when the wiki page says gas plants cost $1900/kilowatt vs $5000/kilowatt.... That's the only part I don't get. Is this just building in alternative sources for better grid reliability?
Grid reliability and fuel diversity is part of the equation, but nuclear can have lower operating costs due to the extremely cheap fuel. Now, a nuclear plant does require far greater staffing than a combustion plant, but that doesn't eat up all the savings of cheap uranium fuel.
A large nuclear power plant with efficient staffing is a huge money maker in most (not all) parts of the US and the world.
If you're wondering why this feels like entrapment even though legally it's not; it's because Amazon treats their workers badly enough (and keeps them financially desperate enough) that temping them with something so minor is enough to push them over the edge. Want people to stop risking their jobs and jail time for what's maybe a $20 package? Pay them enough to live.
Poverty does not cause crime. That's an excuse you use for people whose morals are lacking. I saw your linked article (from a website founded by a noted liar, Matthew Yglesias). What's so hard about not stealing from a truck? There's a truck there? It's not yours? Keep walking! Feel bad about police bait? Well.... don't take it. They're not selling Nikes for food.
When you make excuses for the degenerate and criminal, you spit on all the people who have been poor and harmed no one. You can do your own internet search for 'Does Poverty Cause Crime?' and see if there's anything there that strikes your interest.
Q: Were the decisions correct as a matter of law? Does the law need to be changed?
A: Who cares! Let's demonize this guy! Maybe we can get his children threatened again! Perhaps someone will physically attack him!
May those who push this sort of personal attack be on the receiving end one day. Oh, wait, that does happen, because the left eats it's own. It just hasn't happened to YOU yet.
"The curious task of economics is to teach men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." How could you possibly think this wouldn't choke out almost all hiring and impose impossibly high costs? Corporations don't have unlimited funds, this sort of crazy plan would ensure employees who pose even the slightest risk of being a burden would never get hired.
Have you considered lifting people up individually? It's popular to cry for a "living wage!", but plenty of people already make that kind of money without your help. Perhaps it's best to raise the skills and professionalism of people making minimum wage to match the abilities of the folks who make a good wage without your help. (See Mike Rowe)
I've met some of the Nuscale guys and talked to them about their plant. The first planned one will still have a site output over 1,000 MWe. The 'Big Idea' is that by ganging several smaller reactors together, they can be small enough to avoid expensive ECCS and shutdown cooling systems, but big enough to pay for all the people you need on a nuclear site. Also, with a dozen smaller reactors on site, you can frequently have one in a refueling outage, so you can staff a constant, smaller crew for that. Then your 'big outages' are just the ones necessary to take care of the electrical generating equipment (which will still happen every couple of years.) They do have a planned project with a Utah Power company, I think you can find the details on their website.
We'll see how it works out over the next few years, but as someone familiar with the nuclear industry, I'm optimistic about these guys.
1) IDs are free- sure. 2) National holidays- not really necessary. People working 12 hour shifts, who have the hardest time getting to the polls, will still be working those 12 hour shifts on holidays. That's how shift work works. 3) same day registration- nah. And since we're casting aspersions here, the only reason you want it is so people can vote multiple times in the same day, in multiple states, and there's no time to validate their eligibility to vote.
$10K to cut off 3rd party ink hacks is good spending.
I picked up an HP office jet 476dx and I bought 3rd party inks.... and the printer gave some generic error and refused to use the cartridges. Then I updated the firmware to HP's latest, and I could use the inks. The point is that they shipped a printer that couldn't use third party inks, and then were guilted or otherwise moved to update the firmware to allow them. The printer now works fine with 3rd party inks that cost 1/4 what HP charges, and I only have to tolerate the printer bitching a bit when I replace a cartridge ('You really should use HP inks, never know about this third party stuff.') I'd say that's good enough.
I live in a fairly rural town- 20 square miles, 4,300 people- and Comcast's cable modem service is fine. I'd prefer to pay less, but $93 a month for internet service that's fast enough to stream is adequate. They respond to the occasional service call well enough; I've no complaints.
The only theoretical competition is the telephone company, however, and they're pretty broke. DSL service is terrible- few houses live close enough to the central switch to make it possible- and they just don't have the money to lay fiber everywhere. Sure, they're doing it in chunks here or there, but I've been here for seven years and they're finally installing fiber a couple streets over.
