But a lot of people agree with a significant number of his policies and statements. He definitely has presentation issues and could really do with dumping the whole "captains pick" thing. But I believe Australia has got itself into the habit of trying to destroy sitting prime ministers since the Kevin 07 election campaign so successfully personally targeted John Howard.
Hopefully someone with enough gumption will step into a leadership role and be prepared to do two things. The first is to say "I don't know, speak to the responsible minister" instead of trying to know everything and then being caught out. And the second is to not try to please everyone, but explain why you are making certain decisions.
Mike Baird the NSW Premier has become very successful and very popular by taking that approach.
All the stall are non-politically affiliated. There are generally things like the local scout club or the rotary club. They are not allowed to be political for exactly the reason you alluded to, bribes.
Voting is also always done on a Saturday so there is no time off work and you are also eligible to do postal voting if you so desire. There is no obligation for you to go to a centre, you can pick your vote up early, fill it in and post it back and as long as it is received less than 7 days after the election it is counted.
As for the school comment its a saturday so it isn't a problem.
Because voting is mandatory the turnout is very very high (93.23% last federal election). So for one person to impersonate multiple people would require them to know who wasn't going to show up on polling day. That in itself would be very hard. It would also require them to know the registered address of the person as that is the other check that is done when you get your papers.
The electoral roll is also updated and checked against immigration and death records and is finalised a set time before the election happens. This occurs of the 7th calendar day after the writ for the election is issued. The AEC puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the rolls are accurate. So the chances of someone voting for in place of a dead person is basically zero, it would require the person to have been on the roll and died between the cut off and the election.
Finally the voting system runs boxes which are time stamped and then sealed once they reach a certain number of votes in them. If you were to come in and have had your name marked off already they would seal the boxes that had already been used and put aside with a question mark over their accuracy. Then you would be given a new vote in a new box and voting would continue. When it comes to counting the potentially contaminated boxes are counted separately to the rest. If their contents would not have effected the outcome of the vote then the vote stands. If their contents would have affected the vote then a by-election in the seat would be called.
Voting fraud is investigated by the Australian Federal Police and is treated extremely seriously. The most common type of electoral fraud in Australia are people registering at incorrect addresses so that they can vote in a specific seat. People who are caught doing this are looking at 10 years in prison.
As for the comment about uninformed people voting, I think if you had compulsory voting the push would move from convincing people to actually vote to convincing them that you are the right option. It would probably lead to a higher level of political understanding in the wider population and potentially lead to better outcomes overall. Of course it may not.
From the AEC. What sources of data does the AEC use to assist in the management of the electoral roll? The AEC receives external data from a range of federal and state departments and agencies to use in the management of the electoral roll. The external data received may include details of an individual's surname, given name(s), date of birth, and address.
That data is then examined and matched against the electoral roll to identify people who are entitled to enrol and are not currently enrolled, and those who are entitled to enrol and vote and require an update to their enrolment details.
The sources of data used are listed in the following table: Date Source Jurisdiction State and Territory Driver's Licence Authorities Australia Department of Human Services – Centrelink Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Australia Australian Tax Office Australia Department of Immigration & Border Protection Australia Public Sector Mapping Agency Ltd (PSMA) Australia Australia Post Australia Births, Deaths and Marriages Authorities Australia Correctional Services Authorities Australia Departments of Education Qld, WA, SA, Tas, ACT Departments of Housing Qld, WA Services Tasmania Tas Office of Rental Bonds ACT ACTEWAGL ACT
Nothing stopping your writing "you're all scum" on the ballot paper. It is just you have to turn up and get your name marked off.
Australia actually makes a bit of a day of it. The polling stations are usually in the local schools, people put on BBQs and you grab your free sausage on the way out.
I don't see why you would think that. There is no linking your ID to your vote so it is all anonymous. In Aus you have an electoral roll which has everyone who is to vote on it. You go to your local voting station, give them your name and they cross it off. You are then given your voting paper and they are unmarked and come off a big pile of identical ones. You then fill them out and drop them in a big box.
For those who don't want to vote for any of the candidates there is nothing stopping them from drawing a big cock on the voting form.
That said there isn't any need to show ID in australia unless when you get to a polling station your name has already been crossed off. But that happens so rarely it is usually just into double figures for the whole country.
