(1) Panama was part of the U.S. at the time, so McCain *is* natural born on U.S. soil.
No, it wasn't. The Canal Zone was occupied by the USA at the time, but that's not the same as saying it was "part of the U.S.", anymore than Frankfurt Germany was "part of the U.S." because American soldiers occupied Germany after WW2.
You claim that the wastes are safe, but you don't offer any evidence, just vague references to secret sources of information. When asked for evidence, you go the attack, claiming that because I am not satisfied with crappy Wikipedia articles, nothing would satisfy me, and because I don't have a degree in nuclear engineering, I am not qualified to ask for information.
Not quite. I claim that the specific items I've read are secret. As I said, the contents of same are widely available, but I see no need to find them for you. Do try to read everything I type, not just the parts that (you think) support your prejudices.
The fact that you chose to look at a Wiki article, and then STOP LOOKING, is your issue.
Nor did I say you're not qualified to ask for information. I did pretty much say that you're not qualified to decide whether the information you get is meaningful or drivel. Because you're not. You're no more qualified to analyze nuclear issues than I am to analyze nanotechnology, or the biology of Black Smokers, or Appalachian Folkways.
The difference here is that I'm not ready to insist that I DO know whether any particular bit of nanotechnology, or the biology of Black Smokers, or Appalachian Folkways is true or false. You, on the other hand, are quite prepared to declare that you know that all published material (even the stuff you didn't bother to read) on an esoteric subject is false, or a lie perpetrated by an industrial group. When you get past the point of knowing all the answers, you can begin to learn.
As to specific points:
I've looked for measurements of the radioactivity of spent fuel rods, unsuccessfully.
What part of "it varies from day to day, and even from reactor to reactor, much less from fuel rod design" did you have a hard time with? If I take two identical fuel rods, put one of them into Entergy's number one reactor in La, the other into the number two reactor, leave them there for six weeks, and then pull them out and measure them, I'll get different results. If I wait a day, I'll get different results on both again. Note, by the way, that I use those reactors as examples because they're near my home. I've never worked for Entergy, and never even seen the reactor buildings, much less the reactors.
Would you accept a statement to the effect of "smog levels for Los Angeles are 2ppm NOx" without wanting information like date and time, weather at the time, etc? Well, radioactivity of spent fuel rods would be like that, if numbers were presented to you - you don't even know enough to realize what questions you should ask to decide whether the numbers were typical or aberrant, anymore than the average person could do anything meaningful with a wingloading figure presented to them in the context of an airplane they question the safety of.
I've had to resort to Wikipedia for the numbers I've got, which suggest to me that U-235 converts into a complex mix of fission products, which are much more radioactive than U-235 for at least several hundred years. So the spent fuel rods will also be much more radioactive for a few hundred years. (By a lesser fraction in that U-235 is a small percentage of the fuel.)
Well, no. HINT: Fuel rods have almost no Uranium in them. They're mostly structural metal. If the gas tank of your car were filled with U-235, it would explode. But it would also have more U-235 in it than a typical nuclear reactor. It might even have more than all the commercial reactors in the USA at any given time. Depending on the size of your gas tank, of course.
The containers for the fuel rods will block much of the radiation, but I have doubts that they will maintain their integrity for hundreds of years. Some of the products are gaseous, some are water soluble, there's a complex chemical mix. It's not easy to contain.
A rejection and I'd have to pack with my family (including two US born children) and find another place in the globe to settle.
Well, no. Assuming you were married to the mother of the children (who were American Citizens, by definition), then you're next of kin to a minor American, and pretty much guaranteed to get permission to stay in the USA.
Of course, if you weren't so married, then all bets are off, until and unless the mother died, at which time the conditions mentioned above would come into play again.
You respond by attacking me when I ask for evidence. You tell me to look in Wikipedia, and do my own calculations.
And yet, your response further reinforces my opinion that you'll be anti-nuke, no matter the evidence. I also suggested looking other places, choosing Wokipedia as the usual convenient starting point.
