I'd question, at this point in time, how much money would the power companies actually LOSE in such a recession? They're the cheapest source of electricity per KwH, unemployed people trying to save money might reduce their usage, so it's not like they need to push the plant beyond it's limits because the demand has gone down, but because electricity is still getting used the plant is still making money. It's stable.
Besides, there's still vigorous watchdogs making sure they maintain safe operations.
It's actually pretty neat - you can build a refridgerator that has no moving parts, mearly piping and a heat source. They're known as Absorbtion Chillers. Though after a certain point it is more efficient to have some pumps. Some RV's have these, the heat source is a propane burner. It's more efficient than trying to run a generator(~20% efficient at that size) all the time to keep your food(or medicine) cold when you're not otherwise using electricity. They take a 9V or some other configuration of standard batteries to run the thermostat and fridge light.
The only problem with using solar is that you generally need steam, not mere hot water, for the chillers to work well. this can be done with solar - but you need more complicated solar collectors to concentrate the solar enough to actually boil the water. - rather than a simple panel that you drain water through, you need pipes with curved mirror surfaces(polished metal works well enough though) reflecting more sunlight onto the pipe.
Nucler power plant's power curves are a lot like the inverse of charging a battery.
Going from 0% to 10% takes a heck of a lot longer than going from 90% to 100%.
Going from 0 to 50% capacity might take a day for a nuclear plant, but 50% to 100% and vice versa can be done in under an hour, for a nuclear plant designed for it*.
So, rather than having a 1GW plant acting as 'standby' for peak power demands, you'd have 2-4 plants ready to go from 75% to 100% if necessary.
*Some in the USA are, some aren't. Note that most of our plants were built to be pure baseload, and are 20+ years old.
Nuclear power IS safe, at least by any reasonable use of the term. Thing is, if you scale up Nuclear power to the same electricity production as coal, even if you include a Chernobyl every year, it'd still kill fewer people than Coal does. The statistics DON'T point to a Chernobyl level event every year - at this point you're looking more at a greater than 50 year interval between them, and every year of safe operation without another disaster extends that.
Even though I am thousands of kilometers away, it is still recommended to not eat mushrooms more than a couple of times a year, and I want a better future for my own children.
Are you sure that recommendation is based on good science? Or is it like the Vaccine scare here in the USA about Thermisol? That has parents not vaccinating their kids even with thermisol free vaccines.
showing that US research spendings on solar energy are still only half of those on nuclear energy despite the fact that you claim that there is essentially no research on nuclear energy! ; figures are from National Council for Science and the Environment.
Given that Nuclear power provides ~20% of our power, sure, there's R&D with it, but most of that's gone to increasing power production capabilities at existing nuke plants, not for building new ones. I'd also note that wind isn't listed - which might put wind/solar over nuclear in research investments(might be why they don't list it), but still under the R&D investments for COAL.
While on this topic, I'll point out that I'm for a rough power production plan of 35% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% hydro, 5% other.
Given that I've considered installed a combined cycle generator in my basement*, I'm not hostile to Lichtblick's plan. I'd power it with propane though, as that's what I have access to. It can be very efficient as well - an electrical power only plant is lucky to reach 50%, most are closer to 30%. The rest is waste heat. If you're using the combined cycle to also utilize the heat that would otherwise be waste, bonus.
*Normally you don't want the generator in the house, but it is perfectly safe if you take the right steps and properly duct the exhaust to OUTSIDE the building, and in my case I'd be ducting the air in as well.
Store it, reprocess it, burn it in a breeder, use alternative methods to get it so it degrades faster, like other posters have mentioned.
Besides, radioactive waste isn't having a real effect on the environment because it's contained, unlike the chemical and radiological pollution coal plants release.
Going after salt flats is missing our point, because I haven't ever heard of a pro-nuclear power slashdotter propose using them for long term storage. The proposals are almost universally reprocess/breeder/netron flux with diversions into burying it in subduction zones.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
We have functioning fission plants now, the biggest fusion test reactor being built/proposed is going to cost a couple times that of a good sized fission plant and still has absolutely no provisions for actually producing electricity.
