I made my position on Phelps and his pathetic little cult clear long before he started in on the U.S. military, as can be verified at groups.google.com. Phelps first came to my attention when his pathetic little cult picketed Matthew Shepard's funeral, and I said at that time (as a straight person with fairly traditional views on sexual morality) that I'd far rather be in Matthew Shepard's shoes on the Day of Judgement than in those of Fred Phelps.
Criticizing Israel or its policies is not antisemitic.
However, when someone is obsessively critical of Israel no matter what Israel does, while at the same time turns, at best, a blind eye towards actions by those whose often and vigorously stated aim is the annihilation of Israel and the extermination of every Jew in the Middle East for starters... and, more often, actively sides with those who promote genocide against the Jews... Pointing out the antisemitism is hardly out of line.
Look at all the Hezbollah and Hamas flags at those events that zombietime.com documents. Look at how fashionable the kaffiyeh has become in certain circles. For someone interested in an honest picture, it's pretty blatant that there's something just a bit more than being critical of Israeli policies going on here.
Contrary to your blanket statement about "the US military", the individuals responsible for the murders of Bagram and Dilawar are being court-martialed by the US military, and were in the process of being court-martialed well before news of the incident got out and it started being used by people like you as a blanket attack on the US military.
I've been thinking for a while about something like this on my RV. There are serious blind spots there, and something like this would be a huge help.
I hope they will sell (or license, if they've patented it) the system for other vehicles.
Yeah, I know, if it dies, you're back to the old fashioned way. But if it dies, there's going to be no picture, so you'll know. It's not going to silently edit out that idiot in the Mini Cooper hanging close to your right rear tire.
"Germany at least signed."
How wonderful.
"I have a piece of paper in my hand with Gerhard Schröder's signature, guaranteeing no global warming in our time."
Utterly marvelous.
It doesn't matter if Mr. Bush lives in a thatched shed and uses biogas to light up his dwelling. He is responsible for the energy consumption of the entire USA, not just his hut.
Wow. That's... quite a statement.
He is, of course, also responsible for hurricanes, the Indonesian tsunami, the lack of anything good on TV, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. For starters.
I've heard nothing about the waste being encased in glass, all the plans I've heard of do nothing more than store the waste in metal, I think I heard titanium, casing.
Then you haven't been paying attention to the actual plans. That has always included mixing the waste into molten borosilicate glass, or possibly a ceramic, and casting solid slugs of glass for burial.
In order to melt the glass, the volcano would have to erupt right under the repository. Lava flowing over the top of the repository is just going to seal it better. There is no volcano right under the repository.
"So, it's fine with you to place nuclear waste somewhere that can be struck with an earthquake thus spreading radiation for hundreds of miles?"
I submit that any disaster capable of
(1) pulverizing chunks of solid glass encased in steel and concrete into a dust that can be spread for hundreds of miles and
(2) ripping up the crust of the Earth from down where the waste is stored and spewing material from that depth over hundreds of miles
would necessarily be of such a magnitude that the radioactivity of the debris would represent a barely noticeable blip in the carnage.
The waste is, broadly speaking, two categories -- short-lived fission products, and long-lived actinides. When people talk about very long half-lives, they're talking about the actinides. But those are comparatively weakly radioactive.
Plutonium is an actinide, and it's kind of an intermediate case, radioactive enough to be a real concern, with a half-life longer than the fission products, but shorter than most of the other actinides.
The idea is, only the fission products are truly waste. Put the actinides in fuel rods, and they'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay into other things until they hit some fissionable isotope of something, and become part of the fission products problem set.
In somewhere around 500 years, there will be less radioactivity in the fission products than there was in the ore the uranium came from.
That's quite true. It may well be a better ecosystem.
But it'll be a different (however slightly different) ecosystem, which is bound to upset some folks. Like the heat from water-cooled power plants (nuclear or coal) which supports a much larger population of wildlife, denounced as "heat pollution".
Yes, there are limits, at some point you get fish soup, but those limits aren't being approached.
I agree, Yucca Mountain is way more than good enough. Nevada was happy to have the contracts, campaigned to have the site in the state, when it was construction jobs. Now, after all the money has been spent building it, it's a different story.
One of the more absurd objections to the Yucca Mountain site is "Las Vegas is growing, and before too long, it'll want to be encroaching on Yucca Mountain."
Hello, people, hello! There is something between Las Vegas and Yucca Mountain. That something is the Nevada Test Site, a moonscape of radioactive holes in the ground, uncontained. That is already there. It is, by any rational measure, much more of an impediment to Las Vegas growing in that direction than the Yucca Mountain waste repository would ever be.
The long-term (tens of thousands of years) issue is only true if the plutonium is buried with the waste, instead of burned in new fuel rods, the way any sane fuel cycle will do.
