After that, someone forgot to tell our political leaders that you don't secure a city street corner with a tank, it is the wrong tool for the job.
I don't think anyone "forgot" to tell. Note that General Shineki in the above link was set to retire in six months when he gave the relevant testimony (in 2003) to a congressional hearing. That wasn't a warning from a loose cannon, but a warning given by the member of the DoD leadership with the least to lose.
Another thing - they shut down all of the reactors, not just the ones in relatively high risk areas. Why are the reactors which should be "safe" by your definition still off-line?
To me, it appears to be pandering to the more hysterical, anti-nuclear parts of Japanese society and that the claims of doing this for the sake of safety are a lie.
If the same thing happened again, i.e. a large earthquake, further accidents could happen.
A magnitude 9 earthquake happens on average about once every 15 years - anywhere on the globe. Odds are good that Japan wouldn't see such a quake for centuries. Further, now that they've experienced one Fukushima, they can handle future ones. The risks are far less severe than you imply.
Re-starting the reactors would be extremely dumb until they have been made safe.
They are already safe. It took a magnitude 9 earthquake to make one otherwise.
Ironic. A Slashdotter who resorts to insults when someone disagrees with them.
That's not irony.
Just because something is cheap, doesn't mean you can't be consuming too much. A single game of slot machines is cheap too.
But it is a strong indication that you aren't consuming too much. As to a game of slot machines, the price stays cheap because from the point of view of the slot machine providers, you aren't consuming too much.
Here, your austerity comparison is broken because you continue to fail to acknowledge that the circumstances are different.
That's nice, but irrelevant to my ponit. In a free society, government is only as good as the people in it. If the people themselves aren't capable of applying austerity (conservation) on themselves, they will not succeed in applying it to their government. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work. That's not just the way should be. That is the way it simply is.
Except that some governments are better than others, despite having the same sort of people in both. And how does forcing people to conserve, reduce consumption of cheap energy, when it is not needed, make them better people or their governments, better governments? It does not follow.
Even if it were true, the damage due to failing turbines is nothing compared to Fukushima alone. 50 trillion yen or more, hundreds of thousands of people affected, whole towns lost.
No offense, but a lot of that cost is also due to over-reaction by the public and government.
Second, you're still looking at more deaths and more land permanently lost to wind power. For example, this report claims 144 documented deaths since the 70s (with most of these fatal accidents happening just in 2008-2012 period!) due to wind power and claims a minimum safe distance of 2 km from an industrial sized turbine and any residence. Off shore generation will have less third party fatalities, but with a lot of turbines you will see an increase in fatal accidents from maintaining them.
It wasn't a blind panic, it was due to the other plants having the same vulnerabilities to earthquakes and tsunami. At the very least it was necessary to inspect them for earthquake damage. In addition new technology has revealed fault lines directly under some of them, meaning they will probably never be re-started.
Nonsense. You have yet to provide a reason why most of the plants should have stayed shut down after they were inspected for earthquake damage and passed inspection. The rational response would have been to get the plants running again. Meanwhile the regulators would work out new standards for tsunami preparedness and insure that the nuclear plant operators implement the new standards over the course of a few years.
You then have the gall to blame nuclear power generation for the political over-reaction.
Consider a similar example. Suppose back in the 50s, the US had determined that seat belts save lives. Prior to 1958, seat belts weren't standard issue in any vehicle. So would it have made more sense to ban outright and immediately the driving of cars without seatbelts, leaving perhaps a hundred million people suddenly without legal means of transportation? Or would it have made sense to phase in the safety feature over a few years, eliminating the unnecessary economic turmoil?
You are just making a "bet" on when some individual will die. You can increase the pot without stating a time, in fact.
[...]
In no way is that illegal.
Three factors can make it accessory to murder. First, does the bet pay off if someone murders the subject of the bet? Second, is the bet substantial enough that someone can profit by murdering the subject? Third, will you benefit in some substantial way by the death of the target? If the answer to those three questions is "yes", then I think you're still subject to the law.
For example, life insurance allows you to bet on other peoples' lives to some degree. Some people have gamed this so that they're insuring relatives or friends who are unaware of the insurance and then killing said relatives or friends. But here, if the crime is revealed, then the insurance company doesn't pay out - it's a basic part of life insurance policies. Even if the killer succeeds at the murder and subsequent insurance payout, the insurance company loses money and fails to profit at all from the scheme. So despite it being a bet on someone's life, it fails two of the factors I mention.
Apparently, it was an all-cash offer too. I thought it might be a Facebook stock offering that could be worth far, far less by the time they would be allowed to sell the stock. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens down the road.
There was a simple solution here. Congress could have passed a similar law which didn't violate the US Constitution. They did their token bit to appear to reign in corruption and moved on.