I can see how the telco is in a bind. The area was sold off by verizon a few years ago and the buyout was leveraged. The phone company is in the poor position of competing against comcast phone service, VOIP, and cell phones. They do some TV bundling with satellite providers but it's a tough business. Basically they need to roll out fiber to keep money coming in, but they need money coming in to roll out fiber because they've already borrowed to the hilt. Now that I'm checking as I write this comment, the telco has been purchased by another company.... so we'll see what happens!
That's the expected response- call out Universities for their excesses, for their detachment from reality, for their calloussness in taking $100,000 from naive students getting underwater basket weaving degrees.... and get called 'anti-intellectual'
There's nothing 'intellectual' about anything academics are being challenged for in this thread... 'craven', 'wasteful', 'uncaring', 'fascist thought police'...these are all much more apt descriptions of the modern academic than 'intelectual.' There are a great number of good people at universities doing good work..... but these people ought to be able to see their surroundings for what they are.
I have Native American friends so I've frequented reservations. They're like southern trailer parks but without the pizaz. We didn't just stick them on reservations, we stuck the reservations on the crummiest land in the country. When you're that dirt poor you're too busy trying to survive to worry about others. It's a classic technique of any ruling class: keep everyone on the verge of disaster so they won't band together to help each other out.
Well.... can they leave? Why shouldn't they if it sucks so bad?
Load following is done at some nuclear plants in the world, but you're generally correct in the US, they crank out 100% power as much as possible. When I said "on demand", I meant more that the power plant operates when we want it to, not according to forces beyond our control.
More recently, the 556 MW Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Wisconsin was shut down in 2013. Kewaunee’s operator, Dominion Power, anticipates nearly $1 billion in total costs using the SAFSTOR method and estimates that work will not be complete until 2073.
That $200,000 is looking pretty good put up against that $1 BILLION plus....and 60 years to complete.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine is about a 1/3rd. The biggest wind turbines are about 2 megawatts. Kewaunee had a lifetime capacity factor of 84% for it's 39 years of service.
To replace Kewaunee's output with wind turbines, you would need 631 of the largest wind turbines available, for a cost of about 2 billion dollars. Since wind turbines last perhaps half as long as nuclear plants, figure $4 billion. That also doesn't count added costs with spreading them out geographically far enough to get reliable generation from them; nor have we touched the tremendous amount of land they need.
At a $200,000 per unit decomissioning cost for wind turbines, the total cost would for scrapping two generations of a 631 unit 'wind farm' would be $250,000,000, less than Kewaunee's billion..... but now you're starting to compare apples to apples.
New nuclear plants are double the output of Kewaunee- while they're admittedly expensive, they have the tremendous benefit of power-on-demand- something that's vital for a stable electrical grid.
Assuming you can't just extend the life of the tower somehow, like they do with nuclear plants that suffer from fatigue.
The original basis for a 40 year license for nuclear plants was based on neutron embrittlement of the reactor core, the most expensive and difficult part of the plant to replace. If the metal becomes brittle, it'll stop expanding as it's heated and pressurized, and crack a leak instead.
We only had so much metallurgical data when that rule was made. Since then, core metal samples (removal test coupons) have shown that the reactor vessels are holding up better than expected; especially since core loading has been altered to reduce neutron flux at the vessel wall.
That's why many plants have had their licenses extended to 60 years; one plant is rumored to be going for an additional extension for 80 years total.
Plenty of other parts do get fatigued and are replaced in the life of a plant.
For a wind tower comparison- well, cyclic fatigue of the tower could be addressed by welding additional supports inside or outside, I imagine. At some point the field work and material required to shore up the towers will be too great. If the stress fatigue is concentrated on one part of the tower- say the footing- that might be economical to reinforce; but if the whole tower is subject to the fatigue stress, scrapping it is more likely.
The total decommissioning funds set aside for United States Nuclear Power plants is somewhere around $64,000,000,000. This money is generally invested to grow long-term in order to meet the commitments. I don't believe any other type of power plant is required to have funds set aside in advance to safely tear them down.
Funny how the pro-nuke faction always overlooks that there is not enough Uranium to make nuclear power long-term sustainable.
