Hmmm... I have very much enjoyed some long theological conversations with Reconstructionist and Conservative rabbis, but I rarely try to do so with Orthodox Jews because of irreconcilable differences in our respective attitudes toward things like racial and gender issues.
So I apologize if I've mischaracterized Orthodoxy as a whole, in regards to acceptance of science. I was under the impression that Orthodox Jews believed literally in Maimonides' 13 principles.
No, no, that's not at all what I said. You're not hearing what I'm saying yet.
In your reply, you've equated religion with illogic and mythology. These are not features of religion. They are features of the particular religion you know about.
Oh, absolutely... I didn't mean to imply that you should go join a religion before deciding it's not for you. I can tell I don't want to drink flaming gasoline without even tasting it!
However, you should not expect to be able to pass judgment on the subtle flavors of wine if you aren't ever going to taste anything but Mad Dog 20/20, eh?
As I said before, It's not surprising that most non-religious people think they know all about religion. It's because they have to spend so much time and effort avoiding whatever religion their rulers, parents and neighbors keep trying to force down their throats. In truth, they usually do know a lot about those particular religions - often more than their adherents!
But there's a very big difference between understanding religion and understanding any particular religion's beliefs and behaviors. So non-religious persons who wish to avoid making major misstatements should either stick to criticizing the specific religion(s) they actually know about, or do some serious long-term study of theology and religious philosophy.
You can choose either path and you'll be able to exercise your critical faculties without compromising your integrity. Those who choose to damn all based on the actions of a few, though, they tend to come across as either intolerant fools or dangerous bigots. It's an easy trap to fall into.
Similarly, the USA has vast acreage under the plow, vast unfarmed prairies, and large deserts so it makes sense for us to work on sustainable carbon-neutral biofuels.
India also has a troublesome nuclear power right next door, and thus is (probably/unfortunately/sadly) interested in the bomb-making potential of nuclear fission technologies.
The USA has enough bombs already that we can pretty easily keep our arsenals full for the foreseeable future.
You project a lot. I have little or no interest in the things you so desperately want me to champion. Your issues are not mine. Have you considered therapy?
I mean, you are trying to defend bumbling, inept corporations suckling at the taxpayer teat, running obsolete technologies to provide inefficient services. And when confronted with your own misstatements, you don't admit error honorably, you degenerate into pathetically nitpicking details of tragic events - radiation didn't kill people, a tsunami did.
You love nuclear power. I understand. You are not rational on the subject and cannot believe any report that in any way threatens your faith. I understand. I grew up in a religious household so I've seen it before.
Wait, you said flat out there were no reports of radiation injuries, I proved conclusively that there were with ten seconds of googling, and you say I'm a liar?
You're a funny little guy! Tell me all about anthropogenic global warming now!
And yet, not a single report of a radiation injury
Did you bother looking for any? Because I didn't have any trouble finding dozens of such reports after ten seconds of research.
Which really didn't surprise me, since I remember reading them in most of the major newspapers and online news feeds.
Over 20 workers had been injured by 18 March, including one who was exposed to a large amount of ionizing radiation when the worker tried to vent vapour from a valve of the containment building. Three more workers were exposed to radiation over 100 mSv, and two of them were sent to a hospital due to beta burns on 24 March. Two other workers, Kazuhiko Kokubo, 24, and Yoshiki Terashima, 21, were killed by the tsunami while conducting emergency repairs immediately after the quake. Their bodies were found on March 30.
The Fukushima 50 (actually around 280 volunteers, I believe) knowingly went into the exclusion zone prepared to die. Are you going to pretend none of them got injured, or that their injuries somehow were not really important? These people have asked to be anonymous, and not to be bothered by the press (and so far they haven't been) but they have knowingly set their limit for radiation to 250 millisieverts - five times the maximum allowed in US plants, twelve times the max allowed in France, and more than twice the dose at which an increase in cancer risk is evident.
"It's hard to believe anyone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
Look, now I Godwinned the thread. I hope you're happy.
The sources I find by googling state that no thorium reactor has ever performed to commercial power production requirements, significant operational disadvantages have not yet been overcome (particularly in the fuel-processing stages) and that development mostly ceased 50 years ago because in practice it's so far been even less cost-effective than uranium and plutonium fission plants.