Nonsense. Austerity works for governments, so it must work for people. After all, conservatives keep telling us a government ought to run itself like an individual run their own life.
Great. Yet another Slashdotter who goes hard core stupid when someone disagrees with them. The obvious rebuttal here is that governments in general spend more than they take in as tax revenue. And some such governments, such as those of Greece and Japan have borrowed enough to threaten the long term viability of the host country. That is the underlying cause of austerity - governments that won't stop spending until the country nears economic collapse.
In comparison, electricity-based energy is dirt cheap. There isn't a whole lot of value to conservation unless you're in a particularly energy intensive industry like aluminum smelting.
Bottom linke is that public spending needs to be conserved. Energy doesn't.
That goes both ways. How can you ask your government to conserve if the people themselves do not do the same?
In a free society, the government has many constraints that the people do not. This is the way it should be.
Besides this, your question asking for it, after the single WORST nuclear disaster of a mk1 BWR in world history?
So do you have any evidence for this alleged incompetence or are you just showing off your mastery of the caps lock key? As I noted elsewhere, merely having a nuclear accident after a huge earthquake is not in itself evidence of incompetence. After all, that can happen to competent and incompetent plant operators alike.
"Life" might, but not "life that we require to survive, either directly or indirectly, given our current (and hard-to-change) industries & lifestyles".
My point is that we aren't anywhere near where that becomes a consideration.
Why, with the biggest arsenal in the world, with terrorists shitting bricks in Guantanamo, with several dictators sabre rattling and then sitting down and suddenly behaving when three aircraft carriers and a full entourage show up off their coast, can we not manage to deal with this one, simple, irritation? Just give him what he wants -- he wants to be a martyr. He leaks, and he leaks, and at this point he's probably inventing new documents to leak. Snowden might as well be a brand name; it's got household recognition. So please tell me... what's the hold up on pulling the trigger?
Point 1: It's Russia with nukes. You shouldn't be going around advocating the execution of people when you can't be bothered to understand that there are consequences to that.
Point 2: Snowden's leaks aren't damaging national security, but rather strengthening it by revealing US federal government abuses.
Point 3: Assassination is not a signature US move. In fact, we're rather bad at it.
Point 4: If you meant satire, you're going about it in a rather bone-headed way.
Why are so many Americans allergic to living in a house more than a couple decades old?
Because the house isn't where the demand is. People forget here that demand for new construction is mostly driven by people moving to areas that don't otherwise have enough houses. Existing homes in such areas fill up just like new homes do.
So it would seem that the official findings differ from your opinion.
Negligence is different from merely being a "man-made" disaster. For example, driving cars will inevitably result in man-made accidents, no matter how safe the drivers are. It doesn't mean that drivers as a group are negligent. We could, as the original poster proposes, simply end all use of nuclear power, but not doing so isn't automatically negligence.
I am aware that the above report does at several places claim negligence on TEPCO's part, but there's only one actual claim in the conclusions. Here is the sole place where negligence on TEPCO's part was claimed:
NISA did instruct TEPCO to conduct an anti-seismic backcheck, but by not completing the
backcheck as originally scheduled, TEPCO effectively invited the accident that followed. NISA
is equally at fault because it did not ensure that the backcheck was completed in a timely
fashion, despite its awareness of the backcheckâ(TM)s importance. NISAâ(TM)s failure to demand action,
and TEPCOâ(TM)s failure to act, together constitute negligence which led to the accident. They cannot use the excuse of circumstances occurring that were beyond their expectations.
But of course, they can and did, contrary to the assertion of the report. Note that the supposed back check was called for in 2006. How that's supposed to rapidly turn into the appropriate safety measures in a few short years is never explained by the Commission.
Sure, if someone had been thoughtful enough to remind TEPCO that there was a huge earthquake scheduled for March, 2011, TEPCO could have been ready in time. That didn't seem to happen for some reason.
How would you know if something was successfully suppressed, given that the definition of "successful" includes those who use bullshit assertions themselves while attempting to label others statements as such?
Because there would be evidence of this alleged suppression. And super-cheap energy production would not be created just once.
Slashdot Mirror
After that, someone forgot to tell our political leaders that you don't secure a city street corner with a tank, it is the wrong tool for the job.
I don't think anyone "forgot" to tell. Note that General Shineki in the above link was set to retire in six months when he gave the relevant testimony (in 2003) to a congressional hearing. That wasn't a warning from a loose cannon, but a warning given by the member of the DoD leadership with the least to lose.
Defend your statist power grab like real men.
Coming from someone who posts anonymously and very off topic? You're getting the "defense" you deserve.
Another thing - they shut down all of the reactors, not just the ones in relatively high risk areas. Why are the reactors which should be "safe" by your definition still off-line?
