The development comes on the same day Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told lawmakers that 18 states have asked for help in warding off cyberattacks on their electronic voting systems.
This is one of those phrases that should result in people instantly being fired but, for some reason, never does.
How long ago did the first Diebold issues come out? And this is still a thing?
I'm almost terrified to ask but these "cyber" attacks they're worried... that wouldn't be a reference to internet based attacks, would it? Did some psychopath finally decide that that best way to fix electronic voting machines was to connect them to the internet in any setup that didn't involve an air gap?
How can you ignore the massive time and cost of clean-ups of inevitable accidents
Adopt hydrocarbon attitude: "accident schmaccident, here have some money for your wrecked house, now shut up and go away." This requires being rational about the dangers of nuclear, which from the sound of it, you aren't.
waste storage,
Old chestnut-flavored red herring. And is absolutely moronic and betrays a profound ignorance of the way nuclear works. There is no need to move any waste off-site, ever. If somehow there is such a need, fire and arrest the designer and/or manager of the place.
as it takes quite a lot of expensive education and training
No it doesn't. It takes a lot of training to build the thing. Running it requires attentive people who are mainly just there to verify the automated controls aren't doing something moronic, not Ph. Ds.
How can you ignore the massive time and cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant
Don't decommission them. We have enough Pu in principle to run them for thousands of years, last time I checked. Build another on-site if you must. If people are building disposable sites that can't be reused, fire them and tar and feather them in the press so that no one ever lets them build another reactor ever again.
I see you chose the latter option: "nuclear is expense because look, this report says it's expensive". Thank you for proving that you have nothing to contribute to this debate, which has been about why it has been so expensive and whether that expense is mitigatable.
I do believe I just clearly said that it was NOT LIKE COLD FUSION.
Let's try this again, with another analogy: Saying nuclear power will always be very expensive is akin to saying that gunpowder will never work because your firecrackers keep getting wet. It's a simple problem. It has a solution. Maybe it's an intricate compound problem made worse by your asshole brother pissing in your dresser drawers whilst you sleep, but that doesn't mean that all firecrackers everywhere have a fatal flaw. I don't know. This analogy is irredeemably idiotic but then so it this conversation. Nuclear energy production is very much cost-effective because it is really, really, really simple. Give me the fuel and I'll build a reactor myself. It's not hard.
Yes, I WILL SUFFER A FATAL RADIATION DOSE IN THE PROCESS. Obviously. But I guarantee you I will live long enough to see my turbine spinning and electricity generated. This is my thesis and its implications:
* Using fissile materials to generate electricity is really easy. Given an easy fuel supply (and with breeders or downblending of old warheads I do not think this is an issue), it's certainly easier than coal. No matches required! No smokestack required! And refueling is a rare event.
* Not dying in the process is a bit tricky. It costs extra money to do it without dying, and without polluting nearby stuff.
* For various reasons (largely involving hysterical NIMBYs who don't understand the dangers involved and decades of institutional cruft on all sides), safety-related and mitigation expenditures seem to have spiraled out of control and driven up prices whilst sensible safety measures (of the sort that would have prevented Fukushima) are neglected.
* The yardstick we're using here, obviously, is the amount of harm we tolerate with coal. The damage from radioactive isotopes should not be treated as being markedly more dangerous than we would treat them if they were non-radioactive toxic chemicals with similar a dispersal, absorption, persistence and carcinogen/teratogen potential profile.
* The "affordable safety" issue is not a hard problem like rocketry is hard, nor is it impossible like cold fusion (almost certainly) is; it's a hard problem like writing a fully functional desktop operating system in Haskell is a bit hard. It's absolutely possible. No one knowledgeable would or could argue it's impossible, but it does take a bit of expertise and patience and elbow grease.
* The challenge would be worth undertaking due to the massive problems global with hydrocarbons, particularly (but certainly not limited to) global warming.
* I'm actually so pessimistic about people ever thinking or talking sensibly about nuclear power that in the end I'd probably back renewables instead.
* That doesn't mean I'm sitting idly by, letting people talk nonsense about it being intrinsically more difficult or worse for the environment to shove of pile of U or Pu under a water tank and walk away vs. burning thousands of tons of coal under that same tank.
Quick, see if you can grossly misunderstand something else. I haven't had to explain stuff to cantankerous sloths in quite a while... I could use the practice.
See my reply to the AC for a full rebuttal on why this "nuclear is [intrinsically] expensive" argument is absurd. I'll cover the rest of your nonsense below.
But first, a sort of olive branch: I don't entirely disagree. At the bottom line, nuclear HAS often been rather expensive. But I am in favor of actually exploring why. I can't help it if most governments have got it wrong. It appears to be a case of overcautious regulation giving nesting room for bureaucratic parasites on all sides (regulators, lobbyists, assorted "experts" who don't understand the first thing about mechanical and architectural design, which is where the real challenges are), and in the resulting mess not enough competent engineers are allowed into the high level meetings where these things are decided.
Clean up nuclear power's current problems first
Please. Clean up hydrocarbon's problems first. Stop poisoning our children (and whales and dolphins and other keystone predators) with mercury. Stop acid rain from killing endangered species all over the globe. Stop global warming. Stop poisoning water supplies. Stop allowing oil spills that cover thousands upon thousands of square miles. Stop killing workers in explosions and cave-ins. Stop the hundreds (possibly thousands) of out of control coal seam fires around the world that will burn for hundreds of years, significantly adding to global warming and even occasionally destroying entire towns and displacing thousands of people.
Do all of that, and then maybe we'll see if we can sensibly spare any tears for the two dudes in Fukushima who got radiation burns, or the ~0.43 of a person at Three Mile Island (or whatever it was) that may have died from cancer after the worst nuclear accident America has ever seen.
any sort of nasty waste that lingers as a dnager for a millenia.
Oh yes, and then this ridiculous thing. I've explained why it's ridiculous in at least three replies now; shall we go for a fourth? There is no massive amount of waste produced. If the plants were competently designed and administered, all waste could be kept on-site. And no one complains about the mercury released from coal. Do you know how long mercury lasts before it decays? Billions of years.
The amount of fear-mongering over non-radioactive poisons, including heavy metals and dioxins, isn't even a tenth of the hysteria surrounding radioactive poisons.
