On a ground level, if your commander says "Rape that girl, I want to send a message" then yeah. On a high level, where the country has elected the president, and the president says "Go attack this country"... I don't care what the generals think. Civilian control of the military is such an important principle that it's worth an almost unlimited amount of bad decisions. What you're talking about is basically a coup by generals.
What are you going to do when some general's idea of bad orders doesn't coincide with your own personal idea? Maybe some general doesn't want to stop the Iraq War because he honestly believes that if we let them rebuild more of us will die in the long run. Your method leads to chaos.
I strongly disagree. Sometimes the future of the human race depends on not surrendering even in the face of overwhelming odds. YOU might die, but others will go on.
Well I'm not talking about surrender on an individual level. If your group surrenders and comes to acceptable peace terms, that's better than fighting just for the sake of pride. I don't understand your argument about the future of the human race depending on it, since what I'm saying has happened so many times in history and the human race is still around.
Let's talk about some concrete examples. Japan in WWII, France in the Franco-Prussian War, Egypt under Rome, Persia under Alexander the Great, and the South in the US Civil War. All of them surrendered and the human race continues. Sometimes they surrendered as victims of an aggressive enemy, sometimes as maybe deserving victims (if you consider the Civil War to be just, for instance). Which ones would have benefited the human race, or themselves, by fighting to the death and never surrendering?
Do you think it's a case of cause and effect? They have a hate day, we get pissed, we make a hate day? If so, are they equivalent or is the original still worse?
Moving on? You're seriously lost here. We created a dictator to oust a dictator who had policies we didn't like, and the dictator we created attempted genocide.
I thought you were talking about Iran and our support of the Shah, not Iraq. I guess I am lost, in this conversation at least.
Because we are not pleased with the deal, and intend to alter it?
Usually the deal is unilaterally altered by the other side and we're not pleased with the result. The original deal seemed to be pleasing or we wouldn't have agreed to it. Why rock the boat? And why do things so dramatically, like in Iran completely nationalizing the oil industry rather than gradually introducing higher royalties and, you know, negotiating? It's poor politics and it resulted in war, or proxy war.
Then we give known terrorists and genocidal fucks the Taliban a huge shitpile of money to "stop heroin production"... when they are the ones producing the heroin. Are we really this stupid? I'm not so sure. In fact, I'm pretty sure the people making policy decisions at this level are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing.
I disagree, we are that stupid. Communist countries were seen as a huge threat and Islam wasn't on the radar. Oh, fund some radical Muslims who have no chance of controlling a country or building any real power? Sure, if it hurts the commies. I think it was a huge mistake to underestimate the potential of low-level conflicts with jihadists, and a mistake that continues (look at Obama's recent take on jihad). Looking back on history, we should have *helped* the Russians support a "puppet government" in Afghanistan. We see how communism has evolved in places like China, it's really not that much of a threat.
I'm glad the military follows "bad orders" from the civilian government. It's not their job or their privilege to judge the merit of orders at that level.
But when you are making war on a population, indeed trying to eliminate their social or genetic group, then you can expect them to react violently.
Yes but who is doing that?? Terrorists and resistance fighters would have my support in the case of a genocide. However, history has shown that most wars end in surrender and the losing "social or genetic group" survives just fine. In many cases they even regain power after a while.
You just can't escape the fact that except in the face of extermination, surrender is sometimes the right thing to do.
And yet, they wouldn't even be threatening us with anything if we'd left them the fuck alone instead of giving support to an insane man in order to oust a ruler who wouldn't give us the deal we wanted on oil.
And we wouldn't be threatening them if they had just given us that deal. Or now, 50 years later, if they just stopped threatening us and worked with us. It's called moving on.
I think the message was that maybe we should concentrate less on imperialism and more on cooperation so that people don't feel like they need nuclear weapons for protection from US, or should I say, USA?
We already do this -- unfortunately it's called economic imperialism or some crap by some. You can't escape some labels. But the point is, why would we attack any country with whom we have significant business ties? Iran is free to become more friendly to the West, which would eliminate the need for nuclear weapons.
Apart from the game play aspect (you are fighting against a technologically much stronger force), it might also be interesting to use the Single Player storyline to explore the motives and situation of your current enemy.
That's a big part of the problem. It would work as a stealth game (planting IEDs, recruiting suicide bombers, etc) but it would be hard to make it a FPS game, which seems to be what is popular right now, while retaining enough realism to "explore motives" and all that.