To me, it appears to be pandering to the more hysterical, anti-nuclear parts of Japanese society and that the claims of doing this for the sake of safety are a lie.
How can a 100m tall turbine hit something 1000m away if it falls over?
There are other lethal failure modes than just "falling over". For example, a large wind turbine can sling ice or a detached blade hundreds of meters.
If the same thing happened again, i.e. a large earthquake, further accidents could happen.
A magnitude 9 earthquake happens on average about once every 15 years - anywhere on the globe. Odds are good that Japan wouldn't see such a quake for centuries. Further, now that they've experienced one Fukushima, they can handle future ones. The risks are far less severe than you imply.
Re-starting the reactors would be extremely dumb until they have been made safe.
They are already safe. It took a magnitude 9 earthquake to make one otherwise.
Ironic. A Slashdotter who resorts to insults when someone disagrees with them.
That's not irony.
Just because something is cheap, doesn't mean you can't be consuming too much. A single game of slot machines is cheap too.
But it is a strong indication that you aren't consuming too much. As to a game of slot machines, the price stays cheap because from the point of view of the slot machine providers, you aren't consuming too much.
Here, your austerity comparison is broken because you continue to fail to acknowledge that the circumstances are different.
That's nice, but irrelevant to my ponit. In a free society, government is only as good as the people in it. If the people themselves aren't capable of applying austerity (conservation) on themselves, they will not succeed in applying it to their government. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work. That's not just the way should be. That is the way it simply is.
Except that some governments are better than others, despite having the same sort of people in both. And how does forcing people to conserve, reduce consumption of cheap energy, when it is not needed, make them better people or their governments, better governments? It does not follow.
Even if it were true, the damage due to failing turbines is nothing compared to Fukushima alone. 50 trillion yen or more, hundreds of thousands of people affected, whole towns lost.
No offense, but a lot of that cost is also due to over-reaction by the public and government.
Second, you're still looking at more deaths and more land permanently lost to wind power. For example, this report claims 144 documented deaths since the 70s (with most of these fatal accidents happening just in 2008-2012 period!) due to wind power and claims a minimum safe distance of 2 km from an industrial sized turbine and any residence. Off shore generation will have less third party fatalities, but with a lot of turbines you will see an increase in fatal accidents from maintaining them.
It wasn't a blind panic, it was due to the other plants having the same vulnerabilities to earthquakes and tsunami. At the very least it was necessary to inspect them for earthquake damage. In addition new technology has revealed fault lines directly under some of them, meaning they will probably never be re-started.
Nonsense. You have yet to provide a reason why most of the plants should have stayed shut down after they were inspected for earthquake damage and passed inspection. The rational response would have been to get the plants running again. Meanwhile the regulators would work out new standards for tsunami preparedness and insure that the nuclear plant operators implement the new standards over the course of a few years.
You then have the gall to blame nuclear power generation for the political over-reaction.
Consider a similar example. Suppose back in the 50s, the US had determined that seat belts save lives. Prior to 1958, seat belts weren't standard issue in any vehicle. So would it have made more sense to ban outright and immediately the driving of cars without seatbelts, leaving perhaps a hundred million people suddenly without legal means of transportation? Or would it have made sense to phase in the safety feature over a few years, eliminating the unnecessary economic turmoil?
You are just making a "bet" on when some individual will die. You can increase the pot without stating a time, in fact.
[...]
In no way is that illegal.
Three factors can make it accessory to murder. First, does the bet pay off if someone murders the subject of the bet? Second, is the bet substantial enough that someone can profit by murdering the subject? Third, will you benefit in some substantial way by the death of the target? If the answer to those three questions is "yes", then I think you're still subject to the law.
For example, life insurance allows you to bet on other peoples' lives to some degree. Some people have gamed this so that they're insuring relatives or friends who are unaware of the insurance and then killing said relatives or friends. But here, if the crime is revealed, then the insurance company doesn't pay out - it's a basic part of life insurance policies. Even if the killer succeeds at the murder and subsequent insurance payout, the insurance company loses money and fails to profit at all from the scheme. So despite it being a bet on someone's life, it fails two of the factors I mention.
Apparently, it was an all-cash offer too. I thought it might be a Facebook stock offering that could be worth far, far less by the time they would be allowed to sell the stock. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens down the road.
I can't help but feel extremely nervous about all this.
Why? It's just moving rods of metal around. Believe it or not, that is a solved problem.
Simple answer: recycle the fuel and bury what you can't use.
There was a simple solution here. Congress could have passed a similar law which didn't violate the US Constitution. They did their token bit to appear to reign in corruption and moved on.
but If they want to pursue the case they will have to start it just like everybody else at the lower court level
And what court would that be? It appears EPIC's argument is that there is no such court.
