Some other things I noticed. They checked between gun and non-gun owners, but didn't not the proportions, or attempt to determine, like with elections, 'likely gun purchasers'. As they noted, support dropped substantially with gun owners.
Also, they used non-standard terminology and spoke in vague theoreticals - Sure, I'd consider buying a smart gun if they were available. I'd consider buying a self-driving car, if they were available. Neither are yet in a state where they can be commercial sale successes, much less mandated.
Also, for smart guns the use case is currently too limited. For the cost of a smart gun I can buy a regular gun, and a gun safe large enough to hold it and numerous other firearms. Guns that work with gloves, IE RFID, are likely to still fire if I'm struggling with an attacker, and they have their hands on it(though this is rare). Fingerprint scanners are far too easy to foul.
As a matter of course, I assume that if the criminal has any real amount of time with the firearm to work on it that he'll be able to either reprogram it for himself or disable the 'smart' system.
Scenario one: you come home drunk after a bad day,
Fails as I don't drink. Case (a) - I then stab my spouse to death because the gun wouldn't fire. outcome worse than 'bad'.
Scenario 2: (a) the burglar isn't a burglar, he's a home invader. He's not highly strung and anxious because of armed home owners, he's high on meth. He knows you were home. He's planning on taking you hostage, force your wife to withdraw money from ATMs for an even bigger take, while raping your daughters and planning on killing you all in a house fire. (actually happened, by the way). If the burglar was actually that nervous about armed home owners he'd do the thing that sensible burglars do - break into homes during the day when people are gone. (b) daughter knows not to sneak in. (c) try finding this actually happening. Removing a firearm from an armed person's hands only really happens in the movies. It's too easy to just shoot somebody trying to snatch your weapon. (d) bad conservative/libertarian police: So what? It's the intruder's fault for breaking in. If he doesn't want to risk getting shot, he shouldn't be breaking in.
Do burglars generally decide to murder someone for no reason?
Well, you have a matter of definition here. If they're really there to murder, then they aren't a burglar, are they? Actual burglars tend to target EMPTY homes. They're careful to check this. Home invaders, on the other hand, well, I mentioned the ATM gang, there's ones that will threaten and torture the occupants to try to turn up more money, the occasional rare rapist, etc...
Are burglars more likely to murder someone than the average joe?
Yes. They're also much more likely to be murdered.
There should be a very large market for such a product.
The number 1 reason to own a firearm in the USA today is for self defense. You don't see many pure hunters anymore. Due to the expense, most hunters and recreational shooters wish to 'dual purpose' their guns - IE fun at the range AND useful for self defense..
I'm not going to say that there wouldn't be a market, but the NRA's objection is simple: They should not be mandated. As a matter of market analysis, as long as they cost 5-10 times as much as a non-smart firearm with worse performance, not to mention restricted to.22lr, they're not likely at all to sell well.
I think every issue should stand or fail on its own merit. I don't buy absolutists arguments about not being able to prove this or that as an excuse not to act.
1. I'm not an absolutionist. 2. This isn't an excuse, this is an explanation for a desired course of action.
Specifically, the standard being required is unobtainable and can't be applied to all food. If you're going to require a 'level of safety', it should be both obtainable and applied, as you mention, equally.
The basic fact is humans are tinkering with food in ways that cannot possibly occur naturally.
One thing I've learned is to not discount biology. 'cannot possibly occur naturally' is a much higher standard than most think. Most of our changes could actually happen naturally.
If it is tractable to label particular notable mutations in a useful way than I'm all for it as well because it would serve the same purpose.
This is basically what I was trying to get at. Labeling something GMO or not - with no further information, isn't useful. It's a scare tactic requirement so people who have been fooled into believing that 'natural' = safer can be satisfied. Due to human nature, this would decrease food efficiency because the government wouldn't force labeling if there wasn't a danger, you know? Thus you'd end up with a larger 'natural' crowd, and non-GMO food is more expensive and generally less safe(I've read the studies; a number of organic foods are more dangerous/contaminated then their non-organic versions).
