People have walked up Everest and survived, but at a 1-in-10 death rate. And that's for people who are wearing proper clothing, often have bottled oxygen, and have trained for years to be able to survive a slow changeover from 5,000ft to the top.
Comparing that to the average untrained person with no oxygen or warm clothing being instantly taken from 7,000 feet-equivalent to 30,000 feet is pretty ridiculous.
That's the engine from a Duesenberg Model J. It's an 8 cylinder 5.2L engine that produced 265hp.
We're making power like that from 2-3L 4 cylinders now.
I'm sure someone back then said "the Duesenberg's engine is the pinnacle. No one will ever build an engine that can do better."
And now that engine is eclipsed by the engine in the Chevy Cobalt.
In short, just because we think we know all there is to know about making an engine does not mean that 50 years from now someone won't make a much better one.
I find it kind of amusing that you can sit here amidst the worst unemployment crisis in our country in decades and talk about labor shortages.
As for unions paying money to political parties, I'll be right there with you provided you forbid any* organization from paying money to political parties. Because otherwise, the corporations get to buy their votes, and no one can oppose them.
Which competition are you going to take your skills to if ALL businesses decide to place "unreasonable consideration upon" people's employment?
The "I don't need a union because if I'm unhappy at work I'll just go work somewhere else" fantasy doesn't really work when you can't find anywhere else to work.
Plenty of people. The difference is, they'd either be honest, or very, very brave.
If a truck driver runs over a kid, he'll get in plenty of trouble in addition to having to deal with the emotional repercussions for life. By your logic, we have no truck drivers either.
What you wouldn't get, is the glut of asshole CEO's who go for profit above all else, including safety and responsibility. To them, it wouldn't be worth the risk. But I don't think we'd miss them all that much.
And even if it was not, even if it was true: it would not be an argument!
Oh. You don't. OK.
We had deaths in oil disasters? We had chemical accidents? We had air plane crashes? And? I don't get it! What the heck has that to do with nuclear power generation? Nothing! You have no clue. Period. Yes, add another Period.
Considering you apparently have no idea what I'm talking about, I'd say the clueless one here is not me.
Uranium mining caused thousands of deaths. If not ten thousands. Chernobyl caused 10,000 deaths that are accounted for. And perhaps 100,000 that are not.
Prove it. The official death list from Chernobyl is 30 people. Factor in a 100-fold "Soviet Secrecy" margin of error and you have 3,000 people. Factor in double that for "people who died that we couldn't prove died because of Chernobyl" and you get 6 thousand. Nowhere close to the bottom end of your wild-assed guess. The only sources that come close to your, frankly, absurd numbers are biased anti-nuclear protest groups releasing non-peer-reviewed "studies" on the matter.
As for uranium mining, even assuming your numbers are true (which I doubt, given your total BS numbers in the previous paragraph) all mining is dangerous. Diamond mining has been killing people since long before uranium was discovered.
So, you know what exactly happened there? And you still think regulations would help?
I didn't say regulations, I said regulated, which means making and enforcing regulations. If an outside inspector had been on the job at TMI, he never would have let them turn the backup pumps off without bringing the reactor offline. And they never would have tried to in the first place, because the watchdog would have been there.
Wind and solar can go a long way toward reducing our reliance on other forms of energy, but unless you're talking about specially-designed communities, they won't ever replace them entirely. You are not going to power New York City with solar panels and windmills.
As for nuclear power in a nutshell: It's barely competitive in cost because it's 30+ year old technology that's being used beyond what it should because no one's allowed to build newer, better ones. And I don't care about competitive in cost, I care about competitive in ability to generate power without harming the environment. The low level radiation put out by a nuclear plant is not harmful, is lower than the low level radiation put out by a coal plant, and in fact the yearly radiation absorption by a person living near the plant is lower than the radiation dose you get from eating one banana.
The small risk of catastrophic failure, I've already addressed. The insolvable waste problem is not insolvable. We just haven't seriously tried to solve it yet.
As for breeder reactors being non viable due to weapons problems, that's a very easy solution. Do the same thing we do with our nuclear weapons facilities. Surround them with Marines and dare some asshole to steal the plutonium.
You'd think, but that's assuming a smart public that's good at risk assessment. The fact that people drive and are then afraid to fly shows that people aren't very good at risk assessment.
