I like the idea of generalizing this across the board: If private citizens can not have any particular weapon, law enforcement is not allowed to have it, either. Period, no exceptions. If law enforcement is allowed to use a weapon, then private citizens can have it, too. Period, no exceptions.
We'd be out of uranium already if your hypothetical were the case. At the present rate of use, there is only 80 years left.
Assuming the insanely wasteful "once through throw most of the fuel away" non-cycle. Also assuming no breeder reactors. Also assuming no use of thorium reactors. According to my copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more available energy in the earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Also assuming no use of the ion exchange process that Japan demonstrated back in the 1970s, which could extract uranium from sea water at a cost of about $100/pound (1970 dollars).
And we have the rising CO2 level because the anti-nukes have obstructed the implementation of the only carbon-free power source that actually has the capacity to power industrial civilization for the past 40 years or more. "We can't have nuclear because... oh, yeah, sea level rise" is sort of like Erik and Lyle Menendez demanding the court's mercy because they are orphans.
So, to get a hint of what is already buried in the ground in the general area of Yucca Mountain, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater" in Nevada.
Start scanning south.
Sedan Crater and every one of those other craters is a nuclear bomb crater, with the inside dusted with all the fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (A substantial fraction of it, as I recall.
That doesn't count all the tests that didn't create an above-ground subsidence crater, all the bombs that fizzled, etc.
None of this stuff has any containment whatsoever.
So, for the shrieking technophobes: How is glassified waste possibly any greater threat than what is already there in abundance? Please be specific, shrieking "OMG NUKE!! OMG RaDiOAcTiVe!! OMG NUKE!!" doesn't cut it.
I see bigotry for the southern US is alive and well here on Slashdot. Why look into all the facts when you can parrot this juicy headline.
That's what it looks like to me. From TFA, as others have pointed out,
The Woodland Town Council rejected a proposal to rezone a section of land north of town to M2 (manufacturing) from RA (residential/agricultural), essentially denying approval of a solar farm.
Once land is re-zoned from residential/agricultural to manufacturing, a few solar panels is far from the only thing likely to be done with the re-zoned land.
Also from TFA, I notice that very little of the really stupid "reasons" are reported as actual quotes. They are the reporter's characterization of what the person said.
I used to work in network operations for a company that did this sort of thing. Housewife in Minot, ND, sits down to her computer in the spare bedroom and logs in. A script pops up on her computer and her phone rings. "Welcome to Chikin Lickin, may I take your order?" When done, a minute or two later, the popup/phone again, "Thank you for calling Fat Burner Delux, the miracle weight loss supplement endorsed by Dr. Oz." It could be anything that someone had contracted with the company to do "virtual call center" for, ranging from very much upstanding legitimate companies and organizations, to... not so much.
At the time (it was years ago) their phone answering people were all U.S. based, and that was one of their selling points, that they were Americans and sounded like it. I'm not sure if that's still the case or not, but there's certainly little barrier to having phone reps anywhere on Earth.
Every time there is a shooting we get the same response. The news media reports it, endlessly, for days and days. While appearing to be objective they are actually promoting the liberal gun control agenda. All the while, inciting fear among the unwashed masses.
Exactly. And, the next pathetic little sociopathic malcontent in the shallow end of the gene pool realizes "Doh... I can get all my grievances against [list of things they don't like] aired -- On NATIONAL NEWS!!! Endlessly! By going on a shooting spree! Everyone in the WHOLE WORLD will know how horribly put upon I have been!"
If the people who instantly jump up demanding gun bans really wanted to break this chain of violence, the way to do it would be to quit giving the people who do this everything they want -- extravagant publicity. Enforce a blackout on the incidents. Make it a high-grade 20-to-life felony to publicize them. Make Examples, news anchors and newspaper editors doing hard time for refusing to obey the law.
What's that? Constitution? But they've already established that they consider the Constitution meaningless compared to "doing something" to "feel safe."
Note the title of this posting before flying too far off the handle. More seriously... Demonstrate, specifically, how the proposed law would have stopped this specific attack. Otherwise, I'm not listening.
But it's like the Force. You have it or you don't. Some have it stronger than others, some develop it more easily than others. But if you don't have it, the Force won't be with you. No matter what Master Jedi you train under.