There are real debates to be had, but the anti-nukers almost entirely lead with their worst foot and refuse to admit that they are talking gibberish. In the end, I actually tend to agree with you that "alternative" power is more generally worthy of investment, but mostly only because hysterically misinformed people will continue to stand in the way of real nuclear power reform and innovation.
Do I really need to rehash it all? The higher cost is due to increased safety concerns, direct and indirect, implicit and explicit. The fuel already exists in abundance (decommissioned nukes, possibility of breeding Pu, etc.) You're saying it's more expensive to plop that fuel underneath the water tank that leads to the turbine than it is to build a smokestack and pay for miners to dig up thousands of tons of coal and haul it there and burn it underneath the same (in principle) water tank? You do understand that those coal miners and truck drivers don't work for free? You do understand that no one is going to build the extra smokestack for free?
When expenditures due to safety concerns are tracked separately, nuclear is intrinsically cheaper especially when given an existing supply of fuel, because that fuel is just so goddamn dense. The expense comes from--it must come from--safety concerns, concerns which (given the track record of hydrocarbons vs. nuclear) seem clearly overblown except to the extent that we need fail-cold reactor designs to prevent economic damage if nothing else.
If you want to argue that the safety is indispensable and therefore nuclear will always remain too expensive you're free to try. Or you can just keep saying "uh, it's too expensive because this piece of paper says it's too expensive"... which is a marvelous way of winning any argument, I suppose.
The breeder argument wasn't necessarily vital to what I was saying. Another worthy plan is to decrease our weapons stockpiles and use the downblended stuff to power the reactors. Either way, at the end of the day you're shoving something that is naturally, intrinsically hot (and "burns" for ages) underneath the water tank, sittin' back and watching it go around and around, with no barges full of fuel to unload or smokestacks to keep clean, and when you do need to change out the fuel you put your waste in a modest-sized storage building on-site (not these vast, top secret landfills people keep insisting we need.) And if you're feeling particularly ambitious you can string some HVDC lines out to some remote location and scale up the whole thing in ways that coal can only dream of.
My thesis is that if certain people haven't been able to make it cost-competitive yet, it is due to some combination of paranoid hysteria (relative to the dangers hydrocarbons pose) and those specific people being morons, not because the underlying techniques are just so intrinsically gosh-darn expensive.
You're conflating the idiocy of the humans in charge with the underlying technology. You can't declare it doesn't work like cold fusion doesn't work; you can only declare that the guy who built it (or the guys running it) suck(s). Heat and radiation propagate according to very simple laws. There are no moving parts within the reacting mass itself. The only potentially nasty surprise from an engineering perspective is neutron embrittlement, but we've decades of measurements on that.
What is it like to read about a problem in the newspaper and assume that it's just an insolvable problem that has resisted the best efforts of mice and men instead of what it almost certainly is, a clusterfuck caused by stupid, lazy and/or malevolent people? I must have felt the way you do long ago, as child I suppose, but for the life of me I can't recall it.
If we're generating so much waste that we can't store it on site, immediately adjacent to the current reactor and equiment, then someone somewhere is doing something terribly wrong. Yes, there is neutron embrittlement and normal wear and tear, but this is not something you need a full-sized landfill for.
The storage issues, if any exist, either result from plant closures or from the unscrupulous owners or managers of the plants convincing moronic regulators to allow them to move the materials off-site (which they might do to decrease their workload, I suppose. Or it perhaps it allows them to be much sloppier about the stuff they expose to intense radiation. Either way, there's no excuse for it.)
In the future, you may wish to try using the word "you" a bit less and actually articulating what your view of the matter is. No one is asking you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, for a character reference.
Wait a second... the "joke" was me ingesting tritium? Because you think I don't understand that the major problem with nuclear reactors is with bioabsorbtion of radioisotopes, as opposed to radiation directly emitted by the core? Uh, ok.
Yeah, uh, that's fucking hilarious. Let me try one: Perhaps you enjoyed bananas a little too much as a kid?
Every one views nuclear damage as more dangerous because it is more dangerous, no ifs no buts.
You just disqualified yourself from this conversation, sorry. Global warming is, in fact, a thing. Burning coal causing our fish to accumulate mercury, which in turn lowers the IQs of our children, is a thing. If you aren't willing to compare these harmful effects to the effects of nuclear, you are an unreasonable and unthinking person.
The point is that if those accidents are "serious", many hydrocarbon accidents would have to be classified as stupendous calamities. Even the standard operation of coal power plants (without any accidents) results in much more harm done than all of those accidents combined. This isn't a conversation about nuclear vs. nothing; it's largely about nuclear vs. hydrocarbon.
I guess I needed to spell that out a little more exactingly.
I said well in advance I didn't know what I was talking about re: the finer points of plutonium manufacture, so I'm not sure why you think you're making some kind of point there except that you can't follow a logical thread or understand tongue in cheek humor. Unlike some people around here, I don't actually few autism as an insult but if you aren't... what is your excuse?
Regarding breeding, I was illustrating that the process is, at its core, not terribly delicate or finicky or requiring expensive precise equipment (as rocketry), except as far as safety goes. The reason for expense is safety, some of which is warranted, some of which clearly isn't.
If you knew what you were talking about you could explain the joke, figure out what its about and explain why.
Wow. That... just wow. That bit wasn't even the joke. Or maybe it is. Depends on your sense of humor. Ok, here it is, and it's a real knee-slapper: Burning coal releases mercury, which settles in the sea and bioaccumulates in fish, which bioaccumulates in children who eat the fish, and like most heavy metals it permanently damages their growing brains in addition to some other nasty long term health effects. In some parts of the world, the fish is the staple and they don't have access to the information about the dangers of eating too much. There's some debate about whether most of the mercury in fish comes from power plants or gold manufacture or some other sources, but the last I heard it was clear that coal power plants were at the very least a significant source.
Bioaccumulation also describes the process by which people absorbed lead from the exhaust of leaded gasoline, which in some areas appeared to give rise to a fairly dramatic growth in crime rate... because it was damaging kids' growing brains, making them more stupid and prone to impulse control problems (and thus criminality.)
