Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
A temporary dip in the stock market, and you're talking like this is the subprime/default credit swap debacle. These decommissioning funds have been around longer than you have been, and being invested in the stock market, they took the same hit everyone else did. Fortunately they're in it for the long haul, not the next 'gotcha!' headline.
I don't think a nuclear power plant "crash" would be worth it.
Yeah, right on! Pennsylvania is totally uninhabitable 30 years after the Three Mile Island event!
Seriously, they had a Loss of Coolant Accident with a core meltdown at TMI. That's as bad as it gets with western plants. No one died. No one was hurt. No one was exposed to a harmful level of radiation. It was a billion dollar industrial casualty. The adjacent nuclear unit continues to run with a great safety record.
Three Mile Island exposed deficiencies in training philosophy and human factoring of controls and indications. These lessons have been learned.
It also validated the basic western design philosophy. Multiple fission product barriers, negative temperature coefficient, negative void coefficient.
That's a fair question. I'm not a finance guy but I'll answer to the best of my ability.
Finance cost: 0. Everthing should be paid for. Capital costs required to maintain or even replace three pumps, two heat exchangers, and the associated piping should be minimal.
Land use & taxes: ~$100,000 (guess) Whatever property taxes are. Varies from zero to millions for an active nuclear power plant. The facility would not generate any profits, so property taxes would be the only ones applicable.
Utilities: less than $325,000 / year (Assuming 1,000 hp in total pump power, based on the required pumps installed in my plant. In reality, much smaller pumps would be required to cool just the fuel, and would be installed as the first-year savings would pay for them entirely.)
Staffing: ~$1.6 million per year. (assuming 3 technicians at all times, 5 crews required for 24 hr coverage, $80,000 a year salary, + 1/3 for benefits & taxes.)
Security: ~$1.6 million per year. (more people would be required than staffing, but Security guards are paid less than technicians, and the required number would vary with the plant layout. I'm assuming the high security area would be relatively small compared to the area required for an operating plant.)
Equipment replacement & expendables: ~$100,000 a year, average, high side guess.
Insurance: $250,000 a year, Wild-ass guess. Everything is so over-built, and the insurance companies visit us frequently to evaluate their risk, so I doubt it would be much more than that.
That adds up to about $4 million. As per the nuclear industry standard, I've probably vastly overestimated everything.
If you use a time value of money calculation ending 60 years out, given a 6% rate of return (from the article), assume $0 value at the end, paid quarterly, then about $64 million dollars should do the job. (calculator here. )
That doesn't account for inflation, but since i've probably guessed high on everything I'm not going to feel too bad about that.
Further, after two decades, all your fuel can go into dry cask storage, changing your yearly utility cost down to maybe $10,000 a year for lights and air conditioning.
This would also reduce the staffing required on site even further. Purchasing the canisters and the concrete bunkers to store them in will be expensive, but let's assume that the savings on utilities and personel for the remaining 40 years will cover this as well.
So, there's a rough answer for you: A $64 million dollar fund should be sufficient to maintain a nuclear power plant safely shut down for 60 years.
Now if you want to wipe the power plant from the site completely, that will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and the article talks about that. Simply shutting it down and maintaining the fuel safely won't cost nearly as much.
Fair enough. We do pass these sorts of incidents around in the nuclear industry to prevent recurrance, though I confess I don't recall reading this particular one.
As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like: It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean: 1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool. 2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway) 3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask. 4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too: Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else? Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold: 1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret. 2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more: Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
That's a mighty vague definition of "wealth" you have there. Money, and what you can buy with it. Simple enough for you? We exchange money for goods and services, so 'wealth' might include the ability to use goods and services as you choose.
We just have more people who can afford plumbing, big screen televisions, etc because they are getting cheaper to make.
And widespread access to the creature comforts of life supports your argument how? What is wealth for? Specific dollar numbers are going up and down, but access to the modern benefits that wealth provides is quite widespread....
Re: Competition: The winning and losing involved in competition is not a permanent, one-time state. The person who loses today may better themselves and win tommorow. In denigrating competition, you miss this vital point.
They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness".
Do you actually know anyone on government assistance? I do. He is dependant, self-centered, unreliable, and often lazy. You have an opinion, I have experience.