Where did you get this idea? That we say there's 40-70 years of reserves?
That means 'identified and located reserves' It takes effort to find Uranium mines. Effort means money. When they've located enough Uranium for the next several decades, they stop looking. When we stumble on more doing other things, or when we're down to 30 years 'reserve' , then the companies involved go and look for more. Bam! Years of reserves go back up again. Not to mention it might be possible to economically extract uranium from seawater. Some folks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory just found a way to extract yellowcake from seawater with a method that's cost competitive with mining. If that holds, then current nuclear technology is effectively unlimited by fuel.
Surfing around a bit I found we've got some 100 years of uranium available at current prices. Even if that's all the Uranium that exists on the earth, isn't 4 generations of electricity a worth while investment?
No reactor has ever been built that wasn't massively subsidized by taxpayers. Subsidies for construction, subsidies for security, subsidies for insurance, subsidizes for decommissioning - and that's before the ultimate subsidy, storing the waste for millennia on the taxpayer's dime.
The last one you're definitely wrong- The Yucca Mountain facility was constructed with taxes collected under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and the fund has an unspent balance of $46,000,000,000- and that's with construction at Yucca complete! Other posters have pointed out that there's really a lot of usable energy left in that 'spent' fuel. As I understand it, the current economics of Uranium mining don't justify the capital expense to restart spent fuel reprocessing in the United States, but it works just fine for Japan and France.
Since you're wrong there, the rest of your statements require re-examination. Beyond that, if we're going to use subsidies to set and direct energy policy, nuclear has several significant advantages over solar and wind- not the least of which is that it makes power on demand!
Plenty is getting done at the federal level. Problem is, the left is extremely angry about it. Instead of trying to win votes, they're aggressively attacking anyone who thinks differently from them. See the Bernie-Bro assassination attempt on Scalisle, the attack on Rand Paul, following Sarah Sanders to the next restaurant after asking her to leave, Maxine Waters advocating stalking people, the harassment of the Florida attorney general.... the list goes on. The left, now more than ever, thinks that they're so much better than their opponents that any depraved act is justified to get back on top.
Fact is they're nuts and going insane with rage. While I derive some guilty pleasure from watching youtube videos of far-away left wing cranks going apoplectic; it's not so fun seeing someone I know and like (who has been a generous host to me at several parties) falling apart on facebook. Her world is collapsing because folks she doesn't agree with got elected, and they're starting to play by some of the rules established by the left under Obama.
Well, it helps ensure the person voting is who they say they are and is eligible to vote.
Who has the time to drive round to dozens of different polling stations and impersonate someone
Democratic party activists; the same unemployed cranks who have the time to show up at massive political rallies.
(who the ballot official may know, and who may already have voted).
I'm sure there are quite a few ballot officials who would happily participate in fraud, as long as it supported their preferred candidate.
And how would that swing an election anyway?
Well, in a Narrow election, a few people who spend all day voting. (vote early! vote often!) could certainly swing the vote by a few hundred.
On the other hand, picture ID obviously does create some problems.
Yes, it makes it harder to steal elections. Parties actually have to convince people they're worth voting for.
US... citizens are not required to have ID by the state.
Unless you want to fly, or drive, or do any number of things. Sure, you can be a hermit under a bridge without an ID. Perfectly legal.
But they do have a right to vote. So now they are having their right to vote qualified. That's not OK. The fact that the qualification creates additional bars (cost, time, effort) makes things worse.
Yeah, qualified by the minimum competency required to obtain a state identification, though all sorts of activist groups exist to 'help' people vote as it is; somehow these same groups can't be expected to walk people through getting a little paperwork in order; nor could their be any kind of state program available to help smooth out the process.
I would argue that the ACA was a net negative, though, and possibly worse than doing nothing in the long term because of the backlash. ACA was the Republican plan, and it sucked in a lot of ways. This got in the way of the single-payer system that we actually need, which would actually work.
Republican plan? Are you out of your mind? The ACA was passed on a party-line vote with procedural tricks to ensure no Republican opposition could stand in the way.
It seems like, when the camera company knows that a line is near the end, they put a little extra effort into the last one.
.