Anyway, if you want to insist that Fukushima is a maximum-level catastrophe then I'm afraid you'll have to do better than quoting some Wikipedia article that we all read years ago. I eagerly await to hear how *you* define accidents wherein people actually die. Oh wait, you don't care about those because they're not sexy like radiation. Which is and was entirely my point. And no I don't huge care whether that radiation is due to long lived isotope or short lived created isotope or some transient source, because that alone is not and was not the point. The point is that nuclear is not inherently more expensive and so when judging the expense of nuclear the relative safety is of paramount importance.
Your definition is irrelevant. Your narcissism, adorable.
Your unthinking slavishness to whatever marketingspeak a 15 second Google digs up is irrelevant and less adorable. Fukushima was less serious than the BP accident by any sane measure. Put the reactor out in the middle of nowheresville, America, string some HVDC lines, make it fail cold instead of fail hot with a stronger focus on gaseous or particulate containment in the event the shit hits the fan, give the poor bastards hazard pay and the next accident should barely make the local news.
But that's only true if indeed the impact to human life or the environment were the yardstick here. It's clear that you have a preference for more sensationalist and less relevant measures of harm done, so you may now return to your ignorant scaremongering.
This is almost entirely unalloyed solipsism on your part. If you aren't interested in the conversation you cut into, which specifically excluded the right wing in America (it was already implicitly agreed that they were intolerant), nor interested in giving a clear opinion on the broader conversation regarding tolerance of intolerance, then I'm afraid I can't be bothered to formulate any further replies.
This was not a conversation about prioritization of concerns or whatever lame psychoanalytical witch hunt for crypto-fascists you've got going on here.
Fukushima is an INES level 7 event defined as a 'Major' accident which is more severe than a INES level 6 event defined as a 'Serious' accident. You are clearly, with regards to then international communities definitions of the terms in International Nuclear Event Scale [wikipedia.org], wrong.
The "international community" is a blend of supefyingly dull simpletons, hysterical dolts and Machiavellian assholes. I don't care if they defined it as doubleplus ungood. I define "serious" in terms of the effects that hydrocarbon usage has had and is having, which directly kills people on a regular basis and in the bigger picture borders on catastrophic even if global warming is ignored.
No, you don't know what you are talking about.
Do you eat thirteen servings of carbohydrates a day or whatever the hell it was those assholes said when we were in elementary school? Do you wet yourself every time the Terror Alert goes into the red zone?
Figure out the difference between radionuclide and radioactive. What is bio-accumulation? You need to understand this first.
Bioaccumulation is the process by which childrens' IQs are being stunted by the byproducts of burning hydrocarbons. The issue isn't nearly as bad as it was in the days of leaded gasoline in cars, but I'm a tad worried about it all the same.
Those aren't the magical hysteria words (which was the point of my statement) but I am well aware of the distinction, thanks. I'm also aware of the fact that high voltage DC lines are capable of quite impressive long distance performance, and that nuclear power could be scaled up ways almost no one bothers suggesting (including other ways in which the heat could be utilized) because they are too busy pretending to be intellectual by spewing out sclerotic acronyms used to describe the infantile mistakes and abandoned projects of decades past instead of what could be.
What could possibly go wrong. Go read up on EBRII, IFR. Go find out what the difference between a Fast 'Burner' and Fast Breeder.
I'm basically just going to be repeating the same points I've made in half a dozen other posts, but it's worth it if I can get through to one more person.
The additional downside to breeder reactors is the increased nuclear waste and higher potential for radiation exposure. These are not marginal concerns, these are quite frankly life altering and life ending concerns.
This isn't supported by the evidence or by reasonable hypotheticals. If the engineers and operators can refrain from doing extremely stupid experimental things (Chernobyl), the danger to human life is clearly much lower than coal and oil. Even using old, moronic designs that went into meltdown mode when they lost power to the machinery, the misery and suffering Fukushima inflicted is clearly lower than the suffering inflicted by coal and oil. I'm talking about both the macro and the micro pictures here. There's bits of ground in Chernobyl that I wouldn't want to go picnicking on, sure, but I wouldn't want to picnic in
Centralia, either.
The additional downside to breeder reactors is the increased nuclear waste
A non-issue. I could give you literally ten different reasons as to why this is a non-issue, but my two favorite ones are there shouldn't be so much nuclear waste that you couldn't keep it all on-site, and that no one cares nearly as much about the long term storage of dioxins or other incredibly hazardous but nonradioactive chemicals.
My reasons for opposing nuclear power is not because of the science (I understand the science) my concern is I do not trust corporations to operate in the common good.
Do you trust BP to operate in the common good? Even though they killed a dozen people when Deepwater Horizon exploded? (For those keeping score at home, that's roughly a dozen more than have been killed by commercial nuclear reactors in Amerca.) Even when damn near the entire Gulf of Mexico was darkened with petroleum and they had to spray god knows what on it to get rid of it? What of tanker truck explosions? What of coal mine collapses? What of the thousands of coal seam fires burning around the world today, fires that will keep on burning long after our grandchildren are dead? What of global warming, acid rain decimating vulnerable species, mercury in tuna permanently stunting our childrens' IQs ?
It's not nuclear or nothing. It's nuclear or hydrocarbons. There is no rational safety reason to choose hydrocarbon over nuclear, none whatsoever, except for the possibility (already acknowledged) of proliferation or other nuclear malevolence. I can't give you a decisive argument on that front , but I hope I can at least disabuse you of the notion that the poisons in coal are somehow safer than small, localized bits of radioactive contamination.
As far as the tradeoff of safety and cost goes, I believe that safety reform is needed but in its current state it is completely misguided. The emphasis should be on better and more contingency-proof designs and more durable designs, so that we can more or less set it and forget it. Nuclear reactions are not, at their core, all that complicated. It should not require billions of dollars to idiot-proof, but it does require getting over some of our hysteria and some of the red-tape cruft that doesn't add to safety but does add to the price tag.
Actually, I can give you at least one good argument on the proliferation front, and it addresses your worries (be they valid or not) about breeder reactors: let's downblend our weapons grade fissile materials and use them to power reactors. We've got what, something on the order of 10k warheads? All of them 5x-10x more potent than they need to be for nuclear reactors? Burn 'em. Sign some treaties with Russia and get them to burn theirs, too.
(Most of them, anyway. I'm inclined more towards a minimal effective deterrence philosophy than a total disarmament philosophy.)
Send the techs in to fix it. When they die, hire more techs.