You seem to get it pretty good - there's more complications of course, but much like me, you're not writing an essay, much less a book. Which is what it WOULD take to do this topic real justice. In the case of my post I dropped the economics completely, and only addressed physical efficiency, and in one spot put 'power' where I probably should have put 'electricity'.
Nuclear economics can get complicated, but if you can avoid screwing up the construction and driving up costs enough it's the cheapest, most reliable, carbon-neutral source of power we have.
I tend to dislike coal due to the non-carbon pollution it still releases, and by the time you fix that the build cost of the plant is as much or more than nuclear plants, especially if you introduce carbon capture - which costs the plant several percentage points of efficiency and increases build costs like another 10%. I'd prefer natural gas be saved for mobile work, home heating(97% efficient), and chemical production rather than producing electricity. Hint: NG->Electricity->high efficiency heat pump is STILL less efficient than NG->high efficiency furnace.
Anyways - I've never really seen breeder reactors making it on their own until we have enough traditional nuclear plants that rising costs of fuel and waste disposal issues makes a breeder make sense more from the 'make more fuel' and 'get rid of waste' perspectives with the power production being a happy(and deal-making) side effect.
Oh, and I've never suggested using nuclear for 100% of our power needs - that doesn't make sense. But I see a future mix of Nuclear 'baseload', Solar 'day use', Wind 'off-peak', hydro 'peak', with miscellaneous 'other sources'. Call it 35%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 5% (Very rough).
Basically - at the bottom nuclear grinds away doing what it does best - providing 100% power better than 90% of the time. During the day, solar panels and solar thermal plants* provide the electricity needed to run offices and air conditioning. Wind provides power to everything people are willing to do without for relatively short periods to a day or two. Charging plug-in hybrid cars, perhaps. Hydro provides peak power, within the environmental limits for flow times and rates to keep the rivers healthy(should also be able to help ride out calm/cloudy days). Others - well, provide niche services that are suited for them, Everything from baseload to peak.
My main concern is that our nuclear plants ARE aging, we're going to need to replace them eventually. Given that I think we need to double our current nuclear capability(20-35% market share plus market growth), we need to be building plants. The first couple will be expensive, then we'll have the infrastructure and experience in place and the cost for future plants will drop substantially.
I was under the impression that even breeder reactors had to haul it's waste off site.
That's actually a very rare occurrence here in the states even for traditional nuclear plants.
The containment pool for a nuclear power plant is designed to be able to hold 20 years of waste fuel rods. Due to the screw up that is Yucca Mountain*, that hasn't happened. After 20 years, the radiation from a spent fuel rod has dropped to only a few hairdryers** equivalent, thus not needing the active cooling of the pool, and as the government hasn't held up it's end, they've started storing the waste in above ground casks.
When this happens varies. Some pools can carry 40 years waste, some only 20. The individual power plants figure out the best option. One good thing, as I see it, is that 40 year old fuel rods are a lot easier to reprocess due to reduced radioactivity.
*Government: We've passed a law where you pay us $.00x per kwh produced by your plant and in exchange we'll take your waste(insert legalize descriptions of the waste they'll take, that includes fuel rods of XX age, Y radioactivity, etc...) and store it safely. That solution was to be Yucca Mountain. There's lawsuits by power companies along the lines of you taking your garbage hauler to court after paying him to haul garbage and he hasn't done it... For the last 20 years. ** In laymen's literature, this is the term they actually use!
He's misstating a bit, and is being over-optimistic.
Current generation single pass power plants only burn 3-10% of the 'fuel' in a rod, so waste rods, that due to Carter can't be reprocessed, actually are still 90-97% 'fuel'. With reprocessing, you can get that effectively up to 100%. Ergo, 10-30 times more power from a given amount of Uranium, ergo 10-30 times less waste.
It's not 97-99% more power, but it's pretty good. Also, most GenIV/Breeder designs operate at a higher temperature, which might give you an extra 10% efficiency with turning the heat into electricity. Going from 30% to 40% would allow you to generate a third more power on a given amount of fuel, so 20 times the power for a given amount of fuel/waste wouldn't be unheard of.