Now, labeling the specific GMO - rice modified to produce beta-keratin, the potato lacking the carcinogen, BT tolerance, etc...
You mean video cameras that can send a live feed to the police it calls when it detects that something hooky is going on? The battery that requires a life and at least a serious cart to move?
Current cars are just as interesting to thieves for their parts, if not more.
I don't see that a cab driver is going to tolerate cutting earnings in half every day while they wait for the car to charge...
I'd see a taxi company in larger locations such as NYC being large enough to invest in their OWN battery swap stations. For example, if Musk ever targets the taxi industry, it could be that the driver picks up a car with a fully charged battery, stops at a recharge station for lunch, then drops the car off where the battery is swapped before it's issued to the next driver. Tesla already has a fully developed swap station available.
1. If it's that low on charge, it doesn't pick you up. 2. Battery swap, takes ~90 seconds. 3. You get another taxi 4. Supercharger station for 'just long enough' etc...
Those that are good at minimizing the risk can come out way ahead buying used vs. new over a series of purchases
The same can be said for buying new. Wait for a good deal to come up, don't pay sticker, and if you're a driver that actually takes care of your vehicle as opposed to deciding you're going to sell it in 2 years and thus skip things like oil changes, you can get a vehicle that lasts substantially longer.
My truck is now 8 years old and still hasn't needed major maintenance.
By the same token, California would also be a good spot to have a 'hold the line moment'. Warn all the consumers that new phones won't be available there after Jan 1, 2017. Watch the state explode when people realize they can't get the latest and greatest phones. The bill would be yanked so quickly...
If I buy a car from the dealership for $50,000 and then try to sell it 10 minutes later it's now worth $25,000 at most.
Let me guess, trying to sell it back to the dealer that just sold it to you? Odds are if you're trying to sell it back 10 minutes later you wrecked it or something, discovered it's a lemon/shitty car, and the dealer needs markup.
Meanwhile, last time I went car shopping I discovered that used cars 1-2 years old were 80-90% of the price of a brand spanking new car, and because the interest rates are a couple points higher on loans, the new car was cheaper, at least for me. Maintenance was also iffy. Was the car in an accident? Smoked in? Etc...
Now, if you have bad credit, the situation might be flipped.
Mind you, I still own my truck 8 years later, so the 'hit' has depreciated out. Two more years and I might consider selling it.
i think his businesses filed chapter 11. this restructures the debt; creditors get their money but they do give up something, like they get it over a longer time, or they get less interest.
Not much difference between 11 and 13. 7 is the chapter to avoid.
Your fixation on radiation noted, but recall that Uranium is a heavy metal as well, and Uranium Oxide especially is quite poisonous in the old fashioned sense - at least it is the most oftne observed poisoning compound of Uranium so if you are trying to diminish the importance of Uranium dumps, you probably shouldn't use Heavy metal waste ponds as an example.
Uh, it's not my fixation. It's the GP's that I responded to that's fixated upon radiation. Notice how I mentioned other heavy metals? That no mining operation is 'really clean' even if there's no radiation? I could have probably mentioned the acids. The added radioactivity from Uranium tailings is trivial compared to the chemical hazard, as you mention, but the difference here is that pretty much all tailings are chemical hazards - but we can't just give up the various things we get from said mining.
That being said, you don't actually have to dig up that much when mining Uranium, and there are better ways to mine when it comes to doing it reasonably ecologically, it's just that we used to not do that.
Reading through them, it's mostly meh for the Uranium - keep in mind that I immediately also brought up other mining operations. Hell, a dam containing non-radioactive but still extremely dangerous heavy metals burst last year in the USA and contaminated a whole river.
I'm not saying that there aren't concerns, but I saw a combination of 'not really any danger from the radioactivity' and outright fear mongering.
The initiative may allow owners of GM vehicles to give rides to other passengers who are commuting in the same direction."
I'd be careful about something like this. Consider situations like VHS vs Betamax. The more 'open' standard nearly always wins.