Seriously, the point of all that nonsense (which I nonetheless hope isn't too far off the mark from what is actually possible) was that the expense of nuclear comes almost entirely from safety requirements, not from the intrinsic complexity of what's going on. We put a pile of stuff together and it gets hot. We put a pile of stuff next to the other stuff and it turns into some other desirable stuff. There are mathematics that very, very precisely describe all of this, there are decades of research to confirm the mathematics, and there are no moving parts whatsoever within the stuff that's actually doing the work. There's virtually no room for surprise, except that I suppose a select number of morons will be surprised that Japan might, on occasion, experience an earthquake.
Monitoring equipment can be designed telescopically to work from long ranges, away from damaging levels of neutron radiation. There are a zillion and one different ways to measure temperature, which is the important bit. It's complicated in that the plan needs to take into account all of the concerns and possibilities, but the execution is not complicated. Everything is simple where it counts. It's simple in the way that fusion is NOT (and will never be) simple. It's simple in the way that rocketry will never be simple. All remaining issues are resolvable with enough elbow grease and enough sane planning. it's just a matter of tackling each detail as you come to it and being willing to keep redesigning the whole thing until it becomes a low-maintenance, highly durable thing with sane failure modes.
Just throw a few creative MIT grad students in a jail cell and tell them they're not getting out until they've designed a cost-effective breeder reactor that isn't likely to generate more fatalities than our hydrocarbons do. How long do you think it will take them? Two, maybe three hours?
The whole goddamn mess is like a reverse-Feynman clusterfuck. Feynman was frustrated to no end that NASA refused acknowledge the complexity of the Space Shuttle and their incompetencies (in combination with all of the positive press and feel-goodery surrounding NASA) ultimately led to the Challenger disaster. This is a situation where bureaucracy isn't obscuring the SNAFU; it's actually obscuring the fact that it's a clearly defined and clearly solvable engineering problem, and in this case it's negative publicity that's making matters much worse by obscuring the fact that it is, in fact, solvable. It couldn't possibly be insolvable, provided:
1. We're willing to tolerate some pollution and some risk that is nonzero but still much less than we get with hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, as Fukushima clearly revealed, the general populace is definitely not willing to do this. I stopped listening to the news when they started scaremongering about the radioactive food.
2. We're not stupid about it. The designers of fail-hot nuclear reactors like Fukushima were stupid. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it. You absolutely must design the thing so that your reacting mass breaks apart and separates into subcritical fragments if it gets too hot.
Look, here's some more off the cuff nonsense: Heat-frangible bolts holding the thing together, with support cables that swing each piece away from the center and into its own corner of the room. Or the pieces themselves are designed to (if it comes to it) melt until liquid and then flow into separate areas of the room. Or the entire reacting mass is highly porous and upon overheating a a seal will melt and a granular neutron absorber spills down onto and into the reaction mass. It doesn't matter if these are all untenable; *something* won't be. And some similar clever trick will render breeding straightforward and safe, too. I don't know what that trick will be, but I am positive it's doable using what is, at its core, really simple tech.
Try again [wikipedia.org]. And if you're being literalist, well, shame on you.
How about you try again? I didn't say Christian Nation. I said The Bible as the constitution. The Qu'ran is the official constitution of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant distinction here that you may wish to meditate on; it's sort of analogous to the difference between being a fundamentalist Christian and being a fundamentalist Christian monk living in a monastery. When considering the implications of such an arrangement, the attitude towards innovation found in many conservative strands of Islam is worth highlighting.
Be nice if one of you wringing your hands over the overseas threats would speak out against those in-country
Are you serious? The point of this tangent was immigration, therefore the things people are doing "over there" are just a tiniestbit relevant. As it happens, we have an easy way (or we would have an easy way, if masochists like Perens weren't in charge) to deal with a subset of people who are openly hostile to liberty but want to move here permanently and make trouble.
The Bible belt deeply worries me as well, but we don't have an easy way to deal with those people. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (to put it mildly), by apparently implying that the continued existence of evangelicals means we shouldn't waste any time or energy taking some simple steps to avoid importing right-wing fascists from another wing of Abraham's festering cult.
Whereas I think if you can't admit they are two of the same kind, or even bring up their existence, you have a problem of your own.
They are basically the same in principle (just not extent.) And I did bring them up in my previous post. I vividly recall doing so; are you quite sure you are paying attention?
I bring them up all the damn time. In this case, it's not a hugely relevant to a conversation on immigration because they are ALREADY HERE. Regarding the larger conversation on tolerance, I would also be in favor of not tolerating their intolerance, but this intolerance-of-intolerance would not extent to revoking their citizenship because the world is not set up to make that remotely feasible.
Refusing to stay on the subject at hand is a sign of your own hangups on this issue, not mine. I have authored rants of incredible length and complexity on my hatred of evangelicals, but this particular tangent was about how people on the left (not just the right) have made the same mistake of tolerating intolerance. The people of the left in this country do not have a problem condemning evangelicals (and rightly so); ergo, the evangelicals are not relevant to my point, and so I talk of them now only to the extent of demonstrating how absurd your sentiments are.
Bonus points if you can talk about the actual refugees without another hand-wringing complaint about them needed to be screened, as if no effort was going to be made to do that anyway.
The screening process is currently a joke as "non-violent" Islamists are apparently able to come in, and a great many people (including Bruce Perens) are arguing that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with this.
But guess what? From my understanding, non-violent KKK members are banned from even stepping foot in the United Kingdom, let alone becoming citizens. And I really, really can't fault the UK government for making that call (though as a free speech proponent I'd prefer that they were able to freely travel there, just not be able to settle there.)
Do you actually believe Fukushima was a "serious" public safety incident? How would you classify the BP oil spill, which killed a dozen people and affected thousands of square miles? How would you classify the multiple ongoing coal mine fires around the world that will be burning for at least the next hundred years and have resulted in entire towns being evacuated ? How would you classify children and pregnant women being advised not to eat too much tuna because of the brain damage they or their unborn children might develop as a result from the mercury absorbed by the fish... mercury that ultimately came from millions upon millions of tons of coal we've burned?
Not saying Fukushima was a walk in the park, but in this conversation our scale of seriousness should calibrated with the dangers and deaths we've incurred in oil and coal. There is absolutely zero perspective in these matters, as you've brilliantly demonstrated with your (presumably intended to be devastating) one word rebuttal.