Reading your comment, it just occurred to me that they're probably dumping all their pent-up design concepts into the last model. Any development shop will come up with all kinds of different features, functions and improvements, which will be metered out between different product lines. Normally this provides for differentiation between low-end and high-end, and a reason to upgrade next year. But if there's no next year, and no more low-end or high-end, heck, why not dump it all on the last model?
In all other peoples' experience (yours is the exception; your totally unique experiences are probably what gave you the insight that everyone else has missed), the probability of amino acids assembling into useful proteins is reasonable likely. People have seen mechanical processes sort things all their lives (e.g. any beach). Your idea, though groundbreaking and about to bring you great fame, is contrary to everyone else's observations and experience.
It's funny, you talk about science and observation but mostly you resort to mockery. Surely, then, you can point to some actual study that supports your position that the start of life is reasonably probable as a random event? As you imply, people have been investigating this sort of thing; if someone could mathematically prove that the spontaneous generation of life was probable; surely wouldn't that be Nobel-level material you could immediately point to and show what a fool I am?
The simplest life has some 500,000 base pairs of DNA; perhaps 525 genes. The odds that a chain this long will arise with minimal error is rather small all by itself. Further, In order for these to be expressed into a functioning life, numerous proteins and organelles have to be at work already; but how do you get them started from random bits, even in the most fortuitous of circumstances? There's no non-intelligent mechanism where parts of a useful assembly might be preserved until the remaining bits come along and make it useful; it is likely to degrade back into it's chemical parts before too long. You need countless parts working together at the same time to kick start the entire affair. There's no partial credit! You can't point to evolution when there's no life! (Hey, maybe you can prove me wrong here! How could parts of potential life be preserved until the rest of the bits come along and something manages to kick start it into a living state? ) Even the simplest life is irreducibly complex; take away a vital functioning bit on the cellular level; and it's dead; no chemical happenstance will bring it back to life.
If you're talking about making analogies based on our experience, the specified functional complexity of life only has analogies in human activities, not natural activities. Natural activities will get you crystals, stalactites, canyons, winding rivers, sort some rocks on the beach, push up mountains, etc; nature will never yield a mountain side with four rock formations that look like former presidents of the United States. Design is the best explanation of Mt. Rushmore, and design is the best explanation of life.
It's funny, even a nasty, snarky man like Richard Dawkins is forced to admit the following "“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”... of course, he then spends the rest of the book saying 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes'? (He goes on to state there can be no designer because then "who designed the designer?." however, this is not the original question, but a new question. It's like a child who continues to ask 'Why'? every time an answer is given.)
(Yes, I read the rest of your comment; mostly mockery; little to actually address.)
It didn't make me laugh, but I have to admit that I find it a clever way to comment on a political issue: not abortion itself, but rather the way anti-abortion proponents try to exert control on abortion clinics by forcing them to talk-down to their patients as if they were ignorant children.
Well I think it's funny you say that, funny in a tragic sort of way, because Planned Parenthood has repeatedly aborted the babies of abused children and then handed they underage girls right back to their abusers, no questions asked. (If you're going to attack the source, be sure to attack all the linked supporting documentation too.
Aborting children for convenience- whether the convenience of the reckless woman who didn't weigh her risks properly; or for the convenience of a child rapist who doesn't want to be revealed- is a ghastly thing. It's no surprise that Planned Parenthood would ignore good sense and mandatory reporting laws to keep the 'clients' coming in the door- ignorant children and devilish abusers alike.
The existence of life (or even the universe itself) is the only testament you need to be sure God exists. There is absolutely zero chance that life formed anywhere in the universe without intelligent intervention. Amino acids can form spontaneously under the right conditions. The probability of those amino acids randomly assembling into a simple useful protein, given all the time since the big bang, is less likely than picking one marked atom from all the atoms in the universe. The chance that sufficient useful proteins would randomly assemble at the same place and time in such a fashion as to start the most basic life form is so unfathomably remote as to be fairly called impossible. Of course, various theories have been posited to get around these problems, but none have a shred of evidence or analysis to support them. Their only claim to validity is that atheists want them to be true. I don't have enough faith to accept that the first life in the universe could have been started by anything other than an intelligence that proceeded all life.
Slashdot Mirror
when the wiki page says gas plants cost $1900/kilowatt vs $5000/kilowatt.... That's the only part I don't get. Is this just building in alternative sources for better grid reliability?
