It looks like the shutdown of the entire Nuclear Industry in Japan points to that already occurring so perhaps Japan will make inroads to wind and solar manufacturing in the same way it did with the car industry.
The Japan of today isn't the economic powerhouse of the 80s IMHO. They crippled themselves by how they attempted to recover from their 1990 recession. So maybe they'll do as you say, or maybe they won't have the old advantages any more to compete in those areas.
Not enough to be relevant. Recall the last time allegedly was 33 million years ago during the Paleoceneâ"Eocene Thermal Maximum. As to your linked study, large parts of the ocean routinely experience significantly higher acidity due to volcanic eruptions than CO2 emissions would yield. They don't stay more acidic and life manages to survive those events.
The most telling citation I can provide you from the official report is how the nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I'm sure you've sen that before.
That thread is instructive. My immedicate response to that claim was:
If someone does something incredibly stupid, like drive drunk and slam a car into a tree, what is there to learn? Don't be stupid?
What lessons were there to learn from Chernobyl? Japan didn't have reactors as unsafe as those used at Chernobyl. They didn't do stupid stuff nor were inclined to. They didn't fail to warn the public nor were inclined to.
There wasn't anything going on that was dangerous or stupid enough to where lessons from Chernobyl could have applied.
Nothing has changed to make that comment any less relevant today. And that's when I predicted:
March 24. Bet you that's the date when all these problems started getting better.
I was right on the money while you are still digging that Chernobyl hole over two years later. And my summary still holds:
In summary, I have shown that TEPCO, the owners of the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant, implemented safety systems and measures to mitigate the harm from earthquake and tsunami damage and that that these systems actually did mitigate the harm from a very large earthquake. Yet you continue your ignorant libel in the face of these facts. In your stunted view, not having high enough specs for safety systems is equivalent to all the crazy stuff that the Russians did at Chernobyl.
It's one thing to act on emotion a few weeks after a major disaster. It's a much more pathetic thing to be still parroting the same failed ideas over two years later. You've had plenty of time to correct the error of your thinking. When are you going to do it? Will you go to your deathbed clutching this ignorance?
Let's look at the complaints from the only actual evidence you gave, the report by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission:
The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion
between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said
parties. They effectively betrayed the nationâ(TM)s right to be safe from nuclear accidents.
Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly âoemanmade.â We believe that the
root causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty
rationales for decisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of
any specific individual. (see Recommendation 1)
They then give a bunch of failings of the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency. One particular gem is the claim that in 2006, all the relevant parties "knew" that tsunamis could be much worse than was originally forecast. And nobody seems to bring up the point that the plant was scheduled to be decommissioned in 2011.
Even if we grant that dubious claim (since I see no evidence that TEPCO institutionally knew of this prior to 2008 or 2009, when they had conducted their own studies), we still have the problem of determining what measures to take in response. In hindsight, it's obvious that backup generators were a weak point for such flooding. It's not so obvious in foresight.
Large organizations don't turn on a dime. Nuclear regulation in particular is a control system with several years lag.
Another complaint was that regulators apparently made a habit of asking what the plant operator would do and then demanding that the operator do just that. It's collusion, but collusion that was irrelevant to the problem at hand.
Similarly, the Commission complains about TEPCO's lack of preparedness without explaining where this preparedness for a first time ever accident in Japanese history is supposed to come from.
Much of the complaints about the "TEPCO, regulators and the government" are by regulators and government which among other things claimed by the Commission interfered with TEPCO's chain of command and caused communication breakdowns in the early stages of the crisis. Lumping all three together is deceitful.
I found remarkably little blame is specifically attached to TEPCO from this report. We know that they made mistakes, had poor design, gamed the regulatory system a little, and moved slow on recent historical earthquake research. That doesn't make them incompetent as a result.
As to the call for TEPCO's reform, let me cite the appropriate section of the report's conclusions:
The risk management practices of TEPCO illustrate this. If the risk factors of tsunami are
raised, for example, TEPCO would only look at the risk to their own operations, and whether
it would result in a suspension of existing reactors or weaken their stance in potentia
Problems with TEPCOâ(TM)s management style, based on the government taking final
responsibility, became explicit during the accident. It prioritized the Kanteiâ(TM)s intent over
that of the technical engineers at the site. TEPCOâ(TM)s behavior was consistently unclear, and
the misunderstanding over the âoecomplete withdrawalâ from the plant is a good example of
the confusion that arose from their behavior. (See Section 3)
After the accident, TEPCO continued to avoid transparency in disclosing information.
