Cancer? Maybe, but it would be more likely that they'd die of radiation poisoning long before a cancer had time to spread.
With that said however, dead is dead no matter how it happened.
There was a neat BBC series called Electric Dreams that took the home in to account as well.
It well worth a watch.
Ah, I remember that show. I caught it while working the night shift at a supply depot on Camp Bastion a few years back. Oddly enough, my family still had quite a few of the things from the 70s at home at the time. Things that were around as I grew up (I was born in '89).
Household appliances lasting for 35-40 years is pretty good going by any standard. Sadly, many of the things that replaced the old 70's stuff simply hasn't lasted. The washing machine we bought to replace the 40 old twin tub? That lasted 1 year and 1 day to the day. 1 day out of warranty and *pop* it died.
3 weeks have passed and we're still trying to get the damn thing sorted! Apparently, the manufacturer (Hoover) doesn't even make the parts anymore! In the meantime, we've had to cope with handwashing everything. I'm sure the old man deliberately puts skid marks in his underwear whenever it's my turn to do the laundry....:/
I used to teach NBC (Now known as CBRN) warfare and survival when I was in the army.
As bad as any unreasonable killing can be, seeing someone or something suffer and die from exposure to chemical weapons is far more horrific imo. I'm sure there are videos floating around of animals being hit with these things. Watch some, then picture the same thing but with a human being. Chemical and biological weaponry simply has no place in any reasonable arsenal. A being shot or stabbed often kills within seconds and leaving the victim unaware of what has happened.
Being caught in a chemical weapons strike? Well, just watch those vids. I'm talking almost total agony for the last few minutes of your life, post exposure to any one of the various chemical agents used in chemical warfare. Ever had lockjaw or one of your muscles start contracting painfully and uncontrollably? Just imagine having that happen to every single muscle fiber in your body, leaving you writhing in the street covered in your own bodily fluids as you've lost control of bowel function and gasping for air as your lungs have stopped working due to the brain and nerve cells going haywire due to the nerve agent you just got hit with.
That's just a nerve agent. There's a variety of different substances out there, each one designed to have different effects on the human body. Blister agents (which cause just that, extreme blistering on every organic surface it comes accross, including the insides of your lungs), blood agents (destroys or otherwise disables the haemoglobin in your blood), the various nerve agents (G nerve, H nerve, which cause random junk signals to be passed down your nerves, sending muscles crazy and destroying and sort of control either concious or subconcious).
I hate that stuff. It's unpleasent just to even think of it. It's even more unpleasant to realise that these agents can linger in the environment and remain deadly for far longer than any land mine or shell or bomb. "Think of the children?" is quite appropriate here. I wouldn't want my kids to grow up, knowing that that shit was still around.
Someone mod the parent up! The tone of his post may not be great, but the message is bang on the money.
Mathematics and physics can be used to create and understand wonderful things. Literature and philosophy can be used to create and understand methods of sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt over the aforementioned wonderful things.
Nuclear, on the other hand, basically can't be turned off.
Actually France has nuclear power plants designed to be able to throttle the output down to as low as 30% during normal operation.
Naval nuclear reactors are also able to be throttled relatively easily. Although the reactor designs are rather different, the underlying principles are the same.
Also, I recall reading somewhere that the electrical output of a reactor could be throttled as low as needed through setting up a steam bypass system which sends steam directly to the condenser instead of going through the usual loop of going through the turbine (which is the part that drives the generator, which is what actually generates the electricity.). So while the reactor itself can't be throttled down to much, you can still dial back the amount of electricity generated.
aka anything that could possibly threaten the supremacy of oil.
They sit on anything that could unseat them from their throne while they unleash the tech that simply isn't up to competing as 'competition'.
Yep -- OKI dot matrix printers. They're not going anywhere and are essentially bulletproof.
I agree. But it is also important where they are located, and how their use is accounted for. They should be placed at least 100 meters from the users, in an area that is neither heated nor air conditioned. Each dept should be billed in proportion to how much they print. Even better would be to set up individual accounts, with a cash bonus for saving paper. If the incentives are right, people that "need" to print, will find ways to modify their workflow.