Oh, I don't know, you could probably get an injection of midichlori... *whack* *augh!* *pow* *No, I was just joking* *punch* *aiiiiiiii* (flees from mob of angry "Episodes IV-VI fans.)
Don't count dope dealers in a shootout with other dope dealers as a "mass shooting" in this context. It's an entirely different issue. Besides, no matter how thoroughly banned you make guns and ammunition, the dope dealers are just going to smuggle them in disguised as a routine cocaine shipment.
Minus the ionizing radiation, of course, but the final disposal is generally figured to be after the really hot stuff has decayed. "Really hot" == "short half life", by definition.
Besides... seriously? "Disproved" by some "report" that was "suppressed"? Is it sitting in a crate in Warehouse 13, between the 200 mpg carburetor and the Ark of the Covenant?
Waste is a conglomerate of fission products and unspent fuel. Many parts of that can react easy again with water e.g. and need to be stored in a way that they can't.
It can't react with or dissolve in water if the fission products are mixed with molten glass and cast as solid lumps of glass. Which is the actual plan for dealing with the stuff. Natural glasses are known to have sat in the ocean for on the order of a billion years unchanged. (tektites)
Yeah... the ever-present "Idiot Plot"; everyone has to be an idiot in order for the plot to follow the course the writers have plotted. Lost in Space was chock full of those. At least, to the best of my recollection -- I haven't watched any of them since they were originally aired, and the last one I watched was the walking carrot episode. (Old? Watch it, sonny, or I'll whack you with my cane.)
The main idiocy through the run of the series being, it's a dire survival situation that sinister enemy agent Dr. Zachary Smith has gotten them into... so why is he still alive? Other than Jonathan Harris cleverly figured out if he played Smith as comic relief, he might become popular enough that they keep the character, which worked out well for him. Not so much for my willing suspension of disbelief, though. Given how many disasters Smith caused in the course of the series, they really should have put him in one of those tubes and destroyed the "de-freeze" controls on it.
But no.... I recall one episode where Smith did something that got the Ultra-Powerful Alien Life Form of the Week really ticked at him, and they were going to try, convict, and execute him. "Gee, terribly sorry, Doctor, but seeing as they are Ultra-Powerful, there's not a whole lot we can do, and you did tick them off rather badly. Think of it as evolution in action." But they convinced them that he was innocent by reason of insanity, and he should be committed to their care. *sigh*.
They had the suspended animation tubes. They could have just frozen him, as long as they got control of the robot and ordered it not to thaw him back out. Then, he's a harmless popsicle until if/when they get back to civilization and turn him over to the appropriate authorities.
Yeah... Like the silly "Obama's doing it" rumor they rightly debunked, leaving the FDA rule proposal from the previous century un-remarked-on.
Snopes does have their biases, granted. They seem more likely to rigorously "put to the question" things that go against their biases than those that agree with them. But I haven't caught them in a lie. If they say they've researched something, my impression is that they have researched what they said they researched, and got the answers they say they got. An honest researcher, even with biases that are not mine, is a valuable source of information.
I generally trust Snopes, but I think I'll go with my actual memory of the time over Snopes on this one. (I'm probably way older than most of the people here.) The story they're debunking is some goofy rumor about the Obama administration; this was back in the 80s or 90s, as I recall.
I don't do all the wacky stuff. Having reached a certain age, B12 supplements are a good idea. I'm also prescribed stupid amounts of time-release niacin for cholesterol control which I'd actually prefer not to take; hot flashes aren't fun. And, I do take a D3 pill; D supplements do have good science behind them, and the "400 units" is the amount empirically determined to be "adequate" to stave off a serious deficiency disease, rickets. Optimum is apparently a good bit more than that, I have a family history of skin cancer that I'd like to avoid, and it's hard to get a lot of D from dietary sources. (I like sardines, but I don't like them that much.) No toxicity has been observed at levels up to 50,000 units; I just take 2,000 units. (Or is it 4,000?) I do seem to get a lot fewer colds than I used to, and it's cheap, so what the heck.
The reason this "supplement" law got passed was reaction to total stupidity in the other direction -- the FDA was trying to assert power to require a prescription for vitamins.
I kind of like Jerry Pournelle's proposal -- it should be perfectly legal to sell snake oil, as long as the bottle accurately describes the ingredients, and contains actual oil from actual snakes. And, under the Pournelle Rule, these bozos would be perfectly open to prosecution, since they didn't put whatever weird organic compounds some quack in China whomped up on their label.