Well, that's what I did, and it didn't reassure me. It would reassure me a lot more if there were measurements posted, rather than theoretical calculations.
Don't worry, nothing will reassure you. Since you've decided that any actual evidence that you're mistaken is part of a plot by the nuclear industry to ensure that your children all have three heads and cancer, there's not much point to offering evidence. I had hoped that you were willing to start from basics and do the calculations yourself, rather than be presented with a bunch of evidence that you'd ignore if it didn't fit your preconceptions. My mistake.
So, why aren't measurements posted anywhere? There's more than 50 years of data available, it should be easy.
Actually, most of those "theoretical calculations" were based on observed behaviour of reactors back in the day when we didn't know squat about the subject. You might also consider that "measurements" for a particular type of fuel rod wouldn't actually apply to any other type (not even to the same type put in a different reactor, really). Plus the fact that the measurements are different from day to day (shut the reactor down, walk inside, die. Or shut the reactor down, wait a day, walk inside, no problems).
I suspect that the measurements would contradict some of the claims from the nuclear industry, like the one parroted by Wikipedia that after 200 years the fission products are no more radioactive than uranium ore.
You attribute vast cosmic powers to the nuclear industry, I see. Trust me on this, they're no more capable of keeping secrets for 50 years than General Motors. Rather less, since they're not so rich, nor so influential.
That is clearly nonsense.
It's always nice to see someone who has admitted that he knows nothing about a subject identify salient features of the subject, and immediately realize that he knows more than anyone else about the subject. HINT: Get a degree in nuclear engineering and/or nuclear physics, then come back and talk about the subject.
I don't know who you are or why you are such a proponent of nuclear power, but you are not convincing me.
Of course not. I said a post or two back that you weren't going to be convinced by any evidence. Alas, I don't have any interest in wasting time writing another dissertation on the subject just to give you more things to say "that CANNOT be true, my prejudices don't allow it!"
You make all sorts of claims about the safety of the waste, entirely without any support, or with the support of Wikipedia, which is self-contradictory and hardly authoritative.
Sorry, the specific sources of my knowledge are not (last I looked) publically available. The content of those specific sources can be found in a lot of places, but I don't really feel a burning need to waste time trying to convince someone who has already decided that no evidence is sufficient.
I should like to point out, however, that you make all sorts of claims about the lack of safety of the waste, entirely without support. You even start by admitting you know nothing about the subject. It is arguable whether acknowledging authority in a subject is desirable, but arguing that ignorance is a valid starting point for discarding all authority is specious, at best.
It didn't take 4 years; it took weeks. Also, since they decided that they were going to be highly profitable in the "good times" (unlike GM, Ford, and Chrysler, who prefer to lose money in the good times and bad), they were able to weather the storm so far.
Which must be why foreign governments are considering bailing out their automakers too, right?
Note also that you don't convert an SUV plant to making hybrids in "weeks", as you so blithely assert. Sure, you can shut the SUV plant down in weeks (at a cost in jobs), but you're not switching production so quickly as all that.
Big advantage foreign automakers had was that they didn't have all their eggs in one basket - they had their local markets, as well as the USA. The American Big Three don't really sell all that many cars outside the USA (mostly because the USA is the biggest market - everyone wants to break into the American market, few are racing to be the first to break into the Zimbabwe market).
Note that I'm not trying to justify the bailout. I disapprove of it on principle. But it's not the automakers' fault they built SUV's, so much as the customers' demand for SUV's.
Unfortunately, that line is hundreds or thousands of years out, and nobody has any experience with perfectly sealed storage of something for that long.
The only reason to draw the line that far out is to justify opposing nuclear power. If you want to oppose nuclear power, go right ahead. But it makes as much sense to oppose it because "it smells bad" as because "we have to store the wastes for hundreds or thousands of years". It doesn't, and we don't.