However, research is ongoing, especially in countries with large thorium deposits. Perhaps someday soon it will be possible to build a truly effective commercial thorium reactor. It's almost as likely as commercial fusion plants and much more likely than "zero point energy" plants.
Well obviously the gas in the groundware is not from fracking.
After all, leading experts selected by the Bush administration and paid by the fracking industry have determined that the gas in people's wells came from rotting plant material, so therefore it can't possibly be caused by fracking.
Scientists and other godless atheists usually think that all natural gas was formed by rotting plant material laid down in the carboniferous era. These people believe in other dumb things too, like dinosaurs and homosexuality and stuff that's not in the Bible. You can safely ignore their "evidence" and "logic" because they are tools of the devil.
In reality, it's easy to tell the pure, ideologically correct gas that comes from fracking apart from the biologically-derived natural gas that comes up in people's wells immediately after a fracking operation. See, the gas that comes from fracking is primarily composed of Jesus farts and burps, which is easily determined by the super-sensitive dowsing instruments our experts have in their labs.
Your statement describing "the problem with religion" does not distinguish between some religions (i.e., the science-denying, intolerant ones like Baptist Christianity and Orthodox Judaism) and all religions (which would include religions that specifically endorse the scientific method or have no such conflicts, for example Unitarian Universalism and some of the various later forms of Judaism popular in the USA).
You've also made an error of fact, although it's understandable - I assume you've got better things to do with your time than hang out in Bible Belt tent revivals, so you weren't aware that Bible Belters quite often do rail against Buddhists. This is why such a big deal was made about Al Gore being friendly towards Buddhists during the Gore/Bush presidential race - he lost votes among conservative Christians in the so-called "heartland". Many fundamentalists will tell you quite sincerely that both the Buddha and Mohammed were direct manifestations of Satan, and that all non-Christian religions should be suppressed violently by the state. Some of them feel that way about the Pope, too.
If you avoid contact with religion you are unlikely to be able to speak authoritatively about it. This is a basic philosophic principle that scientists should not forget; purposeful ignorance does not grant enlightenment. Unfortunately, in the western world, everyone gets their faces jammed into Christianity all the time - governments directly sponsor it, through the scheduling of school holidays and other cultural events - so everyone tends to think they have lots of contact with religion, when really they've probably only had contact with one or two tiny, stagnant tide-pools in the vast sea of religious thought.
In mom's basement, on a poorly secured single-user machine that runs a GUI on the console 24x7, the proposed hierarchy probably makes good sense.
But a general purpose file system reorganization also needs to work for family machines (my kids and their friends each have their own unprivileged accounts) and for small business office servers, and for large enterprise application servers. The tip-off is the word "general" in the phrase "general purpose file system".
In multi-user deployments, particularly large secured ones, it's incredibly useful to have a separate place for user executables (generally dynamically linked to unprivileged libraries), sysadmin executables (often statically linked or suid/guid tagged), and site/host/application specific executables (like X11 apps for example, or tomcat stuff).
Segregating things this way helps with establishing backup and security policies and permits partial upgrades - it makes a smart sysadmin's life easier and makes audits simpler too. Obviously, for unemployed hackers who run X11 on single-user laptops all the time, it's not so important.
Sysadmins have always complained about the way Red Hat piles all the X11-only executables in with the pure CLI stuff. That's the opposite of useful categorization; mix everything up randomly in one bag. Why not just put everything in the fs root if these distinctions aren't useful or meaningful? Screw having a separate directory for configuration files and variable data, eh? This is one step further back down the wrong path - categorization is useful!
For the record I got nothing against unemployed teenager hackers lurking in basements. But re-arranging a general purpose system into a system optimized for their use case seems misguided.
It's cheaper and more economical to build a methane-fired power plant than to build a nuclear fission facility.
If the power companies wanted to shut down their aging, unsafe installations they could have a highly profitable power plant running in a tenth of the time, at half the cost of building a new nuke.
Failure to do right in one instance does not justify doing wrong in another. The only tax-funded energy subsidies I strongly favor are for research in the public domain.
We're on the same page. I object to the current generation of nuclear power plants on technical, military, political, and economic grounds. But that doesn't mean there can't ever be safe nuclear technologies.
The key is strong funding of research within the educational system. DARPA delivers what Excelon and Duke Energy cannot. Spending money to ensure the profits of buggy whip makers, when that same money could have been spent to educate the next generation, is criminal foolishness.