You could do it with other conflicts like WWII. That would be interesting.
The externalized costs are offset by the externalized benefits, aren't they? Cheap gas let us build our nation much faster than if we had put everything on hold until we got advanced battery tech working. Cheap coal let us electrify our nation much faster than if we had made air quality the #1 concern. Seems unfair to suddenly say "You have to directly pay for all your indirect costs, but of course we'll ignore all the indirect advantages you give us."
Are you also for "internalizing" the external costs associated with having kids, dropping out of school.. hell, how about people who default on their mortgages? Look at the economic crisis that started with a small minority of homeowners who stopped paying their mortgages. Should they be billed, oh, $3 trillion?
ad hominem, first line. We're off to a great start already.
I'm sorry if you felt that was a personal attack, but I only meant that your view wasn't "a critical and honest view of the entire cycle" which is what you yourself claimed. I don't think that's an ad hominem in the normal sense. I certainly didn't attack you directly about something unrelated to the argument, which is what an ad hominem normally is.
So you're saying that all the problems with ultracentrifuge technology has been solved, it's commercially implemented on an industrial scale in America and that Paducah has been shut down. Before you call me a liar you could send some links supporting your claims as they look like fiction to me.
My point in bringing it up was not that you were wrong, but that you were not being critical and honest. You should have mentioned that CFCs are currently used in the refinement process but that the plants responsible for them were designed and built in the 1950s before CFCs were even on the radar. Further, efforts are underway to develop a new process that does not use CFCs. And already, the CFC use was reduced by 2/3 since 2001.
They've been working on this for years, but this year in March they have made significant progress: "Approximately two dozen AC100 machines are operating in a cascade in a commercial cascade plant configuration, which demonstrates USEC’s strategic suppliers' capability to manufacture production ready centrifuge machines and provides the Company with significant additional operational data. This is an important accomplishment in USEC’s efforts to respond to DOE’s technical concerns."
Do you think your remarks, which left out even a mere mention of these developments, were critical and honest about the requirement of CFCs in uranium production? Otherwise, did you run across that information and find something conflicting and credible to reject USEC's claims, and then decide the whole thing is not worth mentioning? Presenting pertinent facts and honest reporting about *both sides* is essential to being critical and honest.
Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant.
citation please.
Citation? That seems like basic economics and common sense to me. The energy used to gather and refine the fuel obviously costs money. The plants that eventually buy the fuel then sell the electricity produced from that fuel. As energy return goes down, the price per unit has to go up. To make it obvious to your common sense, if it took a million barrels of oil to produce 1 gram of uranium, what would happen to the price of electricity?
I guess you just don't get it, later I might address some of your other points but I'm short on time so I'll summarise. You have provided no evidence to support your assertions. What I provided you were the facts as discovered. If you are going to persist with ad hominem attacks your "argument" really has no credibility.
Wow, you are really sensitive to ad hominems, but you call me "George Bush" which is quite obviously an ad hominem. At least mine was in response to a claim you actually made.
Anyway I doubt you'll accept the evidence I've linked to. I'll note that the evidence you quoted did not support any of your claims. It was merely some information about the supply of uranium. It said nothing about energy return or CFCs. The thing is, I accepted what facts sounded reasonable (the hard vs soft ore was inte
I suppose you're talking about political reality whereas I'm talking about how it should be. It's kind of like the argument for limitations on malpractice lawsuits. We could make nuclear plant insurance cheaper without taking on the liability, it just depends on what societal risks we're willing to take. Personally I think the risks of nuclear power are exaggerated so I would be willing to do it.
A $5/gallon tax would just about cover the externalized costs of gasoline -- the environmental destruction, the foreign policy costs of keeping cheap oil flowing, the social costs of automobile-centric planning.
Environmental destruction -- what environmental destruction? You mean you've actually calculated how much it would cost to completely negate the environmental destruction caused by a gallon of gasoline? I'm assuming that's something like the cost to return the environment to a pre-human state. I don't see the point when the environment is working for us fine the way it is. Otherwise, let me know what you meant by that. If it's just something like carbon offsets, I don't think it would cost as much as you're saying.
Foreign policy costs -- can you explain this? Are you working under the assumption that there would be peace in the middle east and everybody in the world would love us if we stopped using gasoline and we wouldn't need an army, wouldn't need to send food aid to other countries, etc? If not, what portion of all foreign policy costs can be attributed to gasoline?