Nuclear is the adult version of the boogeyman. Whether a danger exists or not, people will see it as dangerous. The sooner the public is able to separate the real problems with nuclear from the boogeyman problems, the sooner we can start seriously discussing how to handle the real problems so that we can safely and viably use nuclear power. You're never going to be able to fix imaginary "radiation will kill us all no matter what" problems, and so until we convince the public that such problems do not exist, they aren't going to be willing to talk about fixing the problems that do.
I don't really think that a project enacted when scientists thought it was safe to have a chunk of plutonium serve as a door stop can really be held up as an example of government regulatory mismanagement. Nuclear hazards were not well-understood at that point, otherwise the Manhattan Project workers wouldn't have been fooling with radioactive materials in the manner that they did.
Well, you make a pretty good point, but there are plenty of industries that have had accidents which have rendered the land unusable for the lifetime of whoever wanted to use the land at the time. At the end of the day, whether you wreck the land for 100 or 10,000 years is immaterial to me - I'm gonna be dead before the land is usable again.
So, you've got the mining industry which destroyed a whole town by sparking off a mine fire that can't be put out (google Centralia)
You've got the chemical industry (we don't even need to go in depth about all the toxic pollutants they've belched into the land and air. And ocean.)
You've got oil, which while it wasn't 25,000 years of damage, certainly did effect not only the Gulf economy, but the Gulf ecosystem for quite some time to come.
You've got coal, which destroys entire ecosystems, not to mention geography, with strip mining.
You've got timber, which is busy cutting down all the old growth trees, and thinks that planting little saplings makes it OK.
You have the energy and automotive industries as a whole, which have caused global warming to the extent that we are starting to see real, and dangerous, effects thereof.
In short, there's a LOT of industries out there that are causing more damage than nuclear ever has.
As for the amount of land, Chernobyl was about as bad as it gets. The damn thing exploded. Such a disaster need never happen again, and only happened because..Well hell, that's just how the Soviets did things. Shoddy and cheap, and who gives a damn what we do to the environment or the people. Basing nuclear decisions on Chernobyl is like basing military decisions on Custer's last stand; "Well that one guy did something freaking stupid and lost, and therefore we should disband the military."
Not that I blame people for having concerns about idiots putting profits over safety - which is why I've been saying that I'm for nuclear only assuming we do everything possible to eliminate that from happening.
But in reality, the public is less concerned over what the corporation does (how many REALLY know what happened at TMI) and more concerned over the misconception that anything radioactive is inherently dangerous, and there is no way to make it safe. If we get the public to realize that nuclear can be safe, if properly supervised, then hopefully the attitude will shift from "oh god no it'll kill us all!" to "ok, then let's get it regulated and get some plants online so we can get rid of coal."
That's what I was getting at yesterday. Nuclear would be fine as long as it was strictly regulated by a 3rd party uninterested in profits (read: the government). And even then you'd have to worry about some asshole inspector taking kickbacks not to notice the corner cutting.
Really, one interesting way to address it would be "if your company causes a disaster, or even a near disaster, because you decided to cut costs by cutting safety corners, the entire upper management of your company goes to jail for life."
Of course, that philosophy would work well extended to all corporations, not just the nuclear industry;)
The reason they've been unable to obtain funding is because they've been unable to obtain authorization to build it. If you come up to me asking for money to build a plant that is illegal to build, I'm not going to give you any money.
And the reason it's illegal to build safer plants is because the public lumps ALL "nukyulur" into the same "oh shit it's dangerous" boat. It doesn't matter what tech you use, or how safe it is: to the public, you're building Chernobyl Mile Island Daichi and must therefore be run out of town.
Hell, when they started irradiating food to kill bugs that could kill people, they found that they couldn't sell it. They had to coin a new marketing word (picowave!) so that the mouthbreathing morons that make up most of the public wouldn't think someone had slipped plutonium into their frozen peas.
So until we get the public over its irrational fear of anything radioactive, we will never see nuclear technological advancements applied. Ever.
And as I said yesterday, once we get the public over that fear, we still have to address the *real* problems of Nuclear: What to do with the waste, and how to stop cheap bastard energy corporations from cutting safety corners in the name of profits.