This post is purely anecdotal. I spent several years in the British army as a supply specialist and the printers used in the supply depots were 99% of the time OKI dot matrix printers (with a couple of zebras for labels). Several months of my experience with them was in Afghanistan.
We used OKI dot matrix printers in the Supply depot on Camp bastion when I was in Afghanistan. Damn things were near bulletproof* and just kept going and going in some of the most challenging conditions around. In rainy season it was incredibly humid, in winter the nights got extremely cold (by UK standards), when it was dry it was super dusty. There were no climate control systems to speak of (other than opening or closing a door) and no air filtration. They did need some maintenance, but it generally consisted of being switched off, given a quick brush down with an old paintbrush and blowing the dust out from inside. This was performed once every two or three days. The only problems we ever had with them were crappy ribbons snapping, and someone losing their temper and throwing the whole unit out the door. Nothing is truly squaddie proof, but those OKIs come close. We were having them running near constantly printing out stocktaking paperwork, issue vouchers, receipt vouchers, dispatch notes, all sorts of paper work. They were running for 24 hours a day (the depot was day shift/night shift 24/7) and only went off for a few mins a day every 2 or 3 days for regular maint and for a minute or two if it needed a fresh ribbon or more paper.
Power wise, they could be run off of a battery backup for an hour or two when our diesel generators went down but as for solar power I'm afraid I have no idea.
We did have some trouble with supplies for them, but it was mostly logistical issues like some fucking chimp ordering the wrong bloody ribbons. Other than that, it was just trouble with the paper getting too damp during the rainy season. Getting the supplies wasn't too hard, but that said we were the military so our supply chains will be rather different.
We avoided problems with damp paper mostly by storing the extra supplies in air tight ISO containers (we had plenty of them at the depot) and keeping the boxes sealed until we needed to open them. Ditto for the the ribbons
The zebra printers for labels were a bit more finnicky. They weren't quite as reliable or as bomb proof as the OKI, but they did they worked very well given the environment and the amount of work they were getting (less than 7000 labels in a day was a quiet day when I was in Afghanistan). They were however, a right royal pain in the arse to fix if they jammed or needed refilling. I'd always get someone else to do it, I hated it!
*Whether they are literally bulletproof, I did not feel the need to test/p?
You're reaching a little here; you have a point with the trillion Bq thing but doses are usually quoted in mSv, because it's a convenient size. 1mSv is the recommend maximum annual dose for members of the public, for example. I don't see quoting doses in mSv as any more unusual than an engineer giving a length as 1200mm.
I don't think I'm reaching at all. As you said, I had a point. I admit that my example was rather poor, but it was certainly not a reach. An engineer giving a length of 1200mm may not be that much of a stretch, that same engineer giving a length of 120Km in millimetres certainly would be. That, as you have noted, is the point I was trying to make.
Coal pollution 'could' be stopped - we choose not to due to cost.
We don't choose not to, but the people who can choose not to don't. A sad situation.
As this accident demonstrates, nuclear radiation from a failed plant can't be contained very well.
Actually, the vast majority of the radiation from the reactor was contained and most of the material is still inside. I don't know about you, but that tells me that the containment system did it's job pretty well given the circumstances.
here, allow Rod Adams to explain http://atomicinsights.com/more-accurate-headline-would-be-fukushima-containment-worked/
As for ecologically viable? Please, renewables are far and away more ecologically sound. Not quite ready for grid scale yet, but just because nuclear has better 'operational' characteristics doesn't make it 'good' since it will fail at some point.
*Everything* fails at some point to assume otherwise is nothing short of idiotic. But reactors that were licensed 40 years ago are being re-licensed for another 20 years and from what I hear there is little reason why those reactors couldn't go on for another 20 years after that. How long does even the longest lived turbine last? 10 to 15 years? Solar panels? 20 years maybe, assuming that the panel will continue to operate as well as it did when it was first installed, which is absurd.