Slashdot Mirror
The development comes on the same day Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told lawmakers that 18 states have asked for help in warding off cyberattacks on their electronic voting systems.
This is one of those phrases that should result in people instantly being fired but, for some reason, never does.
How long ago did the first Diebold issues come out? And this is still a thing?
I'm almost terrified to ask but these "cyber" attacks they're worried... that wouldn't be a reference to internet based attacks, would it? Did some psychopath finally decide that that best way to fix electronic voting machines was to connect them to the internet in any setup that didn't involve an air gap?
How can you ignore the massive time and cost of clean-ups of inevitable accidents
Adopt hydrocarbon attitude: "accident schmaccident, here have some money for your wrecked house, now shut up and go away." This requires being rational about the dangers of nuclear, which from the sound of it, you aren't.
waste storage,
Old chestnut-flavored red herring. And is absolutely moronic and betrays a profound ignorance of the way nuclear works. There is no need to move any waste off-site, ever. If somehow there is such a need, fire and arrest the designer and/or manager of the place.
as it takes quite a lot of expensive education and training
No it doesn't. It takes a lot of training to build the thing. Running it requires attentive people who are mainly just there to verify the automated controls aren't doing something moronic, not Ph. Ds.
How can you ignore the massive time and cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant
Don't decommission them. We have enough Pu in principle to run them for thousands of years, last time I checked. Build another on-site if you must. If people are building disposable sites that can't be reused, fire them and tar and feather them in the press so that no one ever lets them build another reactor ever again.
I see you chose the latter option: "nuclear is expense because look, this report says it's expensive". Thank you for proving that you have nothing to contribute to this debate, which has been about why it has been so expensive and whether that expense is mitigatable.
I do believe I just clearly said that it was NOT LIKE COLD FUSION.
Let's try this again, with another analogy: Saying nuclear power will always be very expensive is akin to saying that gunpowder will never work because your firecrackers keep getting wet. It's a simple problem. It has a solution. Maybe it's an intricate compound problem made worse by your asshole brother pissing in your dresser drawers whilst you sleep, but that doesn't mean that all firecrackers everywhere have a fatal flaw. I don't know. This analogy is irredeemably idiotic but then so it this conversation. Nuclear energy production is very much cost-effective because it is really, really, really simple. Give me the fuel and I'll build a reactor myself. It's not hard.
Yes, I WILL SUFFER A FATAL RADIATION DOSE IN THE PROCESS. Obviously. But I guarantee you I will live long enough to see my turbine spinning and electricity generated. This is my thesis and its implications:
* Using fissile materials to generate electricity is really easy. Given an easy fuel supply (and with breeders or downblending of old warheads I do not think this is an issue), it's certainly easier than coal. No matches required! No smokestack required! And refueling is a rare event.
* Not dying in the process is a bit tricky. It costs extra money to do it without dying, and without polluting nearby stuff.
* For various reasons (largely involving hysterical NIMBYs who don't understand the dangers involved and decades of institutional cruft on all sides), safety-related and mitigation expenditures seem to have spiraled out of control and driven up prices whilst sensible safety measures (of the sort that would have prevented Fukushima) are neglected.
* The yardstick we're using here, obviously, is the amount of harm we tolerate with coal. The damage from radioactive isotopes should not be treated as being markedly more dangerous than we would treat them if they were non-radioactive toxic chemicals with similar a dispersal, absorption, persistence and carcinogen/teratogen potential profile.
* The "affordable safety" issue is not a hard problem like rocketry is hard, nor is it impossible like cold fusion (almost certainly) is; it's a hard problem like writing a fully functional desktop operating system in Haskell is a bit hard. It's absolutely possible. No one knowledgeable would or could argue it's impossible, but it does take a bit of expertise and patience and elbow grease.
* The challenge would be worth undertaking due to the massive problems global with hydrocarbons, particularly (but certainly not limited to) global warming.
* I'm actually so pessimistic about people ever thinking or talking sensibly about nuclear power that in the end I'd probably back renewables instead.
* That doesn't mean I'm sitting idly by, letting people talk nonsense about it being intrinsically more difficult or worse for the environment to shove of pile of U or Pu under a water tank and walk away vs. burning thousands of tons of coal under that same tank.
Quick, see if you can grossly misunderstand something else. I haven't had to explain stuff to cantankerous sloths in quite a while... I could use the practice.
Popularity of a language is immaterial to the usefulness of a language
That would be lovely, if it were actually true.
But first, a sort of olive branch: I don't entirely disagree. At the bottom line, nuclear HAS often been rather expensive. But I am in favor of actually exploring why. I can't help it if most governments have got it wrong. It appears to be a case of overcautious regulation giving nesting room for bureaucratic parasites on all sides (regulators, lobbyists, assorted "experts" who don't understand the first thing about mechanical and architectural design, which is where the real challenges are), and in the resulting mess not enough competent engineers are allowed into the high level meetings where these things are decided.
Clean up nuclear power's current problems first
Please. Clean up hydrocarbon's problems first. Stop poisoning our children (and whales and dolphins and other keystone predators) with mercury. Stop acid rain from killing endangered species all over the globe. Stop global warming. Stop poisoning water supplies. Stop allowing oil spills that cover thousands upon thousands of square miles. Stop killing workers in explosions and cave-ins. Stop the hundreds (possibly thousands) of out of control coal seam fires around the world that will burn for hundreds of years, significantly adding to global warming and even occasionally destroying entire towns and displacing thousands of people.
Do all of that, and then maybe we'll see if we can sensibly spare any tears for the two dudes in Fukushima who got radiation burns, or the ~0.43 of a person at Three Mile Island (or whatever it was) that may have died from cancer after the worst nuclear accident America has ever seen.
any sort of nasty waste that lingers as a dnager for a millenia.
Oh yes, and then this ridiculous thing. I've explained why it's ridiculous in at least three replies now; shall we go for a fourth? There is no massive amount of waste produced. If the plants were competently designed and administered, all waste could be kept on-site. And no one complains about the mercury released from coal. Do you know how long mercury lasts before it decays? Billions of years.
The amount of fear-mongering over non-radioactive poisons, including heavy metals and dioxins, isn't even a tenth of the hysteria surrounding radioactive poisons.
