It would take a lot longer than 5 years to get new nuclear power plants approved in the UK.
Wind doesn't have the energy density required
Required by whom? Energy density is very important when you are carrying the fuel with you (cars, planes, rockets, etc.). It is rather less important when you are building a power station. So wind farms take up more land than nuclear power plants. Big deal.
Tidal might, but also consider the ecological damage
That is a very valid concern. The costs and benefits have to be weighed up against the costs of fossil/nuclear power. Certainly in estuaries, it really has to be assessed on an individual basis for each proposed scheme. Wave power plants that operate in the sea have less of an environmental impact, but are more costly to maintain.
I haven't heard much about tidal
That's not really a very good reason to discount the technology. Have a look here.
We could probably get there within 10 years if the money used for finding and exploiting new, less accessible fossil fuel deposits was instead invested in research towards working fusion reactors.
Only 10? I thought we were always 20 years away from working fusion plants. At least, we have been only 20 years away for the last few decades.
The link wasn't intended to contradict you - it was for information.
The link points to a news report about land that is still contaminated by radioactivity from the accident.
And you said specifically that land in Cumbria was unuseable. That's simply false
No I didn't. Where does the word unuseable appear in the phrase
"the land on which they graze is too contaminated"?
Please don't put words in my mouth and then accuse me of being deceptive.
With any man made device I can never say never, but(there's always a but), do British and French reactors not use containment buildings? This one factor alone could have drastically reduced the affects of Chernobyl.
I don't know. But I do know that there are many other ways for radioactivity to get into the environment because of nuclear power plants. For a start, there is discharge from the plant. The Irish Sea is already being contaminated by Sellafield (formerly Windscale (until the accident there)). Radioactive particles found on the beaches near the Dounreay nuclear power station also don't inspire confidence. The lack of any means of dealing with the toxic waste from the plants is also problematic. The radioactive lakes which are used to store the waste would probably be fairly high on any terrorists' list of targets, but I don't intend to go into all the ways that terrorists could make use of the nuclear industry to wreak havoc.
Furthermore, as the article you pointed to makes plain, the area affected ran in to a particularly bad series of circumstances(e.g. rain during the accident and land that caused uptake in Cesium in plants rather than staying in the soil). So your concerns over a British or French accident is once again an extreme overstatement.
Extreme overstatement?
Soil that is particularly susceptible to contamination is not a bad series of circumstances. The bad circumstances alluded to in the article were that the wind blew the radioactive cloud over England and the rain brought the radioactivity down to the ground. The "nature of the soil in certain areas" is a feature of the land and would have an effect in any repeat of the accident. If such an accident happened in Britain or France (as I suggested), the weather wouldn't be a factor. The land would be contaminated.
Don't get me wrong though, an accident in Britain or France would be bad but not nearly as bad as you claim. There would be plenty of land to grow stuff just as there is in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia(the hardest hit areas).
The fact that the former Soviet Union still had uncontaminated land on which to grow food does not imply that Britain would still have suitable land if an accident happened closer to here. For a start, the wind blew the radiation West rather than East, so a lot of the USSR was spared. More importantly, the USSR was huge, it had an enormous amount of land. Britain is actually quite a small island. Don't be deceived by all those maps that make the UK look bigger than it really is.
[comments about keeping things in perspective]
Land unfit for sheep is not the only lingering effect of Chernobyl, it was just the first that I thought of. There are others, e.g. radioactive fish
I strongly disagree with your sentiment that the effects of nuclear accidents are blown out of proportion. More radioactivity in the environment is not a minor technicality. Radioactivity is known to cause cancer and other nasty problems such as genetic defects and birth abnormalities. Living on, and growing crops on, radioactive land is likely to significantly increase the incidence of cancer (and all the other problems related to radioactivity).
Protecting our environment is important and anti-nuclear campaigners have good reason, and every right, to resist the introduction of more nuclear power plants.
There are still thousands of sheep grazing on radioactive land. The ability to remove these sheep is not really all that relevant to the discussion. The Chernobyl accident happened a very, very long way away from England. If that had been a British or French reactor that had melted down, we probably wouldn't have any uncontaminated land on which to grow crops. Cancer for all! Yippee!!! Chernobyl was a wake up call for Europe.