It limited disclosure to confirmed facts, and failed to disclose information that it felt was
uncertain or inconvenient. Some examples of continuing disclosure issues include the
delay in releasing electricity demand projections used as the basis for rolling blackouts, and
the lack in up-to-date information on the core conditions at the plant.
One third of the above complaint isn't even about TEPCO, but interference by government. And the rest can be boiled down to poor enforcement of
Any design requirements considering local environmental extreme parameters for only the last 100 years for a nuclear reactor planned to be operated for 50 years is an evidence of incompetence.
It would be now. But not at the time the plant was designed in the 60s. Just because a decision was bad in hindsight doesn't mean it was due to incompetence.
When we estimate that, due to human negligence we may have to evacuate whole countries due to one meager nuclear power plant
Which isn't much of a standard since a number of countries are no bigger than small cities and human negligence hasn't been responsible for a big nuclear accident in almost 30 years.
The problem with this is moving the company beyond the reach of the government would remove them from any sane laws regarding what the company can or cannot do, such as spying on everyone anyway.
Well, who's the problem here? Looks to me like it's a powerful government which is more interested in expedient exercises of unaccountable power (like spying on everyone on telecommunication networks and the internet) rather than in crafting and enforcing sane law.
My view is that too power concentrated in anyone's hands is bad, be it government, business, or even a majority of a region's voting population. Thus, I support the ability of businesses to at least partially be able to escape from bad law by moving some of their operations to other countries with saner law.
I have a solution to this problem. How about you stop being an idiot on the internet? I looked at the link and it's a video about the US and EU conducting trade deals showing once again I was right about a trivial fact.
Regardless of the safety of modern reactor designs, Japan's seismic instability and high population density makes it an inherently inappropriate location for nuclear power plants.
Why? No place on Earth is perfectly safe. And nuclear power can have a quite high benefit for its risks.
Japan has a long way to go before exhausting its latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential.
And it reasonable to exhaust better alternatives to these "potentials" first.
What should piss off Japan and everyone else is these plants are US plants, Westinghouse and Japan didn't follow the same standards for US nuclear plants, otherwise this whole thing wouldn't be were its at.
They are Japanese nuclear plants built and operated in Japan.
And why are the standards for US nuclear plants supposed to be better than the standards for Japanese plants? If a USSR design bureau had built some nuclear plants in Japan, would you be similarly claiming that these plants should be built to Soviet standards rather than Japanese standards?
One important thing would had been competent people handling the plant.
This has never been shown to be an actual problem at Fukushima. I've complained about this attitude since shortly after the disaster happened. Where's the evidence that TEPCO acted incompetently? Instead, I see now as I did back when, that TEPCO recovered well from a huge disaster.
The Fukushima plant was exposed due to one of the largest earthquakes of modern history to conditions beyond its design specifications and it behaved as intended with a contained meltdown of several reactors.
TEPCO then acted to prevent the situation from getting worse. They've since expended considerable effort to clean up their mess and take responsibility for their actions (which includes compensating those who have been harmed by the Fukushima accident).
So where is this alleged evidence of incompetence?
If it became known that someone came up with some sort of "John Galt" type way to generate super-cheap and pollution-free energy anywhere with a relatively small lightweight device, they and everyone around them would be killed or otherwise silenced, and all their research, experimental data, and any experimental models confiscated and/or destroyed faster than one can say "drone".
A bullshit assertion because it has never come up. Note this didn't happen in the internet world with stuff like email or web pages.
They want energy and energy distribution systems which they can control and use to confiscate even more of people's hard work better and thus control people better while enriching themselves, not better/cheaper/cleaner energy that empowers the individual and allows them the freedom to be less dependent and more self-reliant.
And once again, it's demonstrated that it's easier to make up shit than to actually come up with economic energy producing technology.
That's part of why higher education in the US is so expensive now. That same reasoning above led to subsidized education loans which in turn led to vast demand increases and above average price increases at universities for the last 40 years. Talk about counterproductive activities.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
And the US spends something like two thirds of all spending on the military and a couple of rather harmful entitlements (Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid).
