solar sounds lovely but until we have self replicating machine plating the worlds deserts with free pannels it's going to remain a toy source of power for niche uses and status symbols like those ones you see on peoples roofs in canada.
coal contains a few parts per million (1-3)of uranium, about 2-3 times as much thorium, and a few other vaguely radioactive isotopes. Nothing exceptional though it is far more concentrated in fly ash.
but we burn billions and billions of tons of coal every year, that few parts per million adds up.
the total amount of radiation is trivial but it's still far more than what escapes from a normal nuclear power plant and you get it in a huge pile of fly ash and smoke rather than in a nice concentrated lump of high level waste.
and yes, the CO2 is the far far far bigger issue. shortly followed by the arseloads of arsenic and various other boring non-radioactive poisonous metals in coal.
Where did I say it wasn't serious? I specifically said it was. It's as serious as other heavy metals leaking into the enviroment from industrial pollution.
If they were just another big company that would be fine but when they can't even secure themselves while they're selling the service of securing others it deserves all the ridicule that the people here can dish out.
I can understand other companies not considering security to be a number 1 concern, they've got other things to worry about but a security company has no such excuse.
Which is skewed by most car trips being extremely short and most plane journeys taking a few hours.
Yes you're less likely to die driving to your local shop than while flying to Australia.
I believe it works out something like if you spend more than a quarter the time that the flight takes driving to the airport then you are more likely to die driving there, approx.
so an hour driving to the airport is something like equal to a 4 hour flight in terms of risk.
Bah! We need a distributed, smart, renewable transport system based around the renewable biofuels whale oil and grass! Oil lamps and horses worked for our ancestors! of course they can work for us now.
not to put too fine a point on it but there's no shortage of completely non-radioactive substances which will diddle with your DNA, get something planar which can bind between bases and you get a nasty little insertion mutation.
lead and it's friends bioaccumulate pretty badly as well. Not to put too fine a point on it but radiation isn't very special.
plutonium leaking into groundwater is serious but so would be lead or arsenic getting into food or groundwater.
It is hard, it's human nature, the disaster that might happen is scarier than the one which did, the invisible killer is scarier than the choking smog cloud.
there were quite a few plants hit by the same disasters which did ok. As with all things it's a combination of disasters and mistakes. A couple of diesel generators, and the backups, and the local power grid, and a few other emergency systems damaged by the tsunami.
newer reactor designs are of course a hell of a lot safer but that comes across as a bit hollow in the middle of a current disaster.
The situation is by no means trivial and the other plants should be looked at and extra systems put in place or simply replaced with significantly better reactors but it's no reason to abandon nuclear altogether.
They're almost as annoying pro-air-travel people who insist that air travel is safer than going by car. I mean only a little while ago there was all that news about a plane crash and they *still* insisted that air travel is "safer".
while all sensible people know that the only safe way to get anywhere is by driving there or cycling.
it ups it but if your isotope with a 20K year half life decays into something something with a halflife of say (for an example that would be easy on the math)5 seconds then you'll get twice as much radioactivity out of it (assuming the seconds products are as dangerous forms of radiation) with a little variation.
a isotope with a 20K halflife will still be utterly dwarfed in terms of radiation output by something with a halflife of a few decades even if the former has a decay chain 10 isotopes long because it can only add a linear multiplier, not an exponential increase in radiation output.
once you're into halflives in the tens of thousands be more afraid of heavy metal poisoning than radiation poisoning.
The potential for damage from air travel is also large, we saw in 2001 what could happen when terrorists use it to attack their target and potentially they could have gone after far worse targets in terms of body count.
the colapse of a hydro electric dam could kill hundreds of thousands. And that *is* based on past performance because they've done just that in the past.
nuclear has over 40 years of history and so far it's doing pretty well with only the oldest plants having problems and the one in japan being after one of the biggest earthquakes and tsunamis ever to hit the country.
The potential for insane amounts of casualties exists with almost all sources.
Blow up an oil rig and you could cause billions worth of damage and another deepwater horizon,poison countless people and destroy the livelyhoods of even more.
