Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market, which is why the US government uses taxpayer dollars to subsidize it. It's old, obsolete, lame technology that favors entrenched corporate interests and provides an excuse for the ongoing centralization and militarization of commercial power generation.
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Libertarians paying attention will note that Price-Anderson is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025). This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future.
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of review, removing barriers to approval, and increasing the time a permit is valid to 40 years.
Today, nuclear plant licensing is going strong. The period when no new licenses were applied for closely corresponds to the period when lack of taxpayer subsidies and the lapse of Price-Anderson made building plants economic suicide - and the fact that license applications revived almost immediately after the GWBush administration reintroduced them is strong circumstantial evidence that nuclear operators must fleece taxpayers in order to survive in the US market, just as they do in every other country that uses nuclear power.
If you believe in capitalism, free markets, or representative government all this should offend you. The White House and the neo-con wing of the Republican party forced an unconsenting electorate to sponsor a huge market distortion - potentially driving market-selected options out of the competition - in order for their corporate buddies to plunder the public pocketbook.
I don't think I've ever seen OpenBSD with a GUI installed in the real world. I usually see it in DNS/DHCP and firewall roles... deep infrastructure for highly secure nets.
I realize I've been carpet-bombing you with vast amounts of information, but I've already answered that question in my previous posts. 1996, in Tennessee.
The idea that the NRC is an anti-nuclear conspiracy is completely unsupportable. Your general point that regulators can and often do override actual law is certainly valid, but in this particular case the regulator of the nuclear industry is... the nuclear industry.
There are four plants actively being built in the USA today. There are more than twenty more that will definitely be built unless forced taxpayer sponsorship and government protection from liability is discontinued. The Watts Bar plant being finished up by the TVA (please share your opinion of the TVA!) is projected to bring unit #2 online in 2012.
If you're wondering how I know all this stuff, well, my first job after college was building thermonuclear weapon delivery systems. My father was on the team that built the Minuteman 3, and I worked on the Peacekeeper (MX missile), and we've both worked on various cruise missiles and sub-launched systems. My next job was working on proprietary distributed control systems used to (among other things) run the Savannah River nuclear plants.
The truth is that nuclear power is not really economically viable in a free market. Only socialist nations that have no major sources of energy within their borders have any valid reason to use terrestrial nuclear fission plants. In the USA, anti-nuclear activists and free market advocates can seek the same goal - removal of government sponsorship of nuclear power. Let the market decide, and both of these unlikely bedfellows will win!
Just choose a diameter that will accommodate anything you might expect to pull in the future and be sure to have some intermediate weather-tight boxes every few hundred feet.
The problem with that is that the provider will know you did it, because it's been done right.
If you do a half-assed looking job you can just call 'em up and when they say "we don't have a cable into your house" you can reply "yes you do, what are you talking about, I'm looking right at it!" and make them send a truck out to check. The guy on the truck will say "hmmm, looks just like one of ours" if you do the job badly enough, and you'll probably get hooked right in.
TL;DR version - this post is chock full of links, from a grab-bag of right-wing, left-wing, and non-partisan sources. If you only have time to read one, read the Cato Institute one. It clearly lays out the economics of nuclear power in toto, unlike all the other links that are merely documentation of individual points.
OK. Now, despite propaganda from pro-nuclear right-wing pundits, there simply is no ban on nuclear power plants in the USA. If there was such a ban, there would have to be some regulation or policy to say so, and there isn't. New reactors are on the way, according to the NRC licensing authorities.
You can argue that the Clinton administration's refusal to relicense unsafe plants and active discouragement of subsidies was a de facto ban on new nuclear power sources, and I would tend to agree with that. But that argument only applies to the duration of Clinton's presidency.
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Price-Anderson, incidentally, is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025).
This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future. Allowing politically connected players to break lawful contracts with impunity is not only philosophically anti-Libertarian, it's anti-Socialist, too - I'd call it fascism.