The economically ignorant complain about how "we have the money", but can't afford whatever bad ideas they have in mind. In order to keep "having the money", you must take care of the golden geese at some point rather than just make the problem worse.
I speak as someone who bothered to get a number of technical degrees. Education is overrated. Sure, it can do the wonderful things that, for example, a liberal arts education is intended to do (such as creating a person who can think). Or it can create social contacts that are useful to the person or to society.
That sometimes happens. It also creates a lot of the problems of modern society, such as people who can't understand why we can't do their pet project when "we got the money" and people who know what's better for the rest of us (the infamous joke about "ideas so good they had to be made mandatory").
Keep in mind that with higher prices, land which has higher cost of production is used. And oil is roughly four times as expensive now as it was in the 90s. Finally, they could be coming off of an unusually high price from supply not meeting demand (as more farmers grow corn).
So the original claim can be true and still have more expensive corn than in the past.
As for this $4 fee... last I heard, our electric company had a program where you could buy solar sells from them and net-meter, their admin fee (on top of everything else) was over $30/month... so I don't see why people complain about $4!
One of the complaints is that once the fee is in place, it could be inched up year after year.
the electric company is owned by the Arizona state
Apparently, the Arizona Public Service Company is a subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation not the state of Arizona. So your chain of reasoning is incomplete. This incidentally is one reason for disengaging such services from public control. It reduces the incident of conflicts of interest.
You can't count on a swift passage through security. I believe it is still recommended that one arrives at a US airport a couple hours early just in case.
Having said that, there are other reasons to arrive early at an airport. So I don't believe that two hours would be saved, even if there was no security checks.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the shutdown of the entire Nuclear Industry in Japan points to that already occurring so perhaps Japan will make inroads to wind and solar manufacturing in the same way it did with the car industry.
The Japan of today isn't the economic powerhouse of the 80s IMHO. They crippled themselves by how they attempted to recover from their 1990 recession. So maybe they'll do as you say, or maybe they won't have the old advantages any more to compete in those areas.
Our Sun was dimmer back in the past.
Not enough to be relevant. Recall the last time allegedly was 33 million years ago during the Paleoceneâ"Eocene Thermal Maximum. As to your linked study, large parts of the ocean routinely experience significantly higher acidity due to volcanic eruptions than CO2 emissions would yield. They don't stay more acidic and life manages to survive those events.
The most telling citation I can provide you from the official report is how the nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I'm sure you've sen that before.
That thread is instructive. My immedicate response to that claim was:
If someone does something incredibly stupid, like drive drunk and slam a car into a tree, what is there to learn? Don't be stupid?
What lessons were there to learn from Chernobyl? Japan didn't have reactors as unsafe as those used at Chernobyl. They didn't do stupid stuff nor were inclined to. They didn't fail to warn the public nor were inclined to.
There wasn't anything going on that was dangerous or stupid enough to where lessons from Chernobyl could have applied.
Nothing has changed to make that comment any less relevant today. And that's when I predicted:
March 24. Bet you that's the date when all these problems started getting better.
I was right on the money while you are still digging that Chernobyl hole over two years later. And my summary still holds:
In summary, I have shown that TEPCO, the owners of the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant, implemented safety systems and measures to mitigate the harm from earthquake and tsunami damage and that that these systems actually did mitigate the harm from a very large earthquake. Yet you continue your ignorant libel in the face of these facts. In your stunted view, not having high enough specs for safety systems is equivalent to all the crazy stuff that the Russians did at Chernobyl.
It's one thing to act on emotion a few weeks after a major disaster. It's a much more pathetic thing to be still parroting the same failed ideas over two years later. You've had plenty of time to correct the error of your thinking. When are you going to do it? Will you go to your deathbed clutching this ignorance?
The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nationâ(TM)s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly âoemanmade.â We believe that the root causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales for decisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of any specific individual. (see Recommendation 1)
They then give a bunch of failings of the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency. One particular gem is the claim that in 2006, all the relevant parties "knew" that tsunamis could be much worse than was originally forecast. And nobody seems to bring up the point that the plant was scheduled to be decommissioned in 2011.