Drive a truck full of explosives into the side of a chemical plant that produces solvents for use in the production of solar panels and you could have another bhopal if the toxic cloud was blown over a big city.
yes it shouldn't be dismissed, yes safety is important and I'm all for backups for backups for backups for backups but nuclear is simply safer than any of it's realistic alternatives.
the problem is that nuclear is safe like air travel while most of it's alternatives are safe like road travel.
People are afraid of flying in a plane because when there's an accident a lot of people die at once and it hits world headlines. When there's some kind of failure they get to see hours of drama on the news as the plane circles and they try to land it without the landing dear down or something along those lines.
of course in reality you're more likely to die driving to the airport then while on the plane but people are irrational like that, road travel may kill vastly more people and be vastly more risky but it's boring and mundane.
per terawatt more people die per year from most other sources than from nuclear but radiation is sexy, radiation is scary, falling off the roof while installing a panel is mundane, getting unlucky and being choked by your safety cord while working on a wind turbine is boring, dying in a coal mine or iron mine is a little more interesting yet still doesn't have the nuclear zaz.
people complain about land being made unusable for a while but that's nothing special, coal sludge spills make vast tracts of land useless due to the heavy metals, oil drilling can destroy areas of the ocean that dwarf states and even gas drilling has lead to at an area where 10000 people used to live in Malaysia turning into an unusable wasteland after it caused a mud volcano.
Plutonium has a long half life but arsenic is forever.
Saying that we should abandon nuclear because there will be accidents is like saying we should abandon planes because there will be crashes and instead we should just drive everywhere or (for a parallel with the smug fuckers who always jump in with "the sun's always shining somewhere" or "it's always windy somewhere") just cycle everywhere because it's so much safer.
My first language was java and my second was C but I've coded in C# quite a bit because it was the language used at the company I was working at. I didn't make a choice about it, I'll just use whatever language I need to get the job done* and learn whatever languages I need to learn.
*except VBscript, after doing one smallish project in it I've come to the conclusion that it's a horrible horrible scripting language.
The problem is that with the current drama perspective falls away.
I'm not calling for safety requirements to be removed, I'm quite in favor of safety systems out the wazoo. My point isn't that nuclear is perfectly safe but rather that it's *acceptably* safe in comparison to most of the other things which people for some reason aren't afraid of.
It's like how people are afraid of flying despite the fact that they're far more likely to die driving to the airport than in a plane crash because you don't hear much about the road accidents but a plane crash gets world headlines.
If you were to point that out it wouldn't make any difference if there had been such a headline the same day. But people who are convinced that flying is far far far too dangerous or that the planes must be terribly badly designed or there must have been some really terrible design choices will point at the TV and say "an aviation accident just happened in front of our eyes". In reality it can still be true that the planes are safer than the alternatives and acceptably safe to use, even in populated areas.
Yes if cars had the same safety requirements that planes do the roads would be a lot safer but that's somewhat impractical and if planes had the same safety systems as cars there would be a lot of plane crashes but that doesn't mean planes are less safe or that planes should avoid flying over all populated areas.
are you seeing the parallel yet?
Yes, things could have been done better, that's a given when anything goes wrong but hindsight is 20:20.
on the contrary, it's common for factories and chemical plants to be near population centres.
A few towns near me have big production facilities in or next to them with most of the town either working at the plants or providing services.
The point is that nuclear isn't special. it isn't any more dangerous than a great many other things which we just accept near population centers. A river still is very convenient, the point is that people accept the dams, they accept the factories but nuclear gets treated as unique, as somehow special because atoms.
Lead will kill you just as silently, arsenic will poison land just as surely, solvents used in many industrial processes are far more likely to kill or maim you than some radioactive iodine.
but nuclear gets slotted into a whole other catagory, it's fine to have all these other types of facilities around, many with worse safety records and far larger death tolls to their name, but anything nuclear has to be 100 miles from anywhere and built to far far higher standards and designed to withstand far bigger disasters than the holding tanks at the chemical plant, the walls of the dam or the holding pit for the coal sludge.
and that's not even touching on the problem that a large nuclear plant has enough staff that it ends up with a population center around it if you try to move it into the middle of nowhere.
