The company's hemorrhaging money. And no company in their right mind would buy them at the artificially (insanely) inflated price they mistakenly think they're worth. They've been getting negative press as a bastion of partisan censorship, further alienating users. So they have to shore up the bottom line somehow..
No. Not really. Current generations of reactor designs are passively safe.
Take a look at Gen IV reactors. Look for the words "passively safe".
Look at Gen III and earlier. The majority of the equipment you see in the actual reactor facility doesn't have anything to do with the reactor itself. It's the huge, Rube-Goldberg safety systems designed to follow through on every imaginable problem with tons of "if-then" layers. The main problem becomes "what if something happens which you didn't foresee"?
Gen IV, anything happens, you stop feeding power to the reactor facility as a whole and the reaction will still taper off.
Wind farms are now mainly build at sea. They don't have land issues anway as the farmers happily farm on the fields where the wind farms are.
Even if your assertion that wind farms are now mainly built at sea was correct, this poses a problem. How much seacoast is there, and how much transmission loss is there getting it to places with no seacoast?
Also, not every land-bound wind farm is being built on farmland. And when clearing land for wind farm use, they're clearing roughly 5000 sq/m per turbine.
Solar, if it is photovoltaic, is best build in cities anywa, where you again have no land issues. Thermic solar is another thing, though.
Actually PV is best built in areas with maximum days of sun and away from obstructions that might interfere with solar coverage. That basically means that while it CAN work in cities, cities are sub-optimal. At least for carrier-grade solar installs.
Solar panels don't need rare earthes.
Correction, the bulk of solar panels, which use silicon bases, don't contain rare earths. However, multi-junction cells and some of the highest efficiency cells are built on substrates of rare earths.
Wind generators use them, but would work also without them.
At far lower efficiency or with much greater bulk...
The environmental arguments are moot. Rare earthes are extracted right out of rock or sand and usually mined in deserts. There are no real concerns.
Bullshit. There's a reason rare earth mining in this country is virtually nonexistent. The tailings from such mines tend to be chock full of things like thorium, and uranium. Which are classified as nuclear waste and are regulated far differently (and more expensively) in the US. You can't just leave the stuff lying around in a pile.
Your claim China is worth than USA, is wrong. China is building up strong regulations, since years. However they suffer from the lack of those during the recent years.
You apparently missed the entire last couple decades. China basically crashed the rare earths market by severely undercutting EVERYONE, simply by having no (or next to no) environmental regulation. They were basically open strip-mining and doing dig-and-dump.
A rare earth mine in the USA would look exactly like one in China. A big pit in a huge rock or desert.
Except the waste from the mine would be controlled differently.
Burning Biomass is not problematic because of green house gas issues, You are an idiot. If it is rotting it produces CO2 and CH4, a far stronger green house gas than CO2. Bottom line it is climat neutral if you burn it, as it wiuld rott otherwise anyway. Or more prcisely, because of avoiding the release of CH4 into the atmosphere it is even an advantage.
Ah. So we get into name calling.
Burning Biomass for power is less of a problem than just open-burning the waste. But it's still being put back up into the atmosphere at a greater rate than allowing it to decay normally. Remember, sequestration isn't about permanent removal of these substances from the environment, it's about how long it's kept out as well.
The amount of energy we produce with biomass is big enough that it is a majour player in the balancing power market.
It's roughly 43% of the energy delivered by renewable sources.
Renewable energy accounts for roughly 7% of total power generation in this country.
So, biomass (both wood and fuels) accounts for a whopping 3% of total energy produced. Hydro power, which is past its peak in the US, generates twice that. Nuclear generates 7x what biomass does. With 100 individual reactors spread across 30 states in 60 individual pla
Fukushima was a case of TEPCO not listening to their engineers. Had the sea wall been of the proper height, nothing would have happened.
Chernobyl was the result of shitty maintenance, old, faulty design and the idiots in charge of the facility playing games with the reactor and not communicating it to the next shift.
TMI was the result of poor maintenance. And it still killed NOBODY.
1: Actually, politics have almost EVERYTHING to do with it. The entire regulatory environment for nuclear power has been poisoned for most of the last 30-40 years. And the countless lawsuits by the anti-nuke crowd don't do anything to drive costs and timelines down.
