Is there any clear scoop on whether locals are identifiable in the released docs? If so, I'm disgusted at Wikileaks, but I'm in no position to read the docs and the reports vary.
Yes, we very closely agree. Damaging troop morale is a bad idea, especially for stupid reasons. Anybody at the pointy end of the spear needs and deserves all the support they can get, in all manners and methods.
Isn't it possible that telling the rest of the world the truth wouldn't lower troop morale since maybe troopers would be happy to know that the truth was out so changes could be made (better strategy if possible or withdrawal if no better options exist) instead of feeling damned to a unending, doomed mess? I don't know the answer, and I pose the question seeking honest replies.
And let me be clear: if I thought these leaks were dangerous, I'd be screaming for the heads of Manning et alia; I'm no knee-jerk peacenik (but I am a peacenik). Our military personnel are too precious to squander, and God bless them for signing up.
>People who have security clearances, or join the military, give up rights that civilians retain.
In fact, when you join the US military, you become US government property. I know guys who, while in the US Army, got drunk and fell asleep in the back of a truck and sunburned the hell out of themselves. They were court-martialed for "damaging government property".
Don't miss the obvious indicators of morale problems already widespread in-theater and among returning Gulf War II vets. The US military suicide rate is through the roof, and troops (overseas and after returning home) are getting an average of 2-3 opiod prescriptions from military doctors (3.8 million prescriptions in 2009), see http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-03-16-military-drugs_N.htm.
Those two facts pretty much say it all.
In Viet Nam, the troops turned to illegal drugs as morale decayed during the failed (and impossible) mission; by 1969-70 or so the US Army had more casualties from drug overdose, addiction, and drug-related illness than from combat. Historical parallels like this must not be ignored.
Get the troops out now, bring them home, shower them with love.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
rosa rugosa, the wild rose, grows anywhere, in almost any soil (native soil is sand dunes), with minimal water, has lovely and fragrant flowers and HUGE thorns.
It was wrong when FDR did it, too, and the US government finally got around to saying so.
This recent PATRIOT etc. crap was put in place by right wing idiots and we've been being told "if you've nothing to hide etc" by apologists for it for years. Now we see what happens when this stuff gets started (political interrogation at the border) and how hard it is to undo.
Obama is trying to figure out how to get out of the mess Bush et alia put us in, with the added fillip that every time he tries to undo some of this crap, the right starts screaming that he's making us weak "You can't close Gitmo!", "You can't try these terrorists in open court!"
So, you see, it IS a right/left thing, and, once again, the left is trying to undo the crap foisted on us by the right.
Remember, as all the right-winger apologists for this kind of un-American crap keep reminding us, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Good luck to us in getting back all the freedoms ursurped since Saint Reagan (especially those lost to that garbage PATRIOT Act).
Online faster (simpler to build, simpler to get permits for), too.
And no nuclear waste, obviating the need for to pro-nuclear people to keep trying convince us that radioactive waste is no problem (while saying "Don't put it in my backyard, please").
What's overdue is hot dry rock geothermal: MIT published a report in 2007 about how this energy generation technology is viable in the US, and not just near places like Yosemite and Yellowstone (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/geothermal.html). Any place where you can get a temperature gradient of about 150 C works, and that's a lot of places at depths our drilling technology can easily reach now. Also, these plants are factors of 10 cheaper than nukes, can be brought online faster, are carbon neutral, and last many times longer since there is no neutron flux ripping up or creating induced radiation in the machinery.
You might want to pay attention to those rocket surgeons at MIT: they've, like, read books and stuff.
The people who want to bring you more nuclear power stations own oil, coal, uranium mining, nuclear fuel processing, and nuclear power generating stations. They just want to keep making more money with what they own. They don't care what happens to you when they do it. If you don't believe that, I can't help you because the evidence is there, from how they fought against regulation of nuclear power plants and wastes, coal mine safety regulation, double-bottomed oil tankers, regulation on offshore wells, pollution controls on refineries and so on and so on (can you say Deepwater Horizon? I knew you could..).
These people want nuclear power stations because they don't own the solar power of the sun, or the power of the wind, or the heat at the core of the earth, and, because they don't own them, they can't artificially drive prices.
= = =
PS: Re Thatcher: the problem with unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism is that it doesn't work.
>number of people whose health is affected by coal based energy
Mostly because the greedy bastards won't use stack gas scrubber technology that's been around for decades. Doesn't stop CO2, but particulates and radioactive flyash are caught.
