The plants don't actually have long life spans, what's happening is that the government keeps re-licensing them long after their original shelf life has passed. That is, they'll do that until one of the plants on an over-extended lifetime pops. Maybe then we'll stop, like how we didn't start dealing with space shuttle foam damage until we blew up a shuttle.
Many of the still-operating pressurized water reactors have materials in their structure (containment steel, piping in the "hot" side of the water systems, etc.) that are in terrifyingly bad shape. The plants are kept running since it's obvious that once you shut them down, there's no income from them and big decommissioning costs kick in. We'd finally have to find out what it really costs to fully decommission a plant; we'd also find out how the hell to do it, because nobody knows how we'll cut up a huge, very "hot" mass of steel and concrete, how we'll dispose of the chunks, how we'll dispose of the spent fuel and low level waste, or (and this is my favorite part) how we'll dispose of all the tools that became "hot" from cutting up the plant.
So, to prevent the true cost of a decommissioning from becoming apparent (and also to hide that we have no clue HOW to do it), owners just don't decommission their plants. The owners of the Millstone plants in Connecticut shut down Millstone Unit 1 because even they couldn't ignore the facts and justify the BS anymore (the exception that proves the rule). But Unit 1 is just sitting there because the owners don't want to add to the $680 million they've spent so far on decommissioning (and, again, because they have no idea what to do next, or how).
Millstone 1's owners are frantically trying to get their decommissioning costs picked up by the Connecticut or federal governments, or by customers. They seem to believe that anybody but the themselves should be responsible for their mess.
Across the industry, decommissioning costs were not properly (if at all) figured in. Ever. Because the owners and NRC knew that good estimates render the actual cost of plant output economically non-viable. That's true, and you're going to have to get used to it. And remember, this is the industry that repeatedly told us the juice from these plants would be "too cheap to meter".
I give them credit for an elegant and simple solution (prevent decommissioning costs by not decommissioning), but the consequences are astounding and dangerous. Eventually, one of these old plants is going to fail catastrophically.
So, it's more expensive to shut a nuke down, that is, until some old plant finally screws the pooch because the neutron-embrittled steel in the containment fails (or whatever error cascade actually occurs), all hell breaks loose, and we find out what THAT costs...
Design life on Millstone 2 was supposed to be 25 years plus or minus; it's still chugging away (licensed now until 2035, so unless it blows up it will run more than twice as long as it was designed to!) and scaring the hell out of those of us who understand what's actually going on in all the materials under bombardment from the neutron flux.
Oh, did I mention that they cranked up the output way above what it was designed for?
So, let's see: far older than its design life and pushed way beyond spec; sure, that'll be fine. What could possibly go wrong?
Does this blind-faith idiocy bother anybody else who understands how engineering is SUPPOSED to be done?
Things DO GO WRONG when pushed beyond limits, and here is a wonderful example, in recent real-life words, of what happens when such pushing or corner-cutting comes back to bite you:
"Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen. [pause] I am fucking calm! You realize the rig is burning?" - James Harrell, Transocean installation manager, Deepwater Horizon.
Again with the "coal kills with particulates, heavy metals, etc."
Let's try this once more and see if it gets through: coal needn't kill through particulates, etc, if the industry would bother to (or be required to) properly scrub stack gasses with existing technology (existing for, oh, twenty or thirty years now).
Got it? It really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp. Now, go tell all your friends.
There's no justification for not scrubbing stack gasses. Unless you put profits ahead of public health. That never happens, though, right?
CO2 release is a different problem, but could be addressed by catalytically-moderated coal burning. People are working on that, but, what do you want to bet: when catalytic, non- (or less-) CO2-emitting coal-to-energy technology becomes available, the industry will say (now, I'm just guessing here), "Catalysts? We don't need no stinking catalysts: those plants cost too much, and all my sooty, heavy-metal-poison-releasing coal burning plants work just fine."
Do you believe everything you read? Do you think the USN goes around broadcasting all it's "unusual events"?
Can you possibly fathom the subtle concept that the Navy finds valid security reasons or other, less-authentic excuses to suppress the information?
Quick quiz: how many USN nuclear reactors are now on the bottom of the world's oceans? (And yes, that does count as an accident: it's called a "lost source" type.)
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 the owner/operator didn't feel it was necessary to point out that release to the NRC.
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 films she and her people made of the obvious radiation-induced damage to farm animals that had been in utero on the downwind side of TMI when it went fizz.