The reason why the power industry lobbies for extensions on existing plants is because:
A - Trying to get a truly NEW reactor site developed is like convincing someone to have all their teeth pulled, without painkillers or being knocked out, THROUGH THEIR RECTUM. Getting NRC time simply to look at or discuss plans is prohibitively expensive. AND THAT'S THEIR FUCKING JOB! Getting local, state and federal approval is a tortuously long and painful process, with nuisance lawsuits breeding faster than rabbits.
B - Because of A, most of these power generation companies would have to replace the aging nuclear reactors with things like coal or oil-fired facilities which have their OWN regulatory nightmares.
C - Most can't implement wind farms or solar farms simply because they don't have access to the land assets necessary, and these power assets still cannot be used as base load. Geothermal is out of the picture for most parts of the country as well.
2: This is why you assign accountants to monitor regulators' finances.
Additionally, look at the history of nuclear safety in the US. Total number of people killed by nuclear power generation. ZERO.
3: Yucca Mountain was forced on Nevada by the Feds. On top of that, the flames of NIMBY-ism were fanned by the state officials talking about rolling nuclear waste down the streets of Las Vegas, when anything BUT was going to happen.
While I, personally, don't know if our engineering is up to building a facility capable of holding things safely for 100K+ years, the site is one of the most heavily researched pieces of land on the planet.
And the OP keeps talking about "we", as if there's some sort of unified front for nuclear power. That usually signifies that they're one of the anti-nuke crowd. Meaning THEY don't think humanity should use it, because they don't want to deal with the waste in any meaningful way.
Wind and solar have land use issues, habitat destruction issues and are NOT carbon neutral due to the rare earth mining that is currently offshored because China doesn't give a shit about its environment and wants to keep the RE market cornered.
Burning biomass is problematic due to greenhouse gas issues.
These forms of power are also NOWHERE near as energy-dense as nuclear power is.
A 1TW reactor is a relatively small affair. And most of the facility's land use is comprised of the cooling tower. Even the tower, a fairly large structure, is still a compact affair.
A 1 TW PV SOLAR facility currently doesn't exist. And the largest solar facility in the world, Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, produces 850MW and covers roughly nine square miles.
The largest Solar Thermal facility, Ivanpah, is set to max out around 400MW, and currently uses about 5 square miles, plus it uses a fuck-ton (about 500K metric cubic feet per year on average) of natural gas to pre-heat the facility in the mornings.
Yeah, but it's only ONE nuclear plant. One that can be strategically located (like right next to the other nuclear plant on the existing facility). So it's not like they just broke ground in some scenic place and spoiled everything.
Additionally, the land use of a reactor facility and cooling tower is a fraction of the amount of land used in a solar or wind farm.
Just the sheer amount of deaths per terawatt caused by nuclear power should make people rethink it. Nothing even comes close.
You mean that whopping number of ZERO?
You're right. Pretty much everything out there has a higher death count than nuclear, even when taken individually. So you're right. Nothing even comes close.
Because they're trying to sell a narrative that WORDS are the equivalent of VIOLENCE.
Well, over here, solicitation to murder carries the same maximum sentence as murder itself, so sometimes yes, words and the act are taken to be more or less equivalent to importance.
This isn't just "voting with your dollars" and "refusing the patronize". This is ACTIVELY trying to damage a business by harassing its customers and physically interfering with people trying to do business with them.
[Citation needed]
Solicitation to murder is ALSO an action.
Freedom of speech doesn't protect you from the consequences of how you use it or your own actions.
Plus, there's the fact that this election is a complete and utter shit-show.
If you're a Trump supporter and drop him over a single issue you happen to disagree with or a single scandal, what then?
Move over to Hillary? Why? Because her political plank issues don't match you in any way, BUT AT LEAST SHE SUPPOSEDLY HASN'T EVER TOLD A SEX JOKE!
Because one of the third party candidates that didn't match you on plank issues STILL doesn't match you on plank issues?
Basically if you drop candidates over a single issue, you have NO candidate in very VERY short order.
These people don't stick with Trump as a candidate because they're enamored of every last foible and faux pas of Trump. They don't stick with him because someone calls him racist, sexist, misogynist, etc. They stick with him because his political message aligns with issues they deem important. That doesn't stop them from thinking Trump is a potato-faced blowhard with a bad wig.
Then again, you're not really stumping for dropping candidates over a single issue. You're basically harping on it because you think that somehow these people are stupid and evil for just not coming over to Hillary based on any given personal foible, real or imagined in Trump.
But the modern SJW "culture" has become deeply and pervasively TOXIC.