There's not as much pressure to do that right now because Uranium fuel is cheap right now compared to reprocessing. Double the price of raw ore... Reprocessing becomes more economical and it's STILL not enough to make nuclear power cost a cent more per KWH.
Despite you saying it the fact is most people apart from the misguided Slashdot "its tech it must be great crowd", would not want to live near a reactor, it is called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)-and is a well known effect.
In today's economy and depending on how you phrase the questions, I'm willing to bet that I could find areas in the USA where 80-90% would vote to build it there. Simply point out all the jobs created, the construction boom, the continuing monies, tax revenues for the city/county, etc...
If current pressures keep up, eventually we'll build more nuclear plants - especially if electric vehicles start becoming popular.
You're still missing the point that all the waste, for all of it's mass(being composed of heavy metals), is also [i]very dense[/i]. If we build breeder reactors, the standard sized containment pool(think extra deep Olympic sized swimming pool) will be able to contain all the waste for the lifetime of the plant. Given that we're looking at 60+ years for many of the old generation-II plants and even longer for the Gen-III and Gen-IV, it's not that big of a deal.
On average we're causing more harm to ourselves burning the coal. Heck, with breeder reactors we'd get more energy refining the coal to get at the radioactives in it to burn in the breeder instead of burning the coal.
Sure, nuclear waste can be deadly - but it's a contained deadly, unlike the released deadly that is coal plants.
Once you've cleaned up a coal plant to be nearly as clean as a nuclear plant you've both increased the cost of construction and decreased efficiency to the point it's cheaper to build nuclear, especially if you're going to do CO2 sequestration.
At that level of burn, the containment pool of your standard nuclear plant will be able to contain centuries worth of waste within it. At worst you'll need two pools - one for rods pulled needing to cool a bit before reprocessing, and a pool of the really nasty stuff waste left over after reprocessing/breeding cycle. After a couple decades, you take the now much cooler nasty stuff and stick it in an above ground cask. After being there for a while, you put it back deep in the mine you got it from, a subduction zone, etc...
I've heard of catalogs from back in the 50's that let doctors order placebos in small pills, large pills, solid, gel, capsule, liquid, of all colors.
You want a 500 mg clear capsule filled with granules of red, white, and blue? You could buy it.
I also heard there was a code that would allow the doctor to tell the pharmacy what kind of placebo to use in a prescription, including how much to charge.
Done right, the placebo effect is sufficient for effective treatment in some cases. That it's essentially utilizing psychology doesn't necessarily detract, though I'm hesitant to approve of the necessary deceiving of the patient in order to do it.
Reminds me of the time that the police got a call about a 'Pit Bull' running loose - that turned out to be a black lab.
As a semi-sorta dog person, I know what a Boston Terrier looks like, the general differences between labs, bull dogs, terriers, etc...
Generally speaking, I expect people who have utterly no experience or knowledge with dogs to simply tell the police that there's a dog running around, not to misidentify it as a 'pit bull'. ID'ing a Boston Terrier as a pit bull is a smidge closer, but still not that close.
I'm also a gunnie. If I'd felt the need to call the police about the rifle, I'd have probably said 'what looks like a Barrett.50 cal'. I'd also accept from those not-quite in the know: rife, sniper rifle, or 'big ass gun'. ID'ing it as a AK-47 implies that you KNOW what an AK-47 looks like, an that ain't it. If he'd been carrying a WASR around, no big deal on the mis-id, they're very similar. Heck, even a SKS looks more like an AK-47 than that beast.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
I don't normally respond to AC's, but I'll respond to you.
The homes he built first would have stayed up, on average, longer than their replacements. They had all sorts of energy efficient/nature friendly buildings - not extreme, but the little things.
After the arsons he built bog standard minimum-standard houses.
While giving the news the figures that the ecological damage from the fires would exceed the damages from the difference between the originals and their replacements.
Pissed most of the more reasonable greenies more on the ELF than him.
Gotta love the people who jumped to assuming that I really want to murder those people.