There are real debates to be had, but the anti-nukers almost entirely lead with their worst foot and refuse to admit that they are talking gibberish. In the end, I actually tend to agree with you that "alternative" power is more generally worthy of investment, but mostly only because hysterically misinformed people will continue to stand in the way of real nuclear power reform and innovation.
Do I really need to rehash it all? The higher cost is due to increased safety concerns, direct and indirect, implicit and explicit. The fuel already exists in abundance (decommissioned nukes, possibility of breeding Pu, etc.) You're saying it's more expensive to plop that fuel underneath the water tank that leads to the turbine than it is to build a smokestack and pay for miners to dig up thousands of tons of coal and haul it there and burn it underneath the same (in principle) water tank? You do understand that those coal miners and truck drivers don't work for free? You do understand that no one is going to build the extra smokestack for free?
When expenditures due to safety concerns are tracked separately, nuclear is intrinsically cheaper especially when given an existing supply of fuel, because that fuel is just so goddamn dense. The expense comes from--it must come from--safety concerns, concerns which (given the track record of hydrocarbons vs. nuclear) seem clearly overblown except to the extent that we need fail-cold reactor designs to prevent economic damage if nothing else.
If you want to argue that the safety is indispensable and therefore nuclear will always remain too expensive you're free to try. Or you can just keep saying "uh, it's too expensive because this piece of paper says it's too expensive"... which is a marvelous way of winning any argument, I suppose.
The breeder argument wasn't necessarily vital to what I was saying. Another worthy plan is to decrease our weapons stockpiles and use the downblended stuff to power the reactors. Either way, at the end of the day you're shoving something that is naturally, intrinsically hot (and "burns" for ages) underneath the water tank, sittin' back and watching it go around and around, with no barges full of fuel to unload or smokestacks to keep clean, and when you do need to change out the fuel you put your waste in a modest-sized storage building on-site (not these vast, top secret landfills people keep insisting we need.) And if you're feeling particularly ambitious you can string some HVDC lines out to some remote location and scale up the whole thing in ways that coal can only dream of.
My thesis is that if certain people haven't been able to make it cost-competitive yet, it is due to some combination of paranoid hysteria (relative to the dangers hydrocarbons pose) and those specific people being morons, not because the underlying techniques are just so intrinsically gosh-darn expensive.
You're conflating the idiocy of the humans in charge with the underlying technology. You can't declare it doesn't work like cold fusion doesn't work; you can only declare that the guy who built it (or the guys running it) suck(s). Heat and radiation propagate according to very simple laws. There are no moving parts within the reacting mass itself. The only potentially nasty surprise from an engineering perspective is neutron embrittlement, but we've decades of measurements on that.
What is it like to read about a problem in the newspaper and assume that it's just an insolvable problem that has resisted the best efforts of mice and men instead of what it almost certainly is, a clusterfuck caused by stupid, lazy and/or malevolent people? I must have felt the way you do long ago, as child I suppose, but for the life of me I can't recall it.
Do you know how little volume a metric ton of metal and concrete occupies? Do you know how energy-dense uranium itself is?
If we're generating so much waste that we can't store it on site, immediately adjacent to the current reactor and equiment, then someone somewhere is doing something terribly wrong. Yes, there is neutron embrittlement and normal wear and tear, but this is not something you need a full-sized landfill for.
The storage issues, if any exist, either result from plant closures or from the unscrupulous owners or managers of the plants convincing moronic regulators to allow them to move the materials off-site (which they might do to decrease their workload, I suppose. Or it perhaps it allows them to be much sloppier about the stuff they expose to intense radiation. Either way, there's no excuse for it.)
In the future, you may wish to try using the word "you" a bit less and actually articulating what your view of the matter is. No one is asking you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, for a character reference.
Wait a second... the "joke" was me ingesting tritium? Because you think I don't understand that the major problem with nuclear reactors is with bioabsorbtion of radioisotopes, as opposed to radiation directly emitted by the core? Uh, ok.
Yeah, uh, that's fucking hilarious. Let me try one: Perhaps you enjoyed bananas a little too much as a kid?
Every one views nuclear damage as more dangerous because it is more dangerous, no ifs no buts.
You just disqualified yourself from this conversation, sorry. Global warming is, in fact, a thing. Burning coal causing our fish to accumulate mercury, which in turn lowers the IQs of our children, is a thing. If you aren't willing to compare these harmful effects to the effects of nuclear, you are an unreasonable and unthinking person.
Woosh.
The point is that if those accidents are "serious", many hydrocarbon accidents would have to be classified as stupendous calamities. Even the standard operation of coal power plants (without any accidents) results in much more harm done than all of those accidents combined. This isn't a conversation about nuclear vs. nothing; it's largely about nuclear vs. hydrocarbon.
I guess I needed to spell that out a little more exactingly.
don't actually think of autism as an insult*
I believe I just did. Lesson 1: People suck and you need to examine the facts and think for yourself.
Regarding breeding, I was illustrating that the process is, at its core, not terribly delicate or finicky or requiring expensive precise equipment (as rocketry), except as far as safety goes. The reason for expense is safety, some of which is warranted, some of which clearly isn't.
If you knew what you were talking about you could explain the joke, figure out what its about and explain why.
Wow. That... just wow. That bit wasn't even the joke. Or maybe it is. Depends on your sense of humor. Ok, here it is, and it's a real knee-slapper: Burning coal releases mercury, which settles in the sea and bioaccumulates in fish, which bioaccumulates in children who eat the fish, and like most heavy metals it permanently damages their growing brains in addition to some other nasty long term health effects. In some parts of the world, the fish is the staple and they don't have access to the information about the dangers of eating too much. There's some debate about whether most of the mercury in fish comes from power plants or gold manufacture or some other sources, but the last I heard it was clear that coal power plants were at the very least a significant source.
Bioaccumulation also describes the process by which people absorbed lead from the exhaust of leaded gasoline, which in some areas appeared to give rise to a fairly dramatic growth in crime rate... because it was damaging kids' growing brains, making them more stupid and prone to impulse control problems (and thus criminality.)