The point is not that a stacked vehicle has a higher reliability rate than a side-mounted vehicle. The point is that IF something goes wrong, you're more likely to survive in a stacked vehicle because all the exploding stuff is below you rather than under your chair. If Challenger had been perched on top of a stack, and an O ring failure happened in the first stage booster, the crew vehicle probably wouldn't have broken up. And assuming it had, since it would have been in a stacked configuration they'd have had an escape tower and a parachute system like on all the other stacked manned vehicles we've launched, and therefore there would have been a much better chance that the vehicle would gently splash down in the ocean rather than hurtling into it at over 200mph.
As for Columbia, in a stacked configuration, Columbia simply wouldn't have happened. Any foam from the ascent stages would not have fallen upward and busted a hole in the vehicle. The big advantage of a stacked system is that when something breaks off, it falls down, and so does not hit the crew vehicle.
Now all that said, I'm not sure how we'd have stacked something with the size requirements of the shuttle without rebuilding the VAB to make it even taller. If you perch a shuttle on top of an ET/SRB stack (which also needs a module on the bottom where the SSME's now have to be since they can't be on the orbiter anymore) it would probably be significantly taller than a Saturn V, which is what that building was designed to accommodate. I would also imagine that moving that stacked vehicle out to the pad would be a nightmare.
Actually I might be wrong, but I believe there is no backup shuttle for Atlantis. The boosters it's using were the last ones made, and they were meant to not be used because Atlantis was supposed to be the emergency backup for Endeavour. But when another flight was authorized, Atlantis moved from backup to being an actual flight. If there's a problem with Atlantis, the astronauts will ride home in a Soyuz from the ISS.
Don't get me wrong. I don't require that nuclear be 100% safe. Nothing is or can be, and I agree with you about coal. I'm actually all for nuclear, once we develop systems that get it as close to 100% safe as possible. Those systems are not in place at this point.
I envision a system wherein a computer checks the work of the plant operators. Want to shut down the backup coolant pumps like they did at TMI? Nope, you can't, because you haven't shut the reactor down yet.
Additionally the industry needs to be heavily regulated by a party that has absolutely no financial interest in the plants it is regulating - namely, the government. If a for-profit corporation thinks it can get away with cutting corners to save money, it will, and the people in that corporation making the call don't give a damn what the consequences might be. We saw that with BP's little party in the Gulf last year. Imagine if we let BP open up a nuclear reactor. "Oh, hell, we don't need the emergency coolant system. What are the odds we'd ever use it, and it'll save money!" Google BP's three little pigs presentation if you don't believe they'd have that attitude.
I don't think it impossible to come up with a system that would allow for the building of nuclear plants that almost guarantees that there would be no accidents due to negligence or profiteering.
But you still have to decide what to do with the waste.
While you're right that coal plants release radiation, where the difference is, is that their waste does not stay radioactive for thousands of years, requiring specialized storage in . . Well. . Somewhere, hopefully, because usually no one's willing to take the waste. Even assuming the nuclear waste is rendered safe, in that once in the storage facility there is no way for it to contaminate anything, ever, you'll never convince the local city council of that, and therefore you'll have a hard time getting it into that safe storage facility in the first place.
The Prairie Island nuclear plant made the news several years ago because it turned out they were storing their waste outside in barrels on the site - not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't find any place to put it. We have to have the waste disposal and storage problem figured out before we go large-scale nuclear.
Again, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. The biggest hurdle there will be getting the media to stop whipping the public into hysterics every time "nuclear" is mentioned. Given the choice between sensationalizing the DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE that's GOING TO KILL US ALL and explaining that the waste is safe if stored properly, most TV stations these days are going to choose the scaremongering path.
So again, I'm not against nuclear, and in fact I think nuclear is, short term anyway, the only way we're going to produce the power that people demand without destroying the climate in the process. I'm all for nuclear, provided the industry can't get away with any BS shenanigans, and provided you can tell me where we're going to put the waste.
As someone else pointed out, rolling up clothes is one thing. Rolling up a $1000 computer is quite another. You're not going to be able to roll the computer as tightly as you can roll a shirt.
This. Just because you can make something doesn't mean anyone is going to want it. There's a reason we upgraded from scrolls to books. Rolled up things are an inefficient use of space.
I don't think you can really be so angry with the anti-nuclear crowd. It's true that nuclear can be safe, as long as the plant builders/operators don't cut corners, plan appropriately for accidents, and follow the safety regs. The trouble is that those three conditions rely on people, and any time you start relying on people you risk getting hit with people who are crooks or who just don't give a damn.