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of rev
The difference, here in the colonies, is that tech departments are often mandated to place an extremely powerful computer in the tech-ignorant CEO's office. In some companies, no other employee is permitted to have a 'better' computer, swivel chair or office window than the CEO. I know of dozens of US companies where this is true (although often the CEO's computer isn't nearly as good as he's been told it is). I even know of one CEO who keeps the computer facing the door, so everyone can see that he never turns it on. It's a power statement.
The super-powerful business barons of yesteryear did not have typewriters in their offices. They had rolexes.;)
But I don't, so I will content myself with observing that it is now a power and status statement (outside hardcore geek circles, anyway) to be incompetent in the use of the computer you have.
The most powerful CEOs rarely answer their own email, for example; they usually have secretaries because they can't spell, can't use grammar correctly, and don't know how to program the insanely powerful status-symbol computer on their desk.
You are making the assumption that nuclear power plants would nut be profitable under free market conditions.
Admittedly I'm just working from currently available information. There has never been an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission plant - every single one has required government subsidies, taxpayer-subsidized protection from risk, government-assured forced sales of power to citizens who would have preferred to buy power from non-nuclear sources, etc. etc. etc.
In a market that allowed competition, there would be non-nuclear options. It has been abundantly demonstrated that when non-nuclear options are available, people prefer them. This would drive the selling price of nuclear power down, not up, which would make them even less economically viable than they are now.
You further make the assumptions that materials inside of nuclear power plants are not valuable, and would not make up the cost of decommissioning, and likely turn a profit.
Hmmm. Well, yes, I am assuming that waste will not be freely sold to the highest bidder, since it would be highly potent war materiel. You do have a point there; it depends on exactly how free you want your free market to be. If you allow the sale of dirty bombs and their precursors, then yes large amounts of high level waste are extremely valuable and their sale would reduce decommissioning costs dramatically. Otherwise, not so much; existing research reactors can already produce all the nuclear materials we need (for medicine, detectors, etc.) inexpensively.
But you are right on about everything else. We can't do anything with fascism. We have to ditch this fascist economics system or we will all be doomed.
See, this is where Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich can have a meeting of minds (I like 'em both, personally) despite their extreme differences.
You seem to indicate a preference for socialist policy, but your assumptions for such policies are unsound. We could, of course, find out fairly quickly if they are true or not by at least temporarily lifting the ban on new nuclear plant development and nixing all subsidies on the industry.
There is no such ban. One was recently built near me, in fact, and this page says there are 20 more in the works. The US government has been offering extremely attractive subsidies since 2005 to offset public distaste for nuclear power. The fact that people do not want them does not matter; our government continues to privatize profit and socialize risks by forcing the US taxpayer to not only subsidize these plants but also to buy the power they produce. In a free market, there would be no need for nuclear power; biogas would drive it off the market by being more desirable to informed consumers (and also cheaper, in the long run).
But I think I know why the banksters and their allies love nuclear power. Nuclear power can't be distributed among the people like other forms of electricity generation, and while you can't really get away with using the military to protect the profits of coal-burning power plants, you can definitely have your government lackeys send soldiers with M16s to guard centralized nuke plants. Nuclear plants are a huge military liability that no general in his right mind would want on friendly soil, but so what? The military is controlled by civilian politicians who are easily bought. Nuclear power is yet another way for entrenched powers to stay entrenched without ever having to be smarter, faster, stronger, or in any other way better than their competition.
Nonetheless, this is where you and I meet, philosophically. We have differing solutions in mind but we're both willing to get rid of subsidies to private industry (I'm also willing to push cost externalities back on to commerce and industry by force) and see what happens. It won't be worse than leaving the banksters in charge!
Unfortunately American politicians are engaged in rewriting all bodies of law to favor known amoral actors, not to restrict them. But I do agree with you.