I absolutely do not want the FDA preventing me from getting vitamin D pills with more than 400 units of D.
But nuclear is still off the table. Arithmetic denier still doesn't get it that the alternatives are (1) coal, (2) nuclear, or (3) end of technological civilization. News at 11:06.
he only long-term solutions to extremism are integration, education and wealth. Period.
Many of the 9/11 terrorists were well-off educated people. I recall at least one of them was an engineer, apparently assimilated.
I don't know what the long-term solution is, short of things decent people don't want to contemplate. My biggest fear is that, at some point, a solid majority is going to decide that decency is overrated.
See "The Snows of Venus" by G. David Nordley. Massive sunshades cast Venus into darkness until the CO2 all freezes out. Then, self-replicating machines build gadzillions of mass drivers, powered by the sunlight absorbed by said sunscreen, to fling the CO2 out into space tangential to the surface to spin the planet up. (This takes centuries to complete, of course.)
Biosphere 2, for ideological reasons, also tried to recreate every terrestrial ecosystem in miniature, rather than just try to build something simple and understandable that could be self-sustaining and support human life.
There are plenty of regulations and such that require all employees take certain training or sign certain forms. In any company of significant size, HR sends out such emails.
At a previous company, HR sent out just such an email, and the links all went off-site, to some domain like "12monkeys.com" That wasn't the name, but it was something similarly named, a "no actual company HR would really use would ever have a name like that" sort of domain. It was also newly registered, and I believe that it had "Privacy Protect" on its whois data to boot.
When I got it, I immediately sounded the alarm, yelling "PHISHY PHISHY PHISHY PHISH!!!", because the email went to everyone in the company. The HR types were... quite put out... but I did the right thing, and my boss, and everyone having anything to do with security agreed.
I'd like to think the HR types learned something from that one, but I suspect they didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the idea of generalizing this across the board: If private citizens can not have any particular weapon, law enforcement is not allowed to have it, either. Period, no exceptions. If law enforcement is allowed to use a weapon, then private citizens can have it, too. Period, no exceptions.
Not really. The proposed new name is LookOut!
I've always called it OutBreak.
We'd be out of uranium already if your hypothetical were the case. At the present rate of use, there is only 80 years left.
Assuming the insanely wasteful "once through throw most of the fuel away" non-cycle. Also assuming no breeder reactors. Also assuming no use of thorium reactors. According to my copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more available energy in the earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Also assuming no use of the ion exchange process that Japan demonstrated back in the 1970s, which could extract uranium from sea water at a cost of about $100/pound (1970 dollars).
And we have the rising CO2 level because the anti-nukes have obstructed the implementation of the only carbon-free power source that actually has the capacity to power industrial civilization for the past 40 years or more. "We can't have nuclear because... oh, yeah, sea level rise" is sort of like Erik and Lyle Menendez demanding the court's mercy because they are orphans.
So, to get a hint of what is already buried in the ground in the general area of Yucca Mountain, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater" in Nevada.
Start scanning south.
Sedan Crater and every one of those other craters is a nuclear bomb crater, with the inside dusted with all the fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (A substantial fraction of it, as I recall.
That doesn't count all the tests that didn't create an above-ground subsidence crater, all the bombs that fizzled, etc.
None of this stuff has any containment whatsoever.
So, for the shrieking technophobes: How is glassified waste possibly any greater threat than what is already there in abundance? Please be specific, shrieking "OMG NUKE!! OMG RaDiOAcTiVe!! OMG NUKE!!" doesn't cut it.
Tendentious article in local paper generates an Internet and social media lynch mob that gets all the important facts wrong.
I see bigotry for the southern US is alive and well here on Slashdot. Why look into all the facts when you can parrot this juicy headline.
That's what it looks like to me. From TFA, as others have pointed out,
The Woodland Town Council rejected a proposal to rezone a section of land north of town to M2 (manufacturing) from RA (residential/agricultural), essentially denying approval of a solar farm.
Once land is re-zoned from residential/agricultural to manufacturing, a few solar panels is far from the only thing likely to be done with the re-zoned land.
Also from TFA, I notice that very little of the really stupid "reasons" are reported as actual quotes. They are the reporter's characterization of what the person said.
