Your comment is excessively extreme. Flint is an outlier...admittedly not as much of an outlier as one would wish. And many rich children are also poisoning themselves, admittedly usually by choice and in different ways.
I, personally, suspect that poorer US citizens feed their children more junk food than wealthier ones do. That would probably be sufficient environmental degradation to explain most of the statistics.
Actually, a certain degree of inequality is necessary for *society* to work. But the difference between between the wealthiest and the poorest shouldn't be much more than a factor of 50, or things start getting unpleasant. Perhaps in as large as a population as we currently have a factor of 100 could be justifiable. This would argue in favor of a combination of a guaranteed annual income (for everyone) and an exponentially based income tax. (It should be so designed that every increase in tax is matched by a proportionate increase in income...but not, as I usually argue, linear.)
P.S.: Democracy isn't the only system that suffers instability when there is extreme centralization of wealth or power. They all do. Some hide the instability more than others do, but it surfaces in coup d'etates, palace revolutions, etc. Note that these chaotic turmoils of instability rarely even touch the underlying cause. Democracy tries to moderate this, but when there is "regulatory capture" then the moderation loses it's power, and instability increases. I judge that in the US today there has been "regulatory capture" of the electoral process. It would be nice to be proven wrong, but that's not the way I'd bet.
Back in the day, I thought of myself as a programmer, but my title was programmer/analyst, and towards the end I called myself a systems analyst, as that was common usage for what I did. But I still thought of myself as a programmer.
I don't think "software developer" is the right title for most people to chose. I think "software analyst/developer" would probably be better. But you need to check what term the place you're working for/applying at uses. And for best results be sure the title matches your skill set. (And it's ok to continue to think of yourself as a programmer.)
It may not quite be "making shit up", but it certainly appears to be "ad hoc adjustment after the experiment to fit the result returned by the experiment". This isn't always invalid, but is certainly not very convincing. Theoretical tests need to predict the result before the experiment is run.
That's probably the most important part, but being able to photograph an entire supernova explosion from slightly before the main event isn't without it's importance.
I do, however, wonder just how tightly this constrains the properties of dark matter. That could (possibly) be a real breakthrough.
In Bangladesh there was also a difference between shallow wells and deep wells. The water from the deep wells was loaded with arsenic. So deep doesn't automatically mean good, even if it hasn't been recharged.
And bottled water is frequently contaminated with plasticizers. And distilled water is lacking in trace minerals (bad ionic balance). And water run through ionic filters generally contains too much salt (as well as plasticizers). Etc.
I generally drink tap water, and hope the water company is doing a decent job.
"sitting there rusting" isn't implemented as a reprocessing system. But, yes, it's been proven technically doable. I don't know that it's been proven economically doable.
I do. I hated driving back when I did it, but I really liked the convenience of having a car. Additionally, I know I'm not a safe driver. I'm near-sighted, blind in one eye, and tend to lose myself in thought.
I would *LOVE* to have a car that I didn't need to drive. (Now, when it's convenient for her, I have my wife drive me. Otherwise I depend on public transit, about which I can only say...UGH.
P.S.: With my eyesight the DMV would not give me a license until I had a recent certification by an optometrist that my eyesight could not be corrected to be better. With that certificate they had no problem issuing the license...but I was dubious about accepting it. OTOH, if I were to try today they'd probably refuse me the license even with the note from my doctor. (They sure ought to!)
Don't be sure. Cars occasionally have mechanical problems that can result in their blocking the road. (I'll agree that your presumption that it was a human caused problem is probably correct, but that's probability, not certainty.)
I expect that when the automated cars progress from prototype stage to production stage they'll re-write the requirements.
At least they aren't demanding that someone run ahead of the car waving a red flag. (Actually, for prototype cars the regulations sound quite reasonable.)
Throughout history dikes and dams have failed. There's no particular reason to believe that they won't fail in the future. And when they fail you already have an emergency that is often more than available resources can deal with. If the failure of the dam or dike also means that you're going to flood your nuclear reactor, you've just vastly increased the difficulty of dealing with an emergency that already exceeds your ability to deal with.
This strike me as a bad answer. They shouldn't have been build in areas subject to flooding anyway. They were because it made cooling them cheaper. Now they can't be moved.
This isn't a crisis, but if it's not treated as an important problem it will BECOME a crisis at just the time when it can't be dealt with. It becomes critical that passive cooling suffice, and that the plant can be sealed against the incursion of water, probably with submarine style locks to allow personnel in ingress and exit. This should be in addition to the dams and dikes, not instead of. For normal operation you want the plant to be on dry land for lots of different reasons.