They could have amortized these scrubbers over the past decades and be into pure profit again, but, that makes too much sense. And somebody might not have been able to hit their quarterly profit targets a few times.
But all those non-rich, non-white kids with asthma and other people who died from coal fired plants while the industry failed to retrofit, that's OK as part of doing business?
If you believe that, go get bent.
>the environmentalists are in fact responsible for millions of deaths
Read history and see how many more millions have died or been permanently damaged from corporate greed. Assuming you bother to read things that cause you cognitive dissonance.
Tell me where you live and I bet in about 5 minutes or less I can show you an environmental law or regulation that has kept you healthy or alive, starting with the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
And before you start whining, I am pro-capitalism, just not capitalism that kills or maims because it's cheaper to run a business that way.
If you know anything about health physics you know it is TRUE that it only takes one radiation event to cause injury or disease. One. The greedy bozos who've been running nuclear power have proven time and again that they can't be trusted to do anything that slows them down or costs them money, even "little" things like proper disposal of Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLRW) which might cause that one event. Those corrupt fools all justify themselves exactly as you just did. Exactly the same way.
It's people like you who don't get it and want to soft-side dangers like LLRW who are the real danger. Get this through you head: there are such STRINGENT rules about handling even LLRW because IT IS GOD-DAMNED DANGEROUS. It doesn't matter how unlikely, or how long it might take: it is a known risk that must be avoided. Yes, the sun or a cosmic ray event may kill you with ionizing radiation (mmmkay? fuck you!), but now we've upped the ante by adding to the natural background many man-made radiation sources.
Do you really think you're smarter than all the astoundingly brilliant people who figured out and wrote the radiation control rules? Maybe you're more arrogant, but I doubt you're smarter. Would you like us to ship the waste to your home, since you don't seem to mind at all? You can roll around in it during your time off and tell us how safe you feel.
I wore a dosimeter for years and studied this subject **hard** and learned and followed the rules to make sure I didn't fuck up on my colleagues or myself. Step into a medical or scientific or industrial facility and say what you just said and somebody with a PhD in physics, or the facility radiation health officer, will slap your mouth shut and then someone else will pull your badge: they won't want you around to kill or injure somebody or expose them to big-time legal risk because you think LLRW is no big deal and you like making fun of people who, because they understand the physics of radiation events (however thermodynamically unlikely), follow the rules.
Perhaps you can live with "maybe I caused somebody's cancer or birth defect". I can't, and I won't let it happen on my watch because of sloppiness, arrogance, greed, or stupidity. I'd far rather live with "I did everything I could to PREVENT cancer or birth defects".
See the difference? If you do, then you understand science.
"Lost source accidents, also referred to as an orphan source are incidents in which a radioactive source is lost, stolen or abandoned. The source then might cause harm to humans."
>If you can provide a.mil url listing actual reports of naval reactor accidents
No, YOU provide ME unassailably genuine CLASSIFIED USN documents which disclose details of nuclear accidents. You can't, can you? Does that logically prove that such documents don't exist, or that such accidents have never happened? Besides, and I'll say this again, but more slowly for you this time: a lost reactor core is a nuclear accident, so I've already provided evidence of two nuclear accidents. You do accept that Thresher and Scorpion are sunk, yes?
Have you spent many careful hours formulating questions for your buddies in the US nuclear navy, questions designed to keep them from revealing anything they shouldn't but allowing them to say, without saying it outright or disclosing operational details, words to the effect of "Yes, there have been nuclear accidents in USN nuclear operations?" I have. And they knew what I was up to and answered me because they were honest people (and very, very brave; God bless the USN!!).
Idiot. Go read a book.
And before you start whining about how I'm being mean to you: I'm only abrupt and dismissive with trolls or people who speak with self-importance and authority but who clearly haven't got any facts (or any correct ones), or who are unwilling to listen. Otherwise, I am the very model of civility and helpfulness: among my reasons for this behavior is how much I have learned from people who politely, patiently, showed me new things or showed me I was mistaken.
>MI proved that the safety systems can contain a runaway criticality
No, TMI proved exactly the opposite.
All the primary and secondary safety cooling systems failed, due to human error, design flaw, or because they broke as the system heated up and began to melt.
What kept the core from finishing its melt down was a kludged-together coolant loop that relied on convection because all the pumps had failed. We were just damn lucky that convection (pure, no-tools physics relying on changes in water density due to heating) was able to pull sufficient water through the damaged core to draw off enough heat to stop the fuel melting and get the core into a non-SCRAMed but fission-controlled semi-shutdown state. And that's where the core stayed for decades because there wasn't much else we could do with it.