I used to work in network operations for a company that did this sort of thing. Housewife in Minot, ND, sits down to her computer in the spare bedroom and logs in. A script pops up on her computer and her phone rings. "Welcome to Chikin Lickin, may I take your order?" When done, a minute or two later, the popup/phone again, "Thank you for calling Fat Burner Delux, the miracle weight loss supplement endorsed by Dr. Oz." It could be anything that someone had contracted with the company to do "virtual call center" for, ranging from very much upstanding legitimate companies and organizations, to ... not so much.
At the time (it was years ago) their phone answering people were all U.S. based, and that was one of their selling points, that they were Americans and sounded like it. I'm not sure if that's still the case or not, but there's certainly little barrier to having phone reps anywhere on Earth.
Every time there is a shooting we get the same response. The news media reports it, endlessly, for days and days. While appearing to be objective they are actually promoting the liberal gun control agenda. All the while, inciting fear among the unwashed masses.
Exactly. And, the next pathetic little sociopathic malcontent in the shallow end of the gene pool realizes "Doh... I can get all my grievances against [list of things they don't like] aired -- On NATIONAL NEWS!!! Endlessly! By going on a shooting spree! Everyone in the WHOLE WORLD will know how horribly put upon I have been!"
If the people who instantly jump up demanding gun bans really wanted to break this chain of violence, the way to do it would be to quit giving the people who do this everything they want -- extravagant publicity. Enforce a blackout on the incidents. Make it a high-grade 20-to-life felony to publicize them. Make Examples, news anchors and newspaper editors doing hard time for refusing to obey the law.
What's that? Constitution? But they've already established that they consider the Constitution meaningless compared to "doing something" to "feel safe."
Note the title of this posting before flying too far off the handle. More seriously... Demonstrate, specifically, how the proposed law would have stopped this specific attack. Otherwise, I'm not listening.
and there's the dog whistle
If you keep hearing dog whistles that no one else hears... maybe you're the dog.
But it's like the Force. You have it or you don't. Some have it stronger than others, some develop it more easily than others. But if you don't have it, the Force won't be with you. No matter what Master Jedi you train under.
Oh, I don't know, you could probably get an injection of midichlori... *whack* *augh!* *pow* *No, I was just joking* *punch* *aiiiiiiii* (flees from mob of angry "Episodes IV-VI fans.)
Don't count dope dealers in a shootout with other dope dealers as a "mass shooting" in this context. It's an entirely different issue. Besides, no matter how thoroughly banned you make guns and ammunition, the dope dealers are just going to smuggle them in disguised as a routine cocaine shipment.
That's arithmetic denialism.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic. -- Stuart Brand
Tektites -- ocean -- salt water -- billion years.
Minus the ionizing radiation, of course, but the final disposal is generally figured to be after the really hot stuff has decayed. "Really hot" == "short half life", by definition.
Besides... seriously? "Disproved" by some "report" that was "suppressed"? Is it sitting in a crate in Warehouse 13, between the 200 mpg carburetor and the Ark of the Covenant?
Waste is a conglomerate of fission products and unspent fuel. Many parts of that can react easy again with water e.g. and need to be stored in a way that they can't.
It can't react with or dissolve in water if the fission products are mixed with molten glass and cast as solid lumps of glass. Which is the actual plan for dealing with the stuff. Natural glasses are known to have sat in the ocean for on the order of a billion years unchanged. (tektites)
Yeah... the ever-present "Idiot Plot"; everyone has to be an idiot in order for the plot to follow the course the writers have plotted. Lost in Space was chock full of those. At least, to the best of my recollection -- I haven't watched any of them since they were originally aired, and the last one I watched was the walking carrot episode. (Old? Watch it, sonny, or I'll whack you with my cane.)
The main idiocy through the run of the series being, it's a dire survival situation that sinister enemy agent Dr. Zachary Smith has gotten them into... so why is he still alive? Other than Jonathan Harris cleverly figured out if he played Smith as comic relief, he might become popular enough that they keep the character, which worked out well for him. Not so much for my willing suspension of disbelief, though. Given how many disasters Smith caused in the course of the series, they really should have put him in one of those tubes and destroyed the "de-freeze" controls on it.