Anyway, if you want to insist that Fukushima is a maximum-level catastrophe then I'm afraid you'll have to do better than quoting some Wikipedia article that we all read years ago. I eagerly await to hear how *you* define accidents wherein people actually die. Oh wait, you don't care about those because they're not sexy like radiation. Which is and was entirely my point. And no I don't huge care whether that radiation is due to long lived isotope or short lived created isotope or some transient source, because that alone is not and was not the point. The point is that nuclear is not inherently more expensive and so when judging the expense of nuclear the relative safety is of paramount importance.
Your definition is irrelevant. Your narcissism, adorable.
Your unthinking slavishness to whatever marketingspeak a 15 second Google digs up is irrelevant and less adorable. Fukushima was less serious than the BP accident by any sane measure. Put the reactor out in the middle of nowheresville, America, string some HVDC lines, make it fail cold instead of fail hot with a stronger focus on gaseous or particulate containment in the event the shit hits the fan, give the poor bastards hazard pay and the next accident should barely make the local news.
But that's only true if indeed the impact to human life or the environment were the yardstick here. It's clear that you have a preference for more sensationalist and less relevant measures of harm done, so you may now return to your ignorant scaremongering.
This is almost entirely unalloyed solipsism on your part. If you aren't interested in the conversation you cut into, which specifically excluded the right wing in America (it was already implicitly agreed that they were intolerant), nor interested in giving a clear opinion on the broader conversation regarding tolerance of intolerance, then I'm afraid I can't be bothered to formulate any further replies.
This was not a conversation about prioritization of concerns or whatever lame psychoanalytical witch hunt for crypto-fascists you've got going on here.
Fukushima is an INES level 7 event defined as a 'Major' accident which is more severe than a INES level 6 event defined as a 'Serious' accident. You are clearly, with regards to then international communities definitions of the terms in International Nuclear Event Scale [wikipedia.org], wrong.
The "international community" is a blend of supefyingly dull simpletons, hysterical dolts and Machiavellian assholes. I don't care if they defined it as doubleplus ungood. I define "serious" in terms of the effects that hydrocarbon usage has had and is having, which directly kills people on a regular basis and in the bigger picture borders on catastrophic even if global warming is ignored.
No, you don't know what you are talking about.
Do you eat thirteen servings of carbohydrates a day or whatever the hell it was those assholes said when we were in elementary school? Do you wet yourself every time the Terror Alert goes into the red zone?
Figure out the difference between radionuclide and radioactive. What is bio-accumulation? You need to understand this first.
Bioaccumulation is the process by which childrens' IQs are being stunted by the byproducts of burning hydrocarbons. The issue isn't nearly as bad as it was in the days of leaded gasoline in cars, but I'm a tad worried about it all the same.
Those aren't the magical hysteria words (which was the point of my statement) but I am well aware of the distinction, thanks. I'm also aware of the fact that high voltage DC lines are capable of quite impressive long distance performance, and that nuclear power could be scaled up ways almost no one bothers suggesting (including other ways in which the heat could be utilized) because they are too busy pretending to be intellectual by spewing out sclerotic acronyms used to describe the infantile mistakes and abandoned projects of decades past instead of what could be.
What could possibly go wrong. Go read up on EBRII, IFR. Go find out what the difference between a Fast 'Burner' and Fast Breeder.
Yes, those acronyms. Thanks.
The additional downside to breeder reactors is the increased nuclear waste and higher potential for radiation exposure. These are not marginal concerns, these are quite frankly life altering and life ending concerns.
This isn't supported by the evidence or by reasonable hypotheticals. If the engineers and operators can refrain from doing extremely stupid experimental things (Chernobyl), the danger to human life is clearly much lower than coal and oil. Even using old, moronic designs that went into meltdown mode when they lost power to the machinery, the misery and suffering Fukushima inflicted is clearly lower than the suffering inflicted by coal and oil. I'm talking about both the macro and the micro pictures here. There's bits of ground in Chernobyl that I wouldn't want to go picnicking on, sure, but I wouldn't want to picnic in Centralia, either.
The additional downside to breeder reactors is the increased nuclear waste
A non-issue. I could give you literally ten different reasons as to why this is a non-issue, but my two favorite ones are there shouldn't be so much nuclear waste that you couldn't keep it all on-site, and that no one cares nearly as much about the long term storage of dioxins or other incredibly hazardous but nonradioactive chemicals.
My reasons for opposing nuclear power is not because of the science (I understand the science) my concern is I do not trust corporations to operate in the common good.
Do you trust BP to operate in the common good? Even though they killed a dozen people when Deepwater Horizon exploded? (For those keeping score at home, that's roughly a dozen more than have been killed by commercial nuclear reactors in Amerca.) Even when damn near the entire Gulf of Mexico was darkened with petroleum and they had to spray god knows what on it to get rid of it? What of tanker truck explosions? What of coal mine collapses? What of the thousands of coal seam fires burning around the world today, fires that will keep on burning long after our grandchildren are dead? What of global warming, acid rain decimating vulnerable species, mercury in tuna permanently stunting our childrens' IQs ?
It's not nuclear or nothing. It's nuclear or hydrocarbons. There is no rational safety reason to choose hydrocarbon over nuclear, none whatsoever, except for the possibility (already acknowledged) of proliferation or other nuclear malevolence. I can't give you a decisive argument on that front , but I hope I can at least disabuse you of the notion that the poisons in coal are somehow safer than small, localized bits of radioactive contamination.
As far as the tradeoff of safety and cost goes, I believe that safety reform is needed but in its current state it is completely misguided. The emphasis should be on better and more contingency-proof designs and more durable designs, so that we can more or less set it and forget it. Nuclear reactions are not, at their core, all that complicated. It should not require billions of dollars to idiot-proof, but it does require getting over some of our hysteria and some of the red-tape cruft that doesn't add to safety but does add to the price tag.
Actually, I can give you at least one good argument on the proliferation front, and it addresses your worries (be they valid or not) about breeder reactors: let's downblend our weapons grade fissile materials and use them to power reactors. We've got what, something on the order of 10k warheads? All of them 5x-10x more potent than they need to be for nuclear reactors? Burn 'em. Sign some treaties with Russia and get them to burn theirs, too.
(Most of them, anyway. I'm inclined more towards a minimal effective deterrence philosophy than a total disarmament philosophy.)
Send the techs in to fix it. When they die, hire more techs.
