Diabetic retinopathy is easily preventable in all diabetics. Information can be found at the Life Extension Foundation site, the LEF forum site, and on the Medline database:
Tau Zero:
...but the Greenies who demand an end to nuclear power... The "greenies" who preach against nuclear power are not environmentalists. They are drama opportunists. There are no environmentalists against nuclear power. Environmentalists are serious people who study the science behind environmental issues.
Tau:
[previous poster]She advocated the right to be paid a fair amount for one's efforts...[/previous poster]
Show me where this is stated, either in one of her treatises or in one of her fictional works. Go ahead, I'll wait.
I'll bet you won't be able to find this in as many words, because the concept of "a fair amount" is foreign to the philosophy.
I only read Atlas Shrugged and a few interviews, etc. I think she was deeply interested in fairness, but not in the right to be paid fairly for work, as you also say. The fairness she sought was the right to be allowed to seek a market price for one's productiveness. One would be free under this definition to produce works with no market value.
It should also be noted that she felt that art that had social value would, in an objectivist society, command appropriate market prices. People writing good books would find a ready market for them in an objectivist society. If an artist is not able to support himself in an objectivist society by selling his art, it is an indictment of the poor value of his work, and therefore he doesn't deserve to get paid for it.
Skeptical Inquirer did a cover story on Tesla and the pseudoscience cult that has formed around him:
Skeptical Inquirer SUMMER 1994 (vol 18, no 4.): `Extraordinary science' and the strange legacy of Nikola Tesla, by Johnson. Nikola Tesla: Genius, visionary, and eccentric, by Johnson.
Their take on it was that he a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of bad ones, and that the common perception of him as an infallible genius is misplaced.
9.4% of the audio on Freenet is Jesus Christ Superstar.
Umm...I'm not sure what to think.
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All construction pollutes and because solar power is so diffuse, the construction of it's collectors pollutes significantly. There is the waste at the construction sites and waste at the factories where the construction materials are made.
Specifically with solar panels, there is the coal burned to make the panels (3% of the lifetime energy output of a solar panel is burned as coal) and, more seriously (serious enough to make solar a serious threat to the survivability of humanity), cadmium sulfide. This is not the limit of toxic waste from solar. Also, incidentally, the coal burned in solar panel construction is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants -- coal contains radioactive elements such as Pottasium 40, Thorium 232, Uranium, and Plutonium.
Visual pollution: All solar energy is diffuse energy and so its many collectors create much visual pollution.
With wind, noise pollution: Complaints of noise pollution from wind turbines are significant. Wind energy is diffuse and so the many collectors needed to concentrate it produce much noise pollution.
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allanj:
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out?
The reason there are a number of safe options for the safe disposal of nuclear waste is that the health hazards of nuclear waste are trivial -- a point agreed upon by all peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject. The dose makes the poison and the poison, in this case, is surprisingly easy to keep the public form getting no more than minimal doses of. After converting the waste to something highly insoluble like glass or ceramic, some ultra-safe disposal options are:
Drop it into the ocean at random locations.
Bury it beneath the ocean floor.
Bury it in a salt mine.
Bury it in a place that isn't a salt mine.
Bury it in a highly engineered 30 gigadollar repository like Yucca mountain.
Use it as landfill.
Use it as construction material. (This is practically already done, as granite is loaded with naturally occuring uranium and many buildings are already made of granite -- yes, they make geiger counters go crazy and, no, they aren't harming the people inside.)
Bury it in shallow trenches.
Dump it directly into rivers.
The list goes on and on...
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corvi42:
If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long? After 500 years, high level nuclear waste is less radioactive than the ore it was mined from.
There are no guarantees it will remain safely contained for any amount of time. Requiring that the by-far single safest energy technology ever invented be the only energy technology to be held to a standard of absolute safety will lead to the heavy use of rather unsafe energy technologies such as solar and to a much greater extent the hyper-deadly coal when it turns out time and time again that solar can't meet our needs.
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corvi42:
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity Wave-generation plants, like windmills, would likely have massive maintenance requirements. Perhaps they would be much higher since seawater is highly corrosive. Maintenance of heavy machinery is some of the most dangerous employment the modern world offers. And there would be lots of this employment since wave energy, being a form of solar energy, is extremely diffuse compared to nuclear energy.