Grid reliability and fuel diversity is part of the equation, but nuclear can have lower operating costs due to the extremely cheap fuel. Now, a nuclear plant does require far greater staffing than a combustion plant, but that doesn't eat up all the savings of cheap uranium fuel.
A large nuclear power plant with efficient staffing is a huge money maker in most (not all) parts of the US and the world.
this.
If you're wondering why this feels like entrapment even though legally it's not; it's because Amazon treats their workers badly enough (and keeps them financially desperate enough) that temping them with something so minor is enough to push them over the edge. Want people to stop risking their jobs and jail time for what's maybe a $20 package? Pay them enough to live.
Poverty does not cause crime. That's an excuse you use for people whose morals are lacking. I saw your linked article (from a website founded by a noted liar, Matthew Yglesias). What's so hard about not stealing from a truck? There's a truck there? It's not yours? Keep walking! Feel bad about police bait? Well.... don't take it. They're not selling Nikes for food.
When you make excuses for the degenerate and criminal, you spit on all the people who have been poor and harmed no one. You can do your own internet search for 'Does Poverty Cause Crime?' and see if there's anything there that strikes your interest.
What's with you people and Ajit Pai?
Q: Were the decisions correct as a matter of law? Does the law need to be changed?
A: Who cares! Let's demonize this guy! Maybe we can get his children threatened again! Perhaps someone will physically attack him!
May those who push this sort of personal attack be on the receiving end one day. Oh, wait, that does happen, because the left eats it's own. It just hasn't happened to YOU yet.
"The curious task of economics is to teach men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
How could you possibly think this wouldn't choke out almost all hiring and impose impossibly high costs? Corporations don't have unlimited funds, this sort of crazy plan would ensure employees who pose even the slightest risk of being a burden would never get hired.
Have you considered lifting people up individually? It's popular to cry for a "living wage!", but plenty of people already make that kind of money without your help.
Perhaps it's best to raise the skills and professionalism of people making minimum wage to match the abilities of the folks who make a good wage without your help. (See Mike Rowe)
I've met some of the Nuscale guys and talked to them about their plant. The first planned one will still have a site output over 1,000 MWe. The 'Big Idea' is that by ganging several smaller reactors together, they can be small enough to avoid expensive ECCS and shutdown cooling systems, but big enough to pay for all the people you need on a nuclear site. Also, with a dozen smaller reactors on site, you can frequently have one in a refueling outage, so you can staff a constant, smaller crew for that. Then your 'big outages' are just the ones necessary to take care of the electrical generating equipment (which will still happen every couple of years.) They do have a planned project with a Utah Power company, I think you can find the details on their website.
We'll see how it works out over the next few years, but as someone familiar with the nuclear industry, I'm optimistic about these guys.
1) IDs are free- sure.
2) National holidays- not really necessary. People working 12 hour shifts, who have the hardest time getting to the polls, will still be working those 12 hour shifts on holidays. That's how shift work works.
3) same day registration- nah. And since we're casting aspersions here, the only reason you want it is so people can vote multiple times in the same day, in multiple states, and there's no time to validate their eligibility to vote.
As long as we're on the subject, black folks know how to get IDs just fine, thank you.
$10K to cut off 3rd party ink hacks is good spending.
I picked up an HP office jet 476dx and I bought 3rd party inks.... and the printer gave some generic error and refused to use the cartridges.
Then I updated the firmware to HP's latest, and I could use the inks.
The point is that they shipped a printer that couldn't use third party inks, and then were guilted or otherwise moved to update the firmware to allow them. The printer now works fine with 3rd party inks that cost 1/4 what HP charges, and I only have to tolerate the printer bitching a bit when I replace a cartridge ('You really should use HP inks, never know about this third party stuff.')
I'd say that's good enough.
I live in a fairly rural town- 20 square miles, 4,300 people- and Comcast's cable modem service is fine. I'd prefer to pay less, but $93 a month for internet service that's fast enough to stream is adequate. They respond to the occasional service call well enough; I've no complaints.