It actually works very well in Australia. Voting is compulsory and it is combined with preferential voting meaning that you have to vote for all candidates and rank them in order of preference. Having lived and voted in a couple of different countries I believe that mandatory voting acts as a damper to the extremist views that come up on both sides.
The preferential voting also means you are able to make your more non-central voice heard without it being a wasted vote. ie you can vote for the motoring party which runs on a campaign of higher speed limits and cheaper registration as your first choice with your second choice being Labor or Liberal, knowing that your second preference will still count.
This has worked particularly well for the greens as they are able to have greater political clout than their number of seats because the major parties can see just how many votes they are getting.
Make voting compulsory and make having an ID compulsory. This solves your racist problem and improves the otherwise shocking turnout at US elections.
And for people who claim that it is an abuse of their rights to be forced to vote my argument has always been that you are a citizen of a country and as a result gain certain privileges. In exchange for those privileges there are costs, depending on the country that is things like have to have a drivers license, not being allowed to kill whoever you want, having to be over a certain age to drink, and having to go and vote.
I hadn't realised the applications would be speaking to the USB devices directly but that seems obvious now in hindsight. From your description it seems like an almost impossible problem to solve without having all hardware comply with a standard, which it is obviously not doing. It is that or have some extremely complex interface layer between the application and the devices which would have huge issues of its own.
When we are looking at USB devices is it possible this could be handled later in the boot process by having all devices re-polled and connected as new devices? So on resume previously connected devices are simply treated as new devices. It would add a delay to the resume process and I'm guessing there may be device confusion if you have 2 controllers attached, ie player 1s controller becomes players 2s after a suspend resume. But would this not be a simple, but manky, solution to the problem?
Out of interest why would you not put a car on a balance sheet? It is a capital asset that depreciates like crazy. To not have it on there means you wouldn't be able to deduct the losses against other income.
Fair enough, Not really comparing apples with apples then and you have removed a large component of one of the costs being the capital depreciation cost. I am working on a $50k car which is calculated to only be worth 49% of the original value at the 36 month point. Just doing that puts 7k - 8k a year into your costs. It's a decreasing curve though, as if I renew for a 2nd 3 years the calculation is done on 49% of the residual figure so $24,500 to $12,000 which drops capital costs to 4k a year and then 12k to 6k for a next (and final I can't package a car more than 7 years old at the start of the contract) renewal.
Mgcarley, I'm Aussie but the cost is for everything. So insurance, registration, servicing, tyres, fuel, finance the lot not just the hire purchase component. With that being $80 a week in fuel alone, 1200/y for insurance 800/y for rego, then paying off 20k over 3 years for the capital loss + the finance costs I don't see how you could get the costs to half that for 2 vehicles.
Bridges do get severely damaged. They are one of the biggest costs post flooding events. Debris carried by water hits the bridge supports and causes huge damage. Even taking larger debris out bridge scour from just the sand and mud carried by flood waters is hugely damaging to bridges. Bridges are actually very poor at resisting lateral forces and even worse at resisting lifting forces.
As for whether the turbines would survive it would depend on too many factors to know. But there certainly would be a percentage damaged, from foundation movement to salt water inundation of the generators.
Actually it would be unlikely to help the economy, outside of a short term construction industry sugar hit, because it is not infrastructure that is adding anything new. It is replacing existing working infrastructure with something that does exactly the same.
In the end there will be accidents, failures and breakages. This goes with all types of facilities, nuclear or otherwise. The key part though is how the systems are designed to handle those failures, not whether a failure can be prevented from occurring in the first instance.
The design of a system has to take into account the fallibility of the human operators. In the case of the cooling tower collapse the plant design was such that there was enough spare capacity in the other cooling towers to keep everything running until the repairs were completed. Failure of a cooling tower was factored into the design.
Modern nuclear designs fail to cold. They have multiple redundant systems which are there to cover for human stupidity / laziness. These designs are still not perfect, and fukushima is an example of where, ideally, there would have been differences in the designs. Location of the backup generators for one.
Essentially I don't trust humans to not fuck up in a nuclear plant. I trust the iterative design process to have built in margin and safety measures to mean that when they do fuck up the impacts are negligible to low.
The nice thing about nuclear vs coal or gas is that the true costs are known. We don't know what the impact of stuffing large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere will be, though we are starting to think they will be pretty bad. We don't really know the impact of coal mining on wider communities health is. At least with nuclear we know the costs of the plant, the remediation and the risks.