CoolAss:
Yes, you can build breeder reactors which use depleted uranium to run the plant, and this would give us nearly 1000 years of electricity... As the efficiency of fuel usage goes up, as in the case of breeder reactors, the cost per unit of energy produced goes down proportionately. Therefore you can tap reserves that were previously considered uneconomic -- such as seawater which would provide far more than 5 billion years of energy, if only the earth would last that long.
but there is one problem, the waste from a breeder reactor is WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM. There are many ways of obtaining nuclear weapons materials. Refining spent fuel from breeder reactors is one of the more difficult. Therefore, weapons proliferation caused by breeder reactors is a non-issue.
...for those of you who are planning on saying "But fusion doesn't work!!" We reached break-even in 1983, and can acheive temperatures of over 150 million C. When we hit around 180m C, we will have a sustainable reaction which will basically solve the worlds energy problems. There is a difference between a sustainable rection and a workable power-plant. There is a difference between a workable power-plant and a constructable power-plant. There is a difference between a constructable power-plant and an economically constructable power-plant.
And since when did the world have energy problems?
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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Operating your own power plant is extremely dangerous and is wasteful of resources since excess capacity must be on hand to deal with the fact that your usage could vary wildly compared to the more moderate variation in usage by a group of hundreds, thousands, or millions of energy customers.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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HeghmoH:
Uranium reserves that are cost-effective to mine will be enough to supply for around forty years.
These are known reserves. Historically, known reserves are unrealistically low estimates of true cost-effective reserves since mining companies are loathe to spend money on costly exploration beyond what is necessary to establish proof of enough capacity for the next few decades. The 1978 known reserves of oil ran out in the 80's. We now have twice those known reserves.
Also, these are conventional reserves. The nuclear energy in the fissionable material (uranium, thorium and plutonium) present as impurities in the coal that's burned every year in the U.S. is greater than the combustible energy of the coal. This is an unconventional uranium reserve. The uranium (and thorium and plutonium) in the captured fly ash could be easily extracted using known technologies and used to power nuke plants. Better yet, the coal plants could be decommissioned and the coal mined strictly for its uranium/thorium/plutonium content.
Other unconventional sources are granite and seawater.
Seawater contains 5 billion tons of uranium, enough to supply all the world's electricity for several million years. But in addition, rivers are constantly disolving uranium out of rock and carrying it into the oceans, renewing the oceans' supply at a rate suffient to provide 25 times the world's present total electricity usage. In fact, breeder rectors operating on uranium extracted from the oceans could produce all the energy humankind will ever need without the cost of electricity increasing by even 1% due to raw fuel costs.
-- Bernard L. Cohen, The Nuclear Energy Option: An Alternative for the Nineties
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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corvi42:
You are citing deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of the meltdown. These statistics do not calculate the deaths and injuries which result as a long-term consequence of the hightened radiation levels.
My citations were for all forseeable fatalities for the next 5 billion years according to the bogus linear-no-threshold theory of radiation cancer-causing potential (which claims people can get cancer from any amount of radiation, no matter how low, and so therefore any radiation release will negatively affect people for eternity -- this theory, called the LNT, has been proven false of course).
Deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of a meltdown would be limited to cases of acute radiation poisoning, a rare disease. According to the same source, "there would be no detectable deaths in 98 out of 100 meltdowns, there would be over 100 such deaths in one out of 500 meltdowns, over 1,000 in one out of 5,000 meltdowns, and in 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns there would be about 3,500 fatalities.
"The largest number of detectable fatalities to date from an energy-related incident was an air-pollution episode in London in 1952 in which 3,500 deaths directly attributable to the pollution occured within a few days. Thus, with regard to detectable fatalities, the equivalent of the worst nuclear accident considered in the RSS -- expected once in 100,000 meltdowns -- has already occured with coal burning."
Source: Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90s; chapter 6, The Fearsome Reactor Meltdown Accident
PV technology...is closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable....
In order of clean to dirty (with a lower rank being cleaner), the three technologies being discussed rank:
1. Nuclear
2. Solar photovoltaic (PV)
3. Coal
PV and coal are close together in dirtiness compared with nuclear which is awkwardly cleaner. Using the industry-standard linear-no-threshold theory of radiation danger (which is biased against nuclear power and has been proven to be false), the eventual deaths caused by one large nuclear, coal, or PV powerplant run for a year are calculable as:
Nuclear: -420
Coal:_____175
PV:________85
Nuclear comes in at right around 1/3 of a death (from high-level waste, low level waste, and routine airborne emissions), until you consider the radon gas exposure that doesn't happen because the uranium that would have produced the radon was mined out of the ground and burned in the nuke plant. Then you get 420 lives saved.