A market cannot function humanely without the wealth spread around fairly evenly
Your use of subjective terms like 'humanely' drive your-and kohn's- position back into the realm of idle speculation.
Generally speaking, 'humanely' is a worthwhile goal, but you can't dip your toes in and out of hard logic & numbers at your convienence, and then expect any deference from me.
At this point I would suggest reading the sowell book I linked in another response to you (I think it was you.) I could type more but I'm not sure you understand my philosophical basis- you likely think I'm a 'rube' for 'the man'
You are engaging in an ad hominem (personal) attack and creating strawmen arguments, and saying there is no point to dialog, which all suggests your points are weak.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time or inclination to write a book, so I merely allude to the fact that the premises underlying our positions are drastically different and vitally important.
As for the rest of your post, you evidently place a great deal of confidence in specific articulated rationality. Unfortunately, much of what you rely on is unproven theory, or merely opinions, as it is not positited in any way that can be tested.
Tossing around rhetorical terms like 'ad hominen' imply a preference for a specifically rational methodology, but the way to verify the rationality in all those grand-sounding thoughts is sorely absent.
These opinions masquerade as social science, but the prerequites of science are lacking- making them again, no more than opinions.
Further, most of these opinions are not even based on experience in the market or effectively governing a country, but merely a twisted wreckage of baseless half-logic that sounds good on paper.
You touch on my position in your own response: It just changes form and that is all.
A balance of inputs and outputs- this is what you talk about, correct? Sure, it's changed form, but hey, the materials were always here, right?
How can we generate wealth if we've got a limited set of components to work with?
Is that your position? The basis of your statement? The notion you rest 'zero-sum wealth on'?
If: raw materials = product then that supports your idea that the amount of wealth in the world is stable, and one may become wealthy only by depriving another.
I believe it's more like this:
raw materials + human effort = product + wealth
Roughly speaking, of course.
Where does the effort humans constantly add into the world figure into your equation?
Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?
Implicit in your question is the assumption that the VP promotion is the only way for that individual to generate wealth beyond what he already posesses. It also implies a fixation on working for someone else to generate wealth, but someone has to start all these companies that grow into fortune 500 companies and employ thousands of people and a few VP's.
"Poisoned soul" doesn't mean anything. You should make an argument to everyone also to convince also them that people have souls prior to making any assertation towards the condition of that soul.
There is an over-reliance on slashdot on academic-style articulated rationality, as if words drove reality, and weren't merely a best-efforts attempt to reflect reality. 'Soul' can be taken as shorthand for the collection of attitudes and philosophies one operates from, with the 'poisoned soul' to mean holding a set of ideas that lead to a stagnant or decreasing quality of life.
This is of course part of what I spoke of- a thousand underlying premises that make these discussions difficult at best.
Wealth is a zero sum game, a game where the wealthy get the sum and everybody else gets as close to zero as possible without revolting against the wealthy class.
Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) posess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?
Wealth is a limited sum game, but the limit is constantly increasing as human effort is added into the pool of wealth. Limited, increasing sum != zero.
I'm terribly sorry to do this point-by-point response, as I generally find it tiresome and cosntantly spiraling, but there it is.
Uh... no criticism of initiative, creativity, or risk taking inherent in achieving individual goals implicit... but do please explain why we currently record the largest gap in incomes since the founding of the republic.
The evidence of a wealth gap in and of itself is not a moral problem, unless you're operating out of a spirit of envy.
The wealth another man has or controls is irrelevant if his posession of such does not prevent me from generating enough wealth to meet my needs.
I have no need to explain it, because the gap itself is not a problem. Perhaps I misunderstand you?
Wealth is a zero sum game. Not everyone can be wealthy. Period. I'll agree that not everyone can be wealthy, but that doesn't make it zero sum. If it was a zero sum game, we could not have far more wealthy people than the world has seen before, and we could not have a vast majority of western countries with citizens who enjoy material wealth not even possible 100 years ago.
That wealth was generated by human activity. It was not taken from someone else, because there was no one to take it from.
The BBC article, and the video, indicates that this 'barcode' requires a LED, which requires power.
By requiring power, it eliminates itself from the 'barcode' replacement market, as it introduces a dozen more problems for the one it solves- and that one problem isn't really a problem, because 1d and 2d barcodes hold enough information for their current uses.