Social costs -- I agree with you there, but social costs are not monetary so I don't know how you're going to quantify that. Sure I would be happier if my town were more walkable, if I could ride my bike to work, if my neighbors spent more time outside.. is that $2.50/gallon? $1/gallon? I'd say $0 since you probably can't define it, let alone measure it.
Wait now, I've heard of externalities like the other replier mentioned... but road damage? Space taken up by existing? I really don't get it. Why should my gas guzzling moped pay more for road damage or space than your electric moped?
If distributed solar ever catches on in a major way, it'll be the same model -- you lease solar panels from your power company. Most people can't afford solar power even with massive subsidies, and we won't be able to extend those subsidies to every person in the country.
It's sad to me that you find nuclear power problems "good news" since it's a great, environmentally friendly, stable power supply. Personally I don't accept the arguments in the article, but even if I did I would at least call it "bad news."
But building the nuclear power plant is cheap, and getting cheaper with new plants.
The only real costs are insurance, decommissioning, and waste storage. Insurance should be cheaper with regulation -- put plants in more remote areas, limit liabilities -- and with new designs which are safer. Waste storage can already be made much cheaper by reprocessing fuel (reprocessing fuel is not competitive with mining new fuel, but is vastly superior to waste storage which is the appropriate comparison). I don't know much about decommissioning. 2/3 isn't bad for a start though.
I like your idea about reprocessing. If we had the transmission system in place to support 10000 square miles of solar panels in the desert, we could do the same thing with nuclear plants. Put them all in the desert (preferably close to the ocean for water access too), put a few refining plants and reprocessing plants right there with them... the whole fuel cycle except mining is done within 10000 square miles.
That's a good point. Does energy production density matter?
Maybe the only advantage, currently, is in transportation efficiency. A few tons of uranium can be put on a truck and driven somewhere much more efficiently than building a nuclear plant at the mine and shipping the electricity over the same distance in wires.
With solar energy or wind energy, currently, the point of collection is necessarily the same as the point of energy production and the source of transmission.
Our current nuclear power is expensive with the easily mined Uranium sources, and we're running out of those.
But fuel costs go into the operational bucket, not construction, decommissioning, safety, debt financing, etc. And nuclear plants are very cheap in terms of operational costs. That's a small part of the total cost of nuclear power, which includes all of those categories.
It's not like if the price of natural gas tripled, where the cost of fuel is a major component in the entire lifetime of the plant.
I've never understood the proliferation argument when it comes to fuel reprocessing.
It's already possible for countries to develop their own nuclear programs against our wishes (i.e. Iran). Our moral standing on the issue is already difficult (we can have them, you can't because we don't trust you). I honestly don't see how our moral standing changes when we add to that, we can reprocess our waste, you can't. And our security standing also doesn't change -- countries aren't choosing to not pursue nuclear power because "it's too hard" or "we just don't get it" -- they face sanctions and stuff like that. Why would that go away just because we start reprocessing fuel?
We got into trouble with the oil and fossil fuels because "40 years" seemed like an impossibly long time in the future and we assumed that "something would come along" all on its own without any effort on our part.
We know about reprocessing already. While more expensive than mining new fuel (i.e. it's not currently commercially viable from a fuel supply perspective), it is cheaper than long-term storage. When cheap fuel runs out, we'll reprocess our waste.
With that taken into account, the amount of nuclear fuel is certainly longer than the lifetime of the plants we'll be building in the next 50 years. At that point, why does it matter? If we build a new generation of nuclear plants because it suits our needs right now, economically, and then those plants serve their purpose and are shut down... what is harmed? I don't see the harm in having used a temporary solution.
I think many people are enamoured by the technology and the "idea" of it. It's only when you take a critical and honest view of the entire cycle do you come to the inevitable conclusion that commercial nuclear power is not viable as there is no net energy return.
I think your view of the nuclear fuel cycle is not entirely critical or honest!
CFCs are used in old refining plants built before regulations about CFCs were ever introduced. New refinement plants do not use or emit CFCs. So while true, it's not an honest, critical, or complete view of the matter.
Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant. Well, nuclear power plants have among the lowest operational costs of any type of energy production. If your assertions about hard ore are correct, it must still be balanced against alternate fuel sources like seawater, which are estimated to be about $300/kg (compared to $100/kg right now). At 3 times the price, nuclear power will have low operational costs. Again -- true, but not really critical or honest.