The above paragraph probably means you don't want to store spent fuel on site. It's also worth noting that even if passive cooling of a working plant is "safe", it will probably wreck the plant. So an auxiliary source of power that is expected to continue to work is extremely highly desirable. (Fukishima had one, but it was swamped by the tidal wave. So part of my recommendation is based on hindsight.)
N.B.: Whatever you build, expect that it will possibly fail, and ensure that the foreseeable failure modes are not excessively dangerous. This is one reason that space elevators are a dubious idea on Earth. There are other skyhooks which while not quite as beneficial are a lot less dangerous.
Some ice sheets in Antarctica are expanding, but others are melting. I believe that the estimate is that MUCH more ice is being lost than is being added.
P.S.: This should be expected with global warming, particularly with warming seas. Warmer seas evaporate more water yielding more precipitation. Some of that will fall on parts of Antarctica, yielding growing ice sheets. This can be expected to cause the ice sheets which aren't rapidly moving to grow. The ones that are moving rapidly will also add ice, but are likely to lose ice faster than new ice is added. The estimate is that they are losing ice faster than new ice is added in the entire continent rather than just in the individual ice sheets, but that doesn't prevent some ice sheets from growing. (The ones that aren't moving.)
What successful shutdowns and decomissionings can you point to?
The only one I can think of that *might* be called successful is one in Britain where they ended up filling the plant with cement as the cheapest answer. My suspicion is that all the pre-construction estimates for decommissioning were done by assuming everything worked optimally for the entire process, and then low balling the cost estimate.
P.S.: I'm not sure that filling the plant with concrete was a bad approach. I'm just sure that wasn't was the original decomissioning plans called for.
What do you mean "irredemably"? I've heard that there were some minor problems with it, but nothing that, to my mind, said it was a terrible solution.
OTOH, if you were asserting that the correct solution wasn't burial, but reprocessing, or even burning in a fast breeder, I'd say perhaps you have a point. (I'm not really convinced about the "fast breeder" argument, and I won't be until there's experimental evidence that proves it actually works even nearly as well as its proponents claim, but I'm not just discarding it.)
P.S.: While I hope fusion works, we don't have it yet, and I'm not convinced that it will be free of radioactive waste either, despite some claims I've read. Most sources seem to only claim less radioactive waste. So we still need reprocessing.
No! Those bricks are a source of process heat. You can use them to preheat water for other purposes.
You do end up with a bunch of stuff that so low level that it's less dangerous than Denver bedrock, but that can just be road gravel or something.
That said, until a reprocessing system is implemented I don't want any more nuclear plants. Promising that "We'll build one as soon as we finish building the plants"(not a real quote) hasn't worked out very well so far.
That the "router" could be flashed upon user initiated action is not at all the same as the router being flashed when you click "OK". That it's technically equivalent doesn't mean that it's equivalent in action. Otherwise this action on Phillips part would constitute fraud and extortion. Or perhaps it actually does. (I don't use the system, so I'm not familiar with the details of how the "upgrade" happened.)
Did you really wait that long to have a belief about the shape of the world? I remember trying to figure out what "people on the other side of the world" meant when I was 3 or 4. (I don't remember my conclusion. My guess is that before that I thought I lived in the center of the world and that it was "basically" flat. But that's a guess.)
That's quite a plausible scenario for how this occurred.
Unfortunately, what this means to me is that they have demonstrated the capability to shut down the lighting system without warning and without anyway back. And they've demonstrated a willingness to do so.
When figuring what amount of trust I should place in a product, when a manufacturer has embedded a way for them to unilaterally disable the system, I do not consider that I should spend either money or effort on it. That they may have had a decent intent this time does not excuse designing the system that way. Such a design reveals a malign intent, even if it's intended to always remain as a threat and never executed.
There is clearly s solar lobby, but to characterize them as a large and powerful lobby is grossly disingenuous. Either that or grossly misinformed.)
There are actually several different solar lobbies. E.g. P.G.&E. is lobbying to build centralized plants in the Mohave desert. This has many environmentalists upset, and I don't know how validly. But this same lobby group is rather opposed to rooftop solar.
It's not just because they get fed bad information, it's because they prefer to accept "bad" information. The same information is out there, available to nearly anybody, but people prefer to accept information that agrees with what they already believe.
Additionally, different people have different models of how the world works. And they are generally more willing to consider that someone who won't agree with them is an idiot than to consider that there may be a more basic disagreement.
E.g., can you explain to me why you believe the world is round? I'm not asking you to defend that belief, but rather to explain why you have it. My memories of believing the world is round go back to before I entered school, and I don't know why I believed it then. But I'm not really open to challenges to that belief. (Refinements, yes. Oblate spheroid gives me not problems. Shaped like a cube would.)
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Now about that $13,000 that they were charged with no explanation...