Now this neat little trick might be good for other applications, sure. I didn't pay much attention to the other uses in the video. The BBC article lists a lot of fun possible uses too, but the academics positing this don't seem to grasp that REQUIRING POWER is a big cock-block for many of their ideas.
Now Dr. Mohan says they could make passive tags for five cents, which is better, but it's still vastly more expensive than a bit of surface-printed ink.
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
It's a poor, twisted soul that even thinks to call wealth 'financial obesity', or refer to it as an illness. It's an even sicker person who sees our society as 'destroyed.' I'll give you weakened, perhaps, but for entirely different reasons than you would hold.
Unfortunately there's no point in arguing the matter further with the authors you linked to, or yourself. The philosophical background, psyche, and emotional state required to believe those sorts of enervating ideas are so utterly different from my own, that any discussion would be wasted. Discussing the point at hand would leave a thousand necessary premises undiscussed, and nothing would come of it.
That being said, I'll leave you with this: holding such ideas will poison your soul and make you miserable, while benefiting yourself and your fellow man not one wit.
The thing is, he knows something is wrong. He started a foundation to help the world. He is just so socially enmeshed in a dying ideology of artificial scarcity economics that he doesn't know how to fix it, and he surrounds himself with people who just produce more of the same rather than thinking outside the scarcity box.
It's even more evidence of a poisoned soul that you see the only possible reason a rich man would engage in charity is guilt. And while you talk of 'artificial scarcity' economics, your anti-wealth rant is based on an 'artificial scarcity of wealth' philosophy- that is, the only way it could possibly be wrong for a person to accumulate as much wealth as Bill Gates is if he's depriving someone else of something.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. It's more like lighting candles- if I light your candle, I still have my flame. The generation of wealth is very real and quite possible to prove within a paragraph or two. I'll leave it to you to consider for the moment.
It's an existing mechanism for inhibiting John Galt from excessive, unwarranted greed, and it can be used to redistribute wealth in a directed fashion. The ability to effectively, purposely redistribute wealth to meet certain social needs is beyond the capacity of any human institution. Humans are flawed, and the institutions we create are flawed. The chaos created by countless individuals making decisions in their own interest is preferable to the ruin created by arrogant attempts to directly dictate results through wealth redistribution. Good results often come from the former, achieving the latter is beyond human capacity.
For example, to fund a health care system that provides health care for all. Western civilization would still be a good idea.
I suggest you emigrate to a country that has the type of civilization you prefer. If it doesn't exist, there's probably a solid reason for that, given the number of countries out there and the length of recorded human history.
Legislatures are the problem nowadays. Fact is, effectively governing a country doesn't actually require anything close to the time we allow those guys to meet. They meet anyway, and meddle with our lives and businesses to the detriment of us all.
Best drive them home, and let them only meet every two years. Then perhaps every three years after a little while.
Really, let's see how long it takes us to miss them.
Way to sum up an entire continent of a billion people. Whle we're indulging in stereotypes, fuck you... you ignorant American tool.
I'm sure you're ready to point instantly, on a blank map, to any state in the USA I care to pick. Quick, where's Colorado?!?
Yeah, right. Knowing where any particular African nation is doesn't benefit anyone but schoolkids facing a geography test and businessmen working a deal there. Imagining that we're going to waste any energy keeping an African map memorized, when the particulars are irrelevant to our daily lives, is rather immodest.
I don't expect you to memorize the particulars of my continent unless that knowledge would hold practical value for you. I'm pretty sure you haven't done so, either, but that doesn't stop you from copping an attitude.
A foreigner lecturing an American about how ignorant we all are is as common and tasteful as a fly on sh*t. Funny thing is if you start interrogating them on the United States, they'll start looking pretty dumb pretty fast, while being utterly sure of every answer they give.
I don't care where on the African continent Nigeria is, because it's trivial knowledge that does me no good. You can't point out Vermont on a map for the same reason.
Thatcher did this, four years after she left office the prime minister's office (1990), and two years after she left parliament (1992)?
Really? Because everyone else is blaming a 1994 law. John Major (1990-1997), also of the conservative party, was the prime minister when this law passed, but you don't even mention him. Tony Blair took the reins in 1997.
Perhaps with all the citations and links you could have at least made sure your leading claim lined up with some dates. All your grand ideas about 'government approved this' and 'capitalist that' seemed like the drug-induced foggy ravings of someone who doesn't even have their dates right.