I don't know of any successful thorium reactors or fast breeders. Fast breeders have been remarkably failure-prone in practice, none of them delivering on their bold promises in actual profits, and thorium is a fantasy technology at this point.
It would be a great idea to heavily fund research into these technologies (and also LENR, and algal production of biofuels) within the University system, but subsidizing private companies to build unproven designs with tax dollars does not make any economic sense at all. It's once again socializing risk and privatizing profits, which is a stupid and destructive policy given that the taxpaying public has clearly expressed a strong dislike of nuclear power.
As long as nation-states exist, it is desirable that one's own nation should be self-sufficient for energy and food. If other nations can blackmail your society by threatening your food and energy supplies you are a effectively a client state, and have lost some ability to act independently.
Nuclear power plants are a enormous national security liability, though. A highly distributed energy generation grid that does not rely on any single technology would be more reliable, more sustainable, less vulnerable to attack, and easier to defend. And using conventional weapons on a solar plant, gas-fired plant, windmill or biofuel refinery will not cause the release of anything equivalent to Cesium-137.
If my nation goes to war with yours, and you have built fission plants, I will target them and make the area around those plants uninhabitable for a century and cripple your energy production at the same time. It's a military no-brainer to go for the enemies' weak points.
The US government, however, does not seem to understand military preparedness or national security. I'm sure it's incredibly frustrating for the professional military; all the dollars spent on "security theater" would have been better used to build sustainable biotech energy plants. Nuclear power plants are not only economically nonviable, putting them on your own soil is militarily foolish.
Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market
What free market? Nuclear primarily competes with coal, where the main costs (pollution) are entirely socialized.
It's nice to see some intelligent responses instead of the same tired nuke-shill talking points for once.
You're right; there is no free and fair energy market.
I personally believe the existing empirical evidence that nuclear power isn't competitive, but unless we get rid of all subsidies and impose true cost accounting on all dirty, obsolete energy sources we can't really know with absolute certainty.
A difficult problem, though, is that costs of conventional nuclear fission plants are both front- and back-loaded. A functional economic system has to accommodate the reality that unethical players will always exist. You don't want to build a system that rewards greedy bastards, but you do want your system to easily survive them. An unethical player can build a fission plant (taking the up front costs) and then run it until it fails, reaping enormous profits and spending them immediately on politicians, hookers and blow before the back end costs come due. The length of time a fission reactor can be reasonably expected to run before failing makes it a good gamble that such a player will be elderly or in a retirement home long before that happens. So he can safely plan on letting society pay the back end price, just as society pays the externalized costs of burning coal. This appears to be the strategy embodied in the 2005 Cheney national energy policy, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.
You're right, the government does subsidize other energy technologies.
The difference is that nuclear has been subsidized for half a century (and still can't turn a profit without ripping off taxpayers who don't want it) while renewables are a relatively new investment that the majority of taxpayers actually want to see developed.
If you oppose all such subsidies that's a different argument than the one we're having now. It's a good argument and well worth having, though; if the government stopped all corporate welfare the price of oil would skyrocket and lots of our problems would be solved relatively quickly by pure market forces. I personally don't believe that any market should be entirely unregulated, but I suspect that what the US government does to distort energy markets is actually worse than doing nothing.
If the US government wants to financially sponsor energy technologies, it should do so in the universities and not in private industry. Corporate welfare is bad for business, it props up buggy whip makers and eliminates opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Interesting; you claim that anti-nuclear "fucktards" are actively preventing the shutdown of nuclear power plants? The operators want to shut them down, but anti-nuclear fucktards won't let them!
And these same "fucktards" are responsible for the Bush administrations' re-licensing obsolete plants that were scheduled for decommissioning? They mounted a letter-writing campaign to Dick Cheney, I guess - Don't close those plants, Dick!
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, which I assume is called "Violent Paranoid Fantasies Weekly".
You're right; the disaster was caused by a normal event. Natural disasters have happened thousands of times in the past and will happen again tens of thousands of times in the future. They cannot be prevented and are mostly unpredictable as well (although we're getting better at the prediction part).
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
Slashdot Mirror
This entire conversational thread works OK for me just as it stands, though.