It is never possible to guarantee perfect safety for any system as complex as a nuclear power plant. With all the best will in the world, it is only ever possible to engineer the risk down to an acceptable level. Chernobyl gave some insight into the scale of the destruction that could happen; I think that is why most people think that there is no acceptable risk - nuclear power is (rightly, IMHO) very, very unpopular with the general public.
Ah, the classic human tendency to misperceive risk. We prefer death by slow attrition to death by catastrophe. Why is that, I wonder?
I think that you may have misunderstood why Chernobyl frightened Europe. The effects of the catastrophe were not just felt by those who were unfortunate enough to live and die near the reactor at the time of the accident.
The long term effects of the accident are manifesting themselves as increased cancer rates, even among children that were not conceived at the time.
More immediately noticeable to the people of Western Europe, however, was the fact that the prevailing winds carried the radioactivity across the continent. Even now, nearly 20 years later, there are still farms in Cumbria (in the North of England) which cannot sell livestock because the land on which they graze is too contaminated.
A single nuclear accident causes short and long term effects and can affect an entire continent.
If the amount of money invested in nulcear was invested in Wind? umm no. Solar? umm not for england. Water turbine? also not for england. hmm.. thats leaves bio diesel or Fussion.... a bit far away from now but maybe... really there aren't that many alternatives. Maybe you could burn soccer hooligans. Their pretty high energy and I don't think anyone will miss them.
In the UK, wind and tidal power are both excellent candidates. Do you have an reason to dismiss them other than "umm no"? Bio-diesel is, as you point out, another very good alternative source of energy which is available now.
Even production of hydro enegy has caused more deaths, due to dam creation and failure, flooding etc. than nuclear.
That's probably true, but there is potential for far greater catastrophes from nuclear plants.
No source of energy is without risk/cost. Most people (outside the US?) now realise that the cost of fossil fuels is too high and would support governmental action to reduce CO2 emissions (as long as they don't have to do anything personally). I think that most people also deem nuclear energy to be too risky (Chernobyl did a lot to convince Europe of the risks). Many hydro-electric plants are ecological disasters, but not on the same scale as Chernobyl.
The problems with fossil fuels are becoming very clear. Nuclear energy could possibly be an excellent solution, but I certainly don't trust my government enough to truly value safety over cost. I am also very concerned about the complacency that usually develops in any organisation which routinely has to deal with safety critical issues. At least if a wind turbine fails, we don't have to worry about the impact on food production thousands of miles away.
*shrug* dunno but since BNFL are government owned it seems a bit academic.
That's the point. When all the costs are included, nuclear energy is too expensive compared to the alternatives (including renewable energy sources). The government couldn't sell off BNFL because the city investors were not prepared to absorb that cost. Nuclear energy is expensive. It is very expensive to do safely. And there is always the (small) risk of catastrophic failure.
Our future lies with renewable energy sources, not nuclear fission.
Part of the reason the UK nuclear industry is in such a bad financial shape is that the Government makes it pay the "climate change levy", on the basis of the amout of CO2 produced to generate a given amount of elecricity.
And how much does BNFL put aside for decommissing of its aging nuclear reactors when it calculates its profits and losses? Of course, it doesn't need to, because the government will pick up that tab separately so it doesn't count as a cost...
Yes. And I would like to see the recomissioning/refurbishing costs of wind turbines as well. If you want whole cycle costs, at least use the same metric on everything you test. Nothing is everlasting.
You can leave a wind turbines to rust for all I care. Decommissioning of nuclear power stations is not a trivial task - there is a lot of radioactive material that has to be disposed of safely.
In the 1990's, the UK government privatised the electricity industry. They had to retain the nuclear part (now called BNFL) because they couldn't convince the markets to absorb the decommissioning costs of the current nuclear reactors.
That's great and all, but we haven't put that money toward renewable sources. And as such we have to work with what we DO have NOW.