Most environmentalists I know (including me) find tidal projects pretty damn funny since, in a couple of decades, they'll be under water due to global sea level rise.
What finally got the core cooled was a mickey-moused cooling loop that depended on convection. Got it? What worked was basic, no-tools physics, not any safety system, primary system, or any system at all.
That cooling kludge had nothing to do with the designed safety systems. We were just plain damn lucky that enough water could passively circulate through the damaged core, based on changes in water density due to heating, to pull out enough heat to stop the melting that was going on and then keep the plant in a non-SCRAMed but fission-controlled state while we figured out what had happened (poof went the fuel) and where the radioisotopes had gone (fizz went the coolant water; hissss went the gas releases) and while GPU and the NRC figured out what lies to tell.
Everything that was supposed to prevent what happened failed: the system, the humans, the NRC. All of it.
all very nice, those little prizes, but how about giving the patent inventor a percentage of the profit gained from each patent? And don't tell me it's hard to figure out; insurance actuaries routinely do things like that.
Senator McCain: how many malignant melanoma lesions have you had removed, what was the thickness and stage of each malignant melanoma lesion you have had (including the biopsy taken in July of this year), and do you have any malignant melanoma now?
The last section here is from a May 2008 New York Times; McCain had another biopsy done in July 2008 about which no information has been released. You'd think that if the biopsy were good news, they'd release the data, right? Note that the survival rate for metastatic malignant melanoma is between 9 and 60% over 5 years: if any of McCain's cancer lesions were metastatic, he'd be so sick before he died that during his presidency he'd be useless.
= = =
But buried in 1,173 pages of medical records that McCain's campaign released before the conference call was something not previously made public: Two pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who examined the melanoma specimen from McCain's left temple in 2000 suggested there were two melanomas on his temple, not one, as his doctors had said publicly at the time.
McCain's campaign and doctors did not respond Friday to a request for clarification of the Armed Forces pathology report and the classification of the melanoma.
Ask nicely in your "How To Use This Program" document and everywhere else for the attribution you desire.
Also, enter a comment section in the program code that makes the same request.
Then code into the program a section that prints as a head/footer in the formatted output or as every Nth line in the unformatted output file text such as "Data created by Program X developed by Person Y at Place Z".
You'll have your attribution, and likely only those who weren't going to comply anyway will bother to edit the output or program code to remove it.
> It only produces its strong oxidizing effects when exposed to ultraviolet light [CR/LF]
So, you have incontrovertibly proven this by testing all possible interactions between nanoparticles of TiO2 (in all its dissociated forms and in every possible new molecule it creates from existing endogenous compounds) and every known biochemical mechanism that supports life in all types of human tissue, fluid, and bone? [CR/LF]
I'd like to see the data on that little project...[CR/LF] How the hell do I make this editor do a newline?
Antibacterial soaps kill the ubiquitous non-pathogenic bacteria so pathogens (including "superbugs") have a wide-open niche to exploit as soon as the soap is rinsed, the disinfectant evaporates or degraged, or standard environmental conditions re-establish themselves (moisture, dust, organic materials like skin cells or mucus from sneezes or whatever). That's why hospitals and other clinical settings are so good at producing nosocomial infections we can't control.
Antibacterial soaps start a vicious cycle that can easily lead to making your bathroom/kitchen/nursery worse than when you started. Stick with 10% chlorine bleach and soap.
sure: resistant to lead but with an average IQ of about 10 and big-time antisocial disorders. Good luck with that. "Delinquent behavior and anti-social outcomes (crime, violence, drug abuse, etc.) associated with childhood lead exposure correlate with differences in quantitative MR measures of brain structure and metabolism." from www.cincinnatichildrens.org/research/project/enviro/projects/cehc/project-5.htm and then there's this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1567775
Because copper kills more than just microbes and, like other heavy metals, persists damn near forever as it moves up the food chain in higher and higher concentrations.
Which leads me to this question: what else does this *nano*titanium stuff kill as it moves its way through the biosphere? Us?
If you had, or knew anyone who had, an affective disorder that led to suicidal ideation or attempts, you wouldn't say that.
Unless you actually are the ignorant, cold, and heartless ass your note reveals.
Slashdot Mirror
>Given the long lifespan of nuclear power plants
The plants don't actually have long life spans, what's happening is that the government keeps re-licensing them long after their original shelf life has passed. That is, they'll do that until one of the plants on an over-extended lifetime pops. Maybe then we'll stop, like how we didn't start dealing with space shuttle foam damage until we blew up a shuttle.