Seriously, the point of all that nonsense (which I nonetheless hope isn't too far off the mark from what is actually possible) was that the expense of nuclear comes almost entirely from safety requirements, not from the intrinsic complexity of what's going on. We put a pile of stuff together and it gets hot. We put a pile of stuff next to the other stuff and it turns into some other desirable stuff. There are mathematics that very, very precisely describe all of this, there are decades of research to confirm the mathematics, and there are no moving parts whatsoever within the stuff that's actually doing the work. There's virtually no room for surprise, except that I suppose a select number of morons will be surprised that Japan might, on occasion, experience an earthquake.
Monitoring equipment can be designed telescopically to work from long ranges, away from damaging levels of neutron radiation. There are a zillion and one different ways to measure temperature, which is the important bit. It's complicated in that the plan needs to take into account all of the concerns and possibilities, but the execution is not complicated. Everything is simple where it counts. It's simple in the way that fusion is NOT (and will never be) simple. It's simple in the way that rocketry will never be simple. All remaining issues are resolvable with enough elbow grease and enough sane planning. it's just a matter of tackling each detail as you come to it and being willing to keep redesigning the whole thing until it becomes a low-maintenance, highly durable thing with sane failure modes.
Just throw a few creative MIT grad students in a jail cell and tell them they're not getting out until they've designed a cost-effective breeder reactor that isn't likely to generate more fatalities than our hydrocarbons do. How long do you think it will take them? Two, maybe three hours?
The whole goddamn mess is like a reverse-Feynman clusterfuck. Feynman was frustrated to no end that NASA refused acknowledge the complexity of the Space Shuttle and their incompetencies (in combination with all of the positive press and feel-goodery surrounding NASA) ultimately led to the Challenger disaster. This is a situation where bureaucracy isn't obscuring the SNAFU; it's actually obscuring the fact that it's a clearly defined and clearly solvable engineering problem, and in this case it's negative publicity that's making matters much worse by obscuring the fact that it is, in fact, solvable. It couldn't possibly be insolvable, provided:
1. We're willing to tolerate some pollution and some risk that is nonzero but still much less than we get with hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, as Fukushima clearly revealed, the general populace is definitely not willing to do this. I stopped listening to the news when they started scaremongering about the radioactive food.
2. We're not stupid about it. The designers of fail-hot nuclear reactors like Fukushima were stupid. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it. You absolutely must design the thing so that your reacting mass breaks apart and separates into subcritical fragments if it gets too hot.
Look, here's some more off the cuff nonsense: Heat-frangible bolts holding the thing together, with support cables that swing each piece away from the center and into its own corner of the room. Or the pieces themselves are designed to (if it comes to it) melt until liquid and then flow into separate areas of the room. Or the entire reacting mass is highly porous and upon overheating a a seal will melt and a granular neutron absorber spills down onto and into the reaction mass. It doesn't matter if these are all untenable; *something* won't be. And some similar clever trick will render breeding straightforward and safe, too. I don't know what that trick will be, but I am positive it's doable using what is, at its core, really simple tech.
Try again [wikipedia.org]. And if you're being literalist, well, shame on you.
How about you try again? I didn't say Christian Nation. I said The Bible as the constitution. The Qu'ran is the official constitution of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant distinction here that you may wish to meditate on; it's sort of analogous to the difference between being a fundamentalist Christian and being a fundamentalist Christian monk living in a monastery. When considering the implications of such an arrangement, the attitude towards innovation found in many conservative strands of Islam is worth highlighting.
Be nice if one of you wringing your hands over the overseas threats would speak out against those in-country
Are you serious? The point of this tangent was immigration, therefore the things people are doing "over there" are just a tiniestbit relevant. As it happens, we have an easy way (or we would have an easy way, if masochists like Perens weren't in charge) to deal with a subset of people who are openly hostile to liberty but want to move here permanently and make trouble.
The Bible belt deeply worries me as well, but we don't have an easy way to deal with those people. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (to put it mildly), by apparently implying that the continued existence of evangelicals means we shouldn't waste any time or energy taking some simple steps to avoid importing right-wing fascists from another wing of Abraham's festering cult.
Whereas I think if you can't admit they are two of the same kind, or even bring up their existence, you have a problem of your own.
They are basically the same in principle (just not extent.) And I did bring them up in my previous post. I vividly recall doing so; are you quite sure you are paying attention?
I bring them up all the damn time. In this case, it's not a hugely relevant to a conversation on immigration because they are ALREADY HERE. Regarding the larger conversation on tolerance, I would also be in favor of not tolerating their intolerance, but this intolerance-of-intolerance would not extent to revoking their citizenship because the world is not set up to make that remotely feasible.
Refusing to stay on the subject at hand is a sign of your own hangups on this issue, not mine. I have authored rants of incredible length and complexity on my hatred of evangelicals, but this particular tangent was about how people on the left (not just the right) have made the same mistake of tolerating intolerance. The people of the left in this country do not have a problem condemning evangelicals (and rightly so); ergo, the evangelicals are not relevant to my point, and so I talk of them now only to the extent of demonstrating how absurd your sentiments are.
Bonus points if you can talk about the actual refugees without another hand-wringing complaint about them needed to be screened, as if no effort was going to be made to do that anyway.
The screening process is currently a joke as "non-violent" Islamists are apparently able to come in, and a great many people (including Bruce Perens) are arguing that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with this.
But guess what? From my understanding, non-violent KKK members are banned from even stepping foot in the United Kingdom, let alone becoming citizens. And I really, really can't fault the UK government for making that call (though as a free speech proponent I'd prefer that they were able to freely travel there, just not be able to settle there.)
Hysterical.
Do you actually believe Fukushima was a "serious" public safety incident? How would you classify the BP oil spill, which killed a dozen people and affected thousands of square miles? How would you classify the multiple ongoing coal mine fires around the world that will be burning for at least the next hundred years and have resulted in entire towns being evacuated ? How would you classify children and pregnant women being advised not to eat too much tuna because of the brain damage they or their unborn children might develop as a result from the mercury absorbed by the fish... mercury that ultimately came from millions upon millions of tons of coal we've burned?
Not saying Fukushima was a walk in the park, but in this conversation our scale of seriousness should calibrated with the dangers and deaths we've incurred in oil and coal. There is absolutely zero perspective in these matters, as you've brilliantly demonstrated with your (presumably intended to be devastating) one word rebuttal.