the actual writing of the book in question.
so by your own argument the whole idea of copyright was utterly without merit until some time in the 1970's.
Music still takes significant skill and effort to perform. it is not free to perform in person.
but for some inexplicable reason you have to pay royalties for playing a copyrighted piece by hand on an instrument in public.
Performing a play requires a great deal of manual labor yet the theatre has to pay for the rights to perform a copyrighted play.
please. explain why playing a violin in front of a crowd should require you to pay a fee to the first person to copyright what you're playing while preparing a dish and serving it to those same people shouldn't deserve a similar fee.