Under the contract, New Line was to pay a percentage of all gross receipts, after deducting 2.6 times the production costs, plus advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount, according to Eskenazi. (from TFA)
Nowadays it seems as though even the average slashdotter knows you take a portion of gross, because nothing involving MPAA or RIAA related-companies ever clears a 'net profit' (wink wink).
It looks like Tolkien & co where less saavy 40 years ago, and essentially signed up to get screwed. I hope the movies were profitable enough that they can still clear some money for the family, but 2.6 times production costs of those movies is a hell of a lot, and 'advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount'- especially if that amount was a 1969 dollar amount, and not a percent-well, they could really end up with a contractually dictated 'nothing.'
If you are looking for a science model for your children, find someone who as managed to integrate their belief in God with science.
Here's my ultra-short version:
1)The Bible uses parables to instill useful values. It is largely NOT literal. Children and simple adults believe it literally because they lack the capacity to grasp the deeper lessons present. This is okay, because the alternative methods of instilling the same useful values to a wide variety of people have no solid track record.
2) God created everything. Science helps us discover the method He used to do so. If God created all of existence, He created the physical laws governing existence, and we discover those laws with science
Those who "combine" the two really are saying, "I believe this or that, but, I can't completely ignore this incontrovertible evidence over here, but, for anything else, I'll just BELIEVE!" Horse-Puckey!
Your reaction is an understandable one, if all you've been exposed to is literal biblical creationists. It's a frustrated reaction to an immature (but still often beneficial, compared to the realistic alternatives) mindset.
The best, most concise way I've heard it phrased is this: The Bible tells us what God did, Science tells us how he did it.
Let's take Genesis, for example. I'll talk as a believer in the God of creation, and please stay with me for argument's sake. Try to keep your loathing at bay long enough to consider my point.
Genesis describes God creating the stars, the Earth, and all life on it. This story is over two millenia old.
The implications of that fact are never considered by the Literal Biblical creationists you clearly despise and are reacting to. As a consequence, your reaction does not account for those implications.
One must consider the point of the story. God gave Moses much of the Torah, including Genesis, on mount Sinai.
Would God give a treatise on the physical laws He wrote, and the raw material He provided, and the occasional divine intervention required to create the universe?
Would He bother the Israelites with scientific axioms about gravity, solar fusion, biology lessons, and a million other details that would be meaningless for thousands of years?
No, because that wasn't the point.
The point was this- God said "I made this world, everything you see, and you. This is not an accident. You are here for a reason."
The point is delivered as parable. The parable is not a scientific discourse, as it would be utterly meaningless at the time.
With me so far? Have you already furiously started typing about what an Idiot I am? No? Good.
We clearly live in a world of cause and effect, of basically reliable physical rules that govern the Universe. Even the most ardently devout will admit God isn't in the practice of conducting routine miracles.
My faith as an Engineer boils down to this: God created the physical laws and the initial state of the universe with the intention of causing the current state of existence. This belief is both non-falsifiable and completely irrelevant to science. Science discovers the laws of the Universe. How and Why those laws came to be is a philosophical question, not a scientific question.
Given the assumption we are placed here on earth to exercise our free will and make of our time here what we will, there would be no other way to do it.
If God simply blinked everything into the current (or last 6,000 years) state of existence, as Genesis suggested, then humanity would eventually uncover this fact.
Once discovered, free will would be meaningless. We would not obey God because we chose to. We would obey God because the blatant miracle would prove His existence, and the peril of disobeying Him would be certain.
Religion and Science are incompatible because they have seperate uses. Oil and Water are 100% incompatible, but we don't toss out one in disgust because they don't mix. We simply use them for different purposes.
To me it means the longer you spend in a heavily liberal academic environment (extended stays are required for most varieties of scientist), the more likely you are to be indoctrinated.
That's one of the cheap and tawdry seductions of the left- "All the smart people are over here! You don't have to think about it, just come to the smart side of the aisle!"
Plenty of people buy it hook, line, and sinker.
Your 'validation' is brought by your superficial membership in a 'smart' group, not in any internal confidence in your position.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
A temporary dip in the stock market, and you're talking like this is the subprime/default credit swap debacle. These decommissioning funds have been around longer than you have been, and being invested in the stock market, they took the same hit everyone else did. Fortunately they're in it for the long haul, not the next 'gotcha!' headline.