Whether you are comfortable with those risks is a personal thing.
Huh? My comment was that cooling towers are used by gas & coal powerplants as well as nuclear and that a failing cooling tower on a coal or gas powerstation would have the same impact as a failing cooling tower on a nuclear one. None of which is good.
I made no comments about solar, wind or hydropower. Of course those don't need cooling towers but I'm not really sure why that matters? They are not thermal methods of generating electricity. It would be like me saying that nuclear power is inherently better than hydro because dams never burst when you use nuclear. It just doesn't make sense because the systems aren't comparable.
Hey, ease up, I even said it was a quick read and I didn't spot the ecological impact but happy to read if you had it.
And from the first paragraph of the article you linked to "A recent scientific study found that Vermont Yankee has a record of discharging water at temperatures above permitted levels. Even so, the nuclear plant has not violated its discharge permit under the Clean Water Act." Also this had nothing to do with the failure of the cooling tower wall which was what you initially pointed to and what I looked for information on.
I'm not saying that there weren't issues with that plant or that the discharges into the river weren't a problem. But they don't appear to be linked to the cooling tower collapse AND they appear to sit within the licensing agreement the operator had with the government, meaning the issues is with the regulation / licensing first.
Secondly the amount of water that is used in a generation system doesn't change the temperature of the water in a cooling tower system or the impact that that water would have if it was dumped into an ecosystem. Water's thermal behaviour is identical whether it is heated by nuclear, coal, the sun or your kettle. Hot water dumped from a coal cooling system would have been identical to water dumped from a nuclear system. The only argument you could have that would make nuclear worse than coal or gas is that in the event of a failure more water would be dumped from a nuclear system but that would totally depend on plant design and again is fuel agnostic.
It's not impossible but it would be damn hard then. If you could manage a build out of all 600 GW of wind power, that would be a cost of $600 billion minimum, based on halving the cost figure I found here - http://www.windustry.org/how_m...
Japan has 27GW of hydro currently so that will cover the short fall of the 25%. So I guess it is technically possible. But it leaves almost no room for growth in power demand in the future. It would also require every possible location to be approved and to find money that Japan doesn't have.
I didn't know the event so just did a quick read. From what I can see the other cooling towers were more than capable of handling the heat load and the plant was throttled to 50% until the cooling tower was repaired. I couldn't find anything that referred to discharges into the river causing ecological damage, happy to read if you have something. Also it looks like it was a failure of a timber support not metal.
That said cooling towers are not specific to nuclear power stations. They are used by all heat based generation systems to the impact would have been identical at a coal or gas plant.
The other way to look at it is if Fukushima had been on the West coast we wouldn't be talking about it at all and it would never have been damaged by the Tsunami.
All power generation systems comes with some kind of risks. As a species we have been using nuclear all around the world for over 50 years and there are around 450ish plants with only 2 accidents of major note. In both instances we have learned what to look for and how to defend against those and similar issues in the future.
One of the huge risks on other energy sources that is a major reason why Japan will have a nuclear energy sector for the foreseeable future is it is the only reasonably independent energy source available to it which other countries can't take away easily. Japan has no major fossil fuel reserves so must import gas, coal etc. putting it at risk to other countries for its energy supply.
The same can be seen in their food production. Japan intensively farms its land and supports / protects its farmers. This is so that in the event of a conflict they retain the ability to feed themselves without imports.
Wind is great, solar is great, hydro is great but I'm not convinced there is enough capacity, built or build-able, in those sources for Japan to move away from nuclear at this stage.
I budget to travel 25,000km per year and usually end up at between 22,000 & 24,000. The average commuter vehicle travels 14,900km per year where I live (Queensland) so I sit about 50% over the average but my job sees me driving quite a bit - http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... . My work commute is 23km each way so just too and from the office I do 230km a week alone getting to and from the office.
You commented lower about my calculations. The vehicle is salary packaged taking advantage of some of the fringe benefit laws in Australia to allow me to pay for part of the running costs out of my pre-tax income. The figure I quoted is my out of pocket costs (actually I checked my paper work and the figure is actually $231.68 per week) so this may account for the differences between the IRS and my running costs. In addition though I drive a fuel efficient car and not one of the American gas guzzling cars, my car runs at 5.9l / 100km and I doubt the IRS figure is tailored to each individual car.