If you insist on having it out in the middle of nowhere and don't let the staff live near it then there's the tradoff that you guarantee more deaths on the road. (which of course don't count because road deaths are booooring and not nearly as sexy as radioactive deaths) and moreover you guarantee such deaths for every plant you do that with while only a tiny fraction will ever have a serious problem.
the near a population centre is for your workforce and for the people who actually want to use your electricuty.
nuclear isn't special.
if you replaced it with a fertaliser plant many of the same issues apply and fertaliser production has killed far more people in accidents than nuclear ever has.(google Bhopal) One chemical leak and thousands of people could die.
Yet it's impractical to put everything a hundred miles from the nearest population centre (for one can you imagine what the roads would be like if every industrial worker had to travel that far every day and that comes with it's only pollution and death toll)
similar with dams, it's normal to build cities on rivers and it's normal to build damns on rivers above those populations centers. It confers advantages like protection from smaller floods but one big earthquake or structural failure and you're looking at far more people dying in a day than every nuclear accident in history.
you might not be able to change your underwear but being able to scratch your nose, change the channel or raise/lower their bed would be kinda a big deal when you're totally paralysed.
long term it might even be possible to hook the output of such an interface up to something like this:
Slashdot Mirror
read this:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
solar sounds lovely but until we have self replicating machine plating the worlds deserts with free pannels it's going to remain a toy source of power for niche uses and status symbols like those ones you see on peoples roofs in canada.
more loss of life than Fukushima still isn't a very big claim, a normal car crash can still make that claim.
some of the other big dam collapses in history though have killed many tens of thousands.
actually no.
It's not bullshit.
coal contains a few parts per million (1-3)of uranium, about 2-3 times as much thorium, and a few other vaguely radioactive isotopes.
Nothing exceptional though it is far more concentrated in fly ash.
but we burn billions and billions of tons of coal every year, that few parts per million adds up.
the total amount of radiation is trivial but it's still far more than what escapes from a normal nuclear power plant and you get it in a huge pile of fly ash and smoke rather than in a nice concentrated lump of high level waste.
and yes, the CO2 is the far far far bigger issue.
shortly followed by the arseloads of arsenic and various other boring non-radioactive poisonous metals in coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Where did I say it wasn't serious?
I specifically said it was.
It's as serious as other heavy metals leaking into the enviroment from industrial pollution.
but don't let that stop your smug little tirade.
the solution?
A monoculture of course!
and telling everyone that *someone else* is handling security for them.
gotta love that wiki.
it's got the most fantastic way of saying that it blew itself apart:
"As a result, the final control method (i.e., dissipation of the prompt critical state) occurred by means of catastrophic core disassembly"
If they were just another big company that would be fine but when they can't even secure themselves while they're selling the service of securing others it deserves all the ridicule that the people here can dish out.
I can understand other companies not considering security to be a number 1 concern, they've got other things to worry about but a security company has no such excuse.
Which is skewed by most car trips being extremely short and most plane journeys taking a few hours.
Yes you're less likely to die driving to your local shop than while flying to Australia.
I believe it works out something like if you spend more than a quarter the time that the flight takes driving to the airport then you are more likely to die driving there, approx.
so an hour driving to the airport is something like equal to a 4 hour flight in terms of risk.
Bah!
We need a distributed, smart, renewable transport system based around the renewable biofuels whale oil and grass!
Oil lamps and horses worked for our ancestors!
of course they can work for us now.
perhaps the contrast has some advantage, a lot of really groundbreaking stuff seems to get done by the really young geniuses.
not to put too fine a point on it but there's no shortage of completely non-radioactive substances which will diddle with your DNA, get something planar which can bind between bases and you get a nasty little insertion mutation.
lead and it's friends bioaccumulate pretty badly as well.
Not to put too fine a point on it but radiation isn't very special.
plutonium leaking into groundwater is serious but so would be lead or arsenic getting into food or groundwater.