Nonsense. Austerity works for governments, so it must work for people. After all, conservatives keep telling us a government ought to run itself like an individual run their own life.
Great. Yet another Slashdotter who goes hard core stupid when someone disagrees with them. The obvious rebuttal here is that governments in general spend more than they take in as tax revenue. And some such governments, such as those of Greece and Japan have borrowed enough to threaten the long term viability of the host country. That is the underlying cause of austerity - governments that won't stop spending until the country nears economic collapse.
In comparison, electricity-based energy is dirt cheap. There isn't a whole lot of value to conservation unless you're in a particularly energy intensive industry like aluminum smelting.
Bottom linke is that public spending needs to be conserved. Energy doesn't.
That goes both ways. How can you ask your government to conserve if the people themselves do not do the same?
In a free society, the government has many constraints that the people do not. This is the way it should be.
Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
It takes a lot of firepower to stop a ball.
We can reduce plenty before our quality of life starts diminishing.
Then why haven't we done that already? I think people are way too glib about conservation and what it can achieve.
Besides this, your question asking for it, after the single WORST nuclear disaster of a mk1 BWR in world history?
So do you have any evidence for this alleged incompetence or are you just showing off your mastery of the caps lock key? As I noted elsewhere, merely having a nuclear accident after a huge earthquake is not in itself evidence of incompetence. After all, that can happen to competent and incompetent plant operators alike.
"Life" might, but not "life that we require to survive, either directly or indirectly, given our current (and hard-to-change) industries & lifestyles".
My point is that we aren't anywhere near where that becomes a consideration.
If Obama has Snowden killed, there would be a lot of posturing from the Kremlin and fuck-all else.
Yea right. How about for starters, escalation of the Syrian civil war?
We should send all those fucking smart-arse slashdotters over to work on the dangerous reactor cleanup.
You know, it'd probably be interesting short term work - as long as the rest of the supersmart Slashdot population isn't there.
Why, with the biggest arsenal in the world, with terrorists shitting bricks in Guantanamo, with several dictators sabre rattling and then sitting down and suddenly behaving when three aircraft carriers and a full entourage show up off their coast, can we not manage to deal with this one, simple, irritation? Just give him what he wants -- he wants to be a martyr. He leaks, and he leaks, and at this point he's probably inventing new documents to leak. Snowden might as well be a brand name; it's got household recognition. So please tell me... what's the hold up on pulling the trigger?
Point 1: It's Russia with nukes. You shouldn't be going around advocating the execution of people when you can't be bothered to understand that there are consequences to that.
Point 2: Snowden's leaks aren't damaging national security, but rather strengthening it by revealing US federal government abuses.
Point 3: Assassination is not a signature US move. In fact, we're rather bad at it.
Point 4: If you meant satire, you're going about it in a rather bone-headed way.
Why are so many Americans allergic to living in a house more than a couple decades old?
Because the house isn't where the demand is. People forget here that demand for new construction is mostly driven by people moving to areas that don't otherwise have enough houses. Existing homes in such areas fill up just like new homes do.
So it would seem that the official findings differ from your opinion.
Negligence is different from merely being a "man-made" disaster. For example, driving cars will inevitably result in man-made accidents, no matter how safe the drivers are. It doesn't mean that drivers as a group are negligent. We could, as the original poster proposes, simply end all use of nuclear power, but not doing so isn't automatically negligence.
I am aware that the above report does at several places claim negligence on TEPCO's part, but there's only one actual claim in the conclusions. Here is the sole place where negligence on TEPCO's part was claimed:
NISA did instruct TEPCO to conduct an anti-seismic backcheck, but by not completing the backcheck as originally scheduled, TEPCO effectively invited the accident that followed. NISA is equally at fault because it did not ensure that the backcheck was completed in a timely fashion, despite its awareness of the backcheckâ(TM)s importance. NISAâ(TM)s failure to demand action, and TEPCOâ(TM)s failure to act, together constitute negligence which led to the accident. They cannot use the excuse of circumstances occurring that were beyond their expectations.
But of course, they can and did, contrary to the assertion of the report. Note that the supposed back check was called for in 2006. How that's supposed to rapidly turn into the appropriate safety measures in a few short years is never explained by the Commission.
Sure, if someone had been thoughtful enough to remind TEPCO that there was a huge earthquake scheduled for March, 2011, TEPCO could have been ready in time. That didn't seem to happen for some reason.
How would you know if something was successfully suppressed, given that the definition of "successful" includes those who use bullshit assertions themselves while attempting to label others statements as such?
Because there would be evidence of this alleged suppression. And super-cheap energy production would not be created just once.