I don't think a nuclear power plant "crash" would be worth it.
Yeah, right on! Pennsylvania is totally uninhabitable 30 years after the Three Mile Island event!
Seriously, they had a Loss of Coolant Accident with a core meltdown at TMI. That's as bad as it gets with western plants.
No one died. No one was hurt. No one was exposed to a harmful level of radiation. It was a billion dollar industrial casualty. The adjacent nuclear unit continues to run with a great safety record.
Three Mile Island exposed deficiencies in training philosophy and human factoring of controls and indications. These lessons have been learned.
It also validated the basic western design philosophy. Multiple fission product barriers, negative temperature coefficient, negative void coefficient.
I answered the question posed to me. That's all.
That's a fair question. I'm not a finance guy but I'll answer to the best of my ability.
Finance cost: 0. Everthing should be paid for. Capital costs required to maintain or even replace three pumps, two heat exchangers, and the associated piping should be minimal.
Land use & taxes: ~$100,000 (guess) Whatever property taxes are. Varies from zero to millions for an active nuclear power plant. The facility would not generate any profits, so property taxes would be the only ones applicable.
Utilities: less than $325,000 / year (Assuming 1,000 hp in total pump power, based on the required pumps installed in my plant. In reality, much smaller pumps would be required to cool just the fuel, and would be installed as the first-year savings would pay for them entirely.)
Staffing: ~$1.6 million per year. (assuming 3 technicians at all times, 5 crews required for 24 hr coverage, $80,000 a year salary, + 1/3 for benefits & taxes.)
Security: ~$1.6 million per year. (more people would be required than staffing, but Security guards are paid less than technicians, and the required number would vary with the plant layout. I'm assuming the high security area would be relatively small compared to the area required for an operating plant.)
Equipment replacement & expendables: ~$100,000 a year, average, high side guess.
Insurance: $250,000 a year, Wild-ass guess. Everything is so over-built, and the insurance companies visit us frequently to evaluate their risk, so I doubt it would be much more than that.
That adds up to about $4 million. As per the nuclear industry standard, I've probably vastly overestimated everything.
If you use a time value of money calculation ending 60 years out, given a 6% rate of return (from the article), assume $0 value at the end, paid quarterly, then about $64 million dollars should do the job.
(calculator here. )
That doesn't account for inflation, but since i've probably guessed high on everything I'm not going to feel too bad about that.
Further, after two decades, all your fuel can go into dry cask storage, changing your yearly utility cost down to maybe $10,000 a year for lights and air conditioning.
This would also reduce the staffing required on site even further. Purchasing the canisters and the concrete bunkers to store them in will be expensive, but let's assume that the savings on utilities and personel for the remaining 40 years will cover this as well.
So, there's a rough answer for you: A $64 million dollar fund should be sufficient to maintain a nuclear power plant safely shut down for 60 years.
Now if you want to wipe the power plant from the site completely, that will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and the article talks about that. Simply shutting it down and maintaining the fuel safely won't cost nearly as much.
Fair enough. We do pass these sorts of incidents around in the nuclear industry to prevent recurrance, though I confess I don't recall reading this particular one.
As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like:
It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean:
1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool.
2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway)
3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask.
4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too:
Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else?
Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold:
1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret.
2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more:
Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
That's a mighty vague definition of "wealth" you have there.
Money, and what you can buy with it. Simple enough for you? We exchange money for goods and services, so 'wealth' might include the ability to use goods and services as you choose.
We just have more people who can afford plumbing, big screen televisions, etc because they are getting cheaper to make.
And widespread access to the creature comforts of life supports your argument how? What is wealth for? Specific dollar numbers are going up and down, but access to the modern benefits that wealth provides is quite widespread....
So what are you complaining about again?
Re: Competition: The winning and losing involved in competition is not a permanent, one-time state. The person who loses today may better themselves and win tommorow. In denigrating competition, you miss this vital point.
They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness".
Do you actually know anyone on government assistance? I do. He is dependant, self-centered, unreliable, and often lazy. You have an opinion, I have experience.
A market cannot function humanely without the wealth spread around fairly evenly
Your use of subjective terms like 'humanely' drive your-and kohn's- position back into the realm of idle speculation.