If non-GM drivers have the choice of Uber, while GM drivers have Uber and Maven, but Maven only works for people who own GM vehicles, that's something like 75% of potential drivers and customers gone. Nearly always you can't simultaneously restrict your user base AND achieve market dominance.
And if drugs policy is to be based on facts then this sort of fact is just one more reason to give it up already and let adults decide what plants they'd like to benefit from.
Indeed. There is a real problem when the biggest detriment that people can identify for using an illegal drug is the very fact that it's illlegal. When the primary concern isn't that the drug will kill you, put you in the hospital, give you organ damage, make you crazy, or make you dependent upon it, but is instead that you'll be fined or tossed into jail, something has gone horribly wrong.
When you have people taking 'bath salts' instead of cocaine, which has a much higher chance of, I don't know, chewing somebody's face off, because the latter is illegal as well as the former, but the 'bath salts' are more accessable for those that would use drugs, we have a problem.
Just don't expect it to bring job growth with it, as he is trying to sell.
It brings some job growth, but you do have the 'problem' that what once took a factory of ~10k workers now takes less than 100. This is for a factory that can supply sufficient amounts of product X for the entire nation. This is how you can get something like a quality toaster for $20, when it was still $20 20 years ago.
The problem is that that means more of the 'profit' is in the machines - infrastructure, capital. Than the people. This means that the people who own said factories get the profit, not the workers.
I'm seriously wondering if we shouldn't change over to an infrastructure/capital based tax system, not a labor income based one.
What I can't understand is, giving the number of times Trump-controlled businesses have gone bankrupt and screwed their creditors, why does anyone still lend him money? Other than lucrative bribes, I can't think of any logical reason.
Having read up on him before, from what I remember he's never filed chapter 7, normally he's filed chapter 13. That means that the creditors still got their money back; just perhaps not as quickly or with as much interest as they would have otherwise gotten. Indeed, he's good at keeping his different businesses separate. So it's not actually Trump borrowing money, but company A, B, or C that's owned/run by Trump that's borrowing money.
Patiently await evidence all possible strains of GMO ever produced are forever guaranteed to never prove harmful. I patiently await evidence all GMO engineering and testing regimes are forever guaranteed to be infallible.
This isn't a good standard, because you can't prove this for unmodified crops! There's always that chance that there was a mutation in the next potato you eat, perfectly 'organic', that happened to cause it to resume producing Solanine.
As such, GMO foods, properly tested, can be rated to be no more dangerous than non-GMO, and sometimes healthier(they recently produced a GMO potato that's less prone to bruising and also doesn't produce a carcinogen).
To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste.
Your standard 1GW coal power plant will, in the meantime, consume approximately 4 Million tons of coal a year, just to keep that 1/8th as much rock figure in proportion. And, rather than being toxic for 'hundreds of thousands of years', they're toxic 'forever'.
Really, Nuclear radiation from things like the mill tailings would be considered a non-issue if we applied the same standards as coal mining and power.
Contamination of local water supplies around uranium mines and processing plants has been documented in Brazil, Colorado, Texas, Australia, Namibia and many other sites.
As another poster noted, this is citation without comparison - You'd need to look into how much pollution and contamination is caused by other forms of mining. Should I point out the entire towns that have had to be evacuated because of coal mining? The contamination from gold/silver mining? The pollution from iron mining?
To get '50 million tons' of 'toxic radioactive residue' a year you'd have to count every pound mined as such - when in reality you can dump most of the mine tailings back in when you're done.
'per watt generated' isn't a good metric either, because a watt of solar will only produce about 25% of the energy of a watt of nuclear, over the same extended period of time.
It would be better to look at it in terms of kWh over the lifetime of the system. Even then, for a true metric you'd have to include energy storage, and the waste of that storage, which hurts solar more than nuclear. When you try to include all that, nuclear looks a lot better.
In the end, I'll go back to my "keep a healthy mix of sources going". That means solar AND wind AND nuclear AND hydro AND geothermal AND...
The time factor involved for radioactive material being hazardous is what makes it bad compared to many other alternatives. The amount of energy needed to produce the fuel at a quality needed for the reactors is also pretty high, which easily can be translated to CO2 emissions.