3 Mile Island was caused by bad design and failure to follow procedure. Chernobyl was too. And the latest problem from Japan was caused by refusal to acknowledge that anything like a big earthquake/tsunami could happen. The latest reports say the plant was designed assuming a tsunami resulting from an 8.6 earthquake, despite ample evidence that larger quakes and tsunamis have happened over the years. When you're talking about something like nuclear, you over-design the hell out of it or you shouldn't do it at all.
I'll be all for nuclear as soon as someone can figure out how to ensure that enough checks are in place so that dumb/lazy/cheap people won't compromise its safety.
Oh hell I agree with you. I think it's stupid that there's controversy over it. Reminds me of the GTA Hot Coffee crap. A game where you're a serial killer running around getting hookers (and killing them), running from cops (and killing them) and robbing people (and killing them) is just fine, but if you have sex with your girlfriend it's the *Antichrist!* and must be *censored!* and *burned!*
American attitudes toward media content are about as stupid as it gets.
Yeah, you'd think. But stickers only work if it's obvious that you shouldn't do something, and to be obvious it usually has to be something of general experience to a large swath of the public. As an extreme example, if I sold you a nuclear reactor, putting a "Do not allow this to melt down" sticker on it wouldn't protect me from liability if you screwed up and had a meltdown.
The trouble with a power cable carrying that much juice is that the average person who is not a lineman for the power company has never dealt with anything approaching that much power before, and so even if you put a bevy of stickers on it, they might hurt themselves just handling it, and then you'd get sued.
Also keep in mind that lawsuits do not have to be successful to sink a company. In addition to the negative publicity they generate, just mounting a defense against them is prohibitively expensive and can bankrupt otherwise financially sound companies.
I was hoping the paper would also go into vulnerabilities-without-threats. I've been having a debate with some people regarding car vulnerabilities - Some universities have done studies and determined that someone could use the tire pressure monitoring systems as a way to hack into the car's computer and screw with some readings. The car guys are generally up in arms about this - "Why wouldn't they secure the systems," while I take the stand that even though the car is technically vulnerable to such an attack, the attack won't materialize because anything you can accomplish by hacking TPMS, for example causing a flat tire readout, making the driver pull over, at which point you steal the car, you can accomplish more efficiently by other methods, such as pointing a gun at them or tapping them from behind and then stealing the car when they get out to check for damage.
It seems, to me anyway, that a lot of the media scare stories out there are based on these threat-less vulnerabilities. I saw a report a couple of days ago that was trying to imply that an Ohio nuclear plant is dangerous because it doesn't have all the safety features that the Japan plant had - but when you drilled down to what was missing, it turned out to be a tsunami wall. So while technically the Ohio plant would be vulnerable if hit by a tsunami, it will never be hit by one, and so it's a threat-less vulnerability.
The problem will be that a lot of homeowners are dumb. In my college days when I worked for an electrician I saw all sorts of stupid crap. Frayed extension cords either left as-is, or in one great case, "fixed" with scotch tape. Tines from a fork used as the end of an extension cord after the original end had broken off. Cords pinched in doorways, stretched across swimming pools, plugged in to the wall, nothing plugged into the end, and sitting outside in a snowbank, all sorts of really stupid crap. The reason people doing stupid stuff like this didn't kill them was partially luck and partially that 120V/15A isn't all that much, and so when something went wrong the breaker tripped before someone got killed.
Throw all that out the window if you're trying to suck enough power to charge a whole car in a few minutes. Forget the cost, forget the unwieldy wiring, forget everything except basic safety. The general rule of thumb for product safety is that if people can do something dumb with it, they will. Hence the dumb warning labels on everything. I guarantee that even if you solve the cooling problems and the flex problems and the money problems, some idiot will fray his charging cable, or make it longer by duct taping extension cords to it, or try to run his Christmas lights off of it, or in some other way do something incredibly stupid, and off himself. And while that might be good for the human gene pool, the resulting product liability suit will bankrupt the company that made the charging equipment.
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People have walked up Everest and survived, but at a 1-in-10 death rate. And that's for people who are wearing proper clothing, often have bottled oxygen, and have trained for years to be able to survive a slow changeover from 5,000ft to the top.