Go find out how much of the total fuel load (by weight) of TMI Unit 2 is "missing".
Go find out how many hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-level radioactive water (containing long-lived isotopes) were released into the Susquehannah River (which flows into Chesepeake Bay, a major source of seafood), and how owner/operator GPU didn't feel it necessary to inform the NRC about the release.
Go find out how much radioactive gas was vented from the Unit 2 containment, on how many occasions, and what isotopes were involved.
Go find out how much radioactive water containing tritium was intentionally evaporated from Unit 2 because it was easier and cheaper than gathering, containing, safing, and shipping it to off-site storage.
Go find out why Dr. Helen Caldicott et alia couldn't get any MSM to show the video and photos she and her people made of the obvious radiation-induced damage to farm animals that had been in utero near TMI Unit 2 when it went fizz.
Slashdot Mirror
No No No:
Professor: "Darn. We needed a big laser. Oh well, throw it all into the moat with the sharks."
No No No:
Professor: "Darn. We needed a big laser. Oh well, throw it into the moat with the sharks."
Is there any clear scoop on whether locals are identifiable in the released docs? If so, I'm disgusted at Wikileaks, but I'm in no position to read the docs and the reports vary.
Yes, we very closely agree. Damaging troop morale is a bad idea, especially for stupid reasons. Anybody at the pointy end of the spear needs and deserves all the support they can get, in all manners and methods.
Isn't it possible that telling the rest of the world the truth wouldn't lower troop morale since maybe troopers would be happy to know that the truth was out so changes could be made (better strategy if possible or withdrawal if no better options exist) instead of feeling damned to a unending, doomed mess? I don't know the answer, and I pose the question seeking honest replies.
And let me be clear: if I thought these leaks were dangerous, I'd be screaming for the heads of Manning et alia; I'm no knee-jerk peacenik (but I am a peacenik). Our military personnel are too precious to squander, and God bless them for signing up.
Yes, the primary bureaucratic syllogism:
We must do something.
X is something we CAN do.
Therefore, we must do X.
>People who have security clearances, or join the military, give up rights that civilians retain.
In fact, when you join the US military, you become US government property. I know guys who, while in the US Army, got drunk and fell asleep in the back of a truck and sunburned the hell out of themselves. They were court-martialed for "damaging government property".
Don't miss the obvious indicators of morale problems already widespread in-theater and among returning Gulf War II vets. The US military suicide rate is through the roof, and troops (overseas and after returning home) are getting an average of 2-3 opiod prescriptions from military doctors (3.8 million prescriptions in 2009), see http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-03-16-military-drugs_N.htm.
Those two facts pretty much say it all.
In Viet Nam, the troops turned to illegal drugs as morale decayed during the failed (and impossible) mission; by 1969-70 or so the US Army had more casualties from drug overdose, addiction, and drug-related illness than from combat. Historical parallels like this must not be ignored.
Get the troops out now, bring them home, shower them with love.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
- testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971 by LTJG John Kerry, USN, Bronze Star, Silver Star, three Purple Hearts (and before you start: all decorations reviewed and re-authorized by the Pentagon Inspector General in 2004; Swiftboat liar Commander George Elliott USN was the officer who originally submitted Kerry for the Silver Star in 1969; http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp; decoration citation texts (if you want to know what leadership and bravery truly are) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bronze_Star_Citation_-_John_Kerry; http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Silver_Star_Citation_-_John_Kerry)
No, you've missed the fundamental abstraction:
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it is the other way around.
>if you cannot understand the ironic mind
Or object permanence...
rosa rugosa, the wild rose, grows anywhere, in almost any soil (native soil is sand dunes), with minimal water, has lovely and fragrant flowers and HUGE thorns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_rugosa
This is basic, it's rule number on of minefields:
"If you make it hard to get in, you also make it hard to get out."
It was wrong when FDR did it, too, and the US government finally got around to saying so.
This recent PATRIOT etc. crap was put in place by right wing idiots and we've been being told "if you've nothing to hide etc" by apologists for it for years. Now we see what happens when this stuff gets started (political interrogation at the border) and how hard it is to undo.
Obama is trying to figure out how to get out of the mess Bush et alia put us in, with the added fillip that every time he tries to undo some of this crap, the right starts screaming that he's making us weak "You can't close Gitmo!", "You can't try these terrorists in open court!"