There's also the matter of reactors being far more predictable than so called 'renewables'. Sometimes pixelpuller, sometimes operational characteristics DO matter. For your beloved 'renewables' the name 'unreliables' may be more apt. Why? Because that's what they are, unreliable.
And there's all that waste lying around in spent fuel ponds we still haven't figured out what to do with.
Uh-huh, so reprocessing hasn't been invented yet? What utter garbage.
As I recall (and have mentioned on/. more than a few times) the "'waste' problem" in the US simply did not exist before a certain US president decided on dubious "non proliferation" grounds to halt and ban any further reprocessing research.
Hell, even just sitting there in the pools it's not doing any harm other than wasting away, denying the people the clean, abundant and reliable energy that can be extracted from it!
It's an easy technical measure, but horrible for expressing meaning. I read up on the definition of a becquerel, and while I get it, I still have no basis of understanding what 20-30 billion becquerels means.
Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure. So using the unit by itself is useless to the lay person. How many becquerels to the banana?
It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big and scary, and that's disingenuous even if accurate.
Basically, it means "Big scary number that isn't necessarily something to worry about".
The anti nukes seem to love bigging up the true technical measures by splitting them into smaller units (i.e. turning 1Sv into 1000 mSv). Exaggeration without actually exaggerating anything. It's rather clever actually.
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Could you imagine turning on your old 486-DX266 and being told it was now installing windows 7
I'd wait a few minutes and take the opportunity to have a big old belly laugh over it. Goodness knows, I could use it (the laugh I mean).
We Americans are also #1 in sarcasm.
Oh indeed, the United Kingdom does not exist. [/sarcasm]
Cancer? Maybe, but it would be more likely that they'd die of radiation poisoning long before a cancer had time to spread. With that said however, dead is dead no matter how it happened.
There was a neat BBC series called Electric Dreams that took the home in to account as well.
It well worth a watch.
Ah, I remember that show. I caught it while working the night shift at a supply depot on Camp Bastion a few years back. Oddly enough, my family still had quite a few of the things from the 70s at home at the time. Things that were around as I grew up (I was born in '89).
Household appliances lasting for 35-40 years is pretty good going by any standard. Sadly, many of the things that replaced the old 70's stuff simply hasn't lasted. The washing machine we bought to replace the 40 old twin tub? That lasted 1 year and 1 day to the day. 1 day out of warranty and *pop* it died.
3 weeks have passed and we're still trying to get the damn thing sorted! Apparently, the manufacturer (Hoover) doesn't even make the parts anymore! In the meantime, we've had to cope with handwashing everything. I'm sure the old man deliberately puts skid marks in his underwear whenever it's my turn to do the laundry.... :/
Shooting geese is so stealthy.
*WOOOOOOSH*
As bad as any unreasonable killing can be, seeing someone or something suffer and die from exposure to chemical weapons is far more horrific imo. I'm sure there are videos floating around of animals being hit with these things. Watch some, then picture the same thing but with a human being. Chemical and biological weaponry simply has no place in any reasonable arsenal. A being shot or stabbed often kills within seconds and leaving the victim unaware of what has happened.
Being caught in a chemical weapons strike? Well, just watch those vids. I'm talking almost total agony for the last few minutes of your life, post exposure to any one of the various chemical agents used in chemical warfare. Ever had lockjaw or one of your muscles start contracting painfully and uncontrollably? Just imagine having that happen to every single muscle fiber in your body, leaving you writhing in the street covered in your own bodily fluids as you've lost control of bowel function and gasping for air as your lungs have stopped working due to the brain and nerve cells going haywire due to the nerve agent you just got hit with.
That's just a nerve agent. There's a variety of different substances out there, each one designed to have different effects on the human body. Blister agents (which cause just that, extreme blistering on every organic surface it comes accross, including the insides of your lungs), blood agents (destroys or otherwise disables the haemoglobin in your blood), the various nerve agents (G nerve, H nerve, which cause random junk signals to be passed down your nerves, sending muscles crazy and destroying and sort of control either concious or subconcious).