Comparing that to the average untrained person with no oxygen or warm clothing being instantly taken from 7,000 feet-equivalent to 30,000 feet is pretty ridiculous.
http://www.artvalue.com/photos/auction/0/44/44130/duesenberg-vehicles-model-j-engine-2025489.jpg
That's the engine from a Duesenberg Model J. It's an 8 cylinder 5.2L engine that produced 265hp.
We're making power like that from 2-3L 4 cylinders now.
I'm sure someone back then said "the Duesenberg's engine is the pinnacle. No one will ever build an engine that can do better."
And now that engine is eclipsed by the engine in the Chevy Cobalt.
In short, just because we think we know all there is to know about making an engine does not mean that 50 years from now someone won't make a much better one.
I find it kind of amusing that you can sit here amidst the worst unemployment crisis in our country in decades and talk about labor shortages.
As for unions paying money to political parties, I'll be right there with you provided you forbid any* organization from paying money to political parties. Because otherwise, the corporations get to buy their votes, and no one can oppose them.
Which competition are you going to take your skills to if ALL businesses decide to place "unreasonable consideration upon" people's employment?
The "I don't need a union because if I'm unhappy at work I'll just go work somewhere else" fantasy doesn't really work when you can't find anywhere else to work.
Plenty of people. The difference is, they'd either be honest, or very, very brave.
If a truck driver runs over a kid, he'll get in plenty of trouble in addition to having to deal with the emotional repercussions for life. By your logic, we have no truck drivers either.
What you wouldn't get, is the glut of asshole CEO's who go for profit above all else, including safety and responsibility. To them, it wouldn't be worth the risk. But I don't think we'd miss them all that much.
Sorry this is bullshit.
Got proof, or are you just spouting off?
And even if it was not, even if it was true: it would not be an argument!
Oh. You don't. OK.
We had deaths in oil disasters? We had chemical accidents? We had air plane crashes?
And?
I don't get it!
What the heck has that to do with nuclear power generation? Nothing!
You have no clue. Period. Yes, add another Period.
Considering you apparently have no idea what I'm talking about, I'd say the clueless one here is not me.
Uranium mining caused thousands of deaths. If not ten thousands. Chernobyl caused 10,000 deaths that are accounted for. And perhaps 100,000 that are not.
Prove it. The official death list from Chernobyl is 30 people. Factor in a 100-fold "Soviet Secrecy" margin of error and you have 3,000 people. Factor in double that for "people who died that we couldn't prove died because of Chernobyl" and you get 6 thousand. Nowhere close to the bottom end of your wild-assed guess. The only sources that come close to your, frankly, absurd numbers are biased anti-nuclear protest groups releasing non-peer-reviewed "studies" on the matter.
As for uranium mining, even assuming your numbers are true (which I doubt, given your total BS numbers in the previous paragraph) all mining is dangerous. Diamond mining has been killing people since long before uranium was discovered.
So, you know what exactly happened there? And you still think regulations would help?
I didn't say regulations, I said regulated, which means making and enforcing regulations. If an outside inspector had been on the job at TMI, he never would have let them turn the backup pumps off without bringing the reactor offline. And they never would have tried to in the first place, because the watchdog would have been there.
Comparing the Soviet government to the US Federal government is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Wind and solar can go a long way toward reducing our reliance on other forms of energy, but unless you're talking about specially-designed communities, they won't ever replace them entirely. You are not going to power New York City with solar panels and windmills.
As for nuclear power in a nutshell: It's barely competitive in cost because it's 30+ year old technology that's being used beyond what it should because no one's allowed to build newer, better ones. And I don't care about competitive in cost, I care about competitive in ability to generate power without harming the environment. The low level radiation put out by a nuclear plant is not harmful, is lower than the low level radiation put out by a coal plant, and in fact the yearly radiation absorption by a person living near the plant is lower than the radiation dose you get from eating one banana.
The small risk of catastrophic failure, I've already addressed. The insolvable waste problem is not insolvable. We just haven't seriously tried to solve it yet.
As for breeder reactors being non viable due to weapons problems, that's a very easy solution. Do the same thing we do with our nuclear weapons facilities. Surround them with Marines and dare some asshole to steal the plutonium.
You'd think, but that's assuming a smart public that's good at risk assessment. The fact that people drive and are then afraid to fly shows that people aren't very good at risk assessment.