Nuclear storage -- a critical and honest view of this issue cannot ignore the far smaller costs of fuel reprocessing instead of elaborate long term storage. Fuel reprocessing, while not economically viable on its own (i.e. compared to cost of obtaining new fuel) is far, far cheaper than things like Yucca mountain. Most discussions either ignore it entirely (like you did) or compare its costs to the wrong thing (new fuel vs. storage). Not critical or honest.
I'm happy to hear the negative things about nuclear power, which mainly revolve around proliferation and safety, but please don't try to claim you are being critical and honest while making outdated or one-sided claims.
If someone makes a plugin (that is GPLed) that reads another form of file (which has nothing to do with the original Wordpress codebase) and is a *true* template language which uses SUBSTITUTIONS like {post_title} and {post_body} rather than get_post_body();
Seems like a simple text substitution should not change the situation in the spirit of copyright. If I rename index.php to index.txt, then have a new index.php that loads index.txt and calls eval() or whatever, have I really changed the software? If I add some text substitutions like {post_body} -> get_post_body(); then has it been changed? Simple substitution may not work for all themes and plugins but it would probably work for some simple ones. Seems silly.
currently templates are PHP coded, they should not. It's bad design to begin with and quite obvious why it inherits the GPL.
Why does the spirit of the license depend on implementation details? It's like saying since DOS had a shared address space and parts were written in assembly, you can't run any GPL assembly language programs in DOS. Or conversely if I wrote a GPL DOS clone, you couldn't run non-GPL assembly language programs in it.
It is strange in that the only difference between a Wordpress theme's relation to Wordpress and an arbitrary Linux-specialized program's relation to Linux hinges on a few implementation details like address space sharing. Seems to me if you stick to a published interface, you are not modifying the underlying program, even if your code gets pulled into the same address space.
It's not bad, necessarily, but the common wording of the license is really unclear in this respect. The license itself is causing FUD.
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On a ground level, if your commander says "Rape that girl, I want to send a message" then yeah. On a high level, where the country has elected the president, and the president says "Go attack this country"... I don't care what the generals think. Civilian control of the military is such an important principle that it's worth an almost unlimited amount of bad decisions. What you're talking about is basically a coup by generals.
What are you going to do when some general's idea of bad orders doesn't coincide with your own personal idea? Maybe some general doesn't want to stop the Iraq War because he honestly believes that if we let them rebuild more of us will die in the long run. Your method leads to chaos.
I strongly disagree. Sometimes the future of the human race depends on not surrendering even in the face of overwhelming odds. YOU might die, but others will go on.
Well I'm not talking about surrender on an individual level. If your group surrenders and comes to acceptable peace terms, that's better than fighting just for the sake of pride. I don't understand your argument about the future of the human race depending on it, since what I'm saying has happened so many times in history and the human race is still around.
Let's talk about some concrete examples. Japan in WWII, France in the Franco-Prussian War, Egypt under Rome, Persia under Alexander the Great, and the South in the US Civil War. All of them surrendered and the human race continues. Sometimes they surrendered as victims of an aggressive enemy, sometimes as maybe deserving victims (if you consider the Civil War to be just, for instance). Which ones would have benefited the human race, or themselves, by fighting to the death and never surrendering?
And because you don't care about fairness towards others, those others have no choice but to arm themselves so they can defend themselves against you.
What country does care about fairness towards others, and interprets that as not needing an army until they're attacked?
Do you think it's a case of cause and effect? They have a hate day, we get pissed, we make a hate day? If so, are they equivalent or is the original still worse?
Moving on? You're seriously lost here. We created a dictator to oust a dictator who had policies we didn't like, and the dictator we created attempted genocide.
I thought you were talking about Iran and our support of the Shah, not Iraq. I guess I am lost, in this conversation at least.
Because we are not pleased with the deal, and intend to alter it?
Usually the deal is unilaterally altered by the other side and we're not pleased with the result. The original deal seemed to be pleasing or we wouldn't have agreed to it. Why rock the boat? And why do things so dramatically, like in Iran completely nationalizing the oil industry rather than gradually introducing higher royalties and, you know, negotiating? It's poor politics and it resulted in war, or proxy war.
Then we give known terrorists and genocidal fucks the Taliban a huge shitpile of money to "stop heroin production"... when they are the ones producing the heroin. Are we really this stupid? I'm not so sure. In fact, I'm pretty sure the people making policy decisions at this level are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing.