Now, it's not just enough to disagree with them or even ridicule them.
No, they must be DESPISED. then disenfranchised and ultimately destroyed. By any means necessary. This isn't just "voting with your dollars" and "refusing the patronize". This is ACTIVELY trying to damage a business by harassing its customers and physically interfering with people trying to do business with them.
Why? Because they're trying to sell a narrative that WORDS are the equivalent of VIOLENCE. Thus, they can feel justified using REAL violence in response to "wrong" opinions.
I'm sorry, that shit just AIN'T okay!
If you don't like what someone has to say, fine. Debate them. Don't want to debate them? Ignore them. Don't patronize where they work.
But going out of your way to destroy someone's life? How fucking petty and pathetic is that?
There's always going to be stupid, clumsy, lazy, skill-free wastes of the act of human reproduction and air that think the world OWES them something. People like that will NEVER be rich. Because they'll never put the time, effort or capital into it.
But anyone who wants to be rich badly enough to TRULY work for it in an intelligent manner can wind up living a very VERY comfortable life.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Adware just flashes unwanted ads at you.
Malware makes system modifications you don't want, loads things you don't want, and endangers your system stability.
Windows 10 fulfills all the requirements for the latter.
The antivirus industry needs to get together and work at stamping out this malware completely.
Technically, if the tool requires that you submit to an OS that's effectively malware? How is that the "right" tool?
That's like buying a TV with a food processor attached. And to change channels or do anything, you need to stick your dick into the food processor.
I run windows 7 SP1 and I have NO problem. Auto updates OFF.
Surely that's the perfect way of getting all the viruses and malwares?
As opposed to turning it on and getting what are, by definition, viruses and malware?
The company's hemorrhaging money.
And no company in their right mind would buy them at the artificially (insanely) inflated price they mistakenly think they're worth.
They've been getting negative press as a bastion of partisan censorship, further alienating users.
So they have to shore up the bottom line somehow..
Edge could have won EVERYTHING and I still wouldn't use it.
And freaking out because nobody in their right mind would buy them and bail them out financially.
Or, if parked in the "wrong" place, a national security threat.
No. Not really. Current generations of reactor designs are passively safe.
Take a look at Gen IV reactors. Look for the words "passively safe".
Look at Gen III and earlier. The majority of the equipment you see in the actual reactor facility doesn't have anything to do with the reactor itself.
It's the huge, Rube-Goldberg safety systems designed to follow through on every imaginable problem with tons of "if-then" layers. The main problem becomes "what if something happens which you didn't foresee"?
Gen IV, anything happens, you stop feeding power to the reactor facility as a whole and the reaction will still taper off.
Sorry, basically everything you write is wrong:
Oh this ought to be good.
Wind farms are now mainly build at sea. They don't have land issues anway as the farmers happily farm on the fields where the wind farms are.
Even if your assertion that wind farms are now mainly built at sea was correct, this poses a problem. How much seacoast is there, and how much transmission loss is there getting it to places with no seacoast?
Also, not every land-bound wind farm is being built on farmland. And when clearing land for wind farm use, they're clearing roughly 5000 sq/m per turbine.
Solar, if it is photovoltaic, is best build in cities anywa, where you again have no land issues. Thermic solar is another thing, though.
Actually PV is best built in areas with maximum days of sun and away from obstructions that might interfere with solar coverage.
That basically means that while it CAN work in cities, cities are sub-optimal. At least for carrier-grade solar installs.
Solar panels don't need rare earthes.
Correction, the bulk of solar panels, which use silicon bases, don't contain rare earths. However, multi-junction cells and some of the highest efficiency cells are built on substrates of rare earths.
Wind generators use them, but would work also without them.
At far lower efficiency or with much greater bulk...
The environmental arguments are moot. Rare earthes are extracted right out of rock or sand and usually mined in deserts. There are no real concerns.
Bullshit. There's a reason rare earth mining in this country is virtually nonexistent. The tailings from such mines tend to be chock full of things like thorium, and uranium. Which are classified as nuclear waste and are regulated far differently (and more expensively) in the US. You can't just leave the stuff lying around in a pile.
Your claim China is worth than USA, is wrong. China is building up strong regulations, since years. However they suffer from the lack of those during the recent years.
You apparently missed the entire last couple decades. China basically crashed the rare earths market by severely undercutting EVERYONE, simply by having no (or next to no) environmental regulation. They were basically open strip-mining and doing dig-and-dump.