And note finally that fission products inside fuel rods won't emit anything outside the fuel rods but gammas
You're assuming that the fission products will stay inside the fuel rods. That might be true for several years, but it's probably not true for hundreds or thousands of years. Some of the fission products are gaseous at normal temperatures (e.g. krypton-85, a beta and gamma emitter), some are likely to be corrosive, since they won't be in stable chemical forms. They're in fairly low concentrations with standard reactors, but any of the designs that burn a significant proportion of the fuel are going to have lots of extremely radioactive and chemically active things in the mix.
Quite so. They're not corrosive, they're not going to seep through a metal wall, they're not going to be extremely radioactive for long. You mention Kr-85 as an example of the bugaboo of nuclear power. Half life is less than eleven years, and virtually 100% of emissions are betas (less than 0.01% gamma). It'll be a non-issue in a century, even with grossly pessimistic assumptions. With reasonable ones, it'll be a non-issue from the get-go (beta emissions don't penetrate paper, much less steel).
Look, I'd be happy to use nuclear if the designs were seen to be safe enough to insure, and if the people running the plants had a believable way to deal with the waste.
Actually, your arguments suggest that you'd be opposed to it no matter what. You know a few anti-nuke buzzwords, but have little, if any, clue about fission products (chemical or radioactive properties), and no idea at all whether they'd be "safe". But to MAKE SURE they're safe, you'll insist that the safety measures have to be practically unachievable.
While at the same time, not worrying at all about, say, mercury, which NEVER goes away. And is more toxic than any fission product.
But they remind me way too much of tobacco companies in the way they hide information and mislead the public. Show me a nuclear industry web site that publishes what the radiation is from fuel rods before going in, and what it is N years after they come out. I've looked, and haven't seen one, but the sort of sloppy calculations I can do make it look as though the used fuel is about a million times worse than the unused fuel for decades after coming out, and is still thousands of times worse hundreds of years later.
Hate to say this, noone bothers with this because back in the seventies, it became clear that no amount of rational debate would make a hill of beans difference. Some people think nuclear power is the Devil (you seem to be one), some people don't. Evidence is not relevant to either side, really.
This is a simple case of polluters wanting to make their pollution into an externality. The nuclear industry creates a problem when they dig up the uranium, then makes it thousands or millions of times worse when they run it through their reactors, but they want the public to deal with it.
Umm, no. They'd mostly be happy to deal with it. But it's against the law to deal with it. The government REQUIRES the nuclear industry to handle radioactive wastes the way it does (including the part about sticking in a pool of water and forgetting it). The government makes it illegal to reprocess fuel rods (as much as 20% of the fissionables remain in a used fuel rod, n
Americans did nothing to force them to make gas guzzlers,
Umm, no. Americans bought SUV's by the (if you'll excuse the phrase) ton. If the "average" American had been wanting fuel-efficient cars, that's what the automakers would have produced.
As was, they produced what the market demanded - big, comfortable vehicles (that just happened to be larger than most armoured cars), and sold them by the (if you'll excuse teh expression) ton.
Then, a miracle happened - oil prices went through the ceiling, and Americans decided they didn't want SUV's anymore. Suddenly, the automakers were stuck with inventory and factories making things noone wanted to buy. Hence, the bailout.
Oddly enough, since oil prices have collapsed, I see a lot more SUV's on the road than I did this past summer....
What you are essentially saying is that our government is headed towards bankruptcy & there's nothing the Congress can do to stop it.
What I'm saying is that Congress isn't the one who has to change to stop it. WE have to change. All 300,000,000+ of us. Congress will give us what we ask for, and what we've been asking for, for decades now, is more government spending every year.
When WE decide that we've had enough, we'll change things. Until then, there's no point in blaming Congress for our overspending.
Hint: as long as YOU (and all the other "you" out there) look at the federal budget and say "well, I don't like that part over there, or this part, or the other one, but THIS LITTLE BIT HERE that affects ME PERSONALLY I approve of", then we're doomed.