First: I'll just say that these sorts just make me wish to be hanging around with a sniper rifle. Our way of life, our technological civilization is based on massive amounts of infrastructure investments. I get irked at people destroying that in the name of the environment - at least one developer swapped out his building materials with less green ones deliberately after an EFL faction burned part of his development down.
Burning a SUV doesn't do anything but cause the car company to use even more resources to build another one. Same with home building.
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Sure it's violence. Which would cost you more of your life - a day in the hospital, even a week, or $100k of damage?
Insurance isn't a true response either - it's just spreading the pain/cost around. Everybody's premiums go up because of shit like this.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association.
Or the stupid teens will be spending too much time behind bars to get into trouble? The older members will be exposed as the domestic terrorists they are?
And if this problem multiplies with successive generations?
Do you have any evidence that it would? If anything, embryos with the genetics to best develop in zero-g would be strongly selected for, and the problem would go away within a few generations.
Going by the study, even if it decreases successful fertilizations by 50%, you have to remember that something like 50% of fertilizations are already unsuccessful, even removing deliberate effects like birth controls. Then consider that at one point having a dozen kids was more or less normal. Octomom is notable for doing it all at once, not for the sheer number.
Space parents might have to try for a few more months on average, but it's well within human abilities to still keep population levels up, even discounting artificial assistance.
Actually, there's some very good reasons for calling them IEDs. IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, of course. What this means is that the explosive device in question is not standard. This matters when it comes to disarming/making them safe.
If a EOD guy comes across an unexploded MK82, he knows precisely how to disarm it - it's standardized. Same deal with most land mines*, claymore devices, unmodified artillery shells**, and the rest of the world's standard military munitions. We even have books on foreign country's stuff, including Russian and old USSR weapons.
Each IED, even if from the same maker, is far more unique, presenting unique challanges when it comes to disarming them.
Oh, and being designated as a land mine doesn't mean a 'large enough' payload, it means it's buried in the ground with an appropriate sensor/detonator to explode when something's over it. Most are pressure sensitive, some anti-vehicle types have magnetic detonators.
Bombs are generally assumed to be dropped out of planes, but then I'm Air Force.
*Though booby-trapping can be an issue with these. **Many are converted into IEDs via non-conventional detonation systems in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Additionally, I would like to know where you have seen anything saying that filtered water is basically the same as tap. I have seen lots of reports that bottled water is basically the same as tap (but then I knew that before they started doing all the reports).
Most bottled water is essentially filtered tap water, some more directly than others.
I can very honestly say the water in my house is filtered - it goes through a house level filter I replace every three months. But that filter isn't as effective as a reverse osmosis system. Mine gets rid of quite a few things, but not all by any means.
I'd say my water is 'essentially tap', it only goes through an activated charcoal filter and a softener*.
Usually when you decriminalize small amounts, they let you grow your own.
Not everyone has the time, talent, space, or materials to grow drugs. Most people don't make their own tobacco or alcohol. It's cheaper, effort wise, to let a professional grow LOTS of it then buy it retail from a distributer, at least for most people.
But maybe special shops could be set up to sell them, so that you can buy it without supporting organized crime, kind of like how they do with alcohol.
What do you think I was proposing? In order for you to have a 'special shop' they have to be legal, which is what I was talking about doing. Because even a small special shop is going to move a whole lot more quantity than 'small amounts' if it's to break even without busting the bank with drug costs.
Probably why I mentioned it. I think I read about it in a discover magazine article sometime. Neat stuff.
The 4nm fab might still use a form of silicon - I know they've got some new ordering tricks, but I don't know if they can stretch that far.
I don't think all chips are going to be alternate substrate anytime soon; but better than than a decade in the future we might see a few CPUs coming out on it.
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I'd question, at this point in time, how much money would the power companies actually LOSE in such a recession? They're the cheapest source of electricity per KwH, unemployed people trying to save money might reduce their usage, so it's not like they need to push the plant beyond it's limits because the demand has gone down, but because electricity is still getting used the plant is still making money. It's stable.
Besides, there's still vigorous watchdogs making sure they maintain safe operations.