The only theoretical competition is the telephone company, however, and they're pretty broke. DSL service is terrible- few houses live close enough to the central switch to make it possible- and they just don't have the money to lay fiber everywhere. Sure, they're doing it in chunks here or there, but I've been here for seven years and they're finally installing fiber a couple streets over.
I can see how the telco is in a bind. The area was sold off by verizon a few years ago and the buyout was leveraged. The phone company is in the poor position of competing against comcast phone service, VOIP, and cell phones. They do some TV bundling with satellite providers but it's a tough business. Basically they need to roll out fiber to keep money coming in, but they need money coming in to roll out fiber because they've already borrowed to the hilt.
Now that I'm checking as I write this comment, the telco has been purchased by another company.... so we'll see what happens!
That's the expected response- call out Universities for their excesses, for their detachment from reality, for their calloussness in taking $100,000 from naive students getting underwater basket weaving degrees.... and get called 'anti-intellectual'
There's nothing 'intellectual' about anything academics are being challenged for in this thread... 'craven', 'wasteful', 'uncaring', 'fascist thought police' ...these are all much more apt descriptions of the modern academic than 'intelectual.'
There are a great number of good people at universities doing good work..... but these people ought to be able to see their surroundings for what they are.
I have Native American friends so I've frequented reservations. They're like southern trailer parks but without the pizaz. We didn't just stick them on reservations, we stuck the reservations on the crummiest land in the country. When you're that dirt poor you're too busy trying to survive to worry about others. It's a classic technique of any ruling class: keep everyone on the verge of disaster so they won't band together to help each other out.
Well.... can they leave? Why shouldn't they if it sucks so bad?
Load following is done at some nuclear plants in the world, but you're generally correct in the US, they crank out 100% power as much as possible.
When I said "on demand", I meant more that the power plant operates when we want it to, not according to forces beyond our control.
I included lifetime capacity factor for Kewaunee in my numbers and stated so clearly. Your adjustment is incorrect.
HHAHHAHHAHHHAHHHHAHHAHAHHAHAAHA. Thanks, i needed a good laugh.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
More recently, the 556 MW Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Wisconsin was shut down in 2013. Kewaunee’s operator, Dominion Power, anticipates nearly $1 billion in total costs using the SAFSTOR method and estimates that work will not be complete until 2073.
That $200,000 is looking pretty good put up against that $1 BILLION plus....and 60 years to complete.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine is about a 1/3rd. The biggest wind turbines are about 2 megawatts. Kewaunee had a lifetime capacity factor of 84% for it's 39 years of service.
To replace Kewaunee's output with wind turbines, you would need 631 of the largest wind turbines available, for a cost of about 2 billion dollars. Since wind turbines last perhaps half as long as nuclear plants, figure $4 billion. That also doesn't count added costs with spreading them out geographically far enough to get reliable generation from them; nor have we touched the tremendous amount of land they need.
At a $200,000 per unit decomissioning cost for wind turbines, the total cost would for scrapping two generations of a 631 unit 'wind farm' would be $250,000,000, less than Kewaunee's billion..... but now you're starting to compare apples to apples.
New nuclear plants are double the output of Kewaunee- while they're admittedly expensive, they have the tremendous benefit of power-on-demand- something that's vital for a stable electrical grid.
Assuming you can't just extend the life of the tower somehow, like they do with nuclear plants that suffer from fatigue.
The original basis for a 40 year license for nuclear plants was based on neutron embrittlement of the reactor core, the most expensive and difficult part of the plant to replace. If the metal becomes brittle, it'll stop expanding as it's heated and pressurized, and crack a leak instead.
We only had so much metallurgical data when that rule was made. Since then, core metal samples (removal test coupons) have shown that the reactor vessels are holding up better than expected; especially since core loading has been altered to reduce neutron flux at the vessel wall.
That's why many plants have had their licenses extended to 60 years; one plant is rumored to be going for an additional extension for 80 years total.
Plenty of other parts do get fatigued and are replaced in the life of a plant.
For a wind tower comparison- well, cyclic fatigue of the tower could be addressed by welding additional supports inside or outside, I imagine. At some point the field work and material required to shore up the towers will be too great. If the stress fatigue is concentrated on one part of the tower- say the footing- that might be economical to reinforce; but if the whole tower is subject to the fatigue stress, scrapping it is more likely.