I disagree, we are that stupid. Communist countries were seen as a huge threat and Islam wasn't on the radar. Oh, fund some radical Muslims who have no chance of controlling a country or building any real power? Sure, if it hurts the commies. I think it was a huge mistake to underestimate the potential of low-level conflicts with jihadists, and a mistake that continues (look at Obama's recent take on jihad). Looking back on history, we should have *helped* the Russians support a "puppet government" in Afghanistan. We see how communism has evolved in places like China, it's really not that much of a threat.
I'm glad the military follows "bad orders" from the civilian government. It's not their job or their privilege to judge the merit of orders at that level.
But when you are making war on a population, indeed trying to eliminate their social or genetic group, then you can expect them to react violently.
Yes but who is doing that?? Terrorists and resistance fighters would have my support in the case of a genocide. However, history has shown that most wars end in surrender and the losing "social or genetic group" survives just fine. In many cases they even regain power after a while.
You just can't escape the fact that except in the face of extermination, surrender is sometimes the right thing to do.
And yet, they wouldn't even be threatening us with anything if we'd left them the fuck alone instead of giving support to an insane man in order to oust a ruler who wouldn't give us the deal we wanted on oil.
And we wouldn't be threatening them if they had just given us that deal. Or now, 50 years later, if they just stopped threatening us and worked with us. It's called moving on.
I think the message was that maybe we should concentrate less on imperialism and more on cooperation so that people don't feel like they need nuclear weapons for protection from US, or should I say, USA?
We already do this -- unfortunately it's called economic imperialism or some crap by some. You can't escape some labels. But the point is, why would we attack any country with whom we have significant business ties? Iran is free to become more friendly to the West, which would eliminate the need for nuclear weapons.
Apart from the game play aspect (you are fighting against a technologically much stronger force), it might also be interesting to use the Single Player storyline to explore the motives and situation of your current enemy.
That's a big part of the problem. It would work as a stealth game (planting IEDs, recruiting suicide bombers, etc) but it would be hard to make it a FPS game, which seems to be what is popular right now, while retaining enough realism to "explore motives" and all that.
You could do it with other conflicts like WWII. That would be interesting.
The externalized costs are offset by the externalized benefits, aren't they? Cheap gas let us build our nation much faster than if we had put everything on hold until we got advanced battery tech working. Cheap coal let us electrify our nation much faster than if we had made air quality the #1 concern. Seems unfair to suddenly say "You have to directly pay for all your indirect costs, but of course we'll ignore all the indirect advantages you give us."
Are you also for "internalizing" the external costs associated with having kids, dropping out of school.. hell, how about people who default on their mortgages? Look at the economic crisis that started with a small minority of homeowners who stopped paying their mortgages. Should they be billed, oh, $3 trillion?
ad hominem, first line. We're off to a great start already.
I'm sorry if you felt that was a personal attack, but I only meant that your view wasn't "a critical and honest view of the entire cycle" which is what you yourself claimed. I don't think that's an ad hominem in the normal sense. I certainly didn't attack you directly about something unrelated to the argument, which is what an ad hominem normally is.
So you're saying that all the problems with ultracentrifuge technology has been solved, it's commercially implemented on an industrial scale in America and that Paducah has been shut down. Before you call me a liar you could send some links supporting your claims as they look like fiction to me.
The only thing I read about CFC use in the enrichment process came from here: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/07/usec-response-on-caldicotts-cfc.html
My point in bringing it up was not that you were wrong, but that you were not being critical and honest. You should have mentioned that CFCs are currently used in the refinement process but that the plants responsible for them were designed and built in the 1950s before CFCs were even on the radar. Further, efforts are underway to develop a new process that does not use CFCs. And already, the CFC use was reduced by 2/3 since 2001.
Digging a bit further, check out this page: http://www.usec.com/americancentrifuge.htm
They've been working on this for years, but this year in March they have made significant progress:
"Approximately two dozen AC100 machines are operating in a cascade in a commercial cascade plant configuration, which demonstrates USEC’s strategic suppliers' capability to manufacture production ready centrifuge machines and provides the Company with significant additional operational data. This is an important accomplishment in USEC’s efforts to respond to DOE’s technical concerns."