So, you see, it IS a right/left thing, and, once again, the left is trying to undo the crap foisted on us by the right.
Remember, as all the right-winger apologists for this kind of un-American crap keep reminding us, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Good luck to us in getting back all the freedoms ursurped since Saint Reagan (especially those lost to that garbage PATRIOT Act).
Bravo. Best post I've seen in a long while.
nuclear isn't evil, but the stupid way we've done it in the US certainly was.
Hot Dry Rock geothermal is just as good, cheaper, cleaner, and virtually unlimited. MIT says it's viable, look at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/geothermal.html.
Online faster (simpler to build, simpler to get permits for), too.
And no nuclear waste, obviating the need for to pro-nuclear people to keep trying convince us that radioactive waste is no problem (while saying "Don't put it in my backyard, please").
What's overdue is hot dry rock geothermal: MIT published a report in 2007 about how this energy generation technology is viable in the US, and not just near places like Yosemite and Yellowstone (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/geothermal.html). Any place where you can get a temperature gradient of about 150 C works, and that's a lot of places at depths our drilling technology can easily reach now. Also, these plants are factors of 10 cheaper than nukes, can be brought online faster, are carbon neutral, and last many times longer since there is no neutron flux ripping up or creating induced radiation in the machinery.
You might want to pay attention to those rocket surgeons at MIT: they've, like, read books and stuff.
The people who want to bring you more nuclear power stations own oil, coal, uranium mining, nuclear fuel processing, and nuclear power generating stations. They just want to keep making more money with what they own. They don't care what happens to you when they do it. If you don't believe that, I can't help you because the evidence is there, from how they fought against regulation of nuclear power plants and wastes, coal mine safety regulation, double-bottomed oil tankers, regulation on offshore wells, pollution controls on refineries and so on and so on (can you say Deepwater Horizon? I knew you could..).
These people want nuclear power stations because they don't own the solar power of the sun, or the power of the wind, or the heat at the core of the earth, and, because they don't own them, they can't artificially drive prices.
= = =
PS: Re Thatcher: the problem with unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism is that it doesn't work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_depression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
>number of people whose health is affected by coal based energy
Mostly because the greedy bastards won't use stack gas scrubber technology that's been around for decades. Doesn't stop CO2, but particulates and radioactive flyash are caught.
They could have amortized these scrubbers over the past decades and be into pure profit again, but, that makes too much sense. And somebody might not have been able to hit their quarterly profit targets a few times.
But all those non-rich, non-white kids with asthma and other people who died from coal fired plants while the industry failed to retrofit, that's OK as part of doing business?
If you believe that, go get bent.
>the environmentalists are in fact responsible for millions of deaths
Read history and see how many more millions have died or been permanently damaged from corporate greed. Assuming you bother to read things that cause you cognitive dissonance.
Tell me where you live and I bet in about 5 minutes or less I can show you an environmental law or regulation that has kept you healthy or alive, starting with the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
And before you start whining, I am pro-capitalism, just not capitalism that kills or maims because it's cheaper to run a business that way.
>"radiation is bad mmmkay"
Shut the FUCK up.
If you know anything about health physics you know it is TRUE that it only takes one radiation event to cause injury or disease. One. The greedy bozos who've been running nuclear power have proven time and again that they can't be trusted to do anything that slows them down or costs them money, even "little" things like proper disposal of Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLRW) which might cause that one event. Those corrupt fools all justify themselves exactly as you just did. Exactly the same way.
It's people like you who don't get it and want to soft-side dangers like LLRW who are the real danger. Get this through you head: there are such STRINGENT rules about handling even LLRW because IT IS GOD-DAMNED DANGEROUS. It doesn't matter how unlikely, or how long it might take: it is a known risk that must be avoided. Yes, the sun or a cosmic ray event may kill you with ionizing radiation (mmmkay? fuck you!), but now we've upped the ante by adding to the natural background many man-made radiation sources.
Do you really think you're smarter than all the astoundingly brilliant people who figured out and wrote the radiation control rules? Maybe you're more arrogant, but I doubt you're smarter. Would you like us to ship the waste to your home, since you don't seem to mind at all? You can roll around in it during your time off and tell us how safe you feel.