I hate that stuff. It's unpleasent just to even think of it. It's even more unpleasant to realise that these agents can linger in the environment and remain deadly for far longer than any land mine or shell or bomb. "Think of the children?" is quite appropriate here. I wouldn't want my kids to grow up, knowing that that shit was still around.
It's rather easy to shoot geese down with the right equipment though. *Boom Boom*.
*Insert obligatory "Quantum Leap/Bakula" joke here*
I wonder when the evil genius of the week is moving in down there?
Mathematics and physics can be used to create and understand wonderful things. Literature and philosophy can be used to create and understand methods of sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt over the aforementioned wonderful things.
As I recall, the water tanks were the leaky part, not the reactor. Or am I just being pedantic?
Nuclear, on the other hand, basically can't be turned off.
Actually France has nuclear power plants designed to be able to throttle the output down to as low as 30% during normal operation.
Naval nuclear reactors are also able to be throttled relatively easily. Although the reactor designs are rather different, the underlying principles are the same.
Also, I recall reading somewhere that the electrical output of a reactor could be throttled as low as needed through setting up a steam bypass system which sends steam directly to the condenser instead of going through the usual loop of going through the turbine (which is the part that drives the generator, which is what actually generates the electricity.). So while the reactor itself can't be throttled down to much, you can still dial back the amount of electricity generated.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up.
... burning hydrocarbons is really cheap.
For now.
It may have been that (from what I'm told) people had more children back then, as well as having them younger. Quite literally, safety in numbers.
It's also nice how a "senior pastor" quickly becomes a medical authority for these people. Do they have their doctors fix their plumbing as well?
Actually, my grandfather was a plumber before he became a priest. That was back in the early 1930's mind you.
Renewables just aren't going to cut it imo. Energy density and physics are horrible bitches when you try to stand against them.
aka anything that could possibly threaten the supremacy of oil. They sit on anything that could unseat them from their throne while they unleash the tech that simply isn't up to competing as 'competition'.
and how long will the panels produce their rated output for?
then Janeway wouldn't have made it past season 3.
Yep -- OKI dot matrix printers. They're not going anywhere and are essentially bulletproof.
I agree. But it is also important where they are located, and how their use is accounted for. They should be placed at least 100 meters from the users, in an area that is neither heated nor air conditioned. Each dept should be billed in proportion to how much they print. Even better would be to set up individual accounts, with a cash bonus for saving paper. If the incentives are right, people that "need" to print, will find ways to modify their workflow.
This post is purely anecdotal. I spent several years in the British army as a supply specialist and the printers used in the supply depots were 99% of the time OKI dot matrix printers (with a couple of zebras for labels). Several months of my experience with them was in Afghanistan.
We used OKI dot matrix printers in the Supply depot on Camp bastion when I was in Afghanistan. Damn things were near bulletproof* and just kept going and going in some of the most challenging conditions around. In rainy season it was incredibly humid, in winter the nights got extremely cold (by UK standards), when it was dry it was super dusty. There were no climate control systems to speak of (other than opening or closing a door) and no air filtration. They did need some maintenance, but it generally consisted of being switched off, given a quick brush down with an old paintbrush and blowing the dust out from inside. This was performed once every two or three days. The only problems we ever had with them were crappy ribbons snapping, and someone losing their temper and throwing the whole unit out the door. Nothing is truly squaddie proof, but those OKIs come close. We were having them running near constantly printing out stocktaking paperwork, issue vouchers, receipt vouchers, dispatch notes, all sorts of paper work. They were running for 24 hours a day (the depot was day shift/night shift 24/7) and only went off for a few mins a day every 2 or 3 days for regular maint and for a minute or two if it needed a fresh ribbon or more paper.
Power wise, they could be run off of a battery backup for an hour or two when our diesel generators went down but as for solar power I'm afraid I have no idea.