Generally speaking, 'humanely' is a worthwhile goal, but you can't dip your toes in and out of hard logic & numbers at your convienence, and then expect any deference from me.
At this point I would suggest reading the sowell book I linked in another response to you (I think it was you.) I could type more but I'm not sure you understand my philosophical basis- you likely think I'm a 'rube' for 'the man'
You are engaging in an ad hominem (personal) attack and creating strawmen arguments, and saying there is no point to dialog, which all suggests your points are weak.
The differing underlying premises we operate from, and how that will generally make us talk past each other, is detailed in part by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time or inclination to write a book, so I merely allude to the fact that the premises underlying our positions are drastically different and vitally important.
As for the rest of your post, you evidently place a great deal of confidence in specific articulated rationality. Unfortunately, much of what you rely on is unproven theory, or merely opinions, as it is not positited in any way that can be tested.
Tossing around rhetorical terms like 'ad hominen' imply a preference for a specifically rational methodology, but the way to verify the rationality in all those grand-sounding thoughts is sorely absent.
These opinions masquerade as social science, but the prerequites of science are lacking- making them again, no more than opinions.
Further, most of these opinions are not even based on experience in the market or effectively governing a country, but merely a twisted wreckage of baseless half-logic that sounds good on paper.
You touch on my position in your own response: It just changes form and that is all.
A balance of inputs and outputs- this is what you talk about, correct? Sure, it's changed form, but hey, the materials were always here, right?
How can we generate wealth if we've got a limited set of components to work with?
Is that your position? The basis of your statement? The notion you rest 'zero-sum wealth on'?
If:
raw materials = product
then that supports your idea that the amount of wealth in the world is stable, and one may become wealthy only by depriving another.
I believe it's more like this:
raw materials + human effort = product + wealth
Roughly speaking, of course.
Where does the effort humans constantly add into the world figure into your equation?
Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?
Implicit in your question is the assumption that the VP promotion is the only way for that individual to generate wealth beyond what he already posesses. It also implies a fixation on working for someone else to generate wealth, but someone has to start all these companies that grow into fortune 500 companies and employ thousands of people and a few VP's.
"Poisoned soul" doesn't mean anything. You should make an argument to everyone also to convince also them that people have souls prior to making any assertation towards the condition of that soul.
There is an over-reliance on slashdot on academic-style articulated rationality, as if words drove reality, and weren't merely a best-efforts attempt to reflect reality. 'Soul' can be taken as shorthand for the collection of attitudes and philosophies one operates from, with the 'poisoned soul' to mean holding a set of ideas that lead to a stagnant or decreasing quality of life.
This is of course part of what I spoke of- a thousand underlying premises that make these discussions difficult at best.
Wealth is a zero sum game, a game where the wealthy get the sum and everybody else gets as close to zero as possible without revolting against the wealthy class.
Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) posess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?
Wealth is a limited sum game, but the limit is constantly increasing as human effort is added into the pool of wealth. Limited, increasing sum != zero.
I'm terribly sorry to do this point-by-point response, as I generally find it tiresome and cosntantly spiraling, but there it is.
Uh... no criticism of initiative, creativity, or risk taking inherent in achieving individual goals implicit ... but do please explain why we currently record the largest gap in incomes since the founding of the republic.
The evidence of a wealth gap in and of itself is not a moral problem, unless you're operating out of a spirit of envy.
The wealth another man has or controls is irrelevant if his posession of such does not prevent me from generating enough wealth to meet my needs.
I have no need to explain it, because the gap itself is not a problem. Perhaps I misunderstand you?
Wealth is a zero sum game. Not everyone can be wealthy. Period.
I'll agree that not everyone can be wealthy, but that doesn't make it zero sum. If it was a zero sum game, we could not have far more wealthy people than the world has seen before, and we could not have a vast majority of western countries with citizens who enjoy material wealth not even possible 100 years ago.
That wealth was generated by human activity. It was not taken from someone else, because there was no one to take it from.
The BBC article, and the video, indicates that this 'barcode' requires a LED, which requires power.
By requiring power, it eliminates itself from the 'barcode' replacement market, as it introduces a dozen more problems for the one it solves- and that one problem isn't really a problem, because 1d and 2d barcodes hold enough information for their current uses.