Even if we grant that dubious claim (since I see no evidence that TEPCO institutionally knew of this prior to 2008 or 2009, when they had conducted their own studies), we still have the problem of determining what measures to take in response. In hindsight, it's obvious that backup generators were a weak point for such flooding. It's not so obvious in foresight.
Large organizations don't turn on a dime. Nuclear regulation in particular is a control system with several years lag.
Another complaint was that regulators apparently made a habit of asking what the plant operator would do and then demanding that the operator do just that. It's collusion, but collusion that was irrelevant to the problem at hand.
Similarly, the Commission complains about TEPCO's lack of preparedness without explaining where this preparedness for a first time ever accident in Japanese history is supposed to come from.
Much of the complaints about the "TEPCO, regulators and the government" are by regulators and government which among other things claimed by the Commission interfered with TEPCO's chain of command and caused communication breakdowns in the early stages of the crisis. Lumping all three together is deceitful.
I found remarkably little blame is specifically attached to TEPCO from this report. We know that they made mistakes, had poor design, gamed the regulatory system a little, and moved slow on recent historical earthquake research. That doesn't make them incompetent as a result.
As to the call for TEPCO's reform, let me cite the appropriate section of the report's conclusions:
The risk management practices of TEPCO illustrate this. If the risk factors of tsunami are raised, for example, TEPCO would only look at the risk to their own operations, and whether it would result in a suspension of existing reactors or weaken their stance in potentia
Problems with TEPCOâ(TM)s management style, based on the government taking final responsibility, became explicit during the accident. It prioritized the Kanteiâ(TM)s intent over that of the technical engineers at the site. TEPCOâ(TM)s behavior was consistently unclear, and the misunderstanding over the âoecomplete withdrawalâ from the plant is a good example of the confusion that arose from their behavior. (See Section 3)
After the accident, TEPCO continued to avoid transparency in disclosing information. It limited disclosure to confirmed facts, and failed to disclose information that it felt was uncertain or inconvenient. Some examples of continuing disclosure issues include the delay in releasing electricity demand projections used as the basis for rolling blackouts, and the lack in up-to-date information on the core conditions at the plant.
One third of the above complaint isn't even about TEPCO, but interference by government. And the rest can be boiled down to poor enforcement of
Again, either an evidence of incompetence or willful neglect, or both.
I see evidence of small mistakes decades ago, I don't see evidence of incompetence now. Competence doesn't mean "never makes mistakes".
Any design requirements considering local environmental extreme parameters for only the last 100 years for a nuclear reactor planned to be operated for 50 years is an evidence of incompetence.
It would be now. But not at the time the plant was designed in the 60s. Just because a decision was bad in hindsight doesn't mean it was due to incompetence.
When we estimate that, due to human negligence we may have to evacuate whole countries due to one meager nuclear power plant
Which isn't much of a standard since a number of countries are no bigger than small cities and human negligence hasn't been responsible for a big nuclear accident in almost 30 years.
The problem with this is moving the company beyond the reach of the government would remove them from any sane laws regarding what the company can or cannot do, such as spying on everyone anyway.
Well, who's the problem here? Looks to me like it's a powerful government which is more interested in expedient exercises of unaccountable power (like spying on everyone on telecommunication networks and the internet) rather than in crafting and enforcing sane law.
My view is that too power concentrated in anyone's hands is bad, be it government, business, or even a majority of a region's voting population. Thus, I support the ability of businesses to at least partially be able to escape from bad law by moving some of their operations to other countries with saner law.
I ask again. Do you have evidence of incompetence?
I have a solution to this problem. How about you stop being an idiot on the internet? I looked at the link and it's a video about the US and EU conducting trade deals showing once again I was right about a trivial fact.
Surely conflict of interest is an argument for keeping utilities under public rather than private control
You tell me how that's supposed to work.
because then the utility's interests are aligned with the public rather than the private ownership.
That's a non sequitur, since being publicly owned doesn't actually do that.
Regardless of the safety of modern reactor designs, Japan's seismic instability and high population density makes it an inherently inappropriate location for nuclear power plants.
Why? No place on Earth is perfectly safe. And nuclear power can have a quite high benefit for its risks.
Japan has a long way to go before exhausting its latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential.
And it reasonable to exhaust better alternatives to these "potentials" first.
I don't know whether our CO2 is going to Venus the Earth. And neither do you.