I think we'd see another technological revolution if we stopped distorting the market by actively encouraging these "negative externalities" of which you speak. Fission would probably fall by the wayside along with fossil fuels, and we'd run on biofuels or cold fusion or something.
Think about the extent to which companies go to avoid being sued.
OK, I'm thinking. I'm thinking "regulatory capture", and "political action committees", and "unlimited campaign contributions". Yep, got it.
Now allow nuclear power plants to be sued for radiation release (they currently can NOT be sued if they meet regulatory requirements, which Fukushima did).
OK, that can't actually happen in our current reality. Because the nuclear power plants are owned by the same companies that own the government, and they are permitted, nay, encouraged to write legislation to prevent this. You try to stop this, and all you'll get is a horse's head in your bed and an IRS audit.
Do you see how this works?
I sure do. The government enlists private corporations to build and run nuclear power plants by using taxpayer dollars (since nuclear fission plants are not economically viable in a free market, but the government wants them for war and science purposes) and the private corporations purchase legislation that allows them to obviate risk. It's all very, very clear.
In a well regulated free market, terrestrial fission plants would not exist, because there aren't enough customers willing to pay for the decommissioning costs they would have to charge up front. In a laissez-faire market, of course, the plants would never be decommissioned, because there's no profit in it. The people who built them would just design them to fail after they died, and in the absence of regulation that would work... for them.
I had all these except the (apparently rare) Mickey bestiality one, and half a dozen more. They walked down a ramp, swinging their legs, but with no knee flexing. Google "Ramp walker" for more. They'd walk forever if you had an infinitely long ramp or an inclined treadmill.
If you buy a house at any point, take the time to properly wire it inside the walls with the best cabling you can afford. You won't regret it, signal isolation is a wonderful thing (and pets aren't as likely to chew the wires inside a wall).
But no way is it worth any real effort to wire up a rental.
I understand your point; I mean no disrespect to lisp or haskell. Do you get my point?
PHP beats lisp in number of real-world deployments earning money and eyeballs. Does that mean PHP is better? No, it means more people know how to use it. (Cue the PHP haters now, I guess.)
If I write ten thousand lines of lisp, I'll be the maintenance programmer for that code for the rest of my career. Nothing but adding the new feature-of-the-week for PHBs - no thanks!
People believe all kinds of crazy things. Show me data to support your claim.
I did, repeatedly. So did you - your link supports my statements. But you are so obsessional or delusional that you've apparently lost the ability to read critically.
The data says mercury can be found in mammalian tissue for at least 120 days after administration of thiomersal. You have decided, in spite of the available research, to believe otherwise. OK, you've been led to water, but you don't want to drink.
So eat all the mercury you want. Go whip the convict labor in the cinnabar mines and huff the fumes from the roasters. I certainly won't force you to stop. You are clearly deeply committed to mercury ingestion - and that's fine with me. Enjoy!
You are also free to subscribe to Paracelsus' overly broad, mentally limiting paradigm all you want. I still won't stop you. It's a valid way of interpreting the data. I personally subscribe to a more nuanced view, that fits the data better for my purposes, but I don't see any reason to try to browbeat others into accepting my point of view as incontrovertible dogma. Which is another characteristic we apparently don't have in common.
Languages are NOT created equal and the challenges we face now needs more powerful languages. That is where Lisp and Scheme come into their own. I think, I'll look into Haskell next. Another language that I previously wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
All turing-complete languages are equally capable, eh? You can create abominations and masterpieces in nearly any language.
Programmers, however, tend to work best in a language that suits their unique preferences and abilities. No language is inherently better than all others, for all people, because people are not interchangeable featureless units. Some people are OK with monkey-patching, even.
Personally, I like to create code that other people can build on and maintain, rather than writing myself into a permanent maintenance position. That kind of rules out Lisp, since nobody else wants to maintain it - among computer languages, popularity is a feature, and lack of popularity is a bug.
Actually... the point of the article... they proved, as the researchers suggested, yes you can build a bigger wall to avoid a catastrophic failure due to a tsunami.