Quick question: How long does it take for the mercury, arsenic, lead, and such released from coal power take to stop being toxic?
Answer: As stable isotopes, they don't. At least with nuclear power we have a chance - they actually become less dangerous over time. Mercury's effectively forever.
The energy expenditure for *one* reactor decommissioning is around the 30-70TWh range [citing Vattenfal *and* Storm for lower and upper ranges] so with 400 odd reactors around the world we have a roughly 2800TWh energy *debt* pending from existing nuclear reactors in the nuclear industry a decade or two after they are decommissioned. An energy debt that will have to be paid by the great grand children of the baby boomers.
Do you happen to have a link for that citation? I tried googling it. It's also less than a decade of operation energy for the plant. Still, it seems an odd metric, most everybody else uses money.
Makes me wonder how much energy it would take to recycle a solar panel...
AP1000 plants have a lower thermal containment ratio (ie, the amount of energy the concrete dome structure can contain) than the installations at Three Mile Island. Additionally AP1000's concrete dome also doubles as a heat exchanger which is not a failure mode that has been tested in anything other than simulations of this type of reactor. So, they maybe newer and more modern, however we won't know for sure if the design changes made are improvements or flawed ideas that can go wrong.
1. Who says TMI's thermal containment ratio is the important part? TMI's dome didn't fail. To my knowledge, the dome has never failed in any nuclear accident. 2. Are you seriously saying that having the concrete dome act as a heat exchanger isn't something we can simulate? I mean, by the same argument the outer walls of our houses are heat exchangers - it's just with them we want to minimize it, with the dome we want to maximize it.
Consider Fukushima - even with 'strong' domes they ended up with radioactive release because they had to pass water through the system in order to keep them cool enough to prevent problems. If you design the dome to be able to transmit enough heat OUT OF IT, without circulating water, that allows you to keep tighter control of the radioactive materials. Which is the important part.
The EPR reactors appear to be a better design over AP1000 for many reason, the most obvious one being a *double* containment building, i.e that massive dome gets *another* structure built over the top of it and main facilities buildings set up so that the whole reactor isn't completely disabled in the event of an emergency. IIRC these are the reactors that Finland is installing.
The important part is 'appears'. When I did the math on predicted core events, AP1000 was less likely to have an accident, but a fleet of AP1000 reactors with matching capacity to a fleet of EPRs would have a very slightly higher incident rate.
Still, in both cases we're looking at around a couple orders of magnitude less likelihood of an incident, which is my point. An AP1000 that gets built is better than and EPR that doesn't, leaving us with an ancient reactor or a replacement coal plant.
Even if they were built and put online today, none of these new reactor facilities will be producing power for people in 40 to 60 years time because they will be at the end of their service life.
Actually, they'd probably last a century or more at this point. Most of them, at least.
That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.
Citation on the mines causing radioactive contamination? Do you have any idea how dirty other mining operations are? None of them are really 'clean'.
As for the energy cost of refining - I suppose you're one of the ones that argues that we shouldn't be using solar panels because making them involves mining and refining materials that creates nasty waste? Just like with solar power, nuclear power quickly becomes energy positive, and while it takes a relatively large amount of refining to get a fuel rod, it produces so much power over it's life, even in a wasteful US once-through system, that the energy costs are negligible, at least compared to the most frequent replacements - coal, natural gas, and such.
For reactors being torn down, yes it takes energy. But given that we should know how to make plants last 50 years at this point, minimum, it's not actually that big of a proportion. Hell, after 50 years you'll probably be replacing the solar panels as well.
On nuclear accidents - I'll give you that the earliest plants are dangerous. Fukushima, for example was older than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Newer plants would be safer.
Really, that's all I ask for - build new nuclear plants to replace the old ones, not coal or natural gas. Keep a healthy mix of sources going.
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Some other things I noticed.
They checked between gun and non-gun owners, but didn't not the proportions, or attempt to determine, like with elections, 'likely gun purchasers'. As they noted, support dropped substantially with gun owners.