Coal deaths are from air pollution, radon emissions, and chemical carcinogens.
PV deaths are from the coal power and the cadmium sulfide used to make the panels, with the bulk of deaths coming from the cadmium sulfide.
Source: Chapter 12, More on Radioactive Waste, from Bernard L. Cohen's The Nuclear Energy Option: An Alternative for the 90s.
the academic and scientific type communities have contributed the most effort to Linux software in the first ten years (is it 10 years old yet? Maybe eight years)
If you count from when emacs started being worked on in the mid 70s, the Linux software canon is about 25 years old.
But the 1.0 kernel was released in mid 1994, so six years counting from then.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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Would the scale of a fission plant disaster * the probability of it happening be worse than scale of a wave disaster * probability of it happening?
Good point. Too bad it was the same point I made. Here it is again for your dancing and dining pleasure:
What would happen is something that wouldn't be significant because it would happen so rarely. Factor in worst-case-scenarios for nuclear and you still get less injury and death.
And I wasn't talking about wave disasters. The daily risks of jobs involved with the routine upkeep of wave generators is where much of the injury and death comes from. Low density power source = massive employment needed for upkeep = massive injury and death.
From Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90's:
In most meltdowns the containment is expected to maintain its integrity for a long time, so the number of fatalities should be zero. In 1 out of 5 meltdowns there would be over 1,000 deaths, in 1 out of 100 there would be over 100,000 deaths, and In 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns, we would approach 50,000 deaths (the number we get each year from motor vehicle accidents). Considering all types, we expect and average of 400 fatalities per meltdown.... For nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning there would have to be 75 meltdowns every year..., or 1 meltdown every 5 days somewhere in the United States.... Since there has never been a single meltdown, clearly we cannot expect one that often.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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for vast lengths of time [nuclear waste] remains quite toxic for longer than the current age of literate civilization.
Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile.
They still haven't figured out what to do with the waste material generated from Diablo
It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
the heat pollution from the plant has demonstrably (and, as a recent decision and fine shows, illegally) altered the ecology of the nearby cove.
All steam-turbine power plants require steam condensers that pollute thermally. Sorry about that.
Less dangerous?....>
Significantly. The danger for workers of a power source is roughly a function of the density of its fuel. You have to consider the routine deaths that occur daily with all forms of power production, not just consider the big accidents. Nuclear fission has, by far, the highest power density fuel and therefore the fewest injuries and deaths.
what would happen to the agriculture and habitability of SLO county if Diablo pulled a Chernobyl?
What would happen is something that wouldn't be significant because it would happen so rarely. Factor in worst-case-scenarios for nuclear and you still get less injury and death. Chernobyl was and is an unsafe reactor design. Diablo is a safe reactor design.
Costs less? PG&E is taking a loss on Diablo Canyon.
Diablo cost too much to build. A number of factors led to this. For cheaper reactors: Safety requirements need to be standardized and reactors need to be preapproved and built faster without fear of hearings and lawsuits after construction starts which can add costly delays. Since the early eighties, France used mass-produced, standardized designs. This is the safest and cheapest way to build nuclear fission plants and this is what needs to be done all over the world.
As far as I'm concerned, nuclear fission can stay sustainable and reliable "on paper" until we can fix its substantial real-world problems.
France has fixed nuclear's substantial real-world problems. The reason France was able to do this was largely because France has a political system that allowed the energy sector to bulldoze over the political opposition (which was substantial and roughly equivalent per capita to the opposition in the United States), and less so because of plain dumb luck in picking the winning formula (standardization and mass production).
While standardization and mass-production might seem obviously more efficient, it wasn't so obvious in the 70's when new technologies were coming out every week. Every utility wanted a custom power plant that would take advantage of the very latest tech. The latest tech is something you can't have with standardized designs. The second seduction was efficiency through massiveness. Contractors were continuously ratcheting up plant size by seducing utilities with higher-wattage plants that would cost just a little more. More gigawatts per buck = cost savings down the line. Unfortunately larger plants = larger loans. Add a few interest rate hikes and construction delays and you have a financial disaster.
In other words, you have Diablo. A model sustainable power plant, but way too pricey.