Thalidomide is also under investigation for help in cancer treatment. It impedes the growth of tumors by preventing them from growing new blood vessels. ("Angiogenesis inhibitor"... the same mechanism which caused the birth defects.)
In the mid-1970s, a Japanese firm demonstrated extraction of uranium from sea water via an ion exchange process at a cost of about $200/pound (1976 dollars). That represents a ceiling price on the cost of uranium, as that's as close to an inexhaustible source as you can get.
There's enough energy available from uranium that $724/pound (2006 dollars, according to the inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/) would not be a show-stopper.
I'm sure it will, with this plant. But it only produces 64 megawatts. 64 megawatts is not all that much, compared to our total energy needs. To produce all our power this way would mean shading over 8,000 square miles.
But solving the nuclear waste issue (or, more accurately, permitting one of the solutions to the nuclear waste problem to be implemented) is not optional. We have to do it to dispose of the waste we've already got. So one of the solutions to disposing of this waste will ultimately be implemented, even if it's just shipping it all to France, where they are disposing of the waste quite handily, thank you very much.
Once we dispose of existing waste, we can dispose of new waste the same way.
You should probably not enter a grocery store or pharmacy. Every one of them has Pepto Bismol for sale, which is a compound of bismuth, a radioactive element with no stable isotopes, which has a half-life of over 20 billion billion years!!
Unless you figure out the fact that "long half-life" is exactly the same thing as "weakly radioactive." Non-radioactive substances, after all, have a half-life of infinity.
On July 13, 2004, Entergy notified the NRC that the fuel rod segments had been located in the spent fuel pool. The pieces had been stored in a unique aluminum cylinder which was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure.
This directly contradicts your assertion that the rods (two pieces, on 7" long, one 17" long, about the diameter of a pencil) were not found. They were found, right there in the cooling pond where the rest of the spent fuel rods were stored.
This seems entirely consistent with the truthfulness, accuracy, and attention to detail that I've grown accustomed to seeing from the antinukes in the past 30-something years.
"The predominantly farming community is now having to receive famine relief food. The residents report that the monkeys have killed livestock and guard dogs, which has also left the villagers living in fear, especially for the safety of their babies and children."
But they're only black African savages, so it's "funny".
If I had mod points today, I'd mod this "Insightful".
My suggestion would be to send the villagers some "Wrist Rocket" type slingshots. Or maybe pepper spray. If enough monkeys associate human dwellings with serious pain, they'll stay away.
Failing that, selection pressure works. None of you fluffy-bunny "Aw, don't hurt the poor cute widdle furry monkeys" types have ever seen your children go hungry because the "cute widdle furry monkeys" destroyed your crops.
And, I think 1u3hr is absolutely correct; a lot of it is racism in its purest form with a very thin transparent gloss of "environmentalism" on top. A lot of people masquerading as enlightened modern folks just like animals better than they like <insert racist slur here>.
I actually wouldn't mind paying more just for the satisfaction of knowing that not a penny of my money is going to Empty-V and it's vast array of clones, or all the ESPN channels. Currently, ESPN and Empty-V charge cable and satellite companies several bucks per subscriber, and require their "offerings" to be in the basic tier.
There are actually so few channels that have anything I'm willing to expend lifespan watching, much less pay good money for, that I'm pretty sure I will end up paying less. There is one (1) channel that I really want that's in Dish's top tier; if I could buy just that one separately, that alone would cut my monthly fees significantly.
The problem is that too many people are (continuing the automobile accident analogy) saying that there were, absolutely, only two cars involved, nothing else, and to even hint that there might have been some other factor involved is Blasphemy Against Science (capitalized and apotheosized.) That is equally a "giving up early", and contributes nothing to our understanding of the crash.
Newtonian analysis of the debris, some people say, shows that there was something more than the two cars involved. The most likely cause is a third car. Assuming it didn't leave any bits around, science can't tell you the make and model of the car, nor can it tell you who was driving, especially if "Science" (capitalized and apotheosized) dogmatically insists that there was not and could not have been a third car. And, certainly, science can't tell you if the cars were deflected by direct divine intervention.
But the main thing that science, real science, does not and can not do is ignore the fact, in this analogy, that the positions of the cars are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the only factors involved in this accident were the two cars.
There are some scientists who do not believe in any sort of creation who say that in their considered opinion, it's clear that there has been some other factor in the billions of years of the history of life on Earth. One is N. C. Wickramasinghe, who is not a Christian of any kind, and the hypothesis that he and Fred Hoyle had was nothing at all like Biblical creation.