As for the capital costs the car is financed through-out it's life of ownership with a guaranteed buyback written into the contract. This means that the cost I quoted includes the financing costs and the capital loss costs. At the end of my three year contract I am given three choices, first is to renew for another period (costs will be lower), or sell the car myself, pay the balloon and pocket the difference, or allow them to take the car at the previously agreed price. To date I have always sold the car myself and pocketed the difference.
The biggest thing though, is I have kids. There are two considerations here. The first of which is both of them are in car seats. Fitting and removing a car seat is a MASSIVE pain in the arse and the last thing I would want to do is to have to hump a car seat around my destination. The only way that works is if I wait longer for a car with car seats fitted. The second is safety. I pay more for a safer car. I also ensure that it is always maintained. I have been involved in a couple of major car accidents, the worst of which was being hit by a semi-trailer on a highway. In that case the emergency services that attended said the only reason my kids were alive was because of the car I was driving. Self driving cars may potentially be safer than driven cars at some point in the future, but that is a massively long way off. I think I will always be the person that wears a seat belt no matter what.
Except I don't want to be in someone else's car. Or let someone else in my car. I want to fit my child seats and leave them fitted. I want to have my shit in the boot that I like to carry just in case. The cost differential would have to be HUGE to make me not have my own vehicle, self drive or otherwise. As it is my car costs me $225 per week total cost. That includes everything from fuel to insurance to the financing costs and is based on 500km a week for a $50k car. A pool car would have to be under 25% of that for me to even come close to considering it and I would have to have almost no wait time ever. If I am having to wait more than 3 minutes for the car to arrive it is adding 50% to my quick local run the the shops and back. That alone would annoy me enough for it to not happen.
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But a lot of people agree with a significant number of his policies and statements. He definitely has presentation issues and could really do with dumping the whole "captains pick" thing. But I believe Australia has got itself into the habit of trying to destroy sitting prime ministers since the Kevin 07 election campaign so successfully personally targeted John Howard.
Hopefully someone with enough gumption will step into a leadership role and be prepared to do two things. The first is to say "I don't know, speak to the responsible minister" instead of trying to know everything and then being caught out. And the second is to not try to please everyone, but explain why you are making certain decisions.
Mike Baird the NSW Premier has become very successful and very popular by taking that approach.
Agreed, ID is not required. Queensland did it for its latest state election but that has been dumped for the next one.
Voter fraud is incredibly low here.
All the stall are non-politically affiliated. There are generally things like the local scout club or the rotary club. They are not allowed to be political for exactly the reason you alluded to, bribes.
Voting is also always done on a Saturday so there is no time off work and you are also eligible to do postal voting if you so desire. There is no obligation for you to go to a centre, you can pick your vote up early, fill it in and post it back and as long as it is received less than 7 days after the election it is counted.
As for the school comment its a saturday so it isn't a problem.
Because voting is mandatory the turnout is very very high (93.23% last federal election). So for one person to impersonate multiple people would require them to know who wasn't going to show up on polling day. That in itself would be very hard. It would also require them to know the registered address of the person as that is the other check that is done when you get your papers.
The electoral roll is also updated and checked against immigration and death records and is finalised a set time before the election happens. This occurs of the 7th calendar day after the writ for the election is issued. The AEC puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the rolls are accurate. So the chances of someone voting for in place of a dead person is basically zero, it would require the person to have been on the roll and died between the cut off and the election.
Finally the voting system runs boxes which are time stamped and then sealed once they reach a certain number of votes in them. If you were to come in and have had your name marked off already they would seal the boxes that had already been used and put aside with a question mark over their accuracy. Then you would be given a new vote in a new box and voting would continue. When it comes to counting the potentially contaminated boxes are counted separately to the rest. If their contents would not have effected the outcome of the vote then the vote stands. If their contents would have affected the vote then a by-election in the seat would be called.
Voting fraud is investigated by the Australian Federal Police and is treated extremely seriously. The most common type of electoral fraud in Australia are people registering at incorrect addresses so that they can vote in a specific seat. People who are caught doing this are looking at 10 years in prison.
As for the comment about uninformed people voting, I think if you had compulsory voting the push would move from convincing people to actually vote to convincing them that you are the right option. It would probably lead to a higher level of political understanding in the wider population and potentially lead to better outcomes overall. Of course it may not.