...geothermal...is really driven by the remaining heat from a fusion reaction within the earth...
Geothermal energy is the remaining heat from decaying uranium and thorium within the earth. There are no reactions involved, fission or fusion (Save for a natural fission reactor here or there. But natural reactors only speed up the process -- they cannot create more heat than would be created anyway from natural decay.).
Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power tech
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Renewable energy sources all have these things in common:
1. They all pollute more than nuclear fission.
2. They are all more dangerous than nuclear fission.
3. They all cost more than nuclear fission.
4. They are all less reliable than nuclear fission.
5. None of them are sustainable.
Nuclear fission, a non-renewable power generation technology, is the only sustainable one yet invented. All of the renewables have problems. Some of the problems with wave generation are: salt-water corrosion; largely unable to be located where power is needed; construction expense; upkeep expense; danger to workers; destruction of natural resources (marine environments, whether beaches or offshore, are natural resources -- putting power plants in them = destruction); and variability of fuel (sometimes waves are high, sometimes not so high).
The fundamental important point is sustainability. Nuclear fission is sustainable on paper for at least 5 billion years, meaning it can outlast the sun.
Find a setting that is not distracting or use
"white noise" to block out common distractions so you are able to complete paperwork. Be prepared to use your portable CD player, offering instrumental music for increased concentration.
It sounds like you're already thinking on the same wavelength as Fisher and Beckley.
In addition to wearing headphones, I would recommend for anyone who finds office distractions overly distracting to get himself screened for ADD without hyperactivity. ADD is a federally recognized disability. If you have it, you can force your office to reasonably accommodate you under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and, if your office is receiving any government money, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
White noise is a sound that contains every frequency within the range of human
hearing (generally from 20 Hz to 20 kHz) in equal amounts. Most people perceive
this sound as having more high-frequency content than low, but this is not the
case. This perception occurs because each successive octave has twice as many
frequencies as the one preceding it. For example, from 100 Hz to 200 Hz, there are
one hundred discrete frequencies. In the next octave (from 200 Hz to 400 Hz),
there are two hundred frequencies.
White noise can be generated on a sound synthesizer. Sound designers can use this sound, with some processing and filtering, to create a multitude of effects such as wind, surf, space whooshes, and rumbles.
Pink noise is a variant of white noise. Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to reduce the volume at each octave. This is done to compensate for the increase in the number of frequencies per octave. Each octave is reduced by 3 dB, resulting in a noise sound wave that has equal energy at every octave.
Slashdot Mirror
Worst rackets in America...
1) RIAA/MPAA
2) Airlines/airfare
3) cell phones/charges
4) college textbooks
5) MiSCOsoft
Medicine.
Insurance.
Real Estate.
Diabetic retinopathy is easily preventable in all diabetics. Information can be found at the Life Extension Foundation site, the LEF forum site, and on the Medline database:
http://lef.org
http://forum.lef.org
http://medportal.com
In html:
http://headwize.com/projects/noise_prj.htm
Tau Zero:
...but the Greenies who demand an end to nuclear power...
The "greenies" who preach against nuclear power are not environmentalists. They are drama opportunists. There are no environmentalists against nuclear power. Environmentalists are serious people who study the science behind environmental issues.
Tau:
[previous poster]She advocated the right to be paid a fair amount for one's efforts...[/previous poster]
Show me where this is stated, either in one of her treatises or in one of her fictional works. Go ahead, I'll wait.
I'll bet you won't be able to find this in as many words, because the concept of "a fair amount" is foreign to the philosophy.
I only read Atlas Shrugged and a few interviews, etc. I think she was deeply interested in fairness, but not in the right to be paid fairly for work, as you also say. The fairness she sought was the right to be allowed to seek a market price for one's productiveness. One would be free under this definition to produce works with no market value.
It should also be noted that she felt that art that had social value would, in an objectivist society, command appropriate market prices. People writing good books would find a ready market for them in an objectivist society. If an artist is not able to support himself in an objectivist society by selling his art, it is an indictment of the poor value of his work, and therefore he doesn't deserve to get paid for it.
Does this sound right?
Skeptical Inquirer did a cover story on Tesla and the pseudoscience cult that has formed around him:
Skeptical Inquirer
SUMMER 1994 (vol 18, no 4.): `Extraordinary science' and the strange legacy of Nikola Tesla, by Johnson. Nikola Tesla: Genius, visionary, and eccentric, by Johnson.