A rare earth mine in the USA would look exactly like one in China. A big pit in a huge rock or desert.
Except the waste from the mine would be controlled differently.
Burning Biomass is not problematic because of green house gas issues, You are an idiot. If it is rotting it produces CO2 and CH4, a far stronger green house gas than CO2. Bottom line it is climat neutral if you burn it, as it wiuld rott otherwise anyway. Or more prcisely, because of avoiding the release of CH4 into the atmosphere it is even an advantage.
Ah. So we get into name calling.
Burning Biomass for power is less of a problem than just open-burning the waste. But it's still being put back up into the atmosphere at a greater rate than allowing it to decay normally. Remember, sequestration isn't about permanent removal of these substances from the environment, it's about how long it's kept out as well.
The amount of energy we produce with biomass is big enough that it is a majour player in the balancing power market.
It's roughly 43% of the energy delivered by renewable sources.
Renewable energy accounts for roughly 7% of total power generation in this country.
So, biomass (both wood and fuels) accounts for a whopping 3% of total energy produced.
Hydro power, which is past its peak in the US, generates twice that.
Nuclear generates 7x what biomass does. With 100 individual reactors spread across 30 states in 60 individual pla
Standards change.
No. They DON'T. Or at least they SHOULDN'T.
They can be appended or superceded. But they shouldn't CHANGE.
Changing them basically defeats the purpose of a STANDARD.
Fukushima was a case of TEPCO not listening to their engineers. Had the sea wall been of the proper height, nothing would have happened.
Chernobyl was the result of shitty maintenance, old, faulty design and the idiots in charge of the facility playing games with the reactor and not communicating it to the next shift.
TMI was the result of poor maintenance. And it still killed NOBODY.
1: Actually, politics have almost EVERYTHING to do with it. The entire regulatory environment for nuclear power has been poisoned for most of the last 30-40 years. And the countless lawsuits by the anti-nuke crowd don't do anything to drive costs and timelines down.
The reason why the power industry lobbies for extensions on existing plants is because:
A - Trying to get a truly NEW reactor site developed is like convincing someone to have all their teeth pulled, without painkillers or being knocked out, THROUGH THEIR RECTUM. Getting NRC time simply to look at or discuss plans is prohibitively expensive. AND THAT'S THEIR FUCKING JOB! Getting local, state and federal approval is a tortuously long and painful process, with nuisance lawsuits breeding faster than rabbits.
B - Because of A, most of these power generation companies would have to replace the aging nuclear reactors with things like coal or oil-fired facilities which have their OWN regulatory nightmares.
C - Most can't implement wind farms or solar farms simply because they don't have access to the land assets necessary, and these power assets still cannot be used as base load. Geothermal is out of the picture for most parts of the country as well.
2: This is why you assign accountants to monitor regulators' finances.
Additionally, look at the history of nuclear safety in the US. Total number of people killed by nuclear power generation. ZERO.
3: Yucca Mountain was forced on Nevada by the Feds. On top of that, the flames of NIMBY-ism were fanned by the state officials talking about rolling nuclear waste down the streets of Las Vegas, when anything BUT was going to happen.
While I, personally, don't know if our engineering is up to building a facility capable of holding things safely for 100K+ years, the site is one of the most heavily researched pieces of land on the planet.
And the OP keeps talking about "we", as if there's some sort of unified front for nuclear power. That usually signifies that they're one of the anti-nuke crowd. Meaning THEY don't think humanity should use it, because they don't want to deal with the waste in any meaningful way.
I'd LOVE to see a bunch of would-be nuclear-fuel thieves try taking a jackhammer to high-strength, reinforced structural concrete...
And just digging the entire reactor vessel up?
Yeah, I SERIOUSLY doubt they're going to do that unnoticed.
Wind and solar have land use issues, habitat destruction issues and are NOT carbon neutral due to the rare earth mining that is currently offshored because China doesn't give a shit about its environment and wants to keep the RE market cornered.
Burning biomass is problematic due to greenhouse gas issues.
These forms of power are also NOWHERE near as energy-dense as nuclear power is.
A 1TW reactor is a relatively small affair. And most of the facility's land use is comprised of the cooling tower. Even the tower, a fairly large structure, is still a compact affair.
A 1 TW PV SOLAR facility currently doesn't exist. And the largest solar facility in the world, Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, produces 850MW and covers roughly nine square miles.
