You need to read your own link better. Right there in the executive summary there's a table that shows total subsidies for nuclear around $1.3B, gas at around $2.1B, and for all renewables at about $4.8B. So you're talking more like 4 times. Also: this just counts current subsidies. Nuclear has had the benefit of an enormous R&D budget, which was almost exclusively paid for by the federal government. Much of the current subsidy to renewables just provides the same type of assistance to that energy source that the nuclear industry has already received.
Also: this analysis almost certainly doesn't count "off the books" costs of nuclear power to the gov't. Read about the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. In a nutshell: when the nuclear power industry was trying to get started in the fifties, they found that they couldn't obtain liability insurance at any price. No private insurer was willing to underwrite them, perceiving that the liabilities involved were potentially so immense that they couldn't effectively be insured against. So the federal government provided them with what amounts to a "pre-bailout" - the government has assumed the liability for any damages above $12 billion. In other words, the US government is providing free insurance to the nuclear industry, and I highly, highly doubt this cost has been incorporated into this cost analysis (certainly, I couldn't find any references to "indemnity" or "insurance" in the document.
So, to sum up: if you're going to compare costs, well, first, accurately represent them. Also, be sure that you count ALL the costs for each item.
No, not all of them do. But all of the Eastern Time portion of the US does (since 2005, even including Indiana). It's sort of irrelevant to this discussion what Arizona does with respect to daylight time.
...my true love gave to me: 23,322 filesharing does, 23,321 bit torrents, 23,320 subpoena'd IPs, 23,319 intellectual property lawyers suing, 23,318 FiOS connections, 23,317 copyright trolls a trollin', 23,316 music executives, a 23,315 GB hard drive..... and RMS in a pear treeeeeeeee
Some mail clients (Mac Mail.app for one) will generate an SMTP non-delivery report for you - if you look at the mail and determine it to be spam, you can select a menu option to bounce it. No idea whether you can set up something to refuse delivery altogether (which would be better), but at least a bounce ought to get someone's attention on the sending side.
Dude, two words. Rooftop solar. Even in Germany a house can provide probably 40 - 60% of it's own electricity (depending siting factors) from a rooftop solar installation. Huge amounts of land not required.
mdsolar may well have an axe to grind... but that doesn't automatically mean that any source he submits ought to be dismissed out of hand. The Christian Science Monitor is a pretty well-regarded newspaper - not exactly birdcage lining material. So although skepticism is always warranted, let's not throw out this particular article because the contributor has posted questionable ones before.
The issue with nuclear power isn't safety, it's economics. The real reason no nuclear plants have been built in the US in recent years: investors can't be found... because the nuclear construction industry is absolutely legendary for cost overruns. Nuclear power is quite risky, not in the safety sense, but economically. A popular response this is "that's because there's too much regulation of the nuclear industry". My answer to that: you want to reduce the regulatory burden on the nuclear industry? Ok, NOW you've got a safety problem. It's true that nuclear plants are, by and large, quite safe. The reason they're safe is because they're heavily, heavily regulated. If they weren't, does anyone honestly believe they wouldn't cut corners on safety?
All that being said: if we're going to massively replace parts of our electrical generation system, for God's sake don't mess with the nuclear plants. Go for the low-hanging fruit - coal fired plants. These things are way, way more damaging to the environment (both from their own emissions and the devastation caused by coal mining) than nuclear ever thought of being. Closing down zero emission nuclear plants while leaving massively polluting coal plants in operation is just tremendously dumb.
Yeah, Mac owner here, and I was about to have McDonald's for lunch, but Steve wouldn't let me - it's bad for my heart, you see. He sees all, knows all, and prevents us from sin via the control chip all Mac owners have implanted.
Or maybe, you know, Steve doesn't control every aspect of my life. Could be that, too.
I think that Stuxnet permanently put the rest the idea that disconnecting your critical systems from the internet was sufficient to secure them. Sure, you need to do it, but you also need to (somehow) prevent your users from moving contaminated media into your secure systems.