Their take on it was that he a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of bad ones, and that the common perception of him as an infallible genius is misplaced.
9.4% of the audio on Freenet is Jesus Christ Superstar.
Umm...I'm not sure what to think.
All construction pollutes and because solar power is so diffuse, the construction of it's collectors pollutes significantly. There is the waste at the construction sites and waste at the factories where the construction materials are made.
Specifically with solar panels, there is the coal burned to make the panels (3% of the lifetime energy output of a solar panel is burned as coal) and, more seriously (serious enough to make solar a serious threat to the survivability of humanity), cadmium sulfide. This is not the limit of toxic waste from solar. Also, incidentally, the coal burned in solar panel construction is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants -- coal contains radioactive elements such as Pottasium 40, Thorium 232, Uranium, and Plutonium.
Visual pollution: All solar energy is diffuse energy and so its many collectors create much visual pollution.
With wind, noise pollution: Complaints of noise pollution from wind turbines are significant. Wind energy is diffuse and so the many collectors needed to concentrate it produce much noise pollution.
allanj:
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out?
The reason there are a number of safe options for the safe disposal of nuclear waste is that the health hazards of nuclear waste are trivial -- a point agreed upon by all peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject. The dose makes the poison and the poison, in this case, is surprisingly easy to keep the public form getting no more than minimal doses of. After converting the waste to something highly insoluble like glass or ceramic, some ultra-safe disposal options are:
Drop it into the ocean at random locations.
Bury it beneath the ocean floor.
Bury it in a salt mine.
Bury it in a place that isn't a salt mine.
Bury it in a highly engineered 30 gigadollar repository like Yucca mountain.
Use it as landfill.
Use it as construction material. (This is practically already done, as granite is loaded with naturally occuring uranium and many buildings are already made of granite -- yes, they make geiger counters go crazy and, no, they aren't harming the people inside.)
Bury it in shallow trenches.
Dump it directly into rivers.
The list goes on and on...
corvi42:
If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long?
After 500 years, high level nuclear waste is less radioactive than the ore it was mined from.
There are no guarantees it will remain safely contained for any amount of time. Requiring that the by-far single safest energy technology ever invented be the only energy technology to be held to a standard of absolute safety will lead to the heavy use of rather unsafe energy technologies such as solar and to a much greater extent the hyper-deadly coal when it turns out time and time again that solar can't meet our needs.
corvi42:
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity
Wave-generation plants, like windmills, would likely have massive maintenance requirements. Perhaps they would be much higher since seawater is highly corrosive. Maintenance of heavy machinery is some of the most dangerous employment the modern world offers. And there would be lots of this employment since wave energy, being a form of solar energy, is extremely diffuse compared to nuclear energy.
CoolAss:
...for those of you who are planning on saying "But fusion doesn't work!!" We reached break-even in 1983, and can acheive temperatures of over 150 million C. When we hit around 180m C, we will have a sustainable reaction which will basically solve the worlds energy problems.
Yes, you can build breeder reactors which use depleted uranium to run the plant, and this would give us nearly 1000 years of electricity...
As the efficiency of fuel usage goes up, as in the case of breeder reactors, the cost per unit of energy produced goes down proportionately. Therefore you can tap reserves that were previously considered uneconomic -- such as seawater which would provide far more than 5 billion years of energy, if only the earth would last that long.
but there is one problem, the waste from a breeder reactor is WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM.
There are many ways of obtaining nuclear weapons materials. Refining spent fuel from breeder reactors is one of the more difficult. Therefore, weapons proliferation caused by breeder reactors is a non-issue.
There is a difference between a sustainable rection and a workable power-plant. There is a difference between a workable power-plant and a constructable power-plant. There is a difference between a constructable power-plant and an economically constructable power-plant.
And since when did the world have energy problems?
Operating your own power plant is extremely dangerous and is wasteful of resources since excess capacity must be on hand to deal with the fact that your usage could vary wildly compared to the more moderate variation in usage by a group of hundreds, thousands, or millions of energy customers.
Uranium reserves that are cost-effective to mine will be enough to supply for around forty years.
These are known reserves. Historically, known reserves are unrealistically low estimates of true cost-effective reserves since mining companies are loathe to spend money on costly exploration beyond what is necessary to establish proof of enough capacity for the next few decades. The 1978 known reserves of oil ran out in the 80's. We now have twice those known reserves.