Hmmm... I have very much enjoyed some long theological conversations with Reconstructionist and Conservative rabbis, but I rarely try to do so with Orthodox Jews because of irreconcilable differences in our respective attitudes toward things like racial and gender issues.
So I apologize if I've mischaracterized Orthodoxy as a whole, in regards to acceptance of science. I was under the impression that Orthodox Jews believed literally in Maimonides' 13 principles.
No, no, that's not at all what I said. You're not hearing what I'm saying yet.
In your reply, you've equated religion with illogic and mythology. These are not features of religion. They are features of the particular religion you know about.
Oh, absolutely... I didn't mean to imply that you should go join a religion before deciding it's not for you. I can tell I don't want to drink flaming gasoline without even tasting it!
However, you should not expect to be able to pass judgment on the subtle flavors of wine if you aren't ever going to taste anything but Mad Dog 20/20, eh?
As I said before, It's not surprising that most non-religious people think they know all about religion. It's because they have to spend so much time and effort avoiding whatever religion their rulers, parents and neighbors keep trying to force down their throats. In truth, they usually do know a lot about those particular religions - often more than their adherents!
But there's a very big difference between understanding religion and understanding any particular religion's beliefs and behaviors. So non-religious persons who wish to avoid making major misstatements should either stick to criticizing the specific religion(s) they actually know about, or do some serious long-term study of theology and religious philosophy.
You can choose either path and you'll be able to exercise your critical faculties without compromising your integrity. Those who choose to damn all based on the actions of a few, though, they tend to come across as either intolerant fools or dangerous bigots. It's an easy trap to fall into.
Yes, India is believed to contain at least 25% of the world's thorium resources, so it makes sense for them to work on exploiting them.
Similarly, the USA has vast acreage under the plow, vast unfarmed prairies, and large deserts so it makes sense for us to work on sustainable carbon-neutral biofuels.
India also has a troublesome nuclear power right next door, and thus is (probably/unfortunately/sadly) interested in the bomb-making potential of nuclear fission technologies.
The USA has enough bombs already that we can pretty easily keep our arsenals full for the foreseeable future.
You project a lot. I have little or no interest in the things you so desperately want me to champion. Your issues are not mine. Have you considered therapy?
I mean, you are trying to defend bumbling, inept corporations suckling at the taxpayer teat, running obsolete technologies to provide inefficient services. And when confronted with your own misstatements, you don't admit error honorably, you degenerate into pathetically nitpicking details of tragic events - radiation didn't kill people, a tsunami did.
You love nuclear power. I understand. You are not rational on the subject and cannot believe any report that in any way threatens your faith. I understand. I grew up in a religious household so I've seen it before.
Wait, you said flat out there were no reports of radiation injuries, I proved conclusively that there were with ten seconds of googling, and you say I'm a liar?
You're a funny little guy! Tell me all about anthropogenic global warming now!
Did you bother looking for any? Because I didn't have any trouble finding dozens of such reports after ten seconds of research.
Which really didn't surprise me, since I remember reading them in most of the major newspapers and online news feeds.
The Fukushima 50 (actually around 280 volunteers, I believe) knowingly went into the exclusion zone prepared to die. Are you going to pretend none of them got injured, or that their injuries somehow were not really important? These people have asked to be anonymous, and not to be bothered by the press (and so far they haven't been) but they have knowingly set their limit for radiation to 250 millisieverts - five times the maximum allowed in US plants, twelve times the max allowed in France, and more than twice the dose at which an increase in cancer risk is evident.
"It's hard to believe anyone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
Look, now I Godwinned the thread. I hope you're happy.
The sources I find by googling state that no thorium reactor has ever performed to commercial power production requirements, significant operational disadvantages have not yet been overcome (particularly in the fuel-processing stages) and that development mostly ceased 50 years ago because in practice it's so far been even less cost-effective than uranium and plutonium fission plants.
However, research is ongoing, especially in countries with large thorium deposits. Perhaps someday soon it will be possible to build a truly effective commercial thorium reactor. It's almost as likely as commercial fusion plants and much more likely than "zero point energy" plants.
You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor!
Well obviously the gas in the groundware is not from fracking.
After all, leading experts selected by the Bush administration and paid by the fracking industry have determined that the gas in people's wells came from rotting plant material, so therefore it can't possibly be caused by fracking.