From the AEC.
What sources of data does the AEC use to assist in the management of the electoral roll?
The AEC receives external data from a range of federal and state departments and agencies to use in the management of the electoral roll. The external data received may include details of an individual's surname, given name(s), date of birth, and address.
That data is then examined and matched against the electoral roll to identify people who are entitled to enrol and are not currently enrolled, and those who are entitled to enrol and vote and require an update to their enrolment details.
The sources of data used are listed in the following table:
Date Source Jurisdiction
State and Territory Driver's Licence Authorities Australia
Department of Human Services – Centrelink Australia
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Australia
Australian Tax Office Australia
Department of Immigration & Border Protection Australia
Public Sector Mapping Agency Ltd (PSMA) Australia
Australia Post Australia
Births, Deaths and Marriages Authorities Australia
Correctional Services Authorities Australia
Departments of Education Qld, WA, SA, Tas, ACT
Departments of Housing Qld, WA
Services Tasmania Tas
Office of Rental Bonds ACT
ACTEWAGL ACT
Nothing stopping your writing "you're all scum" on the ballot paper. It is just you have to turn up and get your name marked off.
Australia actually makes a bit of a day of it. The polling stations are usually in the local schools, people put on BBQs and you grab your free sausage on the way out.
This got posted to reddit last Australian Federal Election - https://i.imgur.com/qrdcfgYl.j...
I don't see why you would think that. There is no linking your ID to your vote so it is all anonymous. In Aus you have an electoral roll which has everyone who is to vote on it. You go to your local voting station, give them your name and they cross it off. You are then given your voting paper and they are unmarked and come off a big pile of identical ones. You then fill them out and drop them in a big box.
For those who don't want to vote for any of the candidates there is nothing stopping them from drawing a big cock on the voting form.
That said there isn't any need to show ID in australia unless when you get to a polling station your name has already been crossed off. But that happens so rarely it is usually just into double figures for the whole country.
It actually works very well in Australia. Voting is compulsory and it is combined with preferential voting meaning that you have to vote for all candidates and rank them in order of preference. Having lived and voted in a couple of different countries I believe that mandatory voting acts as a damper to the extremist views that come up on both sides.
The preferential voting also means you are able to make your more non-central voice heard without it being a wasted vote. ie you can vote for the motoring party which runs on a campaign of higher speed limits and cheaper registration as your first choice with your second choice being Labor or Liberal, knowing that your second preference will still count.
This has worked particularly well for the greens as they are able to have greater political clout than their number of seats because the major parties can see just how many votes they are getting.
Perhaps the US should consider preferential voting. In that system you have to nominate a vote for every single candidate from 1 to x.
Here is a random suggestion.
Make voting compulsory and make having an ID compulsory. This solves your racist problem and improves the otherwise shocking turnout at US elections.
And for people who claim that it is an abuse of their rights to be forced to vote my argument has always been that you are a citizen of a country and as a result gain certain privileges. In exchange for those privileges there are costs, depending on the country that is things like have to have a drivers license, not being allowed to kill whoever you want, having to be over a certain age to drink, and having to go and vote.
Thanks Tlambert,
I hadn't realised the applications would be speaking to the USB devices directly but that seems obvious now in hindsight. From your description it seems like an almost impossible problem to solve without having all hardware comply with a standard, which it is obviously not doing. It is that or have some extremely complex interface layer between the application and the devices which would have huge issues of its own.
When we are looking at USB devices is it possible this could be handled later in the boot process by having all devices re-polled and connected as new devices? So on resume previously connected devices are simply treated as new devices. It would add a delay to the resume process and I'm guessing there may be device confusion if you have 2 controllers attached, ie player 1s controller becomes players 2s after a suspend resume. But would this not be a simple, but manky, solution to the problem?
Out of interest why would you not put a car on a balance sheet? It is a capital asset that depreciates like crazy. To not have it on there means you wouldn't be able to deduct the losses against other income.
Fair enough, Not really comparing apples with apples then and you have removed a large component of one of the costs being the capital depreciation cost. I am working on a $50k car which is calculated to only be worth 49% of the original value at the 36 month point. Just doing that puts 7k - 8k a year into your costs. It's a decreasing curve though, as if I renew for a 2nd 3 years the calculation is done on 49% of the residual figure so $24,500 to $12,000 which drops capital costs to 4k a year and then 12k to 6k for a next (and final I can't package a car more than 7 years old at the start of the contract) renewal.