Your comment is excessively extreme. Flint is an outlier...admittedly not as much of an outlier as one would wish. And many rich children are also poisoning themselves, admittedly usually by choice and in different ways.
I, personally, suspect that poorer US citizens feed their children more junk food than wealthier ones do. That would probably be sufficient environmental degradation to explain most of the statistics.
Actually, a certain degree of inequality is necessary for *society* to work. But the difference between between the wealthiest and the poorest shouldn't be much more than a factor of 50, or things start getting unpleasant. Perhaps in as large as a population as we currently have a factor of 100 could be justifiable. This would argue in favor of a combination of a guaranteed annual income (for everyone) and an exponentially based income tax. (It should be so designed that every increase in tax is matched by a proportionate increase in income...but not, as I usually argue, linear.)
P.S.: Democracy isn't the only system that suffers instability when there is extreme centralization of wealth or power. They all do. Some hide the instability more than others do, but it surfaces in coup d'etates, palace revolutions, etc. Note that these chaotic turmoils of instability rarely even touch the underlying cause. Democracy tries to moderate this, but when there is "regulatory capture" then the moderation loses it's power, and instability increases. I judge that in the US today there has been "regulatory capture" of the electoral process. It would be nice to be proven wrong, but that's not the way I'd bet.
Back in the day, I thought of myself as a programmer, but my title was programmer/analyst, and towards the end I called myself a systems analyst, as that was common usage for what I did. But I still thought of myself as a programmer.
I don't think "software developer" is the right title for most people to chose. I think "software analyst/developer" would probably be better. But you need to check what term the place you're working for/applying at uses. And for best results be sure the title matches your skill set. (And it's ok to continue to think of yourself as a programmer.)
It may not quite be "making shit up", but it certainly appears to be "ad hoc adjustment after the experiment to fit the result returned by the experiment". This isn't always invalid, but is certainly not very convincing. Theoretical tests need to predict the result before the experiment is run.
It may well tell us details about the distribution and clumpiness of dark matter. That could be quite significant.
That's probably the most important part, but being able to photograph an entire supernova explosion from slightly before the main event isn't without it's importance.
I do, however, wonder just how tightly this constrains the properties of dark matter. That could (possibly) be a real breakthrough.
Yes, but so far the state hasn't taken over the local water company where I live.
In Bangladesh there was also a difference between shallow wells and deep wells. The water from the deep wells was loaded with arsenic. So deep doesn't automatically mean good, even if it hasn't been recharged.
And bottled water is frequently contaminated with plasticizers. And distilled water is lacking in trace minerals (bad ionic balance). And water run through ionic filters generally contains too much salt (as well as plasticizers). Etc.
I generally drink tap water, and hope the water company is doing a decent job.
"sitting there rusting" isn't implemented as a reprocessing system. But, yes, it's been proven technically doable. I don't know that it's been proven economically doable.
Nothing prevents one from being both.
I do. I hated driving back when I did it, but I really liked the convenience of having a car. Additionally, I know I'm not a safe driver. I'm near-sighted, blind in one eye, and tend to lose myself in thought.
I would *LOVE* to have a car that I didn't need to drive. (Now, when it's convenient for her, I have my wife drive me. Otherwise I depend on public transit, about which I can only say...UGH.
P.S.: With my eyesight the DMV would not give me a license until I had a recent certification by an optometrist that my eyesight could not be corrected to be better. With that certificate they had no problem issuing the license...but I was dubious about accepting it. OTOH, if I were to try today they'd probably refuse me the license even with the note from my doctor. (They sure ought to!)
Don't be sure. Cars occasionally have mechanical problems that can result in their blocking the road. (I'll agree that your presumption that it was a human caused problem is probably correct, but that's probability, not certainty.)
I expect that when the automated cars progress from prototype stage to production stage they'll re-write the requirements.
At least they aren't demanding that someone run ahead of the car waving a red flag. (Actually, for prototype cars the regulations sound quite reasonable.)
Throughout history dikes and dams have failed. There's no particular reason to believe that they won't fail in the future. And when they fail you already have an emergency that is often more than available resources can deal with. If the failure of the dam or dike also means that you're going to flood your nuclear reactor, you've just vastly increased the difficulty of dealing with an emergency that already exceeds your ability to deal with.
This strike me as a bad answer. They shouldn't have been build in areas subject to flooding anyway. They were because it made cooling them cheaper. Now they can't be moved.
This isn't a crisis, but if it's not treated as an important problem it will BECOME a crisis at just the time when it can't be dealt with. It becomes critical that passive cooling suffice, and that the plant can be sealed against the incursion of water, probably with submarine style locks to allow personnel in ingress and exit. This should be in addition to the dams and dikes, not instead of. For normal operation you want the plant to be on dry land for lots of different reasons.