Scientists and other godless atheists usually think that all natural gas was formed by rotting plant material laid down in the carboniferous era. These people believe in other dumb things too, like dinosaurs and homosexuality and stuff that's not in the Bible. You can safely ignore their "evidence" and "logic" because they are tools of the devil.
In reality, it's easy to tell the pure, ideologically correct gas that comes from fracking apart from the biologically-derived natural gas that comes up in people's wells immediately after a fracking operation. See, the gas that comes from fracking is primarily composed of Jesus farts and burps, which is easily determined by the super-sensitive dowsing instruments our experts have in their labs.
Your statement describing "the problem with religion" does not distinguish between some religions (i.e., the science-denying, intolerant ones like Baptist Christianity and Orthodox Judaism) and all religions (which would include religions that specifically endorse the scientific method or have no such conflicts, for example Unitarian Universalism and some of the various later forms of Judaism popular in the USA).
You've also made an error of fact, although it's understandable - I assume you've got better things to do with your time than hang out in Bible Belt tent revivals, so you weren't aware that Bible Belters quite often do rail against Buddhists. This is why such a big deal was made about Al Gore being friendly towards Buddhists during the Gore/Bush presidential race - he lost votes among conservative Christians in the so-called "heartland". Many fundamentalists will tell you quite sincerely that both the Buddha and Mohammed were direct manifestations of Satan, and that all non-Christian religions should be suppressed violently by the state. Some of them feel that way about the Pope, too.
If you avoid contact with religion you are unlikely to be able to speak authoritatively about it. This is a basic philosophic principle that scientists should not forget; purposeful ignorance does not grant enlightenment. Unfortunately, in the western world, everyone gets their faces jammed into Christianity all the time - governments directly sponsor it, through the scheduling of school holidays and other cultural events - so everyone tends to think they have lots of contact with religion, when really they've probably only had contact with one or two tiny, stagnant tide-pools in the vast sea of religious thought.
In mom's basement, on a poorly secured single-user machine that runs a GUI on the console 24x7, the proposed hierarchy probably makes good sense.
But a general purpose file system reorganization also needs to work for family machines (my kids and their friends each have their own unprivileged accounts) and for small business office servers, and for large enterprise application servers. The tip-off is the word "general" in the phrase "general purpose file system".
In multi-user deployments, particularly large secured ones, it's incredibly useful to have a separate place for user executables (generally dynamically linked to unprivileged libraries), sysadmin executables (often statically linked or suid/guid tagged), and site/host/application specific executables (like X11 apps for example, or tomcat stuff).
Segregating things this way helps with establishing backup and security policies and permits partial upgrades - it makes a smart sysadmin's life easier and makes audits simpler too. Obviously, for unemployed hackers who run X11 on single-user laptops all the time, it's not so important.
Sysadmins have always complained about the way Red Hat piles all the X11-only executables in with the pure CLI stuff. That's the opposite of useful categorization; mix everything up randomly in one bag. Why not just put everything in the fs root if these distinctions aren't useful or meaningful? Screw having a separate directory for configuration files and variable data, eh? This is one step further back down the wrong path - categorization is useful!
For the record I got nothing against unemployed teenager hackers lurking in basements. But re-arranging a general purpose system into a system optimized for their use case seems misguided.
How come my posts are supported by actual facts and your posts are only supported by your vivid fantasies?
http://www.thenation.com/article/159997/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/radioactive-corporate-welfare/
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nuclear-renaissance-is-short-on-largess/
http://www.economist.com/node/14859289
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n1/reg15n1-rothwell.html
Terrestrial nuclear fission plants cannot compete in the marketplace. They are a handout of government money to favored corporations.
It's cheaper and more economical to build a methane-fired power plant than to build a nuclear fission facility.
If the power companies wanted to shut down their aging, unsafe installations they could have a highly profitable power plant running in a tenth of the time, at half the cost of building a new nuke.
Your narrative does not fly.
Failure to do right in one instance does not justify doing wrong in another. The only tax-funded energy subsidies I strongly favor are for research in the public domain.
We're on the same page. I object to the current generation of nuclear power plants on technical, military, political, and economic grounds. But that doesn't mean there can't ever be safe nuclear technologies.
The key is strong funding of research within the educational system. DARPA delivers what Excelon and Duke Energy cannot. Spending money to ensure the profits of buggy whip makers, when that same money could have been spent to educate the next generation, is criminal foolishness.