The total decommissioning funds set aside for United States Nuclear Power plants is somewhere around $64,000,000,000. This money is generally invested to grow long-term in order to meet the commitments. I don't believe any other type of power plant is required to have funds set aside in advance to safely tear them down.
Funny how the pro-nuke faction always overlooks that there is not enough Uranium to make nuclear power long-term sustainable.
Where did you get this idea? That we say there's 40-70 years of reserves?
That means 'identified and located reserves' It takes effort to find Uranium mines. Effort means money. When they've located enough Uranium for the next several decades, they stop looking. When we stumble on more doing other things, or when we're down to 30 years 'reserve' , then the companies involved go and look for more. Bam! Years of reserves go back up again. Not to mention it might be possible to economically extract uranium from seawater. Some folks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory just found a way to extract yellowcake from seawater with a method that's cost competitive with mining. If that holds, then current nuclear technology is effectively unlimited by fuel.
Surfing around a bit I found we've got some 100 years of uranium available at current prices. Even if that's all the Uranium that exists on the earth, isn't 4 generations of electricity a worth while investment?
No reactor has ever been built that wasn't massively subsidized by taxpayers. Subsidies for construction, subsidies for security, subsidies for insurance, subsidizes for decommissioning - and that's before the ultimate subsidy, storing the waste for millennia on the taxpayer's dime.
The last one you're definitely wrong- The Yucca Mountain facility was constructed with taxes collected under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and the fund has an unspent balance of $46,000,000,000- and that's with construction at Yucca complete! Other posters have pointed out that there's really a lot of usable energy left in that 'spent' fuel. As I understand it, the current economics of Uranium mining don't justify the capital expense to restart spent fuel reprocessing in the United States, but it works just fine for Japan and France.
Since you're wrong there, the rest of your statements require re-examination. Beyond that, if we're going to use subsidies to set and direct energy policy, nuclear has several significant advantages over solar and wind- not the least of which is that it makes power on demand!
Plenty is getting done at the federal level. Problem is, the left is extremely angry about it. Instead of trying to win votes, they're aggressively attacking anyone who thinks differently from them. See the Bernie-Bro assassination attempt on Scalisle, the attack on Rand Paul, following Sarah Sanders to the next restaurant after asking her to leave, Maxine Waters advocating stalking people, the harassment of the Florida attorney general.... the list goes on. The left, now more than ever, thinks that they're so much better than their opponents that any depraved act is justified to get back on top.
Fact is they're nuts and going insane with rage. While I derive some guilty pleasure from watching youtube videos of far-away left wing cranks going apoplectic; it's not so fun seeing someone I know and like (who has been a generous host to me at several parties) falling apart on facebook. Her world is collapsing because folks she doesn't agree with got elected, and they're starting to play by some of the rules established by the left under Obama.
What problem does picture ID help you solve?
Well, it helps ensure the person voting is who they say they are and is eligible to vote.
Who has the time to drive round to dozens of different polling stations and impersonate someone
Democratic party activists; the same unemployed cranks who have the time to show up at massive political rallies.
(who the ballot official may know, and who may already have voted).
I'm sure there are quite a few ballot officials who would happily participate in fraud, as long as it supported their preferred candidate.
And how would that swing an election anyway?
Well, in a Narrow election, a few people who spend all day voting. (vote early! vote often!) could certainly swing the vote by a few hundred.
On the other hand, picture ID obviously does create some problems.
Yes, it makes it harder to steal elections. Parties actually have to convince people they're worth voting for.
US ... citizens are not required to have ID by the state.
Unless you want to fly, or drive, or do any number of things. Sure, you can be a hermit under a bridge without an ID. Perfectly legal.
But they do have a right to vote. So now they are having their right to vote qualified. That's not OK. The fact that the qualification creates additional bars (cost, time, effort) makes things worse.
Yeah, qualified by the minimum competency required to obtain a state identification, though all sorts of activist groups exist to 'help' people vote as it is; somehow these same groups can't be expected to walk people through getting a little paperwork in order; nor could their be any kind of state program available to help smooth out the process.
I would argue that the ACA was a net negative, though, and possibly worse than doing nothing in the long term because of the backlash. ACA was the Republican plan, and it sucked in a lot of ways. This got in the way of the single-payer system that we actually need, which would actually work.