We did have some trouble with supplies for them, but it was mostly logistical issues like some fucking chimp ordering the wrong bloody ribbons. Other than that, it was just trouble with the paper getting too damp during the rainy season. Getting the supplies wasn't too hard, but that said we were the military so our supply chains will be rather different.
We avoided problems with damp paper mostly by storing the extra supplies in air tight ISO containers (we had plenty of them at the depot) and keeping the boxes sealed until we needed to open them. Ditto for the the ribbons
The zebra printers for labels were a bit more finnicky. They weren't quite as reliable or as bomb proof as the OKI, but they did they worked very well given the environment and the amount of work they were getting (less than 7000 labels in a day was a quiet day when I was in Afghanistan). They were however, a right royal pain in the arse to fix if they jammed or needed refilling. I'd always get someone else to do it, I hated it!
*Whether they are literally bulletproof, I did not feel the need to test/p?
You're reaching a little here; you have a point with the trillion Bq thing but doses are usually quoted in mSv, because it's a convenient size. 1mSv is the recommend maximum annual dose for members of the public, for example. I don't see quoting doses in mSv as any more unusual than an engineer giving a length as 1200mm.
I don't think I'm reaching at all. As you said, I had a point. I admit that my example was rather poor, but it was certainly not a reach. An engineer giving a length of 1200mm may not be that much of a stretch, that same engineer giving a length of 120Km in millimetres certainly would be. That, as you have noted, is the point I was trying to make.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up :)
Coal pollution 'could' be stopped - we choose not to due to cost.
We don't choose not to, but the people who can choose not to don't. A sad situation.
As this accident demonstrates, nuclear radiation from a failed plant can't be contained very well.
Actually, the vast majority of the radiation from the reactor was contained and most of the material is still inside. I don't know about you, but that tells me that the containment system did it's job pretty well given the circumstances.
here, allow Rod Adams to explain http://atomicinsights.com/more-accurate-headline-would-be-fukushima-containment-worked/
As for ecologically viable? Please, renewables are far and away more ecologically sound. Not quite ready for grid scale yet, but just because nuclear has better 'operational' characteristics doesn't make it 'good' since it will fail at some point.
*Everything* fails at some point to assume otherwise is nothing short of idiotic. But reactors that were licensed 40 years ago are being re-licensed for another 20 years and from what I hear there is little reason why those reactors couldn't go on for another 20 years after that. How long does even the longest lived turbine last? 10 to 15 years? Solar panels? 20 years maybe, assuming that the panel will continue to operate as well as it did when it was first installed, which is absurd.
There's also the matter of reactors being far more predictable than so called 'renewables'. Sometimes pixelpuller, sometimes operational characteristics DO matter. For your beloved 'renewables' the name 'unreliables' may be more apt. Why? Because that's what they are, unreliable.
And there's all that waste lying around in spent fuel ponds we still haven't figured out what to do with.
Uh-huh, so reprocessing hasn't been invented yet? What utter garbage.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1587_web.pdf
As I recall (and have mentioned on /. more than a few times) the "'waste' problem" in the US simply did not exist before a certain US president decided on dubious "non proliferation" grounds to halt and ban any further reprocessing research.
Hell, even just sitting there in the pools it's not doing any harm other than wasting away, denying the people the clean, abundant and reliable energy that can be extracted from it!
It's an easy technical measure, but horrible for expressing meaning. I read up on the definition of a becquerel, and while I get it, I still have no basis of understanding what 20-30 billion becquerels means.
Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure. So using the unit by itself is useless to the lay person. How many becquerels to the banana?
It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big and scary, and that's disingenuous even if accurate.
Basically, it means "Big scary number that isn't necessarily something to worry about".
The anti nukes seem to love bigging up the true technical measures by splitting them into smaller units (i.e. turning 1Sv into 1000 mSv). Exaggeration without actually exaggerating anything. It's rather clever actually.
Argh. Goddamn it /.! Why the hell do you keep dispensing with my formatting, my paragraphing? I guess slashdot does not like readability!