I don't know of any successful thorium reactors or fast breeders. Fast breeders have been remarkably failure-prone in practice, none of them delivering on their bold promises in actual profits, and thorium is a fantasy technology at this point.
It would be a great idea to heavily fund research into these technologies (and also LENR, and algal production of biofuels) within the University system, but subsidizing private companies to build unproven designs with tax dollars does not make any economic sense at all. It's once again socializing risk and privatizing profits, which is a stupid and destructive policy given that the taxpaying public has clearly expressed a strong dislike of nuclear power.
I very strongly agree.
As long as nation-states exist, it is desirable that one's own nation should be self-sufficient for energy and food. If other nations can blackmail your society by threatening your food and energy supplies you are a effectively a client state, and have lost some ability to act independently.
Nuclear power plants are a enormous national security liability, though. A highly distributed energy generation grid that does not rely on any single technology would be more reliable, more sustainable, less vulnerable to attack, and easier to defend. And using conventional weapons on a solar plant, gas-fired plant, windmill or biofuel refinery will not cause the release of anything equivalent to Cesium-137.
If my nation goes to war with yours, and you have built fission plants, I will target them and make the area around those plants uninhabitable for a century and cripple your energy production at the same time. It's a military no-brainer to go for the enemies' weak points.
The US government, however, does not seem to understand military preparedness or national security. I'm sure it's incredibly frustrating for the professional military; all the dollars spent on "security theater" would have been better used to build sustainable biotech energy plants. Nuclear power plants are not only economically nonviable, putting them on your own soil is militarily foolish.
It's nice to see some intelligent responses instead of the same tired nuke-shill talking points for once.
You're right; there is no free and fair energy market.
I personally believe the existing empirical evidence that nuclear power isn't competitive, but unless we get rid of all subsidies and impose true cost accounting on all dirty, obsolete energy sources we can't really know with absolute certainty.
A difficult problem, though, is that costs of conventional nuclear fission plants are both front- and back-loaded. A functional economic system has to accommodate the reality that unethical players will always exist. You don't want to build a system that rewards greedy bastards, but you do want your system to easily survive them. An unethical player can build a fission plant (taking the up front costs) and then run it until it fails, reaping enormous profits and spending them immediately on politicians, hookers and blow before the back end costs come due. The length of time a fission reactor can be reasonably expected to run before failing makes it a good gamble that such a player will be elderly or in a retirement home long before that happens. So he can safely plan on letting society pay the back end price, just as society pays the externalized costs of burning coal. This appears to be the strategy embodied in the 2005 Cheney national energy policy, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.
You're right, the government does subsidize other energy technologies.
The difference is that nuclear has been subsidized for half a century (and still can't turn a profit without ripping off taxpayers who don't want it) while renewables are a relatively new investment that the majority of taxpayers actually want to see developed.
If you oppose all such subsidies that's a different argument than the one we're having now. It's a good argument and well worth having, though; if the government stopped all corporate welfare the price of oil would skyrocket and lots of our problems would be solved relatively quickly by pure market forces. I personally don't believe that any market should be entirely unregulated, but I suspect that what the US government does to distort energy markets is actually worse than doing nothing.
If the US government wants to financially sponsor energy technologies, it should do so in the universities and not in private industry. Corporate welfare is bad for business, it props up buggy whip makers and eliminates opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Interesting; you claim that anti-nuclear "fucktards" are actively preventing the shutdown of nuclear power plants? The operators want to shut them down, but anti-nuclear fucktards won't let them!
And these same "fucktards" are responsible for the Bush administrations' re-licensing obsolete plants that were scheduled for decommissioning? They mounted a letter-writing campaign to Dick Cheney, I guess - Don't close those plants, Dick!
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, which I assume is called "Violent Paranoid Fantasies Weekly".
Best idea so far!
And make sure that bald guy from sector 7G is on the outside of the force field.
You're right; the disaster was caused by a normal event. Natural disasters have happened thousands of times in the past and will happen again tens of thousands of times in the future. They cannot be prevented and are mostly unpredictable as well (although we're getting better at the prediction part).
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
I wonder why they use the past tense, since Chernobyl is still an ongoing problem.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2067562,00.html
The fall of the USSR couldn't have happened at a worse time for the people of the Ukraine...