It's actually pretty neat - you can build a refridgerator that has no moving parts, mearly piping and a heat source. They're known as Absorbtion Chillers. Though after a certain point it is more efficient to have some pumps. Some RV's have these, the heat source is a propane burner. It's more efficient than trying to run a generator(~20% efficient at that size) all the time to keep your food(or medicine) cold when you're not otherwise using electricity. They take a 9V or some other configuration of standard batteries to run the thermostat and fridge light.
They've even done this to provide a building with AC.
The only problem with using solar is that you generally need steam, not mere hot water, for the chillers to work well. this can be done with solar - but you need more complicated solar collectors to concentrate the solar enough to actually boil the water. - rather than a simple panel that you drain water through, you need pipes with curved mirror surfaces(polished metal works well enough though) reflecting more sunlight onto the pipe.
Nucler power plant's power curves are a lot like the inverse of charging a battery.
Going from 0% to 10% takes a heck of a lot longer than going from 90% to 100%.
Going from 0 to 50% capacity might take a day for a nuclear plant, but 50% to 100% and vice versa can be done in under an hour, for a nuclear plant designed for it*.
So, rather than having a 1GW plant acting as 'standby' for peak power demands, you'd have 2-4 plants ready to go from 75% to 100% if necessary.
*Some in the USA are, some aren't. Note that most of our plants were built to be pure baseload, and are 20+ years old.
Nuclear power IS safe, at least by any reasonable use of the term. Thing is, if you scale up Nuclear power to the same electricity production as coal, even if you include a Chernobyl every year, it'd still kill fewer people than Coal does. The statistics DON'T point to a Chernobyl level event every year - at this point you're looking more at a greater than 50 year interval between them, and every year of safe operation without another disaster extends that.
Even though I am thousands of kilometers away, it is still recommended to not eat mushrooms more than a couple of times a year, and I want a better future for my own children.
Are you sure that recommendation is based on good science? Or is it like the Vaccine scare here in the USA about Thermisol? That has parents not vaccinating their kids even with thermisol free vaccines.
showing that US research spendings on solar energy are still only half of those on nuclear energy despite the fact that you claim that there is essentially no research on nuclear energy! ; figures are from National Council for Science and the Environment.
Given that Nuclear power provides ~20% of our power, sure, there's R&D with it, but most of that's gone to increasing power production capabilities at existing nuke plants, not for building new ones. I'd also note that wind isn't listed - which might put wind/solar over nuclear in research investments(might be why they don't list it), but still under the R&D investments for COAL.
While on this topic, I'll point out that I'm for a rough power production plan of 35% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% hydro, 5% other.
Given that I've considered installed a combined cycle generator in my basement*, I'm not hostile to Lichtblick's plan. I'd power it with propane though, as that's what I have access to. It can be very efficient as well - an electrical power only plant is lucky to reach 50%, most are closer to 30%. The rest is waste heat. If you're using the combined cycle to also utilize the heat that would otherwise be waste, bonus.
*Normally you don't want the generator in the house, but it is perfectly safe if you take the right steps and properly duct the exhaust to OUTSIDE the building, and in my case I'd be ducting the air in as well.
What do you do with the toxic waste?
Store it, reprocess it, burn it in a breeder, use alternative methods to get it so it degrades faster, like other posters have mentioned.
Besides, radioactive waste isn't having a real effect on the environment because it's contained, unlike the chemical and radiological pollution coal plants release.
Going after salt flats is missing our point, because I haven't ever heard of a pro-nuclear power slashdotter propose using them for long term storage. The proposals are almost universally reprocess/breeder/netron flux with diversions into burying it in subduction zones.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
We have functioning fission plants now, the biggest fusion test reactor being built/proposed is going to cost a couple times that of a good sized fission plant and still has absolutely no provisions for actually producing electricity.
You seem to get it pretty good - there's more complications of course, but much like me, you're not writing an essay, much less a book. Which is what it WOULD take to do this topic real justice. In the case of my post I dropped the economics completely, and only addressed physical efficiency, and in one spot put 'power' where I probably should have put 'electricity'.