Do you think your remarks, which left out even a mere mention of these developments, were critical and honest about the requirement of CFCs in uranium production? Otherwise, did you run across that information and find something conflicting and credible to reject USEC's claims, and then decide the whole thing is not worth mentioning? Presenting pertinent facts and honest reporting about *both sides* is essential to being critical and honest.
Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant.
citation please.
Citation? That seems like basic economics and common sense to me. The energy used to gather and refine the fuel obviously costs money. The plants that eventually buy the fuel then sell the electricity produced from that fuel. As energy return goes down, the price per unit has to go up. To make it obvious to your common sense, if it took a million barrels of oil to produce 1 gram of uranium, what would happen to the price of electricity?
I guess you just don't get it, later I might address some of your other points but I'm short on time so I'll summarise. You have provided no evidence to support your assertions. What I provided you were the facts as discovered. If you are going to persist with ad hominem attacks your "argument" really has no credibility.
Wow, you are really sensitive to ad hominems, but you call me "George Bush" which is quite obviously an ad hominem. At least mine was in response to a claim you actually made.
Anyway I doubt you'll accept the evidence I've linked to. I'll note that the evidence you quoted did not support any of your claims. It was merely some information about the supply of uranium. It said nothing about energy return or CFCs. The thing is, I accepted what facts sounded reasonable (the hard vs soft ore was inte
I suppose you're talking about political reality whereas I'm talking about how it should be. It's kind of like the argument for limitations on malpractice lawsuits. We could make nuclear plant insurance cheaper without taking on the liability, it just depends on what societal risks we're willing to take. Personally I think the risks of nuclear power are exaggerated so I would be willing to do it.
A $5/gallon tax would just about cover the externalized costs of gasoline -- the environmental destruction, the foreign policy costs of keeping cheap oil flowing, the social costs of automobile-centric planning.
Environmental destruction -- what environmental destruction? You mean you've actually calculated how much it would cost to completely negate the environmental destruction caused by a gallon of gasoline? I'm assuming that's something like the cost to return the environment to a pre-human state. I don't see the point when the environment is working for us fine the way it is. Otherwise, let me know what you meant by that. If it's just something like carbon offsets, I don't think it would cost as much as you're saying.
Foreign policy costs -- can you explain this? Are you working under the assumption that there would be peace in the middle east and everybody in the world would love us if we stopped using gasoline and we wouldn't need an army, wouldn't need to send food aid to other countries, etc? If not, what portion of all foreign policy costs can be attributed to gasoline?
Social costs -- I agree with you there, but social costs are not monetary so I don't know how you're going to quantify that. Sure I would be happier if my town were more walkable, if I could ride my bike to work, if my neighbors spent more time outside.. is that $2.50/gallon? $1/gallon? I'd say $0 since you probably can't define it, let alone measure it.
Wait now, I've heard of externalities like the other replier mentioned... but road damage? Space taken up by existing? I really don't get it. Why should my gas guzzling moped pay more for road damage or space than your electric moped?
If distributed solar ever catches on in a major way, it'll be the same model -- you lease solar panels from your power company. Most people can't afford solar power even with massive subsidies, and we won't be able to extend those subsidies to every person in the country.
It's sad to me that you find nuclear power problems "good news" since it's a great, environmentally friendly, stable power supply. Personally I don't accept the arguments in the article, but even if I did I would at least call it "bad news."
But building the nuclear power plant is cheap, and getting cheaper with new plants.
The only real costs are insurance, decommissioning, and waste storage. Insurance should be cheaper with regulation -- put plants in more remote areas, limit liabilities -- and with new designs which are safer. Waste storage can already be made much cheaper by reprocessing fuel (reprocessing fuel is not competitive with mining new fuel, but is vastly superior to waste storage which is the appropriate comparison). I don't know much about decommissioning. 2/3 isn't bad for a start though.
I like your idea about reprocessing. If we had the transmission system in place to support 10000 square miles of solar panels in the desert, we could do the same thing with nuclear plants. Put them all in the desert (preferably close to the ocean for water access too), put a few refining plants and reprocessing plants right there with them... the whole fuel cycle except mining is done within 10000 square miles.
That's a good point. Does energy production density matter?
Maybe the only advantage, currently, is in transportation efficiency. A few tons of uranium can be put on a truck and driven somewhere much more efficiently than building a nuclear plant at the mine and shipping the electricity over the same distance in wires.
With solar energy or wind energy, currently, the point of collection is necessarily the same as the point of energy production and the source of transmission.