Here's a car analogy: suppose you're at the scene of an auto accident, and you point to some aspect that doesn't make sense. That's a gap in our understanding of how Newtonian physics led to the evidence we observe. And if scientists studied that crash, they would probably have different theories of how it happened, and those theories would change over time. But unless you were driving at a significant fraction of c, there won't be anything that contradicts Newtonian physics. Despite the gap you found, it's still appropriate to teach physics to our high-schoolers.
To continue the car analogy, in examining a crash scene, you might come to the conclusion (properly leaving out both special relativity and quantum mechanics) that Newtonian physics can not be reconciled with the observed results -- unless there was a third vehicle involved which left the scene.
"Intelligent Design" covers a pretty broad spectrum. At one end, you have the 4004 BC Creationists, who have glommed onto the term. I am not defending those people. At all. At the other end, you have people who say "The universe is 15GY old, the Earth 4.5GY, give or take 10%. All the fossils and geology are dated correctly by mainstream science. Evolution is most of the explanation of how we got here. But there is reason to strongly suspect that something else is involved. And insisting that there is no other factor involved is like insisting that there was no third vehicle involved in that car accident, when the location of the vehicles is not consistent with conservation of momentum otherwise."
Forget local stations -- Try the CBS Evening News -- They asked to do a story on the Hackers Conference back in 1986 or so, and talked one of the organizers into letting them bring a camera crew on site.
(Note: This conference is using the pre-media-hype definition of "hackers". Many founders of major Silicon Valley companies show up; Jerry Pournelle attends fairly often. It's not even close to a "juvenile delinquent with a computer" type conference.)
The CBS News segment started off "In the hills above Silicon Valley, a revolutionary army plots its next attack on the helpless valley below" and went straight downhill from there.
It turned out they had a pre-written story about the German kids who were trying to find American SDI secrets to sell to the East Germans; the incident that Cliff Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" about. What that had to do with this conference is a mystery known, if to anyone, only to the fevered brains at CBS News.
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I made my position on Phelps and his pathetic little cult clear long before he started in on the U.S. military, as can be verified at groups.google.com. Phelps first came to my attention when his pathetic little cult picketed Matthew Shepard's funeral, and I said at that time (as a straight person with fairly traditional views on sexual morality) that I'd far rather be in Matthew Shepard's shoes on the Day of Judgement than in those of Fred Phelps.
However, when someone is obsessively critical of Israel no matter what Israel does, while at the same time turns, at best, a blind eye towards actions by those whose often and vigorously stated aim is the annihilation of Israel and the extermination of every Jew in the Middle East for starters ... and, more often, actively sides with those who promote genocide against the Jews ... Pointing out the antisemitism is hardly out of line.
Look at all the Hezbollah and Hamas flags at those events that zombietime.com documents. Look at how fashionable the kaffiyeh has become in certain circles. For someone interested in an honest picture, it's pretty blatant that there's something just a bit more than being critical of Israeli policies going on here.
Contrary to your blanket statement about "the US military", the individuals responsible for the murders of Bagram and Dilawar are being court-martialed by the US military, and were in the process of being court-martialed well before news of the incident got out and it started being used by people like you as a blanket attack on the US military.
I think most everyone else had best not be drinking anything when they read his plaintive cry, though. Bad for keyboards and monitors...
I hope they will sell (or license, if they've patented it) the system for other vehicles.
Yeah, I know, if it dies, you're back to the old fashioned way. But if it dies, there's going to be no picture, so you'll know. It's not going to silently edit out that idiot in the Mini Cooper hanging close to your right rear tire.
"Germany at least signed." How wonderful. "I have a piece of paper in my hand with Gerhard Schröder's signature, guaranteeing no global warming in our time." Utterly marvelous.
He is, of course, also responsible for hurricanes, the Indonesian tsunami, the lack of anything good on TV, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. For starters.
In order to melt the glass, the volcano would have to erupt right under the repository. Lava flowing over the top of the repository is just going to seal it better. There is no volcano right under the repository.
I submit that any disaster capable of
(1) pulverizing chunks of solid glass encased in steel and concrete into a dust that can be spread for hundreds of miles and (2) ripping up the crust of the Earth from down where the waste is stored and spewing material from that depth over hundreds of mileswould necessarily be of such a magnitude that the radioactivity of the debris would represent a barely noticeable blip in the carnage.
Plutonium is an actinide, and it's kind of an intermediate case, radioactive enough to be a real concern, with a half-life longer than the fission products, but shorter than most of the other actinides.
The idea is, only the fission products are truly waste. Put the actinides in fuel rods, and they'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay into other things until they hit some fissionable isotope of something, and become part of the fission products problem set.
In somewhere around 500 years, there will be less radioactivity in the fission products than there was in the ore the uranium came from.
But it'll be a different (however slightly different) ecosystem, which is bound to upset some folks. Like the heat from water-cooled power plants (nuclear or coal) which supports a much larger population of wildlife, denounced as "heat pollution".