And before you ask, my own "THIS LITTLE BIT HERE" is NASA. Yeah, we ALL have them, even (especially) the "reformers". Which is why we're where we are today.
Beta emitters are pretty much harmless as well. Your bed will protect you from a beta-emitter.
Note that "natural uranium" isn't really terribly radioactive. Slightly more so than granite, I'll admit, but not terribly much more.
Note also that the longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is. And the shorter the half-life, the quicker it's gone. Just draw a comfortable line in the sand, and you're good to go.
And note finally that fission products inside fuel rods won't emit anything outside the fuel rods but gammas (and neutrons, if you make the conditions just perfect - say, like the inside of a nuclear reactor). So you can safely ignore the alpha emitters and the beta emitters. And frankly, the gamma emitters aren't all that much of a problem either, really, since the metal of the rod is a gamma shield (depending on design, it'll block, say, 1/3 to 2/3 of the gammas from leaking onto your floor.
Seriously, nuclear reactor waste is more of a problem than the stuff I put out on the curb every Wednesday and Saturday for pickup. But it's not the Incredible Nightmare To All Of Civilization it's frequently made out to be. It's certainly less a problem than mercury pollution.
Cherynobyl represents the absolute worst *realistic* disaster that could come from nukes. And the actual damage caused by it could be severely overstated.
It's only the "absolute worst realistic disaster" because we have to include abysmal human stupidity in our plans for worst case. Chernobyl happened largely because the Soviet equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to run an interesting test that required that EVERY SINGLE SAFETY FEATURE be turned off, and after that the plant had to be put into an unsafe condition deliberately (the condition they wanted was a simulated meltdown, in fact) in order to prodcue the problem.
Actually talking to (and listening to) any competent reactor operator before the test were run would have aborted that test and prevented the disaster. But Soviet scientist/beaurocrats are just like American ones - they're sure they know more than the peons in the field.
So your entire argument is based upon the idea that politicians are too corrupt to do the right thing. I agree. However that was not my point; my point was that the debt COULD be paid off with a 50% cut in spending. All we need is some honest men in power who put principle ahead of re-election.
Let's see if I can get through to you. I doubt it, but let's try one last time. If we filled the House and Senate with "honest men in power who put principle ahead of re-election", they could cut spending by 50%. Then they'd all fail of re-election, since the people who voted them in would be grossly offended that Great Aunt May no longer had her Medicare and Social Security to live on. The new officeholders would be chosen by the people to restore those cuts, and would do so. End of story.
If I were president I'd simply hand Congress a budget with every line-item cut 50%, except social security (I wouldn't touch that with a ten lightyear pole). The Congresspersons would probably balk and whine and cry, but eventually a budget would pass with 25% cuts which is not what I wanted, but it's a step in the right direction.
Do you remember the last time a Congress proposed any budget cuts? I do. 1995. The didn't actually CUT the budget, so much as NOT INCREASE it as much as previous years. The President lambasted them, the media lambasted them, the public generally believed the President and the Media, and the cuts were defeated.
"We have to raise taxes" is not the only solution. I prefer the alternate solution of cutting spending. Something American families are now forced to do, and I think the American government should follow down that same path.
It's very nice that you believe that. History has shown that the techniques you favour for the government WILL NOT WORK. Like it or not, Social Security and Medicare are effectively untouchable. Like it or not, Debt Servicing is untouchable. Like it or not, the rest of the budget is largely untouchable.
In the last case, it's mostly because the only real effect of touching "the rest of the budget" (except DoD) would be to kill any infrastructure spending whatsoever. You remember "infrastructure spending", don't you? It's what Obama is promising as the Way to Prosperity for All America.
Of course, there's the DoD. We could zero their budget, and pay off the Debt in 15 years or so. Of course, it would put more Americans out of jobs than letting the Big Three fail would do. Quite possibly many times more people. Or do you really think that laying off several million soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, plus the civilian employees of the Defense Department, plus the people who supply the Defense Department (for a start, we can look at Chrysler, Boeing, LockMar, etc....) would be good for the economy? Especially given that unemployment benefits would also have gone the way of the dodo bird before the DoD did?