Nuclear economics can get complicated, but if you can avoid screwing up the construction and driving up costs enough it's the cheapest, most reliable, carbon-neutral source of power we have.
I tend to dislike coal due to the non-carbon pollution it still releases, and by the time you fix that the build cost of the plant is as much or more than nuclear plants, especially if you introduce carbon capture - which costs the plant several percentage points of efficiency and increases build costs like another 10%. I'd prefer natural gas be saved for mobile work, home heating(97% efficient), and chemical production rather than producing electricity. Hint: NG->Electricity->high efficiency heat pump is STILL less efficient than NG->high efficiency furnace.
Anyways - I've never really seen breeder reactors making it on their own until we have enough traditional nuclear plants that rising costs of fuel and waste disposal issues makes a breeder make sense more from the 'make more fuel' and 'get rid of waste' perspectives with the power production being a happy(and deal-making) side effect.
Oh, and I've never suggested using nuclear for 100% of our power needs - that doesn't make sense. But I see a future mix of Nuclear 'baseload', Solar 'day use', Wind 'off-peak', hydro 'peak', with miscellaneous 'other sources'. Call it 35%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 5% (Very rough).
Basically - at the bottom nuclear grinds away doing what it does best - providing 100% power better than 90% of the time. During the day, solar panels and solar thermal plants* provide the electricity needed to run offices and air conditioning. Wind provides power to everything people are willing to do without for relatively short periods to a day or two. Charging plug-in hybrid cars, perhaps. Hydro provides peak power, within the environmental limits for flow times and rates to keep the rivers healthy(should also be able to help ride out calm/cloudy days). Others - well, provide niche services that are suited for them, Everything from baseload to peak.
My main concern is that our nuclear plants ARE aging, we're going to need to replace them eventually. Given that I think we need to double our current nuclear capability(20-35% market share plus market growth), we need to be building plants. The first couple will be expensive, then we'll have the infrastructure and experience in place and the cost for future plants will drop substantially.
*Incuding solar hot water in appropriate areas
I was under the impression that even breeder reactors had to haul it's waste off site.
That's actually a very rare occurrence here in the states even for traditional nuclear plants.
The containment pool for a nuclear power plant is designed to be able to hold 20 years of waste fuel rods. Due to the screw up that is Yucca Mountain*, that hasn't happened.
After 20 years, the radiation from a spent fuel rod has dropped to only a few hairdryers** equivalent, thus not needing the active cooling of the pool, and as the government hasn't held up it's end, they've started storing the waste in above ground casks.
When this happens varies. Some pools can carry 40 years waste, some only 20. The individual power plants figure out the best option. One good thing, as I see it, is that 40 year old fuel rods are a lot easier to reprocess due to reduced radioactivity.
*Government: We've passed a law where you pay us $.00x per kwh produced by your plant and in exchange we'll take your waste(insert legalize descriptions of the waste they'll take, that includes fuel rods of XX age, Y radioactivity, etc...) and store it safely. That solution was to be Yucca Mountain. There's lawsuits by power companies along the lines of you taking your garbage hauler to court after paying him to haul garbage and he hasn't done it... For the last 20 years.
** In laymen's literature, this is the term they actually use!
He's misstating a bit, and is being over-optimistic.
Current generation single pass power plants only burn 3-10% of the 'fuel' in a rod, so waste rods, that due to Carter can't be reprocessed, actually are still 90-97% 'fuel'. With reprocessing, you can get that effectively up to 100%. Ergo, 10-30 times more power from a given amount of Uranium, ergo 10-30 times less waste.
It's not 97-99% more power, but it's pretty good. Also, most GenIV/Breeder designs operate at a higher temperature, which might give you an extra 10% efficiency with turning the heat into electricity. Going from 30% to 40% would allow you to generate a third more power on a given amount of fuel, so 20 times the power for a given amount of fuel/waste wouldn't be unheard of.
There's not as much pressure to do that right now because Uranium fuel is cheap right now compared to reprocessing. Double the price of raw ore... Reprocessing becomes more economical and it's STILL not enough to make nuclear power cost a cent more per KWH.