Many of the still-operating pressurized water reactors have materials in their structure (containment steel, piping in the "hot" side of the water systems, etc.) that are in terrifyingly bad shape. The plants are kept running since it's obvious that once you shut them down, there's no income from them and big decommissioning costs kick in. We'd finally have to find out what it really costs to fully decommission a plant; we'd also find out how the hell to do it, because nobody knows how we'll cut up a huge, very "hot" mass of steel and concrete, how we'll dispose of the chunks, how we'll dispose of the spent fuel and low level waste, or (and this is my favorite part) how we'll dispose of all the tools that became "hot" from cutting up the plant.
So, to prevent the true cost of a decommissioning from becoming apparent (and also to hide that we have no clue HOW to do it), owners just don't decommission their plants. The owners of the Millstone plants in Connecticut shut down Millstone Unit 1 because even they couldn't ignore the facts and justify the BS anymore (the exception that proves the rule). But Unit 1 is just sitting there because the owners don't want to add to the $680 million they've spent so far on decommissioning (and, again, because they have no idea what to do next, or how).
Millstone 1's owners are frantically trying to get their decommissioning costs picked up by the Connecticut or federal governments, or by customers. They seem to believe that anybody but the themselves should be responsible for their mess.
Across the industry, decommissioning costs were not properly (if at all) figured in. Ever. Because the owners and NRC knew that good estimates render the actual cost of plant output economically non-viable. That's true, and you're going to have to get used to it. And remember, this is the industry that repeatedly told us the juice from these plants would be "too cheap to meter".
I give them credit for an elegant and simple solution (prevent decommissioning costs by not decommissioning), but the consequences are astounding and dangerous. Eventually, one of these old plants is going to fail catastrophically.
So, it's more expensive to shut a nuke down, that is, until some old plant finally screws the pooch because the neutron-embrittled steel in the containment fails (or whatever error cascade actually occurs), all hell breaks loose, and we find out what THAT costs...
Design life on Millstone 2 was supposed to be 25 years plus or minus; it's still chugging away (licensed now until 2035, so unless it blows up it will run more than twice as long as it was designed to!) and scaring the hell out of those of us who understand what's actually going on in all the materials under bombardment from the neutron flux.
Oh, did I mention that they cranked up the output way above what it was designed for?
So, let's see: far older than its design life and pushed way beyond spec; sure, that'll be fine. What could possibly go wrong?
Does this blind-faith idiocy bother anybody else who understands how engineering is SUPPOSED to be done?
Things DO GO WRONG when pushed beyond limits, and here is a wonderful example, in recent real-life words, of what happens when such pushing or corner-cutting comes back to bite you:
"Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen. [pause] I am fucking calm! You realize the rig is burning?" - James Harrell, Transocean installation manager, Deepwater Horizon.
Timeline - Millstone Unit 2
Construction Permit Issued: December 11, 1970
Final S
people who haven't heard about hot-rock geothermal?
Again with the "coal kills with particulates, heavy metals, etc."
Let's try this once more and see if it gets through: coal needn't kill through particulates, etc, if the industry would bother to (or be required to) properly scrub stack gasses with existing technology (existing for, oh, twenty or thirty years now).
Got it? It really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp. Now, go tell all your friends.
There's no justification for not scrubbing stack gasses. Unless you put profits ahead of public health. That never happens, though, right?
CO2 release is a different problem, but could be addressed by catalytically-moderated coal burning. People are working on that, but, what do you want to bet: when catalytic, non- (or less-) CO2-emitting coal-to-energy technology becomes available, the industry will say (now, I'm just guessing here), "Catalysts? We don't need no stinking catalysts: those plants cost too much, and all my sooty, heavy-metal-poison-releasing coal burning plants work just fine."
>has basically ZERO accidents
Do you believe everything you read? Do you think the USN goes around broadcasting all it's "unusual events"?
Can you possibly fathom the subtle concept that the Navy finds valid security reasons or other, less-authentic excuses to suppress the information?
Quick quiz: how many USN nuclear reactors are now on the bottom of the world's oceans? (And yes, that does count as an accident: it's called a "lost source" type.)
Go read a book.
>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 the owner/operator didn't feel it was necessary to point out that release to the NRC.