"Couple that with a culture that tends to frown on whistle blowing and reporting your superiors and you have a real problem on your hands. "
actually the thing with the documents was uncovered because of a whistleblower.
It is hard, it's human nature, the disaster that might happen is scarier than the one which did, the invisible killer is scarier than the choking smog cloud.
there were quite a few plants hit by the same disasters which did ok.
As with all things it's a combination of disasters and mistakes.
A couple of diesel generators, and the backups, and the local power grid, and a few other emergency systems damaged by the tsunami.
newer reactor designs are of course a hell of a lot safer but that comes across as a bit hollow in the middle of a current disaster.
The situation is by no means trivial and the other plants should be looked at and extra systems put in place or simply replaced with significantly better reactors but it's no reason to abandon nuclear altogether.
They're almost as annoying pro-air-travel people who insist that air travel is safer than going by car.
I mean only a little while ago there was all that news about a plane crash and they *still* insisted that air travel is "safer".
while all sensible people know that the only safe way to get anywhere is by driving there or cycling.
and follow it up with some lead, silver and arsenic just to be sure.
You can never have too many heavy metals.
.... not really no.
it ups it but if your isotope with a 20K year half life decays into something something with a halflife of say (for an example that would be easy on the math)5 seconds then you'll get twice as much radioactivity out of it (assuming the seconds products are as dangerous forms of radiation) with a little variation.
a isotope with a 20K halflife will still be utterly dwarfed in terms of radiation output by something with a halflife of a few decades even if the former has a decay chain 10 isotopes long because it can only add a linear multiplier, not an exponential increase in radiation output.
once you're into halflives in the tens of thousands be more afraid of heavy metal poisoning than radiation poisoning.
The potential for damage from air travel is also large, we saw in 2001 what could happen when terrorists use it to attack their target and potentially they could have gone after far worse targets in terms of body count.
the colapse of a hydro electric dam could kill hundreds of thousands.
And that *is* based on past performance because they've done just that in the past.
nuclear has over 40 years of history and so far it's doing pretty well with only the oldest plants having problems and the one in japan being after one of the biggest earthquakes and tsunamis ever to hit the country.
The potential for insane amounts of casualties exists with almost all sources.
Blow up an oil rig and you could cause billions worth of damage and another deepwater horizon ,poison countless people and destroy the livelyhoods of even more.
Drive a truck full of explosives into the side of a chemical plant that produces solvents for use in the production of solar panels and you could have another bhopal if the toxic cloud was blown over a big city.
yes it shouldn't be dismissed, yes safety is important and I'm all for backups for backups for backups for backups but nuclear is simply safer than any of it's realistic alternatives.
"Chernobyl is going to be a reoccurring"
all things are possible.
the problem is that nuclear is safe like air travel while most of it's alternatives are safe like road travel.
People are afraid of flying in a plane because when there's an accident a lot of people die at once and it hits world headlines.
When there's some kind of failure they get to see hours of drama on the news as the plane circles and they try to land it without the landing dear down or something along those lines.
of course in reality you're more likely to die driving to the airport then while on the plane but people are irrational like that, road travel may kill vastly more people and be vastly more risky but it's boring and mundane.
per terawatt more people die per year from most other sources than from nuclear but radiation is sexy, radiation is scary, falling off the roof while installing a panel is mundane, getting unlucky and being choked by your safety cord while working on a wind turbine is boring, dying in a coal mine or iron mine is a little more interesting yet still doesn't have the nuclear zaz.
people complain about land being made unusable for a while but that's nothing special, coal sludge spills make vast tracts of land useless due to the heavy metals, oil drilling can destroy areas of the ocean that dwarf states and even gas drilling has lead to at an area where 10000 people used to live in Malaysia turning into an unusable wasteland after it caused a mud volcano.
Plutonium has a long half life but arsenic is forever.