Also, they used non-standard terminology and spoke in vague theoreticals - Sure, I'd consider buying a smart gun if they were available. I'd consider buying a self-driving car, if they were available. Neither are yet in a state where they can be commercial sale successes, much less mandated.
Also, for smart guns the use case is currently too limited. For the cost of a smart gun I can buy a regular gun, and a gun safe large enough to hold it and numerous other firearms. Guns that work with gloves, IE RFID, are likely to still fire if I'm struggling with an attacker, and they have their hands on it(though this is rare). Fingerprint scanners are far too easy to foul.
As a matter of course, I assume that if the criminal has any real amount of time with the firearm to work on it that he'll be able to either reprogram it for himself or disable the 'smart' system.
Scenario one: you come home drunk after a bad day,
Fails as I don't drink.
Case (a) - I then stab my spouse to death because the gun wouldn't fire. outcome worse than 'bad'.
Scenario 2:
(a) the burglar isn't a burglar, he's a home invader. He's not highly strung and anxious because of armed home owners, he's high on meth. He knows you were home. He's planning on taking you hostage, force your wife to withdraw money from ATMs for an even bigger take, while raping your daughters and planning on killing you all in a house fire. (actually happened, by the way).
If the burglar was actually that nervous about armed home owners he'd do the thing that sensible burglars do - break into homes during the day when people are gone.
(b) daughter knows not to sneak in.
(c) try finding this actually happening. Removing a firearm from an armed person's hands only really happens in the movies. It's too easy to just shoot somebody trying to snatch your weapon.
(d) bad conservative/libertarian police: So what? It's the intruder's fault for breaking in. If he doesn't want to risk getting shot, he shouldn't be breaking in.
Do burglars generally decide to murder someone for no reason?
Well, you have a matter of definition here. If they're really there to murder, then they aren't a burglar, are they? Actual burglars tend to target EMPTY homes. They're careful to check this. Home invaders, on the other hand, well, I mentioned the ATM gang, there's ones that will threaten and torture the occupants to try to turn up more money, the occasional rare rapist, etc...
Are burglars more likely to murder someone than the average joe?
Yes. They're also much more likely to be murdered.
There should be a very large market for such a product.
The number 1 reason to own a firearm in the USA today is for self defense. You don't see many pure hunters anymore. Due to the expense, most hunters and recreational shooters wish to 'dual purpose' their guns - IE fun at the range AND useful for self defense..
I'm not going to say that there wouldn't be a market, but the NRA's objection is simple: They should not be mandated. As a matter of market analysis, as long as they cost 5-10 times as much as a non-smart firearm with worse performance, not to mention restricted to .22lr, they're not likely at all to sell well.
I think every issue should stand or fail on its own merit. I don't buy absolutists arguments about not being able to prove this or that as an excuse not to act.
1. I'm not an absolutionist.
2. This isn't an excuse, this is an explanation for a desired course of action.
Specifically, the standard being required is unobtainable and can't be applied to all food. If you're going to require a 'level of safety', it should be both obtainable and applied, as you mention, equally.
The basic fact is humans are tinkering with food in ways that cannot possibly occur naturally.
One thing I've learned is to not discount biology. 'cannot possibly occur naturally' is a much higher standard than most think. Most of our changes could actually happen naturally.
If it is tractable to label particular notable mutations in a useful way than I'm all for it as well because it would serve the same purpose.
This is basically what I was trying to get at. Labeling something GMO or not - with no further information, isn't useful. It's a scare tactic requirement so people who have been fooled into believing that 'natural' = safer can be satisfied. Due to human nature, this would decrease food efficiency because the government wouldn't force labeling if there wasn't a danger, you know? Thus you'd end up with a larger 'natural' crowd, and non-GMO food is more expensive and generally less safe(I've read the studies; a number of organic foods are more dangerous/contaminated then their non-organic versions).
Now, labeling the specific GMO - rice modified to produce beta-keratin, the potato lacking the carcinogen, BT tolerance, etc...
You mean video cameras that can send a live feed to the police it calls when it detects that something hooky is going on? The battery that requires a life and at least a serious cart to move?