Unfortunately, tsunami wave height has not yet been standardized.
If bloated nanny-state governments were to allow truly free markets, businesses would naturally unite to standardize all such events, and the invisible hand would build walls big enough for all future tsunami.
And of course, by simply standardizing on a maximum wave height of two feet, you can build shorter walls and pass the savings on to consumers! Winning!!!
Wikipedia cites Clarkson and Magos, "Critical Reviews in Toxology":
Ethylmercury clears from blood with a half-life of about 18 days in adults. Ethylmercury is eliminated from the brain in about 14 days in infant monkeys. Inorganic mercury metabolized from ethylmercury has a much longer half-life, at least 120 days; though it appears to be much less toxic than the inorganic mercury produced from mercury vapor, for reasons not yet understood
The study you cited (which was performed on a total of 21 subjects, so the authors do not regard it as conclusive) only deals with blood concentration of mercury. You can't kill human babies and assay their brain tissue for mercury content like the toxicologists do with their monkey babies. The second study also includes fecal sampling but I don't see anywhere that it compares the amount eliminated with the amount ingested, eh? So it still does not disprove what Wikipedia cites.
Thus, it's currently believed that it takes 120 days for the mercury that comes out of the thiomersal due to normal metabolic activity to clear the system. It's 14 days for the thiomersol that does not break down. Therefore, mercury does not rapidly leave the system, it takes at least four months. This is not what people mean by "rapid".
As a side note, "the dose makes the poison" is not a view I subscribe to, personally, although it's not inherently invalid. Meaning no offense to Paracelsus.
And in any case, my major point has always been that we should minimize the use of mercury, and I don't think a lack of ill effects from thimerosal in vaccines means it's OK to roast cinnabar in China and 3rd world countries. If thiomersal left the body at the speed of light, it would still be a good idea to work towards elimination of mercury in vaccines.
Dealing with controversies in a humane and functional matter is a rewarding activity. Safety, on the other claw, is highly over-rated these days, and unachievable anyway.
There are several perfectly good reasons to restrict the use of mercury. For instance - did you know that US mercury reserves have been exhausted, and that the chinese cinnabar mines are an environmental and worker health nightmare?
Personally, I don't feel any need to champion vaccine companies' desire to use old technology. They're just trying to squeeze an extra nickel of profit out of the 3rd world, where multi-use vaccines that do not require constant refrigeration are in demand. These companies are quite capable of converting over to modern mercury-free formulations, and their leadership will still all be multimillionaires afterward. Boo hoo, they might not be billionaires - so what? I'd be richer if I didn't pay my sewer bills and dumped my crap in somebody else's drinking water instead. Wealth is supposed to be a product of good business practices, not just a handout for drones who happen to have been born members of the boardroom social class.
None of this has anything to do with unfounded fears of autism. Pretending mercury is only controversial because of the autism scare is very good corporate PR, but we private citizens shouldn't let ourselves be fooled.
Toxicity is only observed at doses massively greater than present in vaccines.
True. As I pointed out, lots of deadly poisons can be tolerated in extremely low doses. Strychnine and arsenic come to mind, for example, if you didn't like the more commonplace example of chlorinated water.
Moreover, it is quite rapidly eliminated from the body.
False. Read the research again. "Quite rapidly" is when you pee out asparagus stench an hour after eating some. 120 days is not even slightly "rapid".
Symptoms of mercury poisoning are well known and readily identifiable and quite different from autism and also from the known rare adverse effects of vaccination. So even if it were not abundantly clear that removal of mercury from childhood vaccines has had zero impact on the incidence of autism, the mercury toxicity hypothesis of autism would be implausible.
I think you are mistaking me for someone else. None of that has anything to do with what I posted.
Vaccines are available that do not contain thiomersal. By choosing these vaccines one may have a small impact on the pollution and health issues associated with the extraction and use of mercury. I've never had any problem getting mercury-free vaccinations for my children, although they cost slightly more and have to be scheduled slightly further in advance.