The above paragraph probably means you don't want to store spent fuel on site. It's also worth noting that even if passive cooling of a working plant is "safe", it will probably wreck the plant. So an auxiliary source of power that is expected to continue to work is extremely highly desirable. (Fukishima had one, but it was swamped by the tidal wave. So part of my recommendation is based on hindsight.)
N.B.: Whatever you build, expect that it will possibly fail, and ensure that the foreseeable failure modes are not excessively dangerous. This is one reason that space elevators are a dubious idea on Earth. There are other skyhooks which while not quite as beneficial are a lot less dangerous.
Some ice sheets in Antarctica are expanding, but others are melting. I believe that the estimate is that MUCH more ice is being lost than is being added.
P.S.: This should be expected with global warming, particularly with warming seas. Warmer seas evaporate more water yielding more precipitation. Some of that will fall on parts of Antarctica, yielding growing ice sheets. This can be expected to cause the ice sheets which aren't rapidly moving to grow. The ones that are moving rapidly will also add ice, but are likely to lose ice faster than new ice is added. The estimate is that they are losing ice faster than new ice is added in the entire continent rather than just in the individual ice sheets, but that doesn't prevent some ice sheets from growing. (The ones that aren't moving.)
What successful shutdowns and decomissionings can you point to?
The only one I can think of that *might* be called successful is one in Britain where they ended up filling the plant with cement as the cheapest answer. My suspicion is that all the pre-construction estimates for decommissioning were done by assuming everything worked optimally for the entire process, and then low balling the cost estimate.
P.S.: I'm not sure that filling the plant with concrete was a bad approach. I'm just sure that wasn't was the original decomissioning plans called for.
What do you mean "irredemably"? I've heard that there were some minor problems with it, but nothing that, to my mind, said it was a terrible solution.
OTOH, if you were asserting that the correct solution wasn't burial, but reprocessing, or even burning in a fast breeder, I'd say perhaps you have a point. (I'm not really convinced about the "fast breeder" argument, and I won't be until there's experimental evidence that proves it actually works even nearly as well as its proponents claim, but I'm not just discarding it.)
P.S.: While I hope fusion works, we don't have it yet, and I'm not convinced that it will be free of radioactive waste either, despite some claims I've read. Most sources seem to only claim less radioactive waste. So we still need reprocessing.
No! Those bricks are a source of process heat. You can use them to preheat water for other purposes.
You do end up with a bunch of stuff that so low level that it's less dangerous than Denver bedrock, but that can just be road gravel or something.
That said, until a reprocessing system is implemented I don't want any more nuclear plants. Promising that "We'll build one as soon as we finish building the plants"(not a real quote) hasn't worked out very well so far.
That the "router" could be flashed upon user initiated action is not at all the same as the router being flashed when you click "OK". That it's technically equivalent doesn't mean that it's equivalent in action. Otherwise this action on Phillips part would constitute fraud and extortion. Or perhaps it actually does. (I don't use the system, so I'm not familiar with the details of how the "upgrade" happened.)
Did you really wait that long to have a belief about the shape of the world? I remember trying to figure out what "people on the other side of the world" meant when I was 3 or 4. (I don't remember my conclusion. My guess is that before that I thought I lived in the center of the world and that it was "basically" flat. But that's a guess.)
That's quite a plausible scenario for how this occurred.
Unfortunately, what this means to me is that they have demonstrated the capability to shut down the lighting system without warning and without anyway back. And they've demonstrated a willingness to do so.
When figuring what amount of trust I should place in a product, when a manufacturer has embedded a way for them to unilaterally disable the system, I do not consider that I should spend either money or effort on it. That they may have had a decent intent this time does not excuse designing the system that way. Such a design reveals a malign intent, even if it's intended to always remain as a threat and never executed.
There is clearly s solar lobby, but to characterize them as a large and powerful lobby is grossly disingenuous. Either that or grossly misinformed.)
There are actually several different solar lobbies. E.g. P.G.&E. is lobbying to build centralized plants in the Mohave desert. This has many environmentalists upset, and I don't know how validly. But this same lobby group is rather opposed to rooftop solar.
It's not just because they get fed bad information, it's because they prefer to accept "bad" information. The same information is out there, available to nearly anybody, but people prefer to accept information that agrees with what they already believe.
Additionally, different people have different models of how the world works. And they are generally more willing to consider that someone who won't agree with them is an idiot than to consider that there may be a more basic disagreement.
E.g., can you explain to me why you believe the world is round? I'm not asking you to defend that belief, but rather to explain why you have it. My memories of believing the world is round go back to before I entered school, and I don't know why I believed it then. But I'm not really open to challenges to that belief. (Refinements, yes. Oblate spheroid gives me not problems. Shaped like a cube would.)
OTOH, it's worth remembering that people make that same mistake.