Mgcarley, I'm Aussie but the cost is for everything. So insurance, registration, servicing, tyres, fuel, finance the lot not just the hire purchase component. With that being $80 a week in fuel alone, 1200/y for insurance 800/y for rego, then paying off 20k over 3 years for the capital loss + the finance costs I don't see how you could get the costs to half that for 2 vehicles.
Bridges do get severely damaged. They are one of the biggest costs post flooding events. Debris carried by water hits the bridge supports and causes huge damage. Even taking larger debris out bridge scour from just the sand and mud carried by flood waters is hugely damaging to bridges. Bridges are actually very poor at resisting lateral forces and even worse at resisting lifting forces.
As for whether the turbines would survive it would depend on too many factors to know. But there certainly would be a percentage damaged, from foundation movement to salt water inundation of the generators.
Here is a photo of a bridge post fukushima tsunami. - https://www.ucsf.edu/sites/def... and http://www.beyonder.com.au/blo...
Actually it would be unlikely to help the economy, outside of a short term construction industry sugar hit, because it is not infrastructure that is adding anything new. It is replacing existing working infrastructure with something that does exactly the same.
Ok. I understand where you are coming from now.
In the end there will be accidents, failures and breakages. This goes with all types of facilities, nuclear or otherwise. The key part though is how the systems are designed to handle those failures, not whether a failure can be prevented from occurring in the first instance.
The design of a system has to take into account the fallibility of the human operators. In the case of the cooling tower collapse the plant design was such that there was enough spare capacity in the other cooling towers to keep everything running until the repairs were completed. Failure of a cooling tower was factored into the design.
Modern nuclear designs fail to cold. They have multiple redundant systems which are there to cover for human stupidity / laziness. These designs are still not perfect, and fukushima is an example of where, ideally, there would have been differences in the designs. Location of the backup generators for one.
Essentially I don't trust humans to not fuck up in a nuclear plant. I trust the iterative design process to have built in margin and safety measures to mean that when they do fuck up the impacts are negligible to low.
The nice thing about nuclear vs coal or gas is that the true costs are known. We don't know what the impact of stuffing large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere will be, though we are starting to think they will be pretty bad. We don't really know the impact of coal mining on wider communities health is. At least with nuclear we know the costs of the plant, the remediation and the risks.
Whether you are comfortable with those risks is a personal thing.
Huh? My comment was that cooling towers are used by gas & coal powerplants as well as nuclear and that a failing cooling tower on a coal or gas powerstation would have the same impact as a failing cooling tower on a nuclear one. None of which is good.
I made no comments about solar, wind or hydropower. Of course those don't need cooling towers but I'm not really sure why that matters? They are not thermal methods of generating electricity. It would be like me saying that nuclear power is inherently better than hydro because dams never burst when you use nuclear. It just doesn't make sense because the systems aren't comparable.
Hey, ease up, I even said it was a quick read and I didn't spot the ecological impact but happy to read if you had it.
And from the first paragraph of the article you linked to "A recent scientific study found that Vermont Yankee has a record of discharging water at temperatures above permitted levels. Even so, the nuclear plant has not violated its discharge permit under the Clean Water Act." Also this had nothing to do with the failure of the cooling tower wall which was what you initially pointed to and what I looked for information on.
I'm not saying that there weren't issues with that plant or that the discharges into the river weren't a problem. But they don't appear to be linked to the cooling tower collapse AND they appear to sit within the licensing agreement the operator had with the government, meaning the issues is with the regulation / licensing first.
Secondly the amount of water that is used in a generation system doesn't change the temperature of the water in a cooling tower system or the impact that that water would have if it was dumped into an ecosystem. Water's thermal behaviour is identical whether it is heated by nuclear, coal, the sun or your kettle. Hot water dumped from a coal cooling system would have been identical to water dumped from a nuclear system. The only argument you could have that would make nuclear worse than coal or gas is that in the event of a failure more water would be dumped from a nuclear system but that would totally depend on plant design and again is fuel agnostic.