Despite you saying it the fact is most people apart from the misguided Slashdot "its tech it must be great crowd", would not want to live near a reactor, it is called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)-and is a well known effect.
In today's economy and depending on how you phrase the questions, I'm willing to bet that I could find areas in the USA where 80-90% would vote to build it there. Simply point out all the jobs created, the construction boom, the continuing monies, tax revenues for the city/county, etc...
If current pressures keep up, eventually we'll build more nuclear plants - especially if electric vehicles start becoming popular.
You're still missing the point that all the waste, for all of it's mass(being composed of heavy metals), is also [i]very dense[/i]. If we build breeder reactors, the standard sized containment pool(think extra deep Olympic sized swimming pool) will be able to contain all the waste for the lifetime of the plant. Given that we're looking at 60+ years for many of the old generation-II plants and even longer for the Gen-III and Gen-IV, it's not that big of a deal.
On average we're causing more harm to ourselves burning the coal. Heck, with breeder reactors we'd get more energy refining the coal to get at the radioactives in it to burn in the breeder instead of burning the coal.
Sure, nuclear waste can be deadly - but it's a contained deadly, unlike the released deadly that is coal plants.
Once you've cleaned up a coal plant to be nearly as clean as a nuclear plant you've both increased the cost of construction and decreased efficiency to the point it's cheaper to build nuclear, especially if you're going to do CO2 sequestration.
At that level of burn, the containment pool of your standard nuclear plant will be able to contain centuries worth of waste within it. At worst you'll need two pools - one for rods pulled needing to cool a bit before reprocessing, and a pool of the really nasty stuff waste left over after reprocessing/breeding cycle. After a couple decades, you take the now much cooler nasty stuff and stick it in an above ground cask. After being there for a while, you put it back deep in the mine you got it from, a subduction zone, etc...
Walrus, various seals and whales are all ocean mammals - and the proposed ANWAR sites are all inland.
As for the Birds and Caribu - I've seen studies that they tend to LIKE pipelines - it provides shelter.
Done right, the drilling won't be a problem.
Personally, I'm for nuclear power - it's harder to replace oil than it is coal.
I've heard of catalogs from back in the 50's that let doctors order placebos in small pills, large pills, solid, gel, capsule, liquid, of all colors.
You want a 500 mg clear capsule filled with granules of red, white, and blue? You could buy it.
I also heard there was a code that would allow the doctor to tell the pharmacy what kind of placebo to use in a prescription, including how much to charge.
Done right, the placebo effect is sufficient for effective treatment in some cases. That it's essentially utilizing psychology doesn't necessarily detract, though I'm hesitant to approve of the necessary deceiving of the patient in order to do it.
Reminds me of the time that the police got a call about a 'Pit Bull' running loose - that turned out to be a black lab.
As a semi-sorta dog person, I know what a Boston Terrier looks like, the general differences between labs, bull dogs, terriers, etc...
Generally speaking, I expect people who have utterly no experience or knowledge with dogs to simply tell the police that there's a dog running around, not to misidentify it as a 'pit bull'. ID'ing a Boston Terrier as a pit bull is a smidge closer, but still not that close.
I'm also a gunnie. If I'd felt the need to call the police about the rifle, I'd have probably said 'what looks like a Barrett .50 cal'. I'd also accept from those not-quite in the know: rife, sniper rifle, or 'big ass gun'. ID'ing it as a AK-47 implies that you KNOW what an AK-47 looks like, an that ain't it. If he'd been carrying a WASR around, no big deal on the mis-id, they're very similar. Heck, even a SKS looks more like an AK-47 than that beast.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
I don't normally respond to AC's, but I'll respond to you.
The homes he built first would have stayed up, on average, longer than their replacements. They had all sorts of energy efficient/nature friendly buildings - not extreme, but the little things.
After the arsons he built bog standard minimum-standard houses.
While giving the news the figures that the ecological damage from the fires would exceed the damages from the difference between the originals and their replacements.
Pissed most of the more reasonable greenies more on the ELF than him.
Gotta love the people who jumped to assuming that I really want to murder those people.