Also, these are conventional reserves. The nuclear energy in the fissionable material (uranium, thorium and plutonium) present as impurities in the coal that's burned every year in the U.S. is greater than the combustible energy of the coal. This is an unconventional uranium reserve. The uranium (and thorium and plutonium) in the captured fly ash could be easily extracted using known technologies and used to power nuke plants. Better yet, the coal plants could be decommissioned and the coal mined strictly for its uranium/thorium/plutonium content.
Other unconventional sources are granite and seawater.
corvi42:
You are citing deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of the meltdown. These statistics do not calculate the deaths and injuries which result as a long-term consequence of the hightened radiation levels.
My citations were for all forseeable fatalities for the next 5 billion years according to the bogus linear-no-threshold theory of radiation cancer-causing potential (which claims people can get cancer from any amount of radiation, no matter how low, and so therefore any radiation release will negatively affect people for eternity -- this theory, called the LNT, has been proven false of course).
Deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of a meltdown would be limited to cases of acute radiation poisoning, a rare disease. According to the same source, "there would be no detectable deaths in 98 out of 100 meltdowns, there would be over 100 such deaths in one out of 500 meltdowns, over 1,000 in one out of 5,000 meltdowns, and in 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns there would be about 3,500 fatalities.
"The largest number of detectable fatalities to date from an energy-related incident was an air-pollution episode in London in 1952 in which 3,500 deaths directly attributable to the pollution occured within a few days. Thus, with regard to detectable fatalities, the equivalent of the worst nuclear accident considered in the RSS -- expected once in 100,000 meltdowns -- has already occured with coal burning."
Source: Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90s; chapter 6, The Fearsome Reactor Meltdown Accident
PV technology...is closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable....
In order of clean to dirty (with a lower rank being cleaner), the three technologies being discussed rank:
1. Nuclear
2. Solar photovoltaic (PV)
3. Coal
PV and coal are close together in dirtiness compared with nuclear which is awkwardly cleaner. Using the industry-standard linear-no-threshold theory of radiation danger (which is biased against nuclear power and has been proven to be false), the eventual deaths caused by one large nuclear, coal, or PV powerplant run for a year are calculable as:
Nuclear: -420
Coal:_____175
PV:________85
Nuclear comes in at right around 1/3 of a death (from high-level waste, low level waste, and routine airborne emissions), until you consider the radon gas exposure that doesn't happen because the uranium that would have produced the radon was mined out of the ground and burned in the nuke plant. Then you get 420 lives saved.
Coal deaths are from air pollution, radon emissions, and chemical carcinogens.
PV deaths are from the coal power and the cadmium sulfide used to make the panels, with the bulk of deaths coming from the cadmium sulfide.
Source: Chapter 12, More on Radioactive Waste, from Bernard L. Cohen's The Nuclear Energy Option: An Alternative for the 90s.
the academic and scientific type communities have contributed the most effort to Linux software in the first ten years (is it 10 years old yet? Maybe eight years)
If you count from when emacs started being worked on in the mid 70s, the Linux software canon is about 25 years old.
But the 1.0 kernel was released in mid 1994, so six years counting from then.
Good point. Too bad it was the same point I made. Here it is again for your dancing and dining pleasure:
And I wasn't talking about wave disasters. The daily risks of jobs involved with the routine upkeep of wave generators is where much of the injury and death comes from. Low density power source = massive employment needed for upkeep = massive injury and death.
From Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90's:
for vast lengths of time [nuclear waste] remains quite toxic for longer than the current age of literate civilization.
Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile.
They still haven't figured out what to do with the waste material generated from Diablo
It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
the heat pollution from the plant has demonstrably (and, as a recent decision and fine shows, illegally) altered the ecology of the nearby cove.
All steam-turbine power plants require steam condensers that pollute thermally. Sorry about that.
Less dangerous?....>
Significantly. The danger for workers of a power source is roughly a function of the density of its fuel. You have to consider the routine deaths that occur daily with all forms of power production, not just consider the big accidents. Nuclear fission has, by far, the highest power density fuel and therefore the fewest injuries and deaths.
what would happen to the agriculture and habitability of SLO county if Diablo pulled a Chernobyl?
What would happen is something that wouldn't be significant because it would happen so rarely. Factor in worst-case-scenarios for nuclear and you still get less injury and death. Chernobyl was and is an unsafe reactor design. Diablo is a safe reactor design.