It's not impossible but it would be damn hard then. If you could manage a build out of all 600 GW of wind power, that would be a cost of $600 billion minimum, based on halving the cost figure I found here - http://www.windustry.org/how_m...
Japan has 27GW of hydro currently so that will cover the short fall of the 25%. So I guess it is technically possible. But it leaves almost no room for growth in power demand in the future. It would also require every possible location to be approved and to find money that Japan doesn't have.
I didn't know the event so just did a quick read. From what I can see the other cooling towers were more than capable of handling the heat load and the plant was throttled to 50% until the cooling tower was repaired. I couldn't find anything that referred to discharges into the river causing ecological damage, happy to read if you have something. Also it looks like it was a failure of a timber support not metal.
That said cooling towers are not specific to nuclear power stations. They are used by all heat based generation systems to the impact would have been identical at a coal or gas plant.
The other way to look at it is if Fukushima had been on the West coast we wouldn't be talking about it at all and it would never have been damaged by the Tsunami.
All power generation systems comes with some kind of risks. As a species we have been using nuclear all around the world for over 50 years and there are around 450ish plants with only 2 accidents of major note. In both instances we have learned what to look for and how to defend against those and similar issues in the future.
One of the huge risks on other energy sources that is a major reason why Japan will have a nuclear energy sector for the foreseeable future is it is the only reasonably independent energy source available to it which other countries can't take away easily. Japan has no major fossil fuel reserves so must import gas, coal etc. putting it at risk to other countries for its energy supply.
The same can be seen in their food production. Japan intensively farms its land and supports / protects its farmers. This is so that in the event of a conflict they retain the ability to feed themselves without imports.
Wind is great, solar is great, hydro is great but I'm not convinced there is enough capacity, built or build-able, in those sources for Japan to move away from nuclear at this stage.
I budget to travel 25,000km per year and usually end up at between 22,000 & 24,000. The average commuter vehicle travels 14,900km per year where I live (Queensland) so I sit about 50% over the average but my job sees me driving quite a bit - http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... . My work commute is 23km each way so just too and from the office I do 230km a week alone getting to and from the office.
You commented lower about my calculations. The vehicle is salary packaged taking advantage of some of the fringe benefit laws in Australia to allow me to pay for part of the running costs out of my pre-tax income. The figure I quoted is my out of pocket costs (actually I checked my paper work and the figure is actually $231.68 per week) so this may account for the differences between the IRS and my running costs. In addition though I drive a fuel efficient car and not one of the American gas guzzling cars, my car runs at 5.9l / 100km and I doubt the IRS figure is tailored to each individual car.
As for the capital costs the car is financed through-out it's life of ownership with a guaranteed buyback written into the contract. This means that the cost I quoted includes the financing costs and the capital loss costs. At the end of my three year contract I am given three choices, first is to renew for another period (costs will be lower), or sell the car myself, pay the balloon and pocket the difference, or allow them to take the car at the previously agreed price. To date I have always sold the car myself and pocketed the difference.
The biggest thing though, is I have kids. There are two considerations here. The first of which is both of them are in car seats. Fitting and removing a car seat is a MASSIVE pain in the arse and the last thing I would want to do is to have to hump a car seat around my destination. The only way that works is if I wait longer for a car with car seats fitted. The second is safety. I pay more for a safer car. I also ensure that it is always maintained. I have been involved in a couple of major car accidents, the worst of which was being hit by a semi-trailer on a highway. In that case the emergency services that attended said the only reason my kids were alive was because of the car I was driving. Self driving cars may potentially be safer than driven cars at some point in the future, but that is a massively long way off. I think I will always be the person that wears a seat belt no matter what.
Oh and the average weekly car travel in the UK is 244km in 2013 according to http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
Alternatively, use a wood chipper.
Except I don't want to be in someone else's car. Or let someone else in my car. I want to fit my child seats and leave them fitted. I want to have my shit in the boot that I like to carry just in case. The cost differential would have to be HUGE to make me not have my own vehicle, self drive or otherwise. As it is my car costs me $225 per week total cost. That includes everything from fuel to insurance to the financing costs and is based on 500km a week for a $50k car. A pool car would have to be under 25% of that for me to even come close to considering it and I would have to have almost no wait time ever. If I am having to wait more than 3 minutes for the car to arrive it is adding 50% to my quick local run the the shops and back. That alone would annoy me enough for it to not happen.