No one, as far as I can tell, seriously think that antimatter has negative mass or any other seriously far out behavior. They're looking for very small differences in how an antihydrogen atom responds to gravity, not whether it would "fall up".
then the current electricity output of the US (roughly a terawatt averaged over a year) could produce a kilogram of antimatter every 7-8 months or so.
then
Still that's roughly 3 billion usd per megaton of explosive power (just in energy cost at $0.05 per kWh). I see antimatter bombs not filling the roles of the 250kton-1 megaton bombs (or larger), but things on the order of compact 0.1-1 kiloton bombs (useful for shattering deep underground structures). Much cheaper and fills a niche that currently isn't covered by nuclear or conventional weapons.
You've conveniently omitted the cost of, you know, replacing the entire electricity supply of the United States. Or did you think the entire rest of the economy was just going to shut down for a year while you diverted ALL the electric power to building this thing? Not to mention the R&D costs associated with going from 7 atoms stored for 15 minutes to Avogadro's number of atoms stored for years, then being released on command. There's also the possibility that antimatter wouldn't even WORK as a bomb - there have been some simulations that have shown that the initial annihilation reactions would disperse the remaining antimatter to the point that you get something more like a deflagration than an explosion.
Destroying deep bunkers: still a lot cheaper with existing technology.
... that if we spent billions and billions of dollars solving this "engineering problem", we'd be able to... do the same stuff we can already do with chemical propellants and or nuclear explosives? I can't imagine why no one's taken you up on this.
Sure, they stored it for 15 minutes or so, but what they stored was 7 atoms. Even a matter-antimatter annihilation of 7 atoms is not going to propel the space shuttle. And they had to create many thousands of such atoms just to catch the 7.
They require a signature for EVERYTHING, no matter how cheap or inconsequential. My favorite: I needed a replacement cable of some kind, which I bought from the Apple online store for like fifteen bucks. I get home on the shipping day, only to be greeted by the dreaded "we couldn't leave this because the shipper required a signature" sticky note. Really, Apple? Come on.
Take a look upthread - someone did the checking, and the IPs responsible for the Revere edits correspond to those favorably modifying Palin's Wiki entry.
George W. Bush sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Iraq in an unprovoked attack, killing (conservatively) many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Obviously an act of war, and, as it turned out, a wholly unjustified one. The US government continues to shelter Mr. Bush in Dallas. So, clearly, you think it must be legitimate for a Saddam loyalist group to infiltrate the US and kill him, right? No? I guess you understand the double standard pretty well then.
1) I'm not sure that you can assert "Wikipedia" as sufficient casus belli. "Some guy somewhere (we're not sure who) said you attacked us, this means war!"
The US invaded Iraq, for literally no reason at all. Oh, sure, they had official reasons (which they switched from time to time as it became to difficult to pretend to believe them any longer). I'm pretty sure that countries can do whatever the hell they want to with respect to reasons for war. I don't have any particular problem with deciding that cyber attacks could be an act of war - what I'm saying is that the US doesn't particularly care about justifications for war. We'll invade anyone, anytime, for any reason we feel like (as has been well-established by our history since 1945), and no one can or will do anything about it. That's what makes this whole thing so silly.
... that the US is going to obtain proof before they decide to attack on this basis, I've got some swampland to sell you. Exhibit A: Iraq. Reason for invading: non-existent "weapons of mass destruction". That we pretty well knew were non-existent before we started.
So forgive me if I don't bother providing proof that the US/Israel unleashed Stuxnet.
Back when I was still on active duty, I was a staff weenie on a 3 star Navy staff. One day I came into work, fired up my SIPRNET terminal (SIPRNET being the SECRET-level network in use by the military). I opened up my mail, and there it was: FM: COL Chesty Puller, USMC (name changed, obvs). SUBJ: I love you
I knew COL Puller and I was pretty sure he didn't actually love me, so I didn't open it. Turned out to be a smart move. Someone had, against policy, moved some infected files from an internet-connected machine to the SIPRNET, and it was on: Half our SIPRNET machines were OOC for several days while the IT folks purged the ILoveYou virus from them.
So, yeah, it happens. Usually because of stupid user problems.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the positive effect was about the same for decaf. It's thought that the good effects mostly come from antioxidants in coffee.
The problem, with caffeine and so many other things is not what researchers are finding. The problem is self-proclaimed "experts" who make pronouncements based on... nothing in particular beyond their own prejudices. Dietary advice is a classic example. For years, we were told that if we wanted to control our weight, avoid starchy foods. Then, although there was no evidence for it, we were told that no, the way to remain thin was radically cut dietary fat. Now we're again being told that the key is to limit carbohydrates.