Current cars are just as interesting to thieves for their parts, if not more.
I don't see that a cab driver is going to tolerate cutting earnings in half every day while they wait for the car to charge...
I'd see a taxi company in larger locations such as NYC being large enough to invest in their OWN battery swap stations. For example, if Musk ever targets the taxi industry, it could be that the driver picks up a car with a fully charged battery, stops at a recharge station for lunch, then drops the car off where the battery is swapped before it's issued to the next driver. Tesla already has a fully developed swap station available.
1. If it's that low on charge, it doesn't pick you up.
2. Battery swap, takes ~90 seconds.
3. You get another taxi
4. Supercharger station for 'just long enough'
etc...
Those that are good at minimizing the risk can come out way ahead buying used vs. new over a series of purchases
The same can be said for buying new. Wait for a good deal to come up, don't pay sticker, and if you're a driver that actually takes care of your vehicle as opposed to deciding you're going to sell it in 2 years and thus skip things like oil changes, you can get a vehicle that lasts substantially longer.
My truck is now 8 years old and still hasn't needed major maintenance.
By the same token, California would also be a good spot to have a 'hold the line moment'. Warn all the consumers that new phones won't be available there after Jan 1, 2017. Watch the state explode when people realize they can't get the latest and greatest phones. The bill would be yanked so quickly...
If I buy a car from the dealership for $50,000 and then try to sell it 10 minutes later it's now worth $25,000 at most.
Let me guess, trying to sell it back to the dealer that just sold it to you? Odds are if you're trying to sell it back 10 minutes later you wrecked it or something, discovered it's a lemon/shitty car, and the dealer needs markup.
Meanwhile, last time I went car shopping I discovered that used cars 1-2 years old were 80-90% of the price of a brand spanking new car, and because the interest rates are a couple points higher on loans, the new car was cheaper, at least for me. Maintenance was also iffy. Was the car in an accident? Smoked in? Etc...
Now, if you have bad credit, the situation might be flipped.
Mind you, I still own my truck 8 years later, so the 'hit' has depreciated out. Two more years and I might consider selling it.
i think his businesses filed chapter 11. this restructures the debt; creditors get their money but they do give up something, like they get it over a longer time, or they get less interest.
Not much difference between 11 and 13. 7 is the chapter to avoid.
Your fixation on radiation noted, but recall that Uranium is a heavy metal as well, and Uranium Oxide especially is quite poisonous in the old fashioned sense - at least it is the most oftne observed poisoning compound of Uranium so if you are trying to diminish the importance of Uranium dumps, you probably shouldn't use Heavy metal waste ponds as an example.
Uh, it's not my fixation. It's the GP's that I responded to that's fixated upon radiation. Notice how I mentioned other heavy metals? That no mining operation is 'really clean' even if there's no radiation? I could have probably mentioned the acids. The added radioactivity from Uranium tailings is trivial compared to the chemical hazard, as you mention, but the difference here is that pretty much all tailings are chemical hazards - but we can't just give up the various things we get from said mining.
That being said, you don't actually have to dig up that much when mining Uranium, and there are better ways to mine when it comes to doing it reasonably ecologically, it's just that we used to not do that.
Reading through them, it's mostly meh for the Uranium - keep in mind that I immediately also brought up other mining operations. Hell, a dam containing non-radioactive but still extremely dangerous heavy metals burst last year in the USA and contaminated a whole river.
I'm not saying that there aren't concerns, but I saw a combination of 'not really any danger from the radioactivity' and outright fear mongering.
The initiative may allow owners of GM vehicles to give rides to other passengers who are commuting in the same direction."
I'd be careful about something like this. Consider situations like VHS vs Betamax. The more 'open' standard nearly always wins.
If non-GM drivers have the choice of Uber, while GM drivers have Uber and Maven, but Maven only works for people who own GM vehicles, that's something like 75% of potential drivers and customers gone. Nearly always you can't simultaneously restrict your user base AND achieve market dominance.
Not that I expect GM to realize this.