Now this neat little trick might be good for other applications, sure. I didn't pay much attention to the other uses in the video. The BBC article lists a lot of fun possible uses too, but the academics positing this don't seem to grasp that REQUIRING POWER is a big cock-block for many of their ideas.
Now Dr. Mohan says they could make passive tags for five cents, which is better, but it's still vastly more expensive than a bit of surface-printed ink.
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
It's a poor, twisted soul that even thinks to call wealth 'financial obesity', or refer to it as an illness. It's an even sicker person who sees our society as 'destroyed.' I'll give you weakened, perhaps, but for entirely different reasons than you would hold.
Unfortunately there's no point in arguing the matter further with the authors you linked to, or yourself. The philosophical background, psyche, and emotional state required to believe those sorts of enervating ideas are so utterly different from my own, that any discussion would be wasted. Discussing the point at hand would leave a thousand necessary premises undiscussed, and nothing would come of it.
That being said, I'll leave you with this: holding such ideas will poison your soul and make you miserable, while benefiting yourself and your fellow man not one wit.
The thing is, he knows something is wrong. He started a foundation to help the world. He is just so socially enmeshed in a dying ideology of artificial scarcity economics that he doesn't know how to fix it, and he surrounds himself with people who just produce more of the same rather than thinking outside the scarcity box.
It's even more evidence of a poisoned soul that you see the only possible reason a rich man would engage in charity is guilt. And while you talk of 'artificial scarcity' economics, your anti-wealth rant is based on an 'artificial scarcity of wealth' philosophy- that is, the only way it could possibly be wrong for a person to accumulate as much wealth as Bill Gates is if he's depriving someone else of something.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. It's more like lighting candles- if I light your candle, I still have my flame. The generation of wealth is very real and quite possible to prove within a paragraph or two. I'll leave it to you to consider for the moment.
It's an existing mechanism for inhibiting John Galt from excessive, unwarranted greed, and it can be used to redistribute wealth in a directed fashion.
The ability to effectively, purposely redistribute wealth to meet certain social needs is beyond the capacity of any human institution. Humans are flawed, and the institutions we create are flawed.
The chaos created by countless individuals making decisions in their own interest is preferable to the ruin created by arrogant attempts to directly dictate results through wealth redistribution. Good results often come from the former, achieving the latter is beyond human capacity.
For example, to fund a health care system that provides health care for all. Western civilization would still be a good idea.
I suggest you emigrate to a country that has the type of civilization you prefer. If it doesn't exist, there's probably a solid reason for that, given the number of countries out there and the length of recorded human history.
It's not ironic. The relative importance of the information is the same. I can tell the difference between a country, a state, and a continent.
Legislatures are the problem nowadays. Fact is, effectively governing a country doesn't actually require anything close to the time we allow those guys to meet. They meet anyway, and meddle with our lives and businesses to the detriment of us all.
Best drive them home, and let them only meet every two years. Then perhaps every three years after a little while.
Really, let's see how long it takes us to miss them.
Way to sum up an entire continent of a billion people.
Whle we're indulging in stereotypes, fuck you... you ignorant American tool.
I'm sure you're ready to point instantly, on a blank map, to any state in the USA I care to pick. Quick, where's Colorado?!?
Yeah, right. Knowing where any particular African nation is doesn't benefit anyone but schoolkids facing a geography test and businessmen working a deal there. Imagining that we're going to waste any energy keeping an African map memorized, when the particulars are irrelevant to our daily lives, is rather immodest.
I don't expect you to memorize the particulars of my continent unless that knowledge would hold practical value for you. I'm pretty sure you haven't done so, either, but that doesn't stop you from copping an attitude.
A foreigner lecturing an American about how ignorant we all are is as common and tasteful as a fly on sh*t. Funny thing is if you start interrogating them on the United States, they'll start looking pretty dumb pretty fast, while being utterly sure of every answer they give.
I don't care where on the African continent Nigeria is, because it's trivial knowledge that does me no good. You can't point out Vermont on a map for the same reason.
Thatcher did this, four years after she left office the prime minister's office (1990), and two years after she left parliament (1992)?
Really? Because everyone else is blaming a 1994 law. John Major (1990-1997), also of the conservative party, was the prime minister when this law passed, but you don't even mention him. Tony Blair took the reins in 1997.