Fair enough. We can stop subsidising the nuclear industry right now and start a massive programme of building wind/sea/sun farms. Meanwhile, a small portion of the money that the government currently spends on the nations safety (in the form of defence expenditure) could be invested in serious research programmes to further reduce the cost/increase the efficiency of renewable energy sources.
Of course, the only reason that renewable sources look expensive at the moment is because significant costs incurred by other methods (oil: pollution, nuclear: decommissioning) are not included by economists.
Once you devise a method of generating power that can compete on an economic level with nuclear, of *course* the world will switch.
The nuclear industry (in the UK at least) is *heavily* subsidised by tax-payers. It has to be, it wouldn't be competitive otherwise (and that is before you consider the cost of decomissioning). The real problems with nuclear energy, however, are that we can't get rid of the waste and the consequences of even minor mistakes are catastrophic.
If the amount of money that has been spend on the nuclear indusry had been invested in renewable energy sources, we wouldn't now have an impending crisis. We would still have people complaining about wind farms being a blot on the landscape, but that is a much easier problem to solve.
I could be mistaken, but wouldn't open source code for voting machines make it that much easier for someone to hack the machines if they so desired?
Yes. We all know that security by obscurity is one of the best methods of ensuring that systems are secure. That is why nobody has ever been able to hack into a system running closed-source software such as Microsoft Windows.
Sarcasm aside, if the software is not open-source, there will still be many, many people that will have access to the code. The difference is that the general public won't be able to check what the code does. Are you sure that you trust every employee of Diebold (for instance) to be honest?
In your opinion, perhaps. This was a high risk, high reward programme from the very beginning. There was never any secret that there was a fairly high probability that it would not be successful; it was a project based on hope rather than expectation. However, it would be unfair to say that it has not acheived anything. Much of the work may be useful in designing future landers but, more importantly, the project fired the imagination of the British public. I think it is far more likely now that there will be another, better funded, attempt to land on Mars than if this project had never taken place.
They did. They picked "faster" due to launch date constraints and "cheaper" because they couldn't get the necessary sponsorship to spend more money. There was never any great secret about it, but it would still have been much "better" than nothing if it had worked.
If you leave your car doors unlocked, there is a smaller chance that theives will break the window when stealing your car, thus reducing the costs to you (or your insurance) when the car is stolen.
Seriously, I now leave my car unlocked. I used to live in Manchester and my car was stolen a number of times. When I stopped locking it, I found that
a) it went missing less (maybe not enough of a challenge?)
b) when I got it back, it was in better condition than the previous times it had gone missing.
Then again, there was one time when they broke the back quarter-light to get in, even though the car was unlocked. That did annoy me.
I'm pleased that there is funding for this kind of research in the EU, but it sounds like a stupid way of solving the problem of Echelon. The article makes it clear that the purpose of the quantum encryption is to exchange keys securely and to then encrypt messages using more conventional algorithms and transmission methods.
If conventional encryption and transmission is deemed sufficiently secure for transmitting the messages, a quantum exchange of keys does not add significantly to the security of the communication. It would surely be easier and cheaper to organize physical transfer of one-time pads than to install all the necessary infrastructure to support the key exchange.
The EP were obviously taken in by buzzwords, but at least the research will advance the state of the art.
But if the EU decides not to honour US patents, and GWB is appointed President for a second term, I see another cold war brewing.
I knew there had to be a bright side to the possibility of Bush getting re-elected. Another of his "for us or against us" speeches, but this time about software patents, is probably the best thing that could happen to unite Europe against the American position.
(1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions which are susceptible of industrial application, which are new and which involve an inventive step.
(2) The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1:
(a) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
(b) aesthetic creations;
(c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
(d) presentations of information.
The mathematical methods and programs for computers parts both rule out patenting of computer algorithms. The European Patent Office may have granted many patents for these things (in violation of the Convention) but that doesn't mean that they would be enforceable in court.
Please explain what mystery economic process would cause this. It doesn't matter if I buy my oil in pesos or groats, it still costs the same, and the exchange rate is still 27 pesos to the groat no matter which currency I use.