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 films she and her people made of the obvious radiation-induced damage to farm animals that had been in utero on the downwind side of TMI 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 fuck yourself, either is fine with me.
Most environmentalists I know (including me) find tidal projects pretty damn funny since, in a couple of decades, they'll be under water due to global sea level rise.
They'll make great artificial reefs, though...
wrong: TMI proved exactly the opposite.
What finally got the core cooled was a mickey-moused cooling loop that depended on convection. Got it? What worked was basic, no-tools physics, not any safety system, primary system, or any system at all.
That cooling kludge had nothing to do with the designed safety systems. We were just plain damn lucky that enough water could passively circulate through the damaged core, based on changes in water density due to heating, to pull out enough heat to stop the melting that was going on and then keep the plant in a non-SCRAMed but fission-controlled state while we figured out what had happened (poof went the fuel) and where the radioisotopes had gone (fizz went the coolant water; hissss went the gas releases) and while GPU and the NRC figured out what lies to tell.
Everything that was supposed to prevent what happened failed: the system, the humans, the NRC. All of it.
people who don't understand hot-rock geothermal?
all very nice, those little prizes, but how about giving the patent inventor a percentage of the profit gained from each patent? And don't tell me it's hard to figure out; insurance actuaries routinely do things like that.
Senator McCain: how many malignant melanoma lesions have you had removed, what was the thickness and stage of each malignant melanoma lesion you have had (including the biopsy taken in July of this year), and do you have any malignant melanoma now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanoma
The last section here is from a May 2008 New York Times; McCain had another biopsy done in July 2008 about which no information has been released. You'd think that if the biopsy were good news, they'd release the data, right? Note that the survival rate for metastatic malignant melanoma is between 9 and 60% over 5 years: if any of McCain's cancer lesions were metastatic, he'd be so sick before he died that during his presidency he'd be useless.
= = =
But buried in 1,173 pages of medical records that McCain's campaign released before the conference call was something not previously made public: Two pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who examined the melanoma specimen from McCain's left temple in 2000 suggested there were two melanomas on his temple, not one, as his doctors had said publicly at the time.
McCain's campaign and doctors did not respond Friday to a request for clarification of the Armed Forces pathology report and the classification of the melanoma.
by = but
and if the output is to a GUI, have the program display the same text on the GUI, unobtrusively by ubiquitously.
Also, enter a comment section in the program code that makes the same request.
Then code into the program a section that prints as a head/footer in the formatted output or as every Nth line in the unformatted output file text such as "Data created by Program X developed by Person Y at Place Z".
You'll have your attribution, and likely only those who weren't going to comply anyway will bother to edit the output or program code to remove it.
QED
> It only produces its strong oxidizing effects when exposed to ultraviolet light [CR/LF] So, you have incontrovertibly proven this by testing all possible interactions between nanoparticles of TiO2 (in all its dissociated forms and in every possible new molecule it creates from existing endogenous compounds) and every known biochemical mechanism that supports life in all types of human tissue, fluid, and bone? [CR/LF] I'd like to see the data on that little project...[CR/LF] How the hell do I make this editor do a newline?
Antibacterial soaps kill the ubiquitous non-pathogenic bacteria so pathogens (including "superbugs") have a wide-open niche to exploit as soon as the soap is rinsed, the disinfectant evaporates or degraged, or standard environmental conditions re-establish themselves (moisture, dust, organic materials like skin cells or mucus from sneezes or whatever). That's why hospitals and other clinical settings are so good at producing nosocomial infections we can't control. Antibacterial soaps start a vicious cycle that can easily lead to making your bathroom/kitchen/nursery worse than when you started. Stick with 10% chlorine bleach and soap.
sure: resistant to lead but with an average IQ of about 10 and big-time antisocial disorders. Good luck with that. "Delinquent behavior and anti-social outcomes (crime, violence, drug abuse, etc.) associated with childhood lead exposure correlate with differences in quantitative MR measures of brain structure and metabolism." from www.cincinnatichildrens.org/research/project/enviro/projects/cehc/project-5.htm and then there's this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1567775
Because copper kills more than just microbes and, like other heavy metals, persists damn near forever as it moves up the food chain in higher and higher concentrations. Which leads me to this question: what else does this *nano*titanium stuff kill as it moves its way through the biosphere? Us?
If you had, or knew anyone who had, an affective disorder that led to suicidal ideation or attempts, you wouldn't say that. Unless you actually are the ignorant, cold, and heartless ass your note reveals.