Perhaps with all the citations and links you could have at least made sure your leading claim lined up with some dates. All your grand ideas about 'government approved this' and 'capitalist that' seemed like the drug-induced foggy ravings of someone who doesn't even have their dates right.
Looks like the deal was done maybe 40 years ago:
Under the contract, New Line was to pay a percentage of all gross receipts, after deducting 2.6 times the production costs, plus advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount, according to Eskenazi. (from TFA)
Nowadays it seems as though even the average slashdotter knows you take a portion of gross, because nothing involving MPAA or RIAA related-companies ever clears a 'net profit' (wink wink).
It looks like Tolkien & co where less saavy 40 years ago, and essentially signed up to get screwed. I hope the movies were profitable enough that they can still clear some money for the family, but 2.6 times production costs of those movies is a hell of a lot, and 'advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount'- especially if that amount was a 1969 dollar amount, and not a percent-well, they could really end up with a contractually dictated 'nothing.'
If you are looking for a science model for your children, find someone who as managed to integrate their belief in God with science.
Here's my ultra-short version:
1)The Bible uses parables to instill useful values. It is largely NOT literal. Children and simple adults believe it literally because they lack the capacity to grasp the deeper lessons present. This is okay, because the alternative methods of instilling the same useful values to a wide variety of people have no solid track record.
2) God created everything. Science helps us discover the method He used to do so. If God created all of existence, He created the physical laws governing existence, and we discover those laws with science
Those who "combine" the two really are saying, "I believe this or that, but, I can't completely ignore this incontrovertible evidence over here, but, for anything else, I'll just BELIEVE!" Horse-Puckey!
Your reaction is an understandable one, if all you've been exposed to is literal biblical creationists. It's a frustrated reaction to an immature (but still often beneficial, compared to the realistic alternatives) mindset.
The best, most concise way I've heard it phrased is this: The Bible tells us what God did, Science tells us how he did it.
Let's take Genesis, for example. I'll talk as a believer in the God of creation, and please stay with me for argument's sake. Try to keep your loathing at bay long enough to consider my point.
Genesis describes God creating the stars, the Earth, and all life on it. This story is over two millenia old.
The implications of that fact are never considered by the Literal Biblical creationists you clearly despise and are reacting to. As a consequence, your reaction does not account for those implications.
One must consider the point of the story. God gave Moses much of the Torah, including Genesis, on mount Sinai.
Would God give a treatise on the physical laws He wrote, and the raw material He provided, and the occasional divine intervention required to create the universe?
Would He bother the Israelites with scientific axioms about gravity, solar fusion, biology lessons, and a million other details that would be meaningless for thousands of years?
No, because that wasn't the point.
The point was this- God said "I made this world, everything you see, and you. This is not an accident. You are here for a reason."
The point is delivered as parable. The parable is not a scientific discourse, as it would be utterly meaningless at the time.
With me so far? Have you already furiously started typing about what an Idiot I am? No? Good.
We clearly live in a world of cause and effect, of basically reliable physical rules that govern the Universe. Even the most ardently devout will admit God isn't in the practice of conducting routine miracles.
My faith as an Engineer boils down to this: God created the physical laws and the initial state of the universe with the intention of causing the current state of existence. This belief is both non-falsifiable and completely irrelevant to science. Science discovers the laws of the Universe. How and Why those laws came to be is a philosophical question, not a scientific question.
Given the assumption we are placed here on earth to exercise our free will and make of our time here what we will, there would be no other way to do it.
If God simply blinked everything into the current (or last 6,000 years) state of existence, as Genesis suggested, then humanity would eventually uncover this fact.
Once discovered, free will would be meaningless. We would not obey God because we chose to. We would obey God because the blatant miracle would prove His existence, and the peril of disobeying Him would be certain.
Religion and Science are incompatible because they have seperate uses. Oil and Water are 100% incompatible, but we don't toss out one in disgust because they don't mix. We simply use them for different purposes.
To me it means the longer you spend in a heavily liberal academic environment (extended stays are required for most varieties of scientist), the more likely you are to be indoctrinated.
That's one of the cheap and tawdry seductions of the left- "All the smart people are over here! You don't have to think about it, just come to the smart side of the aisle!"
Plenty of people buy it hook, line, and sinker.
Your 'validation' is brought by your superficial membership in a 'smart' group, not in any internal confidence in your position.