Nuclear is the adult version of the boogeyman. Whether a danger exists or not, people will see it as dangerous. The sooner the public is able to separate the real problems with nuclear from the boogeyman problems, the sooner we can start seriously discussing how to handle the real problems so that we can safely and viably use nuclear power. You're never going to be able to fix imaginary "radiation will kill us all no matter what" problems, and so until we convince the public that such problems do not exist, they aren't going to be willing to talk about fixing the problems that do.
I don't really think that a project enacted when scientists thought it was safe to have a chunk of plutonium serve as a door stop can really be held up as an example of government regulatory mismanagement. Nuclear hazards were not well-understood at that point, otherwise the Manhattan Project workers wouldn't have been fooling with radioactive materials in the manner that they did.
Well, you make a pretty good point, but there are plenty of industries that have had accidents which have rendered the land unusable for the lifetime of whoever wanted to use the land at the time. At the end of the day, whether you wreck the land for 100 or 10,000 years is immaterial to me - I'm gonna be dead before the land is usable again.
So, you've got the mining industry which destroyed a whole town by sparking off a mine fire that can't be put out (google Centralia)
You've got the chemical industry (we don't even need to go in depth about all the toxic pollutants they've belched into the land and air. And ocean.)
You've got oil, which while it wasn't 25,000 years of damage, certainly did effect not only the Gulf economy, but the Gulf ecosystem for quite some time to come.
You've got coal, which destroys entire ecosystems, not to mention geography, with strip mining.
You've got timber, which is busy cutting down all the old growth trees, and thinks that planting little saplings makes it OK.
You have the energy and automotive industries as a whole, which have caused global warming to the extent that we are starting to see real, and dangerous, effects thereof.
In short, there's a LOT of industries out there that are causing more damage than nuclear ever has.
As for the amount of land, Chernobyl was about as bad as it gets. The damn thing exploded. Such a disaster need never happen again, and only happened because. .Well hell, that's just how the Soviets did things. Shoddy and cheap, and who gives a damn what we do to the environment or the people. Basing nuclear decisions on Chernobyl is like basing military decisions on Custer's last stand; "Well that one guy did something freaking stupid and lost, and therefore we should disband the military."
Not that I blame people for having concerns about idiots putting profits over safety - which is why I've been saying that I'm for nuclear only assuming we do everything possible to eliminate that from happening.
But in reality, the public is less concerned over what the corporation does (how many REALLY know what happened at TMI) and more concerned over the misconception that anything radioactive is inherently dangerous, and there is no way to make it safe. If we get the public to realize that nuclear can be safe, if properly supervised, then hopefully the attitude will shift from "oh god no it'll kill us all!" to "ok, then let's get it regulated and get some plants online so we can get rid of coal."
That's what I was getting at yesterday. Nuclear would be fine as long as it was strictly regulated by a 3rd party uninterested in profits (read: the government). And even then you'd have to worry about some asshole inspector taking kickbacks not to notice the corner cutting.
Really, one interesting way to address it would be "if your company causes a disaster, or even a near disaster, because you decided to cut costs by cutting safety corners, the entire upper management of your company goes to jail for life."
Of course, that philosophy would work well extended to all corporations, not just the nuclear industry ;)
The reason they've been unable to obtain funding is because they've been unable to obtain authorization to build it. If you come up to me asking for money to build a plant that is illegal to build, I'm not going to give you any money.
And the reason it's illegal to build safer plants is because the public lumps ALL "nukyulur" into the same "oh shit it's dangerous" boat. It doesn't matter what tech you use, or how safe it is: to the public, you're building Chernobyl Mile Island Daichi and must therefore be run out of town.
Hell, when they started irradiating food to kill bugs that could kill people, they found that they couldn't sell it. They had to coin a new marketing word (picowave!) so that the mouthbreathing morons that make up most of the public wouldn't think someone had slipped plutonium into their frozen peas.
So until we get the public over its irrational fear of anything radioactive, we will never see nuclear technological advancements applied. Ever.
And as I said yesterday, once we get the public over that fear, we still have to address the *real* problems of Nuclear: What to do with the waste, and how to stop cheap bastard energy corporations from cutting safety corners in the name of profits.