And if drugs policy is to be based on facts then this sort of fact is just one more reason to give it up already and let adults decide what plants they'd like to benefit from.
Indeed. There is a real problem when the biggest detriment that people can identify for using an illegal drug is the very fact that it's illlegal. When the primary concern isn't that the drug will kill you, put you in the hospital, give you organ damage, make you crazy, or make you dependent upon it, but is instead that you'll be fined or tossed into jail, something has gone horribly wrong.
When you have people taking 'bath salts' instead of cocaine, which has a much higher chance of, I don't know, chewing somebody's face off, because the latter is illegal as well as the former, but the 'bath salts' are more accessable for those that would use drugs, we have a problem.
Just don't expect it to bring job growth with it, as he is trying to sell.
It brings some job growth, but you do have the 'problem' that what once took a factory of ~10k workers now takes less than 100. This is for a factory that can supply sufficient amounts of product X for the entire nation. This is how you can get something like a quality toaster for $20, when it was still $20 20 years ago.
The problem is that that means more of the 'profit' is in the machines - infrastructure, capital. Than the people. This means that the people who own said factories get the profit, not the workers.
I'm seriously wondering if we shouldn't change over to an infrastructure/capital based tax system, not a labor income based one.
What I can't understand is, giving the number of times Trump-controlled businesses have gone bankrupt and screwed their creditors, why does anyone still lend him money? Other than lucrative bribes, I can't think of any logical reason.
Having read up on him before, from what I remember he's never filed chapter 7, normally he's filed chapter 13. That means that the creditors still got their money back; just perhaps not as quickly or with as much interest as they would have otherwise gotten. Indeed, he's good at keeping his different businesses separate. So it's not actually Trump borrowing money, but company A, B, or C that's owned/run by Trump that's borrowing money.
In other words, he's still a good risk.
Labeling strains of GMO is a hedge against the unknown making it easier to isolate and mitigate unexpected problems.
How? If problems crop up, it'll be traced to the brand name first, then they'll backtrace.
Patiently await evidence all possible strains of GMO ever produced are forever guaranteed to never prove harmful. I patiently await evidence all GMO engineering and testing regimes are forever guaranteed to be infallible.
This isn't a good standard, because you can't prove this for unmodified crops! There's always that chance that there was a mutation in the next potato you eat, perfectly 'organic', that happened to cause it to resume producing Solanine.
As such, GMO foods, properly tested, can be rated to be no more dangerous than non-GMO, and sometimes healthier(they recently produced a GMO potato that's less prone to bruising and also doesn't produce a carcinogen).
To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste.
Your standard 1GW coal power plant will, in the meantime, consume approximately 4 Million tons of coal a year, just to keep that 1/8th as much rock figure in proportion. And, rather than being toxic for 'hundreds of thousands of years', they're toxic 'forever'.
Really, Nuclear radiation from things like the mill tailings would be considered a non-issue if we applied the same standards as coal mining and power.
Contamination of local water supplies around uranium mines and processing plants has been documented in Brazil, Colorado, Texas, Australia, Namibia and many other sites.
As another poster noted, this is citation without comparison - You'd need to look into how much pollution and contamination is caused by other forms of mining. Should I point out the entire towns that have had to be evacuated because of coal mining? The contamination from gold/silver mining? The pollution from iron mining?
To get '50 million tons' of 'toxic radioactive residue' a year you'd have to count every pound mined as such - when in reality you can dump most of the mine tailings back in when you're done.
'per watt generated' isn't a good metric either, because a watt of solar will only produce about 25% of the energy of a watt of nuclear, over the same extended period of time.
It would be better to look at it in terms of kWh over the lifetime of the system. Even then, for a true metric you'd have to include energy storage, and the waste of that storage, which hurts solar more than nuclear. When you try to include all that, nuclear looks a lot better.
In the end, I'll go back to my "keep a healthy mix of sources going". That means solar AND wind AND nuclear AND hydro AND geothermal AND ...
I'm not against solar. I'm for a mix.