Still, if you like drinking small amounts of toxins, be my guest! It's extremely unlikely to do you any harm; people do it every day all over the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market, which is why the US government uses taxpayer dollars to subsidize it. It's old, obsolete, lame technology that favors entrenched corporate interests and provides an excuse for the ongoing centralization and militarization of commercial power generation.
If you do no other research at all, PLEASE read this: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Libertarians paying attention will note that Price-Anderson is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025). This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future.
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of review, removing barriers to approval, and increasing the time a permit is valid to 40 years.
Today, nuclear plant licensing is going strong. The period when no new licenses were applied for closely corresponds to the period when lack of taxpayer subsidies and the lapse of Price-Anderson made building plants economic suicide - and the fact that license applications revived almost immediately after the GWBush administration reintroduced them is strong circumstantial evidence that nuclear operators must fleece taxpayers in order to survive in the US market, just as they do in every other country that uses nuclear power.
If you believe in capitalism, free markets, or representative government all this should offend you. The White House and the neo-con wing of the Republican party forced an unconsenting electorate to sponsor a huge market distortion - potentially driving market-selected options out of the competition - in order for their corporate buddies to plunder the public pocketbook.
Oh, I wasn't disagreeing.
I don't think I've ever seen OpenBSD with a GUI installed in the real world. I usually see it in DNS/DHCP and firewall roles... deep infrastructure for highly secure nets.
I can't decide whether to mod you "funny", "insightful", "flamebait", or "sad".
Maybe we need an "all of the above" category.
Actually, I looked in your comment history and read some of your other "rections".
What I saw disinclines me to converse with you.
Ah, the knee jerk reaction, as expected.
Don't you effete liberals realize a scary muslim could fly one of those trains right into a skyscraper and cause mass chaos?
I realize I've been carpet-bombing you with vast amounts of information, but I've already answered that question in my previous posts. 1996, in Tennessee.
The idea that the NRC is an anti-nuclear conspiracy is completely unsupportable. Your general point that regulators can and often do override actual law is certainly valid, but in this particular case the regulator of the nuclear industry is... the nuclear industry.
There are four plants actively being built in the USA today. There are more than twenty more that will definitely be built unless forced taxpayer sponsorship and government protection from liability is discontinued. The Watts Bar plant being finished up by the TVA (please share your opinion of the TVA!) is projected to bring unit #2 online in 2012.
If you're wondering how I know all this stuff, well, my first job after college was building thermonuclear weapon delivery systems. My father was on the team that built the Minuteman 3, and I worked on the Peacekeeper (MX missile), and we've both worked on various cruise missiles and sub-launched systems. My next job was working on proprietary distributed control systems used to (among other things) run the Savannah River nuclear plants.
The truth is that nuclear power is not really economically viable in a free market. Only socialist nations that have no major sources of energy within their borders have any valid reason to use terrestrial nuclear fission plants. In the USA, anti-nuclear activists and free market advocates can seek the same goal - removal of government sponsorship of nuclear power. Let the market decide, and both of these unlikely bedfellows will win!
The problem with that is that the provider will know you did it, because it's been done right.
If you do a half-assed looking job you can just call 'em up and when they say "we don't have a cable into your house" you can reply "yes you do, what are you talking about, I'm looking right at it!" and make them send a truck out to check. The guy on the truck will say "hmmm, looks just like one of ours" if you do the job badly enough, and you'll probably get hooked right in.
TL;DR version - this post is chock full of links, from a grab-bag of right-wing, left-wing, and non-partisan sources. If you only have time to read one, read the Cato Institute one. It clearly lays out the economics of nuclear power in toto, unlike all the other links that are merely documentation of individual points.