Alternatively, we cut the DoD's budget by 25% across the board. Only 25% of the pain, which still means more new unemployed than losing the Big Three, buy hey, it helps, right? Yah, it means that if you can keep the same people in Congress and the White House for the next SIXTY years, we'll have paid the debt down. Assuming that we hold ALL OTHER SPENDING CONSTANT. Which we can't do, since Social Security and Medicare are what's called Entitlements in this country.
In case you're interested, and Entitlement is something where the budget is only guesstimated every year. The actual payout is whatever it has to be to cover ALL the people who fit the definitions of eligibility. Which means that it'll continue to grow for at least the next 30 years.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that the federal budget is largely untouchable. NOT because the Congress and Senate and Whitehouse are corrupt and self-serving, but because the Dear People want all that spending. The real solution to government sp
Besides, it's not only the number of lives taken that counts, but the damage to the bombed areas as in how poisoned it becomes and for how long.
Hiroshima was being rebuilt by 1949. It began rebuilding in 1945. By 1955, Hiroshima's population was back to pre-war levels.
Note, by the way, that Berlin has not reached pre-war population levels yet. Note that in absolute numbers, Berlin has regained about as much population post-war as Hiroshima has, but Berlin was a much larger city. Note that Berlin took until about 1990 to recover the population that Hiroshima did in ten years.
there is ALWAYS wind. if there's no wind here, there certainly will be wind 500 miles from here.
Doesn't help much if your turbines are here, though.
So, we'd have to build wind turbines in two (or three, or four, or more) places to get consistent output from one of them at a time. Was the cost of two (or three, or four, or more) wind turbines per unit output included in the estimate?
Wind is potentially very useful as an adjunct to our main power generation. It won't replace our main power generation method, though. Until we have nothing else to use. Which won't be for a long time.
But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer?
Define "exposed". Define "at risk".
That said, if the fuel rod has sat in a tank of water for six months, you can store it safely under your bed with no risk whatsoever, unless you're worried about terrorists breaking in to steal it to make an atom bomb. Stupid terrorists, because there isn't enough fissionable in a fuel rod to make an atom bomb, and processing one into an atom bomb is going to expend a lot of terrorists (hot uranium is dangerous - cold is fine. And by hot I don't mean radioactive, I mean melting metal hot).
TWO fuel rods gets a bit more complicated, of course. They're designed to not do nasty stuff in isolation, but two or more placed closely enough together with other conditions being met (those conditions won't be met by accident unless you have a LOT more than two) can be problematic.
Storing that nuclear waste for the next million years is the problem.
Even the most insanely conservative estimates don't require storage for a million years. Realistically, storage for a hundred years is probably unnecessary, unless you're working hard to justify not using nuclear power.
Note that the overwhelming majority (>> 99%)of the radioactivity produced by nuclear waste is stone cold within a week of reactor shutdown.
The overwhelming majority of what's left at that point in stone cold in six months.
The overwhelming majority of what's left after six months is stone cold in five years.
And after that, you've got things that can safely be stored under your bed as far as the radioactivity is concerned - alpha emitters with a long half-life are basically harmless unless you eat them.
You needed to know how to use a slip stick, aka slide rule.
You bring back memories, indeed you do. I really was taught to use a slipstick in High School. Calculators were very new, and not considered acceptable for use in science classes at the time, so we were taught slide rule basics in Chem class.
If I can do it, so too can a determined Congress and president.
Well, no. The federal budget is mostly "must spend" items. Much less than half of it is even optional, and by "optional" I mean things like the Defense Department, HUD, Interior, that sort of thing. Doesn't leave many reasonable options to cut. If the Defense Department budget were zeroed (which would, in itself, bring on a massive recession, like it or not), then we'd still be better than a decade away from paying off the national debt.