The mysterious process that would cause the US economy to collapse is the change in exchange rates. While US dollars are the reserve currency in which oil is traded, all nations need to ensure that they have a fistful of dollars in reserve with which they can buy oil. This means that the US treasury can print and spend dollars and can get goods in return while being confident that most of these dollars are safely tied up in foreign national banks and will not be "cashed in" against the US reserves. In effect the US has literally been able to print money since the gold standard was abolished.
If Euros become the new reserve currency, all of a sudden there will be a whole lot of dollars used to pay off any trade balances with the US. Instead of getting goods in return for paper, the US will start to get paper in return for goods. The final effect will be massive inflation in the US and a plummeting dollar on the international exchange markets.
If you want a slightly more coherent and well thought out explanation of this, I suggest you read Will Hutton's The state we're in.
I like the idea. Unfortunately I don't think there would be any way legal reason for the module developer to take the slightest bit of notice. The Linux kernel asserting that the module is GPL would not make any difference in court.
It is the user of a module that causes it to be loaded, not the developer. Just because a company makes a binary driver that works on Linux available to its customers, it does not follow that the module developer has entered into any kind of contract with the kernel developers. There would be no grounds to sue for access to the source code on this basis.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM started throwing its weight behind Linux because it was taking off.
It would take a lot longer than 5 years to get new nuclear power plants approved in the UK.
Wind doesn't have the energy density required
Required by whom? Energy density is very important when you are carrying the fuel with you (cars, planes, rockets, etc.). It is rather less important when you are building a power station. So wind farms take up more land than nuclear power plants. Big deal.
Tidal might, but also consider the ecological damage
That is a very valid concern. The costs and benefits have to be weighed up against the costs of fossil/nuclear power. Certainly in estuaries, it really has to be assessed on an individual basis for each proposed scheme. Wave power plants that operate in the sea have less of an environmental impact, but are more costly to maintain.
I haven't heard much about tidal
That's not really a very good reason to discount the technology. Have a look here.
Clever use of words!
How about,
Why don't we just replace 100% eco friendly with eco friendlier.
Doesn't really work, does it.You seem to be offering a Package Deal.
Only 10? I thought we were always 20 years away from working fusion plants. At least, we have been only 20 years away for the last few decades.
The link wasn't intended to contradict you - it was for information. The link points to a news report about land that is still contaminated by radioactivity from the accident.
And you said specifically that land in Cumbria was unuseable. That's simply false
No I didn't. Where does the word unuseable appear in the phrase "the land on which they graze is too contaminated"? Please don't put words in my mouth and then accuse me of being deceptive.
With any man made device I can never say never, but(there's always a but), do British and French reactors not use containment buildings? This one factor alone could have drastically reduced the affects of Chernobyl.
I don't know. But I do know that there are many other ways for radioactivity to get into the environment because of nuclear power plants. For a start, there is discharge from the plant. The Irish Sea is already being contaminated by Sellafield (formerly Windscale (until the accident there)). Radioactive particles found on the beaches near the Dounreay nuclear power station also don't inspire confidence. The lack of any means of dealing with the toxic waste from the plants is also problematic. The radioactive lakes which are used to store the waste would probably be fairly high on any terrorists' list of targets, but I don't intend to go into all the ways that terrorists could make use of the nuclear industry to wreak havoc.
Furthermore, as the article you pointed to makes plain, the area affected ran in to a particularly bad series of circumstances(e.g. rain during the accident and land that caused uptake in Cesium in plants rather than staying in the soil). So your concerns over a British or French accident is once again an extreme overstatement.
Extreme overstatement? Soil that is particularly susceptible to contamination is not a bad series of circumstances. The bad circumstances alluded to in the article were that the wind blew the radioactive cloud over England and the rain brought the radioactivity down to the ground. The "nature of the soil in certain areas" is a feature of the land and would have an effect in any repeat of the accident. If such an accident happened in Britain or France (as I suggested), the weather wouldn't be a factor. The land would be contaminated.
Don't get me wrong though, an accident in Britain or France would be bad but not nearly as bad as you claim. There would be plenty of land to grow stuff just as there is in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia(the hardest hit areas).