The time factor involved for radioactive material being hazardous is what makes it bad compared to many other alternatives. The amount of energy needed to produce the fuel at a quality needed for the reactors is also pretty high, which easily can be translated to CO2 emissions.
Quick question: How long does it take for the mercury, arsenic, lead, and such released from coal power take to stop being toxic?
Answer: As stable isotopes, they don't. At least with nuclear power we have a chance - they actually become less dangerous over time. Mercury's effectively forever.
The energy expenditure for *one* reactor decommissioning is around the 30-70TWh range [citing Vattenfal *and* Storm for lower and upper ranges] so with 400 odd reactors around the world we have a roughly 2800TWh energy *debt* pending from existing nuclear reactors in the nuclear industry a decade or two after they are decommissioned. An energy debt that will have to be paid by the great grand children of the baby boomers.
Do you happen to have a link for that citation? I tried googling it. It's also less than a decade of operation energy for the plant. Still, it seems an odd metric, most everybody else uses money.
Makes me wonder how much energy it would take to recycle a solar panel...
AP1000 plants have a lower thermal containment ratio (ie, the amount of energy the concrete dome structure can contain) than the installations at Three Mile Island. Additionally AP1000's concrete dome also doubles as a heat exchanger which is not a failure mode that has been tested in anything other than simulations of this type of reactor. So, they maybe newer and more modern, however we won't know for sure if the design changes made are improvements or flawed ideas that can go wrong.
1. Who says TMI's thermal containment ratio is the important part? TMI's dome didn't fail. To my knowledge, the dome has never failed in any nuclear accident.
2. Are you seriously saying that having the concrete dome act as a heat exchanger isn't something we can simulate? I mean, by the same argument the outer walls of our houses are heat exchangers - it's just with them we want to minimize it, with the dome we want to maximize it.
Consider Fukushima - even with 'strong' domes they ended up with radioactive release because they had to pass water through the system in order to keep them cool enough to prevent problems. If you design the dome to be able to transmit enough heat OUT OF IT, without circulating water, that allows you to keep tighter control of the radioactive materials. Which is the important part.
The EPR reactors appear to be a better design over AP1000 for many reason, the most obvious one being a *double* containment building, i.e that massive dome gets *another* structure built over the top of it and main facilities buildings set up so that the whole reactor isn't completely disabled in the event of an emergency. IIRC these are the reactors that Finland is installing.
The important part is 'appears'. When I did the math on predicted core events, AP1000 was less likely to have an accident, but a fleet of AP1000 reactors with matching capacity to a fleet of EPRs would have a very slightly higher incident rate.
Still, in both cases we're looking at around a couple orders of magnitude less likelihood of an incident, which is my point. An AP1000 that gets built is better than and EPR that doesn't, leaving us with an ancient reactor or a replacement coal plant.
Even if they were built and put online today, none of these new reactor facilities will be producing power for people in 40 to 60 years time because they will be at the end of their service life.
Actually, they'd probably last a century or more at this point. Most of them, at least.
Considering the number of 'overrated -1' I got, there's an anti-nuclear side to it as well.
That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.
Citation on the mines causing radioactive contamination? Do you have any idea how dirty other mining operations are? None of them are really 'clean'.
As for the energy cost of refining - I suppose you're one of the ones that argues that we shouldn't be using solar panels because making them involves mining and refining materials that creates nasty waste? Just like with solar power, nuclear power quickly becomes energy positive, and while it takes a relatively large amount of refining to get a fuel rod, it produces so much power over it's life, even in a wasteful US once-through system, that the energy costs are negligible, at least compared to the most frequent replacements - coal, natural gas, and such.
For reactors being torn down, yes it takes energy. But given that we should know how to make plants last 50 years at this point, minimum, it's not actually that big of a proportion. Hell, after 50 years you'll probably be replacing the solar panels as well.
On nuclear accidents - I'll give you that the earliest plants are dangerous. Fukushima, for example was older than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Newer plants would be safer.
Really, that's all I ask for - build new nuclear plants to replace the old ones, not coal or natural gas. Keep a healthy mix of sources going.