The point is not that a stacked vehicle has a higher reliability rate than a side-mounted vehicle. The point is that IF something goes wrong, you're more likely to survive in a stacked vehicle because all the exploding stuff is below you rather than under your chair. If Challenger had been perched on top of a stack, and an O ring failure happened in the first stage booster, the crew vehicle probably wouldn't have broken up. And assuming it had, since it would have been in a stacked configuration they'd have had an escape tower and a parachute system like on all the other stacked manned vehicles we've launched, and therefore there would have been a much better chance that the vehicle would gently splash down in the ocean rather than hurtling into it at over 200mph.
As for Columbia, in a stacked configuration, Columbia simply wouldn't have happened. Any foam from the ascent stages would not have fallen upward and busted a hole in the vehicle. The big advantage of a stacked system is that when something breaks off, it falls down, and so does not hit the crew vehicle.
Now all that said, I'm not sure how we'd have stacked something with the size requirements of the shuttle without rebuilding the VAB to make it even taller. If you perch a shuttle on top of an ET/SRB stack (which also needs a module on the bottom where the SSME's now have to be since they can't be on the orbiter anymore) it would probably be significantly taller than a Saturn V, which is what that building was designed to accommodate. I would also imagine that moving that stacked vehicle out to the pad would be a nightmare.
Actually I might be wrong, but I believe there is no backup shuttle for Atlantis. The boosters it's using were the last ones made, and they were meant to not be used because Atlantis was supposed to be the emergency backup for Endeavour. But when another flight was authorized, Atlantis moved from backup to being an actual flight. If there's a problem with Atlantis, the astronauts will ride home in a Soyuz from the ISS.
Don't get me wrong. I don't require that nuclear be 100% safe. Nothing is or can be, and I agree with you about coal. I'm actually all for nuclear, once we develop systems that get it as close to 100% safe as possible. Those systems are not in place at this point.
I envision a system wherein a computer checks the work of the plant operators. Want to shut down the backup coolant pumps like they did at TMI? Nope, you can't, because you haven't shut the reactor down yet.
Additionally the industry needs to be heavily regulated by a party that has absolutely no financial interest in the plants it is regulating - namely, the government. If a for-profit corporation thinks it can get away with cutting corners to save money, it will, and the people in that corporation making the call don't give a damn what the consequences might be. We saw that with BP's little party in the Gulf last year. Imagine if we let BP open up a nuclear reactor. "Oh, hell, we don't need the emergency coolant system. What are the odds we'd ever use it, and it'll save money!" Google BP's three little pigs presentation if you don't believe they'd have that attitude.
I don't think it impossible to come up with a system that would allow for the building of nuclear plants that almost guarantees that there would be no accidents due to negligence or profiteering.
But you still have to decide what to do with the waste.
While you're right that coal plants release radiation, where the difference is, is that their waste does not stay radioactive for thousands of years, requiring specialized storage in . . Well. . Somewhere, hopefully, because usually no one's willing to take the waste. Even assuming the nuclear waste is rendered safe, in that once in the storage facility there is no way for it to contaminate anything, ever, you'll never convince the local city council of that, and therefore you'll have a hard time getting it into that safe storage facility in the first place.
The Prairie Island nuclear plant made the news several years ago because it turned out they were storing their waste outside in barrels on the site - not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't find any place to put it. We have to have the waste disposal and storage problem figured out before we go large-scale nuclear.
Again, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. The biggest hurdle there will be getting the media to stop whipping the public into hysterics every time "nuclear" is mentioned. Given the choice between sensationalizing the DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE that's GOING TO KILL US ALL and explaining that the waste is safe if stored properly, most TV stations these days are going to choose the scaremongering path.
So again, I'm not against nuclear, and in fact I think nuclear is, short term anyway, the only way we're going to produce the power that people demand without destroying the climate in the process. I'm all for nuclear, provided the industry can't get away with any BS shenanigans, and provided you can tell me where we're going to put the waste.
As someone else pointed out, rolling up clothes is one thing. Rolling up a $1000 computer is quite another. You're not going to be able to roll the computer as tightly as you can roll a shirt.
This. Just because you can make something doesn't mean anyone is going to want it. There's a reason we upgraded from scrolls to books. Rolled up things are an inefficient use of space.
I don't think you can really be so angry with the anti-nuclear crowd. It's true that nuclear can be safe, as long as the plant builders/operators don't cut corners, plan appropriately for accidents, and follow the safety regs. The trouble is that those three conditions rely on people, and any time you start relying on people you risk getting hit with people who are crooks or who just don't give a damn.