Our current nuclear power is expensive with the easily mined Uranium sources, and we're running out of those.
But fuel costs go into the operational bucket, not construction, decommissioning, safety, debt financing, etc. And nuclear plants are very cheap in terms of operational costs. That's a small part of the total cost of nuclear power, which includes all of those categories.
It's not like if the price of natural gas tripled, where the cost of fuel is a major component in the entire lifetime of the plant.
I've never understood the proliferation argument when it comes to fuel reprocessing.
It's already possible for countries to develop their own nuclear programs against our wishes (i.e. Iran). Our moral standing on the issue is already difficult (we can have them, you can't because we don't trust you). I honestly don't see how our moral standing changes when we add to that, we can reprocess our waste, you can't. And our security standing also doesn't change -- countries aren't choosing to not pursue nuclear power because "it's too hard" or "we just don't get it" -- they face sanctions and stuff like that. Why would that go away just because we start reprocessing fuel?
We got into trouble with the oil and fossil fuels because "40 years" seemed like an impossibly long time in the future and we assumed that "something would come along" all on its own without any effort on our part.
We know about reprocessing already. While more expensive than mining new fuel (i.e. it's not currently commercially viable from a fuel supply perspective), it is cheaper than long-term storage. When cheap fuel runs out, we'll reprocess our waste.
With that taken into account, the amount of nuclear fuel is certainly longer than the lifetime of the plants we'll be building in the next 50 years. At that point, why does it matter? If we build a new generation of nuclear plants because it suits our needs right now, economically, and then those plants serve their purpose and are shut down... what is harmed? I don't see the harm in having used a temporary solution.
I think many people are enamoured by the technology and the "idea" of it. It's only when you take a critical and honest view of the entire cycle do you come to the inevitable conclusion that commercial nuclear power is not viable as there is no net energy return.
I think your view of the nuclear fuel cycle is not entirely critical or honest!
CFCs are used in old refining plants built before regulations about CFCs were ever introduced. New refinement plants do not use or emit CFCs. So while true, it's not an honest, critical, or complete view of the matter.
Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant. Well, nuclear power plants have among the lowest operational costs of any type of energy production. If your assertions about hard ore are correct, it must still be balanced against alternate fuel sources like seawater, which are estimated to be about $300/kg (compared to $100/kg right now). At 3 times the price, nuclear power will have low operational costs. Again -- true, but not really critical or honest.
Nuclear storage -- a critical and honest view of this issue cannot ignore the far smaller costs of fuel reprocessing instead of elaborate long term storage. Fuel reprocessing, while not economically viable on its own (i.e. compared to cost of obtaining new fuel) is far, far cheaper than things like Yucca mountain. Most discussions either ignore it entirely (like you did) or compare its costs to the wrong thing (new fuel vs. storage). Not critical or honest.
I'm happy to hear the negative things about nuclear power, which mainly revolve around proliferation and safety, but please don't try to claim you are being critical and honest while making outdated or one-sided claims.
The "Free Market" that you're manipulating with taxes to get the outcome you want? Are you being sarcastic?
If someone makes a plugin (that is GPLed) that reads another form of file (which has nothing to do with the original Wordpress codebase) and is a *true* template language which uses SUBSTITUTIONS like {post_title} and {post_body} rather than get_post_body();
Seems like a simple text substitution should not change the situation in the spirit of copyright. If I rename index.php to index.txt, then have a new index.php that loads index.txt and calls eval() or whatever, have I really changed the software? If I add some text substitutions like {post_body} -> get_post_body(); then has it been changed? Simple substitution may not work for all themes and plugins but it would probably work for some simple ones. Seems silly.
currently templates are PHP coded, they should not. It's bad design to begin with and quite obvious why it inherits the GPL.
Why does the spirit of the license depend on implementation details? It's like saying since DOS had a shared address space and parts were written in assembly, you can't run any GPL assembly language programs in DOS. Or conversely if I wrote a GPL DOS clone, you couldn't run non-GPL assembly language programs in it.
It is strange in that the only difference between a Wordpress theme's relation to Wordpress and an arbitrary Linux-specialized program's relation to Linux hinges on a few implementation details like address space sharing. Seems to me if you stick to a published interface, you are not modifying the underlying program, even if your code gets pulled into the same address space.
It's not bad, necessarily, but the common wording of the license is really unclear in this respect. The license itself is causing FUD.