Costs less? PG&E is taking a loss on Diablo Canyon.
Diablo cost too much to build. A number of factors led to this. For cheaper reactors: Safety requirements need to be standardized and reactors need to be preapproved and built faster without fear of hearings and lawsuits after construction starts which can add costly delays. Since the early eighties, France used mass-produced, standardized designs. This is the safest and cheapest way to build nuclear fission plants and this is what needs to be done all over the world.
As far as I'm concerned, nuclear fission can stay sustainable and reliable "on paper" until we can fix its substantial real-world problems.
France has fixed nuclear's substantial real-world problems. The reason France was able to do this was largely because France has a political system that allowed the energy sector to bulldoze over the political opposition (which was substantial and roughly equivalent per capita to the opposition in the United States), and less so because of plain dumb luck in picking the winning formula (standardization and mass production).
While standardization and mass-production might seem obviously more efficient, it wasn't so obvious in the 70's when new technologies were coming out every week. Every utility wanted a custom power plant that would take advantage of the very latest tech. The latest tech is something you can't have with standardized designs. The second seduction was efficiency through massiveness. Contractors were continuously ratcheting up plant size by seducing utilities with higher-wattage plants that would cost just a little more. More gigawatts per buck = cost savings down the line. Unfortunately larger plants = larger loans. Add a few interest rate hikes and construction delays and you have a financial disaster.
In other words, you have Diablo. A model sustainable power plant, but way too pricey.
what about a volcanic based steam turbine?
Lava is hot because it is heated by decaying uranium and thorium. And radioactive potassium; forgot that one.
http://rglsun1.geol.vt.edu/seus.html/a& gt;
...geothermal...is really driven by the remaining heat from a fusion reaction within the earth...
Geothermal energy is the remaining heat from decaying uranium and thorium within the earth. There are no reactions involved, fission or fusion (Save for a natural fission reactor here or there. But natural reactors only speed up the process -- they cannot create more heat than would be created anyway from natural decay.).
Renewable energy sources all have these things in common:
1. They all pollute more than nuclear fission.
2. They are all more dangerous than nuclear fission.
3. They all cost more than nuclear fission.
4. They are all less reliable than nuclear fission.
5. None of them are sustainable.
Nuclear fission, a non-renewable power generation technology, is the only sustainable one yet invented. All of the renewables have problems. Some of the problems with wave generation are: salt-water corrosion; largely unable to be located where power is needed; construction expense; upkeep expense; danger to workers; destruction of natural resources (marine environments, whether beaches or offshore, are natural resources -- putting power plants in them = destruction); and variability of fuel (sometimes waves are high, sometimes not so high).
The fundamental important point is sustainability. Nuclear fission is sustainable on paper for at least 5 billion years, meaning it can outlast the sun.
It sounds like you're already thinking on the same wavelength as Fisher and Beckley.
In addition to wearing headphones, I would recommend for anyone who finds office distractions overly distracting to get himself screened for ADD without hyperactivity. ADD is a federally recognized disability. If you have it, you can force your office to reasonably accommodate you under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and, if your office is receiving any government money, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
White noise is nothing really but random static in which all sound frequencies are equally present.
True, but white noise deserves a more complex explanation like the following one from
http://iroi.seu.edu.cn/books/wh ati s/whitenoi.htm
white noise and pink noise
White noise is a sound that contains every frequency within the range of human
hearing (generally from 20 Hz to 20 kHz) in equal amounts. Most people perceive
this sound as having more high-frequency content than low, but this is not the
case. This perception occurs because each successive octave has twice as many
frequencies as the one preceding it. For example, from 100 Hz to 200 Hz, there are
one hundred discrete frequencies. In the next octave (from 200 Hz to 400 Hz),
there are two hundred frequencies.
White noise can be generated on a sound synthesizer. Sound designers can use this sound, with some processing and filtering, to create a multitude of effects such as wind, surf, space whooshes, and rumbles.
Pink noise is a variant of white noise. Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to reduce the volume at each octave. This is done to compensate for the increase in the number of frequencies per octave. Each octave is reduced by 3 dB, resulting in a noise sound wave that has equal energy at every octave.
No, wait, it was working up until a few minutes ago. Apparently the monkey's arm was censored by PornSweeper. Oh well. Should've used SSH...