OK. Now, despite propaganda from pro-nuclear right-wing pundits, there simply is no ban on nuclear power plants in the USA. If there was such a ban, there would have to be some regulation or policy to say so, and there isn't. New reactors are on the way, according to the NRC licensing authorities.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-map.html
You can argue that the Clinton administration's refusal to relicense unsafe plants and active discouragement of subsidies was a de facto ban on new nuclear power sources, and I would tend to agree with that. But that argument only applies to the duration of Clinton's presidency.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+new+nuclear+plants
In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0425-06.htm
The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Price-Anderson, incidentally, is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025).
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1304068:
This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740
In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future. Allowing politically connected players to break lawful contracts with impunity is not only philosophically anti-Libertarian, it's anti-Socialist, too - I'd call it fascism.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1336416:
Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of rev
The difference, here in the colonies, is that tech departments are often mandated to place an extremely powerful computer in the tech-ignorant CEO's office. In some companies, no other employee is permitted to have a 'better' computer, swivel chair or office window than the CEO. I know of dozens of US companies where this is true (although often the CEO's computer isn't nearly as good as he's been told it is). I even know of one CEO who keeps the computer facing the door, so everyone can see that he never turns it on. It's a power statement.
The super-powerful business barons of yesteryear did not have typewriters in their offices. They had rolexes. ;)
If I had mod points I'd use one on your post.
But I don't, so I will content myself with observing that it is now a power and status statement (outside hardcore geek circles, anyway) to be incompetent in the use of the computer you have.
The most powerful CEOs rarely answer their own email, for example; they usually have secretaries because they can't spell, can't use grammar correctly, and don't know how to program the insanely powerful status-symbol computer on their desk.
Admittedly I'm just working from currently available information. There has never been an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission plant - every single one has required government subsidies, taxpayer-subsidized protection from risk, government-assured forced sales of power to citizens who would have preferred to buy power from non-nuclear sources, etc. etc. etc.
In a market that allowed competition, there would be non-nuclear options. It has been abundantly demonstrated that when non-nuclear options are available, people prefer them. This would drive the selling price of nuclear power down, not up, which would make them even less economically viable than they are now.
Hmmm. Well, yes, I am assuming that waste will not be freely sold to the highest bidder, since it would be highly potent war materiel. You do have a point there; it depends on exactly how free you want your free market to be. If you allow the sale of dirty bombs and their precursors, then yes large amounts of high level waste are extremely valuable and their sale would reduce decommissioning costs dramatically. Otherwise, not so much; existing research reactors can already produce all the nuclear materials we need (for medicine, detectors, etc.) inexpensively.
See, this is where Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich can have a meeting of minds (I like 'em both, personally) despite their extreme differences.
There is no such ban. One was recently built near me, in fact, and this page says there are 20 more in the works. The US government has been offering extremely attractive subsidies since 2005 to offset public distaste for nuclear power. The fact that people do not want them does not matter; our government continues to privatize profit and socialize risks by forcing the US taxpayer to not only subsidize these plants but also to buy the power they produce. In a free market, there would be no need for nuclear power; biogas would drive it off the market by being more desirable to informed consumers (and also cheaper, in the long run).
But I think I know why the banksters and their allies love nuclear power. Nuclear power can't be distributed among the people like other forms of electricity generation, and while you can't really get away with using the military to protect the profits of coal-burning power plants, you can definitely have your government lackeys send soldiers with M16s to guard centralized nuke plants. Nuclear plants are a huge military liability that no general in his right mind would want on friendly soil, but so what? The military is controlled by civilian politicians who are easily bought. Nuclear power is yet another way for entrenched powers to stay entrenched without ever having to be smarter, faster, stronger, or in any other way better than their competition.
Nonetheless, this is where you and I meet, philosophically. We have differing solutions in mind but we're both willing to get rid of subsidies to private industry (I'm also willing to push cost externalities back on to commerce and industry by force) and see what happens. It won't be worse than leaving the banksters in charge!
Unfortunately American politicians are engaged in rewriting all bodies of law to favor known amoral actors, not to restrict them. But I do agree with you.