Saying that we should abandon nuclear because there will be accidents is like saying we should abandon planes because there will be crashes and instead we should just drive everywhere or (for a parallel with the smug fuckers who always jump in with "the sun's always shining somewhere" or "it's always windy somewhere") just cycle everywhere because it's so much safer.
you mean every year?
My first language was java and my second was C but I've coded in C# quite a bit because it was the language used at the company I was working at.
I didn't make a choice about it, I'll just use whatever language I need to get the job done* and learn whatever languages I need to learn.
*except VBscript, after doing one smallish project in it I've come to the conclusion that it's a horrible horrible scripting language.
The problem is that with the current drama perspective falls away.
I'm not calling for safety requirements to be removed, I'm quite in favor of safety systems out the wazoo.
My point isn't that nuclear is perfectly safe but rather that it's *acceptably* safe in comparison to most of the other things which people for some reason aren't afraid of.
It's like how people are afraid of flying despite the fact that they're far more likely to die driving to the airport than in a plane crash because you don't hear much about the road accidents but a plane crash gets world headlines.
If you were to point that out it wouldn't make any difference if there had been such a headline the same day.
But people who are convinced that flying is far far far too dangerous or that the planes must be terribly badly designed or there must have been some really terrible design choices will point at the TV and say "an aviation accident just happened in front of our eyes".
In reality it can still be true that the planes are safer than the alternatives and acceptably safe to use, even in populated areas.
Yes if cars had the same safety requirements that planes do the roads would be a lot safer but that's somewhat impractical and if planes had the same safety systems as cars there would be a lot of plane crashes but that doesn't mean planes are less safe or that planes should avoid flying over all populated areas.
are you seeing the parallel yet?
Yes, things could have been done better, that's a given when anything goes wrong but hindsight is 20:20.
on the contrary, it's common for factories and chemical plants to be near population centres.
A few towns near me have big production facilities in or next to them with most of the town either working at the plants or providing services.
The point is that nuclear isn't special.
it isn't any more dangerous than a great many other things which we just accept near population centers.
A river still is very convenient, the point is that people accept the dams, they accept the factories but nuclear gets treated as unique, as somehow special because atoms.
Lead will kill you just as silently, arsenic will poison land just as surely, solvents used in many industrial processes are far more likely to kill or maim you than some radioactive iodine.
but nuclear gets slotted into a whole other catagory, it's fine to have all these other types of facilities around, many with worse safety records and far larger death tolls to their name, but anything nuclear has to be 100 miles from anywhere and built to far far higher standards and designed to withstand far bigger disasters than the holding tanks at the chemical plant, the walls of the dam or the holding pit for the coal sludge.
and that's not even touching on the problem that a large nuclear plant has enough staff that it ends up with a population center around it if you try to move it into the middle of nowhere.
If you insist on having it out in the middle of nowhere and don't let the staff live near it then there's the tradoff that you guarantee more deaths on the road.
(which of course don't count because road deaths are booooring and not nearly as sexy as radioactive deaths)
and moreover you guarantee such deaths for every plant you do that with while only a tiny fraction will ever have a serious problem.
the near a population centre is for your workforce and for the people who actually want to use your electricuty.
nuclear isn't special.
if you replaced it with a fertaliser plant many of the same issues apply and fertaliser production has killed far more people in accidents than nuclear ever has.(google Bhopal)
One chemical leak and thousands of people could die.
Yet it's impractical to put everything a hundred miles from the nearest population centre (for one can you imagine what the roads would be like if every industrial worker had to travel that far every day and that comes with it's only pollution and death toll)
similar with dams, it's normal to build cities on rivers and it's normal to build damns on rivers above those populations centers. It confers advantages like protection from smaller floods but one big earthquake or structural failure and you're looking at far more people dying in a day than every nuclear accident in history.
you really think something like this wouldn't be any use to someone who is totally paralysed?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRVZgLaXus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWSah4RD2E
you might not be able to change your underwear but being able to scratch your nose, change the channel or raise/lower their bed would be kinda a big deal when you're totally paralysed.
long term it might even be possible to hook the output of such an interface up to something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYE7eB6fksM
to allow mobility.
or this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYE7eB6fksM