The largest Solar Thermal facility, Ivanpah, is set to max out around 400MW, and currently uses about 5 square miles, plus it uses a fuck-ton (about 500K metric cubic feet per year on average) of natural gas to pre-heat the facility in the mornings.
Yeah, but it's only ONE nuclear plant. One that can be strategically located (like right next to the other nuclear plant on the existing facility). So it's not like they just broke ground in some scenic place and spoiled everything.
Additionally, the land use of a reactor facility and cooling tower is a fraction of the amount of land used in a solar or wind farm.
Just the sheer amount of deaths per terawatt caused by nuclear power should make people rethink it. Nothing even comes close.
You mean that whopping number of ZERO?
You're right. Pretty much everything out there has a higher death count than nuclear, even when taken individually. So you're right. Nothing even comes close.
Because they're trying to sell a narrative that WORDS are the equivalent of VIOLENCE.
Well, over here, solicitation to murder carries the same maximum sentence as murder itself, so sometimes yes, words and the act are taken to be more or less equivalent to importance.
This isn't just "voting with your dollars" and "refusing the patronize". This is ACTIVELY trying to damage a business by harassing its customers and physically interfering with people trying to do business with them.
[Citation needed]
Solicitation to murder is ALSO an action.
Freedom of speech doesn't protect you from the consequences of how you use it or your own actions.
Yes dropping Trump doesn't mean you become a Hillary supporter.
But if Trump's primary political plank (if not his personal conduct) still matches your political leanings, who are you supposed to support?
Or are you hoping that, because they weren't going to vote for Clinton anyhow, they'll just "not vote"?
You mean like how Thiel went out of his way to destroy Gawker?
If I'm being fair here? YES! That kind of behavior is just childish and evil.
I'm not saying any one group has a corner on malicious idiocy here.
Basically, it it's tied to Tweet count, Trump can cause these people to violate campaign finance laws, simply by being prolific.
Though, realistically, it would more likely just cause financial hardship as a big chunk of cash disappears from their account.
Anyone who uses this is basically a moron who basically WANTS to be stolen from.
Pretty much what everyone else has said.
Plus, there's the fact that this election is a complete and utter shit-show.
If you're a Trump supporter and drop him over a single issue you happen to disagree with or a single scandal, what then?
Move over to Hillary? Why? Because her political plank issues don't match you in any way, BUT AT LEAST SHE SUPPOSEDLY HASN'T EVER TOLD A SEX JOKE!
Because one of the third party candidates that didn't match you on plank issues STILL doesn't match you on plank issues?
Basically if you drop candidates over a single issue, you have NO candidate in very VERY short order.
These people don't stick with Trump as a candidate because they're enamored of every last foible and faux pas of Trump. They don't stick with him because someone calls him racist, sexist, misogynist, etc. They stick with him because his political message aligns with issues they deem important. That doesn't stop them from thinking Trump is a potato-faced blowhard with a bad wig.
Then again, you're not really stumping for dropping candidates over a single issue.
You're basically harping on it because you think that somehow these people are stupid and evil for just not coming over to Hillary based on any given personal foible, real or imagined in Trump.
Jeeze. Try learning to read.
Nobody SAID it was the government.
But the modern SJW "culture" has become deeply and pervasively TOXIC.
Now, it's not just enough to disagree with them or even ridicule them.
No, they must be DESPISED. then disenfranchised and ultimately destroyed. By any means necessary.
This isn't just "voting with your dollars" and "refusing the patronize". This is ACTIVELY trying to damage a business by harassing its customers and physically interfering with people trying to do business with them.
Why? Because they're trying to sell a narrative that WORDS are the equivalent of VIOLENCE. Thus, they can feel justified using REAL violence in response to "wrong" opinions.
I'm sorry, that shit just AIN'T okay!
If you don't like what someone has to say, fine. Debate them.
Don't want to debate them? Ignore them. Don't patronize where they work.
But going out of your way to destroy someone's life? How fucking petty and pathetic is that?
And I'm saying that I seriously doubt that it's going to happen..
No, not everyone can be rich.
There's always going to be stupid, clumsy, lazy, skill-free wastes of the act of human reproduction and air that think the world OWES them something.
People like that will NEVER be rich. Because they'll never put the time, effort or capital into it.
But anyone who wants to be rich badly enough to TRULY work for it in an intelligent manner can wind up living a very VERY comfortable life.