You see the same thing with both alcohol and caffeine, but for a different reason: drugs, you see, are baaaaad. Even though, as the GP says, most studies have shown that coffee consumption is on balance, good for you, there's tremendous resistance to this idea. Similarly with alcohol - study after study has shown that light to moderate alcohol consumption, good for most people (strong positive effects on cardiovascular health, but slight increases in upper GI cancer - and if you have problems with addiction... definitely avoid alcohol). But there's still a very, very strong reluctance to actually recommend alcohol consumption to anyone. Because drugs are, by definition, bad. Even when they're good for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to read your own link better. Right there in the executive summary there's a table that shows total subsidies for nuclear around $1.3B, gas at around $2.1B, and for all renewables at about $4.8B. So you're talking more like 4 times. Also: this just counts current subsidies. Nuclear has had the benefit of an enormous R&D budget, which was almost exclusively paid for by the federal government. Much of the current subsidy to renewables just provides the same type of assistance to that energy source that the nuclear industry has already received.
Also: this analysis almost certainly doesn't count "off the books" costs of nuclear power to the gov't. Read about the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. In a nutshell: when the nuclear power industry was trying to get started in the fifties, they found that they couldn't obtain liability insurance at any price. No private insurer was willing to underwrite them, perceiving that the liabilities involved were potentially so immense that they couldn't effectively be insured against. So the federal government provided them with what amounts to a "pre-bailout" - the government has assumed the liability for any damages above $12 billion. In other words, the US government is providing free insurance to the nuclear industry, and I highly, highly doubt this cost has been incorporated into this cost analysis (certainly, I couldn't find any references to "indemnity" or "insurance" in the document.
So, to sum up: if you're going to compare costs, well, first, accurately represent them. Also, be sure that you count ALL the costs for each item.
No, not all of them do. But all of the Eastern Time portion of the US does (since 2005, even including Indiana). It's sort of irrelevant to this discussion what Arizona does with respect to daylight time.
...my true love gave to me: 23,322 filesharing does, 23,321 bit torrents, 23,320 subpoena'd IPs, 23,319 intellectual property lawyers suing, 23,318 FiOS connections, 23,317 copyright trolls a trollin', 23,316 music executives, a 23,315 GB hard drive..... and RMS in a pear treeeeeeeee
Some mail clients (Mac Mail.app for one) will generate an SMTP non-delivery report for you - if you look at the mail and determine it to be spam, you can select a menu option to bounce it. No idea whether you can set up something to refuse delivery altogether (which would be better), but at least a bounce ought to get someone's attention on the sending side.
Dude, two words. Rooftop solar. Even in Germany a house can provide probably 40 - 60% of it's own electricity (depending siting factors) from a rooftop solar installation. Huge amounts of land not required.
87% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Twenty bucks says that GPs assertion that nuclear is a tenth the cost of solar is one of them.
A couple comments on this.
Yeah, Mac owner here, and I was about to have McDonald's for lunch, but Steve wouldn't let me - it's bad for my heart, you see. He sees all, knows all, and prevents us from sin via the control chip all Mac owners have implanted.
Or maybe, you know, Steve doesn't control every aspect of my life. Could be that, too.
I think that Stuxnet permanently put the rest the idea that disconnecting your critical systems from the internet was sufficient to secure them. Sure, you need to do it, but you also need to (somehow) prevent your users from moving contaminated media into your secure systems.
In Mordor, Token Ring of Power controls You!
No one, as far as I can tell, seriously think that antimatter has negative mass or any other seriously far out behavior. They're looking for very small differences in how an antihydrogen atom responds to gravity, not whether it would "fall up".
Is why you would want to, when the fission triggers we have now work just fine, and their R&D is already paid for.
then
You've conveniently omitted the cost of, you know, replacing the entire electricity supply of the United States. Or did you think the entire rest of the economy was just going to shut down for a year while you diverted ALL the electric power to building this thing? Not to mention the R&D costs associated with going from 7 atoms stored for 15 minutes to Avogadro's number of atoms stored for years, then being released on command. There's also the possibility that antimatter wouldn't even WORK as a bomb - there have been some simulations that have shown that the initial annihilation reactions would disperse the remaining antimatter to the point that you get something more like a deflagration than an explosion.