I think we'd see another technological revolution if we stopped distorting the market by actively encouraging these "negative externalities" of which you speak. Fission would probably fall by the wayside along with fossil fuels, and we'd run on biofuels or cold fusion or something.
OK, I'm thinking. I'm thinking "regulatory capture", and "political action committees", and "unlimited campaign contributions". Yep, got it.
OK, that can't actually happen in our current reality. Because the nuclear power plants are owned by the same companies that own the government, and they are permitted, nay, encouraged to write legislation to prevent this. You try to stop this, and all you'll get is a horse's head in your bed and an IRS audit.
I sure do. The government enlists private corporations to build and run nuclear power plants by using taxpayer dollars (since nuclear fission plants are not economically viable in a free market, but the government wants them for war and science purposes) and the private corporations purchase legislation that allows them to obviate risk. It's all very, very clear.
In a well regulated free market, terrestrial fission plants would not exist, because there aren't enough customers willing to pay for the decommissioning costs they would have to charge up front. In a laissez-faire market, of course, the plants would never be decommissioned, because there's no profit in it. The people who built them would just design them to fail after they died, and in the absence of regulation that would work... for them.
When I was a child in the 60s (and dreams could be held through TV) we had plastic toys that were just like miniature versions of this.
They were made by Marx, I think, and we called them "wickety wackety walking toys".
George Jetson's dog
Pluto the Pup
Barney and Fred Flintstone in a compromising position
Mickey Mouse shamefully abusing Pluto
I had all these except the (apparently rare) Mickey bestiality one, and half a dozen more. They walked down a ramp, swinging their legs, but with no knee flexing. Google "Ramp walker" for more. They'd walk forever if you had an infinitely long ramp or an inclined treadmill.
Oh my God! He only has one ass. He's of no use to me, I'll have to burn the room.
If you buy a house at any point, take the time to properly wire it inside the walls with the best cabling you can afford. You won't regret it, signal isolation is a wonderful thing (and pets aren't as likely to chew the wires inside a wall).
But no way is it worth any real effort to wire up a rental.
You're on the right track.
Productivity in lisp sucks too, for most people.
I understand your point; I mean no disrespect to lisp or haskell. Do you get my point?
PHP beats lisp in number of real-world deployments earning money and eyeballs. Does that mean PHP is better? No, it means more people know how to use it. (Cue the PHP haters now, I guess.)
If I write ten thousand lines of lisp, I'll be the maintenance programmer for that code for the rest of my career. Nothing but adding the new feature-of-the-week for PHBs - no thanks!
I did, repeatedly. So did you - your link supports my statements. But you are so obsessional or delusional that you've apparently lost the ability to read critically.
Thiomersal (C9H9HgNaO2S) is metabolized or degraded to ethylmercury (C2H5Hg+) and thiosalicylate.
Inorganic mercury metabolized from ethylmercury has a half-life of at least 120 days.
The data says mercury can be found in mammalian tissue for at least 120 days after administration of thiomersal. You have decided, in spite of the available research, to believe otherwise. OK, you've been led to water, but you don't want to drink.
So eat all the mercury you want. Go whip the convict labor in the cinnabar mines and huff the fumes from the roasters. I certainly won't force you to stop. You are clearly deeply committed to mercury ingestion - and that's fine with me. Enjoy!
You are also free to subscribe to Paracelsus' overly broad, mentally limiting paradigm all you want. I still won't stop you. It's a valid way of interpreting the data. I personally subscribe to a more nuanced view, that fits the data better for my purposes, but I don't see any reason to try to browbeat others into accepting my point of view as incontrovertible dogma. Which is another characteristic we apparently don't have in common.
All turing-complete languages are equally capable, eh? You can create abominations and masterpieces in nearly any language.
Programmers, however, tend to work best in a language that suits their unique preferences and abilities. No language is inherently better than all others, for all people, because people are not interchangeable featureless units. Some people are OK with monkey-patching, even.