I do know that conditions have been considerably worse in the past than they are now and the Earth didn't turn into Venus.
What should piss off Japan and everyone else is these plants are US plants, Westinghouse and Japan didn't follow the same standards for US nuclear plants, otherwise this whole thing wouldn't be were its at.
They are Japanese nuclear plants built and operated in Japan.
And why are the standards for US nuclear plants supposed to be better than the standards for Japanese plants? If a USSR design bureau had built some nuclear plants in Japan, would you be similarly claiming that these plants should be built to Soviet standards rather than Japanese standards?
One important thing would had been competent people handling the plant.
This has never been shown to be an actual problem at Fukushima. I've complained about this attitude since shortly after the disaster happened. Where's the evidence that TEPCO acted incompetently? Instead, I see now as I did back when, that TEPCO recovered well from a huge disaster.
The Fukushima plant was exposed due to one of the largest earthquakes of modern history to conditions beyond its design specifications and it behaved as intended with a contained meltdown of several reactors.
TEPCO then acted to prevent the situation from getting worse. They've since expended considerable effort to clean up their mess and take responsibility for their actions (which includes compensating those who have been harmed by the Fukushima accident).
So where is this alleged evidence of incompetence?
If it became known that someone came up with some sort of "John Galt" type way to generate super-cheap and pollution-free energy anywhere with a relatively small lightweight device, they and everyone around them would be killed or otherwise silenced, and all their research, experimental data, and any experimental models confiscated and/or destroyed faster than one can say "drone".
A bullshit assertion because it has never come up. Note this didn't happen in the internet world with stuff like email or web pages.
They want energy and energy distribution systems which they can control and use to confiscate even more of people's hard work better and thus control people better while enriching themselves, not better/cheaper/cleaner energy that empowers the individual and allows them the freedom to be less dependent and more self-reliant.
And once again, it's demonstrated that it's easier to make up shit than to actually come up with economic energy producing technology.
The job of government is to pay for education.
That's part of why higher education in the US is so expensive now. That same reasoning above led to subsidized education loans which in turn led to vast demand increases and above average price increases at universities for the last 40 years. Talk about counterproductive activities.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
And the US spends something like two thirds of all spending on the military and a couple of rather harmful entitlements (Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid).
The economically ignorant complain about how "we have the money", but can't afford whatever bad ideas they have in mind. In order to keep "having the money", you must take care of the golden geese at some point rather than just make the problem worse.
I speak as someone who bothered to get a number of technical degrees. Education is overrated. Sure, it can do the wonderful things that, for example, a liberal arts education is intended to do (such as creating a person who can think). Or it can create social contacts that are useful to the person or to society.
That sometimes happens. It also creates a lot of the problems of modern society, such as people who can't understand why we can't do their pet project when "we got the money" and people who know what's better for the rest of us (the infamous joke about "ideas so good they had to be made mandatory").
Keep in mind that with higher prices, land which has higher cost of production is used. And oil is roughly four times as expensive now as it was in the 90s. Finally, they could be coming off of an unusually high price from supply not meeting demand (as more farmers grow corn).
So the original claim can be true and still have more expensive corn than in the past.
Why are you even paying companies to build your infrastructure?
Because otherwise they don't have incentive to build that infrastructure. Paying for use of infrastructure makes sense to me.
As for this $4 fee... last I heard, our electric company had a program where you could buy solar sells from them and net-meter, their admin fee (on top of everything else) was over $30/month... so I don't see why people complain about $4!
One of the complaints is that once the fee is in place, it could be inched up year after year.
the electric company is owned by the Arizona state
Apparently, the Arizona Public Service Company is a subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation not the state of Arizona. So your chain of reasoning is incomplete. This incidentally is one reason for disengaging such services from public control. It reduces the incident of conflicts of interest.
What's with the drama? Electricity generating facilities of all kinds are routinely described in terms of peak capacity.
You can't count on a swift passage through security. I believe it is still recommended that one arrives at a US airport a couple hours early just in case.
Having said that, there are other reasons to arrive early at an airport. So I don't believe that two hours would be saved, even if there was no security checks.
Why would it work any better with batteries?
This time will be different!
We're already at a point of labor oversupply.
Because the demand for labor has been artificially suppressed in the developed world, not because of technology.