Destroying deep bunkers: still a lot cheaper with existing technology.
... that if we spent billions and billions of dollars solving this "engineering problem", we'd be able to... do the same stuff we can already do with chemical propellants and or nuclear explosives? I can't imagine why no one's taken you up on this.
Sure, they stored it for 15 minutes or so, but what they stored was 7 atoms. Even a matter-antimatter annihilation of 7 atoms is not going to propel the space shuttle. And they had to create many thousands of such atoms just to catch the 7.
They require a signature for EVERYTHING, no matter how cheap or inconsequential. My favorite: I needed a replacement cable of some kind, which I bought from the Apple online store for like fifteen bucks. I get home on the shipping day, only to be greeted by the dreaded "we couldn't leave this because the shipper required a signature" sticky note. Really, Apple? Come on.
Take a look upthread - someone did the checking, and the IPs responsible for the Revere edits correspond to those favorably modifying Palin's Wiki entry.
I think that's exactly what he is suggesting, just in a Modest Proposal sort of way.
George W. Bush sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Iraq in an unprovoked attack, killing (conservatively) many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Obviously an act of war, and, as it turned out, a wholly unjustified one. The US government continues to shelter Mr. Bush in Dallas. So, clearly, you think it must be legitimate for a Saddam loyalist group to infiltrate the US and kill him, right? No? I guess you understand the double standard pretty well then.
The US invaded Iraq, for literally no reason at all. Oh, sure, they had official reasons (which they switched from time to time as it became to difficult to pretend to believe them any longer). I'm pretty sure that countries can do whatever the hell they want to with respect to reasons for war. I don't have any particular problem with deciding that cyber attacks could be an act of war - what I'm saying is that the US doesn't particularly care about justifications for war. We'll invade anyone, anytime, for any reason we feel like (as has been well-established by our history since 1945), and no one can or will do anything about it. That's what makes this whole thing so silly.
... that the US is going to obtain proof before they decide to attack on this basis, I've got some swampland to sell you. Exhibit A: Iraq. Reason for invading: non-existent "weapons of mass destruction". That we pretty well knew were non-existent before we started.
So forgive me if I don't bother providing proof that the US/Israel unleashed Stuxnet.
Back when I was still on active duty, I was a staff weenie on a 3 star Navy staff. One day I came into work, fired up my SIPRNET terminal (SIPRNET being the SECRET-level network in use by the military). I opened up my mail, and there it was: FM: COL Chesty Puller, USMC (name changed, obvs). SUBJ: I love you
I knew COL Puller and I was pretty sure he didn't actually love me, so I didn't open it. Turned out to be a smart move. Someone had, against policy, moved some infected files from an internet-connected machine to the SIPRNET, and it was on: Half our SIPRNET machines were OOC for several days while the IT folks purged the ILoveYou virus from them.
So, yeah, it happens. Usually because of stupid user problems.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the positive effect was about the same for decaf. It's thought that the good effects mostly come from antioxidants in coffee.
See here:
It is axiomatic that drugs are baaaaad. Even when they're good for you.
The problem, with caffeine and so many other things is not what researchers are finding. The problem is self-proclaimed "experts" who make pronouncements based on... nothing in particular beyond their own prejudices. Dietary advice is a classic example. For years, we were told that if we wanted to control our weight, avoid starchy foods. Then, although there was no evidence for it, we were told that no, the way to remain thin was radically cut dietary fat. Now we're again being told that the key is to limit carbohydrates.
You see the same thing with both alcohol and caffeine, but for a different reason: drugs, you see, are baaaaad. Even though, as the GP says, most studies have shown that coffee consumption is on balance, good for you, there's tremendous resistance to this idea. Similarly with alcohol - study after study has shown that light to moderate alcohol consumption, good for most people (strong positive effects on cardiovascular health, but slight increases in upper GI cancer - and if you have problems with addiction... definitely avoid alcohol). But there's still a very, very strong reluctance to actually recommend alcohol consumption to anyone. Because drugs are, by definition, bad. Even when they're good for you.