First: I'll just say that these sorts just make me wish to be hanging around with a sniper rifle. Our way of life, our technological civilization is based on massive amounts of infrastructure investments. I get irked at people destroying that in the name of the environment - at least one developer swapped out his building materials with less green ones deliberately after an EFL faction burned part of his development down.
Burning a SUV doesn't do anything but cause the car company to use even more resources to build another one. Same with home building.
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Sure it's violence. Which would cost you more of your life - a day in the hospital, even a week, or $100k of damage?
Insurance isn't a true response either - it's just spreading the pain/cost around. Everybody's premiums go up because of shit like this.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association.
Or the stupid teens will be spending too much time behind bars to get into trouble? The older members will be exposed as the domestic terrorists they are?
And if this problem multiplies with successive generations?
Do you have any evidence that it would? If anything, embryos with the genetics to best develop in zero-g would be strongly selected for, and the problem would go away within a few generations.
Going by the study, even if it decreases successful fertilizations by 50%, you have to remember that something like 50% of fertilizations are already unsuccessful, even removing deliberate effects like birth controls. Then consider that at one point having a dozen kids was more or less normal. Octomom is notable for doing it all at once, not for the sheer number.
Space parents might have to try for a few more months on average, but it's well within human abilities to still keep population levels up, even discounting artificial assistance.
Actually, there's some very good reasons for calling them IEDs. IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, of course. What this means is that the explosive device in question is not standard. This matters when it comes to disarming/making them safe.
If a EOD guy comes across an unexploded MK82, he knows precisely how to disarm it - it's standardized. Same deal with most land mines*, claymore devices, unmodified artillery shells**, and the rest of the world's standard military munitions. We even have books on foreign country's stuff, including Russian and old USSR weapons.
Each IED, even if from the same maker, is far more unique, presenting unique challanges when it comes to disarming them.
Oh, and being designated as a land mine doesn't mean a 'large enough' payload, it means it's buried in the ground with an appropriate sensor/detonator to explode when something's over it. Most are pressure sensitive, some anti-vehicle types have magnetic detonators.
Bombs are generally assumed to be dropped out of planes, but then I'm Air Force.
*Though booby-trapping can be an issue with these.
**Many are converted into IEDs via non-conventional detonation systems in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Pretty much all of them? Prison guard isn't a minimum wage job; mall security pretty much IS, at least in my area.
The disadvantage is that if a username/password combination is guessed, one can get on the network.
Isn't that generally a problem with any system?
Still, WPA2 w/RADIUS can be smart card enabled, so that helps.
Prison guards, on average, aren't poorly paid at all.
They aren't mall rent a cops.
Additionally, I would like to know where you have seen anything saying that filtered water is basically the same as tap. I have seen lots of reports that bottled water is basically the same as tap (but then I knew that before they started doing all the reports).
Most bottled water is essentially filtered tap water, some more directly than others.
I can very honestly say the water in my house is filtered - it goes through a house level filter I replace every three months. But that filter isn't as effective as a reverse osmosis system. Mine gets rid of quite a few things, but not all by any means.
I'd say my water is 'essentially tap', it only goes through an activated charcoal filter and a softener*.
*To save my appliances more than for taste.
Usually when you decriminalize small amounts, they let you grow your own.
Not everyone has the time, talent, space, or materials to grow drugs. Most people don't make their own tobacco or alcohol. It's cheaper, effort wise, to let a professional grow LOTS of it then buy it retail from a distributer, at least for most people.
But maybe special shops could be set up to sell them, so that you can buy it without supporting organized crime, kind of like how they do with alcohol.
What do you think I was proposing? In order for you to have a 'special shop' they have to be legal, which is what I was talking about doing. Because even a small special shop is going to move a whole lot more quantity than 'small amounts' if it's to break even without busting the bank with drug costs.
Probably why I mentioned it. I think I read about it in a discover magazine article sometime. Neat stuff.
The 4nm fab might still use a form of silicon - I know they've got some new ordering tricks, but I don't know if they can stretch that far.
I don't think all chips are going to be alternate substrate anytime soon; but better than than a decade in the future we might see a few CPUs coming out on it.