Yes, there are limits, at some point you get fish soup, but those limits aren't being approached.
One of the more absurd objections to the Yucca Mountain site is "Las Vegas is growing, and before too long, it'll want to be encroaching on Yucca Mountain."
Hello, people, hello! There is something between Las Vegas and Yucca Mountain. That something is the Nevada Test Site, a moonscape of radioactive holes in the ground, uncontained. That is already there. It is, by any rational measure, much more of an impediment to Las Vegas growing in that direction than the Yucca Mountain waste repository would ever be.
The long-term (tens of thousands of years) issue is only true if the plutonium is buried with the waste, instead of burned in new fuel rods, the way any sane fuel cycle will do.
Thalidomide is also under investigation for help in cancer treatment. It impedes the growth of tumors by preventing them from growing new blood vessels. ("Angiogenesis inhibitor"... the same mechanism which caused the birth defects.)
There's enough energy available from uranium that $724/pound (2006 dollars, according to the inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/) would not be a show-stopper.
I'm sure it will, with this plant. But it only produces 64 megawatts. 64 megawatts is not all that much, compared to our total energy needs. To produce all our power this way would mean shading over 8,000 square miles.
Once we dispose of existing waste, we can dispose of new waste the same way.
How many acres of desert ecosystem are plunged into permanent shade to provide this 64 megawatts of power?
Unless you figure out the fact that "long half-life" is exactly the same thing as "weakly radioactive." Non-radioactive substances, after all, have a half-life of infinity.
This seems entirely consistent with the truthfulness, accuracy, and attention to detail that I've grown accustomed to seeing from the antinukes in the past 30-something years.
But they're only black African savages, so it's "funny".
If I had mod points today, I'd mod this "Insightful".My suggestion would be to send the villagers some "Wrist Rocket" type slingshots. Or maybe pepper spray. If enough monkeys associate human dwellings with serious pain, they'll stay away.
Failing that, selection pressure works. None of you fluffy-bunny "Aw, don't hurt the poor cute widdle furry monkeys" types have ever seen your children go hungry because the "cute widdle furry monkeys" destroyed your crops.
And, I think 1u3hr is absolutely correct; a lot of it is racism in its purest form with a very thin transparent gloss of "environmentalism" on top. A lot of people masquerading as enlightened modern folks just like animals better than they like <insert racist slur here>.
> ... amadjehimedad (or however you spell that, you know, the iranian dude)
Eichmanndinejad
There are actually so few channels that have anything I'm willing to expend lifespan watching, much less pay good money for, that I'm pretty sure I will end up paying less. There is one (1) channel that I really want that's in Dish's top tier; if I could buy just that one separately, that alone would cut my monthly fees significantly.
Newtonian analysis of the debris, some people say, shows that there was something more than the two cars involved. The most likely cause is a third car. Assuming it didn't leave any bits around, science can't tell you the make and model of the car, nor can it tell you who was driving, especially if "Science" (capitalized and apotheosized) dogmatically insists that there was not and could not have been a third car. And, certainly, science can't tell you if the cars were deflected by direct divine intervention.
But the main thing that science, real science, does not and can not do is ignore the fact, in this analogy, that the positions of the cars are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the only factors involved in this accident were the two cars.
There are some scientists who do not believe in any sort of creation who say that in their considered opinion, it's clear that there has been some other factor in the billions of years of the history of life on Earth. One is N. C. Wickramasinghe, who is not a Christian of any kind, and the hypothesis that he and Fred Hoyle had was nothing at all like Biblical creation.
"Intelligent Design" covers a pretty broad spectrum. At one end, you have the 4004 BC Creationists, who have glommed onto the term. I am not defending those people. At all. At the other end, you have people who say "The universe is 15GY old, the Earth 4.5GY, give or take 10%. All the fossils and geology are dated correctly by mainstream science. Evolution is most of the explanation of how we got here. But there is reason to strongly suspect that something else is involved. And insisting that there is no other factor involved is like insisting that there was no third vehicle involved in that car accident, when the location of the vehicles is not consistent with conservation of momentum otherwise."
(Note: This conference is using the pre-media-hype definition of "hackers". Many founders of major Silicon Valley companies show up; Jerry Pournelle attends fairly often. It's not even close to a "juvenile delinquent with a computer" type conference.)
The CBS News segment started off "In the hills above Silicon Valley, a revolutionary army plots its next attack on the helpless valley below" and went straight downhill from there.
It turned out they had a pre-written story about the German kids who were trying to find American SDI secrets to sell to the East Germans; the incident that Cliff Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" about. What that had to do with this conference is a mystery known, if to anyone, only to the fevered brains at CBS News.