3 Mile Island was caused by bad design and failure to follow procedure. Chernobyl was too. And the latest problem from Japan was caused by refusal to acknowledge that anything like a big earthquake/tsunami could happen. The latest reports say the plant was designed assuming a tsunami resulting from an 8.6 earthquake, despite ample evidence that larger quakes and tsunamis have happened over the years. When you're talking about something like nuclear, you over-design the hell out of it or you shouldn't do it at all.
I'll be all for nuclear as soon as someone can figure out how to ensure that enough checks are in place so that dumb/lazy/cheap people won't compromise its safety.
This.
60% of something is not "near" it anymore than getting a D in school is "almost" getting an A.
Oh hell I agree with you. I think it's stupid that there's controversy over it. Reminds me of the GTA Hot Coffee crap. A game where you're a serial killer running around getting hookers (and killing them), running from cops (and killing them) and robbing people (and killing them) is just fine, but if you have sex with your girlfriend it's the *Antichrist!* and must be *censored!* and *burned!*
American attitudes toward media content are about as stupid as it gets.
If I had to guess, it's to remove the part of the game where you slap the woman around. They've gotten a lot of negative publicity for that recently.
Yeah, you'd think. But stickers only work if it's obvious that you shouldn't do something, and to be obvious it usually has to be something of general experience to a large swath of the public. As an extreme example, if I sold you a nuclear reactor, putting a "Do not allow this to melt down" sticker on it wouldn't protect me from liability if you screwed up and had a meltdown.
The trouble with a power cable carrying that much juice is that the average person who is not a lineman for the power company has never dealt with anything approaching that much power before, and so even if you put a bevy of stickers on it, they might hurt themselves just handling it, and then you'd get sued.
Also keep in mind that lawsuits do not have to be successful to sink a company. In addition to the negative publicity they generate, just mounting a defense against them is prohibitively expensive and can bankrupt otherwise financially sound companies.
I was hoping the paper would also go into vulnerabilities-without-threats. I've been having a debate with some people regarding car vulnerabilities - Some universities have done studies and determined that someone could use the tire pressure monitoring systems as a way to hack into the car's computer and screw with some readings. The car guys are generally up in arms about this - "Why wouldn't they secure the systems," while I take the stand that even though the car is technically vulnerable to such an attack, the attack won't materialize because anything you can accomplish by hacking TPMS, for example causing a flat tire readout, making the driver pull over, at which point you steal the car, you can accomplish more efficiently by other methods, such as pointing a gun at them or tapping them from behind and then stealing the car when they get out to check for damage.
It seems, to me anyway, that a lot of the media scare stories out there are based on these threat-less vulnerabilities. I saw a report a couple of days ago that was trying to imply that an Ohio nuclear plant is dangerous because it doesn't have all the safety features that the Japan plant had - but when you drilled down to what was missing, it turned out to be a tsunami wall. So while technically the Ohio plant would be vulnerable if hit by a tsunami, it will never be hit by one, and so it's a threat-less vulnerability.
The problem will be that a lot of homeowners are dumb. In my college days when I worked for an electrician I saw all sorts of stupid crap. Frayed extension cords either left as-is, or in one great case, "fixed" with scotch tape. Tines from a fork used as the end of an extension cord after the original end had broken off. Cords pinched in doorways, stretched across swimming pools, plugged in to the wall, nothing plugged into the end, and sitting outside in a snowbank, all sorts of really stupid crap. The reason people doing stupid stuff like this didn't kill them was partially luck and partially that 120V/15A isn't all that much, and so when something went wrong the breaker tripped before someone got killed.
Throw all that out the window if you're trying to suck enough power to charge a whole car in a few minutes. Forget the cost, forget the unwieldy wiring, forget everything except basic safety. The general rule of thumb for product safety is that if people can do something dumb with it, they will. Hence the dumb warning labels on everything. I guarantee that even if you solve the cooling problems and the flex problems and the money problems, some idiot will fray his charging cable, or make it longer by duct taping extension cords to it, or try to run his Christmas lights off of it, or in some other way do something incredibly stupid, and off himself. And while that might be good for the human gene pool, the resulting product liability suit will bankrupt the company that made the charging equipment.