But no.... I recall one episode where Smith did something that got the Ultra-Powerful Alien Life Form of the Week really ticked at him, and they were going to try, convict, and execute him. "Gee, terribly sorry, Doctor, but seeing as they are Ultra-Powerful, there's not a whole lot we can do, and you did tick them off rather badly. Think of it as evolution in action." But they convinced them that he was innocent by reason of insanity, and he should be committed to their care. *sigh*.
They had the suspended animation tubes. They could have just frozen him, as long as they got control of the robot and ordered it not to thaw him back out. Then, he's a harmless popsicle until if/when they get back to civilization and turn him over to the appropriate authorities.
Yeah... Like the silly "Obama's doing it" rumor they rightly debunked, leaving the FDA rule proposal from the previous century un-remarked-on.
Snopes does have their biases, granted. They seem more likely to rigorously "put to the question" things that go against their biases than those that agree with them. But I haven't caught them in a lie. If they say they've researched something, my impression is that they have researched what they said they researched, and got the answers they say they got. An honest researcher, even with biases that are not mine, is a valuable source of information.
I generally trust Snopes, but I think I'll go with my actual memory of the time over Snopes on this one. (I'm probably way older than most of the people here.) The story they're debunking is some goofy rumor about the Obama administration; this was back in the 80s or 90s, as I recall.
I don't do all the wacky stuff. Having reached a certain age, B12 supplements are a good idea. I'm also prescribed stupid amounts of time-release niacin for cholesterol control which I'd actually prefer not to take; hot flashes aren't fun. And, I do take a D3 pill; D supplements do have good science behind them, and the "400 units" is the amount empirically determined to be "adequate" to stave off a serious deficiency disease, rickets. Optimum is apparently a good bit more than that, I have a family history of skin cancer that I'd like to avoid, and it's hard to get a lot of D from dietary sources. (I like sardines, but I don't like them that much.) No toxicity has been observed at levels up to 50,000 units; I just take 2,000 units. (Or is it 4,000?) I do seem to get a lot fewer colds than I used to, and it's cheap, so what the heck.
The reason this "supplement" law got passed was reaction to total stupidity in the other direction -- the FDA was trying to assert power to require a prescription for vitamins.
I kind of like Jerry Pournelle's proposal -- it should be perfectly legal to sell snake oil, as long as the bottle accurately describes the ingredients, and contains actual oil from actual snakes. And, under the Pournelle Rule, these bozos would be perfectly open to prosecution, since they didn't put whatever weird organic compounds some quack in China whomped up on their label.
I absolutely do not want the FDA preventing me from getting vitamin D pills with more than 400 units of D.
Denier doesn't get it, news at 11:05.
But nuclear is still off the table. Arithmetic denier still doesn't get it that the alternatives are (1) coal, (2) nuclear, or (3) end of technological civilization. News at 11:06.
he only long-term solutions to extremism are integration, education and wealth. Period.
Many of the 9/11 terrorists were well-off educated people. I recall at least one of them was an engineer, apparently assimilated.
I don't know what the long-term solution is, short of things decent people don't want to contemplate. My biggest fear is that, at some point, a solid majority is going to decide that decency is overrated.
See "The Snows of Venus" by G. David Nordley. Massive sunshades cast Venus into darkness until the CO2 all freezes out. Then, self-replicating machines build gadzillions of mass drivers, powered by the sunlight absorbed by said sunscreen, to fling the CO2 out into space tangential to the surface to spin the planet up. (This takes centuries to complete, of course.)
Biosphere 2, for ideological reasons, also tried to recreate every terrestrial ecosystem in miniature, rather than just try to build something simple and understandable that could be self-sustaining and support human life.
There are plenty of regulations and such that require all employees take certain training or sign certain forms. In any company of significant size, HR sends out such emails.
At a previous company, HR sent out just such an email, and the links all went off-site, to some domain like "12monkeys.com" That wasn't the name, but it was something similarly named, a "no actual company HR would really use would ever have a name like that" sort of domain. It was also newly registered, and I believe that it had "Privacy Protect" on its whois data to boot.
When I got it, I immediately sounded the alarm, yelling "PHISHY PHISHY PHISHY PHISH!!!", because the email went to everyone in the company. The HR types were ... quite put out ... but I did the right thing, and my boss, and everyone having anything to do with security agreed.
I'd like to think the HR types learned something from that one, but I suspect they didn't.