The fact that the former Soviet Union still had uncontaminated land on which to grow food does not imply that Britain would still have suitable land if an accident happened closer to here. For a start, the wind blew the radiation West rather than East, so a lot of the USSR was spared. More importantly, the USSR was huge, it had an enormous amount of land. Britain is actually quite a small island. Don't be deceived by all those maps that make the UK look bigger than it really is.
[comments about keeping things in perspective]
Land unfit for sheep is not the only lingering effect of Chernobyl, it was just the first that I thought of. There are others, e.g. radioactive fish
I strongly disagree with your sentiment that the effects of nuclear accidents are blown out of proportion. More radioactivity in the environment is not a minor technicality. Radioactivity is known to cause cancer and other nasty problems such as genetic defects and birth abnormalities. Living on, and growing crops on, radioactive land is likely to significantly increase the incidence of cancer (and all the other problems related to radioactivity).
Protecting our environment is important and anti-nuclear campaigners have good reason, and every right, to resist the introduction of more nuclear power plants.
It is never possible to guarantee perfect safety for any system as complex as a nuclear power plant. With all the best will in the world, it is only ever possible to engineer the risk down to an acceptable level. Chernobyl gave some insight into the scale of the destruction that could happen; I think that is why most people think that there is no acceptable risk - nuclear power is (rightly, IMHO) very, very unpopular with the general public.
I think that you may have misunderstood why Chernobyl frightened Europe. The effects of the catastrophe were not just felt by those who were unfortunate enough to live and die near the reactor at the time of the accident.
The long term effects of the accident are manifesting themselves as increased cancer rates, even among children that were not conceived at the time.
More immediately noticeable to the people of Western Europe, however, was the fact that the prevailing winds carried the radioactivity across the continent. Even now, nearly 20 years later, there are still farms in Cumbria (in the North of England) which cannot sell livestock because the land on which they graze is too contaminated.
A single nuclear accident causes short and long term effects and can affect an entire continent.
In the UK, wind and tidal power are both excellent candidates. Do you have an reason to dismiss them other than "umm no"? Bio-diesel is, as you point out, another very good alternative source of energy which is available now.
That's probably true, but there is potential for far greater catastrophes from nuclear plants.
No source of energy is without risk/cost. Most people (outside the US?) now realise that the cost of fossil fuels is too high and would support governmental action to reduce CO2 emissions (as long as they don't have to do anything personally). I think that most people also deem nuclear energy to be too risky (Chernobyl did a lot to convince Europe of the risks). Many hydro-electric plants are ecological disasters, but not on the same scale as Chernobyl.
The problems with fossil fuels are becoming very clear. Nuclear energy could possibly be an excellent solution, but I certainly don't trust my government enough to truly value safety over cost. I am also very concerned about the complacency that usually develops in any organisation which routinely has to deal with safety critical issues. At least if a wind turbine fails, we don't have to worry about the impact on food production thousands of miles away.
That's the point. When all the costs are included, nuclear energy is too expensive compared to the alternatives (including renewable energy sources). The government couldn't sell off BNFL because the city investors were not prepared to absorb that cost. Nuclear energy is expensive. It is very expensive to do safely. And there is always the (small) risk of catastrophic failure.
Our future lies with renewable energy sources, not nuclear fission.
And how much does BNFL put aside for decommissing of its aging nuclear reactors when it calculates its profits and losses? Of course, it doesn't need to, because the government will pick up that tab separately so it doesn't count as a cost ...
You can leave a wind turbines to rust for all I care. Decommissioning of nuclear power stations is not a trivial task - there is a lot of radioactive material that has to be disposed of safely.
In the 1990's, the UK government privatised the electricity industry. They had to retain the nuclear part (now called BNFL) because they couldn't convince the markets to absorb the decommissioning costs of the current nuclear reactors.
Fair enough. We can stop subsidising the nuclear industry right now and start a massive programme of building wind/sea/sun farms. Meanwhile, a small portion of the money that the government currently spends on the nations safety (in the form of defence expenditure) could be invested in serious research programmes to further reduce the cost/increase the efficiency of renewable energy sources.