I wore a dosimeter for years and studied this subject **hard** and learned and followed the rules to make sure I didn't fuck up on my colleagues or myself. Step into a medical or scientific or industrial facility and say what you just said and somebody with a PhD in physics, or the facility radiation health officer, will slap your mouth shut and then someone else will pull your badge: they won't want you around to kill or injure somebody or expose them to big-time legal risk because you think LLRW is no big deal and you like making fun of people who, because they understand the physics of radiation events (however thermodynamically unlikely), follow the rules.
Perhaps you can live with "maybe I caused somebody's cancer or birth defect". I can't, and I won't let it happen on my watch because of sloppiness, arrogance, greed, or stupidity. I'd far rather live with "I did everything I could to PREVENT cancer or birth defects".
See the difference? If you do, then you understand science.
If you don't, I can't help you.
You flunked your quiz; here is the answer, in question form:
Where are the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion and their nuclear reactor cores?
>lost source" means that the reactor is "intact" and may be functional
Not sure what planet you're from, but the Earth definition of "lost source" says nothing about what the source is or whether what was lost is functional; it just means it is lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents#Lost_source
"Lost source accidents, also referred to as an orphan source are incidents in which a radioactive source is lost, stolen or abandoned. The source then might cause harm to humans."
>If you can provide a .mil url listing actual reports of naval reactor accidents
No, YOU provide ME unassailably genuine CLASSIFIED USN documents which disclose details of nuclear accidents. You can't, can you? Does that logically prove that such documents don't exist, or that such accidents have never happened? Besides, and I'll say this again, but more slowly for you this time: a lost reactor core is a nuclear accident, so I've already provided evidence of two nuclear accidents. You do accept that Thresher and Scorpion are sunk, yes?
Have you spent many careful hours formulating questions for your buddies in the US nuclear navy, questions designed to keep them from revealing anything they shouldn't but allowing them to say, without saying it outright or disclosing operational details, words to the effect of "Yes, there have been nuclear accidents in USN nuclear operations?" I have. And they knew what I was up to and answered me because they were honest people (and very, very brave; God bless the USN!!).
Idiot. Go read a book.
And before you start whining about how I'm being mean to you: I'm only abrupt and dismissive with trolls or people who speak with self-importance and authority but who clearly haven't got any facts (or any correct ones), or who are unwilling to listen. Otherwise, I am the very model of civility and helpfulness: among my reasons for this behavior is how much I have learned from people who politely, patiently, showed me new things or showed me I was mistaken.
>Thatcher
The problem with unregulated Laissez-Faire capitalism is that is doesn't work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008
>MI proved that the safety systems can contain a runaway criticality
No, TMI proved exactly the opposite.
All the primary and secondary safety cooling systems failed, due to human error, design flaw, or because they broke as the system heated up and began to melt.
What kept the core from finishing its melt down was a kludged-together coolant loop that relied on convection because all the pumps had failed. We were just damn lucky that convection (pure, no-tools physics relying on changes in water density due to heating) was able to pull sufficient water through the damaged core to draw off enough heat to stop the fuel melting and get the core into a non-SCRAMed but fission-controlled semi-shutdown state. And that's where the core stayed for decades because there wasn't much else we could do with it.
Luck. Not safety systems. Get the facts.
>TMI turned out to be a big non-incident
Go find out how much of the total fuel load (by weight) of TMI Unit 2 is "missing".
Go find out how many hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-level radioactive water (containing long-lived isotopes) were released into the Susquehannah River (which flows into Chesepeake Bay, a major source of seafood), and how owner/operator GPU didn't feel it necessary to inform the NRC about the release.
Go find out how much radioactive gas was vented from the Unit 2 containment, on how many occasions, and what isotopes were involved.
Go find out how much radioactive water containing tritium was intentionally evaporated from Unit 2 because it was easier and cheaper than gathering, containing, safing, and shipping it to off-site storage.
Go find out why Dr. Helen Caldicott et alia couldn't get any MSM to show the video and photos she and her people made of the obvious radiation-induced damage to farm animals that had been in utero near TMI Unit 2 when it went fizz.
Go look at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/3/716139/-Startling-revelations-on-Three-Mile-Islandnuclear-power
Go get at least a couple of clues.
Or go get bent; either is fine with me.
>uninformed fear of radiation
There are good reasons to fear it even if you ARE informed; that's why there's this little science called "Health Physics".
Even low-level waste is capable of causing disease and mutations that can pass to the next generation.
>potential to have the least environmental impact
You have GOT to be joking.
So, we can dump all the tailings from the uranium mines and all the high-level fuel waste in your driveway, then? For about 2 - 5 million years?
Thanks. Imagine how much money you just saved the rest of us!