Republican plan? Are you out of your mind? The ACA was passed on a party-line vote with procedural tricks to ensure no Republican opposition could stand in the way.
It seems like, when the camera company knows that a line is near the end, they put a little extra effort into the last one.
.
Reading your comment, it just occurred to me that they're probably dumping all their pent-up design concepts into the last model. Any development shop will come up with all kinds of different features, functions and improvements, which will be metered out between different product lines. Normally this provides for differentiation between low-end and high-end, and a reason to upgrade next year.
But if there's no next year, and no more low-end or high-end, heck, why not dump it all on the last model?
My point? Uh... nothing, really.
It's funny, you talk about science and observation but mostly you resort to mockery. Surely, then, you can point to some actual study that supports your position that the start of life is reasonably probable as a random event? As you imply, people have been investigating this sort of thing; if someone could mathematically prove that the spontaneous generation of life was probable; surely wouldn't that be Nobel-level material you could immediately point to and show what a fool I am?
The simplest life has some 500,000 base pairs of DNA; perhaps 525 genes. The odds that a chain this long will arise with minimal error is rather small all by itself. Further, In order for these to be expressed into a functioning life, numerous proteins and organelles have to be at work already; but how do you get them started from random bits, even in the most fortuitous of circumstances? There's no non-intelligent mechanism where parts of a useful assembly might be preserved until the remaining bits come along and make it useful; it is likely to degrade back into it's chemical parts before too long. You need countless parts working together at the same time to kick start the entire affair. There's no partial credit! You can't point to evolution when there's no life! (Hey, maybe you can prove me wrong here! How could parts of potential life be preserved until the rest of the bits come along and something manages to kick start it into a living state? ) Even the simplest life is irreducibly complex; take away a vital functioning bit on the cellular level; and it's dead; no chemical happenstance will bring it back to life.
If you're talking about making analogies based on our experience, the specified functional complexity of life only has analogies in human activities, not natural activities. Natural activities will get you crystals, stalactites, canyons, winding rivers, sort some rocks on the beach, push up mountains, etc; nature will never yield a mountain side with four rock formations that look like former presidents of the United States. Design is the best explanation of Mt. Rushmore, and design is the best explanation of life.
It's funny, even a nasty, snarky man like Richard Dawkins is forced to admit the following "“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”... of course, he then spends the rest of the book saying 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes'? (He goes on to state there can be no designer because then "who designed the designer?." however, this is not the original question, but a new question. It's like a child who continues to ask 'Why'? every time an answer is given.)
(Yes, I read the rest of your comment; mostly mockery; little to actually address.)
It didn't make me laugh, but I have to admit that I find it a clever way to comment on a political issue: not abortion itself, but rather the way anti-abortion proponents try to exert control on abortion clinics by forcing them to talk-down to their patients as if they were ignorant children.
Well I think it's funny you say that, funny in a tragic sort of way, because Planned Parenthood has repeatedly aborted the babies of abused children and then handed they underage girls right back to their abusers, no questions asked. (If you're going to attack the source, be sure to attack all the linked supporting documentation too.
Aborting children for convenience- whether the convenience of the reckless woman who didn't weigh her risks properly; or for the convenience of a child rapist who doesn't want to be revealed- is a ghastly thing. It's no surprise that Planned Parenthood would ignore good sense and mandatory reporting laws to keep the 'clients' coming in the door- ignorant children and devilish abusers alike.
The existence of life (or even the universe itself) is the only testament you need to be sure God exists. There is absolutely zero chance that life formed anywhere in the universe without intelligent intervention.
Amino acids can form spontaneously under the right conditions. The probability of those amino acids randomly assembling into a simple useful protein, given all the time since the big bang, is less likely than picking one marked atom from all the atoms in the universe. The chance that sufficient useful proteins would randomly assemble at the same place and time in such a fashion as to start the most basic life form is so unfathomably remote as to be fairly called impossible.
Of course, various theories have been posited to get around these problems, but none have a shred of evidence or analysis to support them. Their only claim to validity is that atheists want them to be true. I don't have enough faith to accept that the first life in the universe could have been started by anything other than an intelligence that proceeded all life.
Unless they can vat-grow leather, we'll still need lots of cows.