Of course, the only reason that renewable sources look expensive at the moment is because significant costs incurred by other methods (oil: pollution, nuclear: decommissioning) are not included by economists.
The nuclear industry (in the UK at least) is *heavily* subsidised by tax-payers. It has to be, it wouldn't be competitive otherwise (and that is before you consider the cost of decomissioning). The real problems with nuclear energy, however, are that we can't get rid of the waste and the consequences of even minor mistakes are catastrophic.
If the amount of money that has been spend on the nuclear indusry had been invested in renewable energy sources, we wouldn't now have an impending crisis. We would still have people complaining about wind farms being a blot on the landscape, but that is a much easier problem to solve.
I think that Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson might be what you are referring to.
Yes. We all know that security by obscurity is one of the best methods of ensuring that systems are secure. That is why nobody has ever been able to hack into a system running closed-source software such as Microsoft Windows.
Sarcasm aside, if the software is not open-source, there will still be many, many people that will have access to the code. The difference is that the general public won't be able to check what the code does. Are you sure that you trust every employee of Diebold (for instance) to be honest?
No problem. Leave the keys in the lamborghini and someone else will park it for you. Finding out where they parked it is the tricky bit ...
In your opinion, perhaps. This was a high risk, high reward programme from the very beginning. There was never any secret that there was a fairly high probability that it would not be successful; it was a project based on hope rather than expectation. However, it would be unfair to say that it has not acheived anything. Much of the work may be useful in designing future landers but, more importantly, the project fired the imagination of the British public. I think it is far more likely now that there will be another, better funded, attempt to land on Mars than if this project had never taken place.
They did. They picked "faster" due to launch date constraints and "cheaper" because they couldn't get the necessary sponsorship to spend more money. There was never any great secret about it, but it would still have been much "better" than nothing if it had worked.
Seriously, I now leave my car unlocked. I used to live in Manchester and my car was stolen a number of times. When I stopped locking it, I found that
a) it went missing less (maybe not enough of a challenge?)
b) when I got it back, it was in better condition than the previous times it had gone missing.
Then again, there was one time when they broke the back quarter-light to get in, even though the car was unlocked. That did annoy me.
If conventional encryption and transmission is deemed sufficiently secure for transmitting the messages, a quantum exchange of keys does not add significantly to the security of the communication. It would surely be easier and cheaper to organize physical transfer of one-time pads than to install all the necessary infrastructure to support the key exchange.
The EP were obviously taken in by buzzwords, but at least the research will advance the state of the art.
I knew there had to be a bright side to the possibility of Bush getting re-elected. Another of his "for us or against us" speeches, but this time about software patents, is probably the best thing that could happen to unite Europe against the American position.
Article 52(1) and (2) of the European Patent Convention:
The mathematical methods and programs for computers parts both rule out patenting of computer algorithms. The European Patent Office may have granted many patents for these things (in violation of the Convention) but that doesn't mean that they would be enforceable in court.
The mysterious process that would cause the US economy to collapse is the change in exchange rates. While US dollars are the reserve currency in which oil is traded, all nations need to ensure that they have a fistful of dollars in reserve with which they can buy oil. This means that the US treasury can print and spend dollars and can get goods in return while being confident that most of these dollars are safely tied up in foreign national banks and will not be "cashed in" against the US reserves. In effect the US has literally been able to print money since the gold standard was abolished.
If Euros become the new reserve currency, all of a sudden there will be a whole lot of dollars used to pay off any trade balances with the US. Instead of getting goods in return for paper, the US will start to get paper in return for goods. The final effect will be massive inflation in the US and a plummeting dollar on the international exchange markets.
If you want a slightly more coherent and well thought out explanation of this, I suggest you read Will Hutton's The state we're in.
I like the idea. Unfortunately I don't think there would be any way legal reason for the module developer to take the slightest bit of notice. The Linux kernel asserting that the module is GPL would not make any difference in court.
It is the user of a module that causes it to be loaded, not the developer. Just because a company makes a binary driver that works on Linux available to its customers, it does not follow that the module developer has entered into any kind of contract with the kernel developers. There would be no grounds to sue for access to the source code on this basis.