Personally, I like to create code that other people can build on and maintain, rather than writing myself into a permanent maintenance position. That kind of rules out Lisp, since nobody else wants to maintain it - among computer languages, popularity is a feature, and lack of popularity is a bug.
Condolences to Mr. McCarthy's family and friends.
Unfortunately, tsunami wave height has not yet been standardized.
If bloated nanny-state governments were to allow truly free markets, businesses would naturally unite to standardize all such events, and the invisible hand would build walls big enough for all future tsunami.
And of course, by simply standardizing on a maximum wave height of two feet, you can build shorter walls and pass the savings on to consumers! Winning!!!
Wikipedia cites Clarkson and Magos, "Critical Reviews in Toxology":
The study you cited (which was performed on a total of 21 subjects, so the authors do not regard it as conclusive) only deals with blood concentration of mercury. You can't kill human babies and assay their brain tissue for mercury content like the toxicologists do with their monkey babies. The second study also includes fecal sampling but I don't see anywhere that it compares the amount eliminated with the amount ingested, eh? So it still does not disprove what Wikipedia cites.
Thus, it's currently believed that it takes 120 days for the mercury that comes out of the thiomersal due to normal metabolic activity to clear the system. It's 14 days for the thiomersol that does not break down. Therefore, mercury does not rapidly leave the system, it takes at least four months. This is not what people mean by "rapid".
As a side note, "the dose makes the poison" is not a view I subscribe to, personally, although it's not inherently invalid. Meaning no offense to Paracelsus.
And in any case, my major point has always been that we should minimize the use of mercury, and I don't think a lack of ill effects from thimerosal in vaccines means it's OK to roast cinnabar in China and 3rd world countries. If thiomersal left the body at the speed of light, it would still be a good idea to work towards elimination of mercury in vaccines.
Dealing with controversies in a humane and functional matter is a rewarding activity. Safety, on the other claw, is highly over-rated these days, and unachievable anyway.
There are several perfectly good reasons to restrict the use of mercury. For instance - did you know that US mercury reserves have been exhausted, and that the chinese cinnabar mines are an environmental and worker health nightmare?
Personally, I don't feel any need to champion vaccine companies' desire to use old technology. They're just trying to squeeze an extra nickel of profit out of the 3rd world, where multi-use vaccines that do not require constant refrigeration are in demand. These companies are quite capable of converting over to modern mercury-free formulations, and their leadership will still all be multimillionaires afterward. Boo hoo, they might not be billionaires - so what? I'd be richer if I didn't pay my sewer bills and dumped my crap in somebody else's drinking water instead. Wealth is supposed to be a product of good business practices, not just a handout for drones who happen to have been born members of the boardroom social class.
None of this has anything to do with unfounded fears of autism. Pretending mercury is only controversial because of the autism scare is very good corporate PR, but we private citizens shouldn't let ourselves be fooled.
True. As I pointed out, lots of deadly poisons can be tolerated in extremely low doses. Strychnine and arsenic come to mind, for example, if you didn't like the more commonplace example of chlorinated water.
False. Read the research again. "Quite rapidly" is when you pee out asparagus stench an hour after eating some. 120 days is not even slightly "rapid".
I think you are mistaking me for someone else. None of that has anything to do with what I posted.
Vaccines are available that do not contain thiomersal. By choosing these vaccines one may have a small impact on the pollution and health issues associated with the extraction and use of mercury. I've never had any problem getting mercury-free vaccinations for my children, although they cost slightly more and have to be scheduled slightly further in advance.
Still, if you like drinking small amounts of toxins, be my guest! It's extremely unlikely to do you any harm; people do it every day all over the world.
Dilbert talks about his job in 1993:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-20/
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-21/
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-22/
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-23/
And again in 2007:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-11-18/
Of course, this approach assumes you are trying to prevent competition for jobs...