The only way to pay the debt down would be to start slashing the "must spends", like Social Security and Medicare. And if you try that in Washington, bad things happen to you, your political party, and everyone who knows you.
Like we Obama said: "Yes we can". You just have to take the first step.
Don't notice many steps he seems to be taking that will LOWER the debt, really. Rather the reverse. "We can" is a nice idea, really it is. However, practicality requires us to look at the real world, not the dream world. And in the real world, "no, we can't" is a better picture of reality. Not unless you can convince the overwhelming majority of voters to support cuts that affect THEM PERSONALLY. It's easy to get people to support a budget cut that affects a stranger, it's a lot harder to get their support for something that affects Aunt May.
Also I've worked for the government. You could lay off 3/4 of the staff and still get the same amount of work done. There is a LOT of fat that can be trimmed.... just like any large organization that restructures & cuts costs.
Meaningless. Every one of those federal jobs represents some way for a Congresscritter to convince a donor to give him the big money for his next election. Which means no meaningful cuts will be made in anything (except NASA, which has few friends in Congress).
>>>we need to increase taxes across the board by about 50% to pay the debt down
Yes. Or even better: cut spending by 50% for the same effect. The excess unspent money (50 cents per dollar collected in taxes) can then be used to slowly but surely pay off the ridiculously huge debt we borrowed from the Chinese and other foreign nationals.
I'm not trying to suggest that we shouldn't pay down our debt. We should, most emphatically. However, our debt has grown large enough that any plan to pay it down must consider decades, not years. It's not going to happen by 2020. It's not going to happen by 2030. Probably not by 2040. And that's if we even bother to try. Which I doubt we will.
That said. the assumption that lowering spending is even an option is just silly. It's been tried, from time to time. And it never works. People get used to the idea of the government providing certain services, and resist the idea of removing them. Especially people in government, whose power depends on an ever-increasing amount of money to dole out in exchange for campaign contributions.
Once the debt is minimized from trillions to millions, we will better be able to service the Baby Boomer SS/Medicare payouts from circa 2030-to-2060 without going bankrupt.
We won't go bankrupt from SS/Medicare payouts anyway. We'll raise taxes just enough to cover the extra costs, and continue down our merry road to ruin. And next time SS/Medicare needs more funds, we'll do the same. Until the tax rates are ruinous, of course. Guess what happens then?
Perhaps the nation can not "save" like an individual, but they can certainly start by paying off the multi-trillion-dollar debt so the U.S. will be in a better position when ~40 million people start demanding SS and Medicare payments.
Good plan, that. So, since we have about 10 years left till we reach that point, we need to increase taxes across the board by about 50% to pay the debt down (the real debt, not the intra-governmental lending that accounts for some of the debt, but which is nothing more than moving money from your left hip-pocket to your right hip-pocket and claiming you now have twice as much money).
Good luck on getting that passed, and better luck on getting re-elected after you do it.
Social Security buys Billions and Billions in Treasury bonds every year for this exact reason. Currently, more money is coming in, then going out, and they hold it in trust. However, congress likes to "borrow" against that money, and give an IOU, so thats going to bite us in the ass too.
Umm, no.
What happens is that the SS revenue is spent on Social Security every year. Then the leftover funds are transferred to the General Fund, in exchange for NO INTEREST T-Bills. Then the money is spent.
When SS needs more money than is coming in every year, they will NOT be able to miraculously redeem those NO INTEREST T-bills. What will happen is that the Government will issue more interest bearing T-Bills to pay the difference. Sort of exactly like the deficit spending they're doing now that people hate so much.
This will continue until and unless the government raises SS taxes on the working people to cover the difference. Which will, of course, happen right away - the government doesn't really want to admit that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is a meaningless example of flim-flammery.
Net effect: we pay taxes, government spends the revenue gained any way it damn well pleases. SS Trust Fund NEVER gets used (because if it were used, we'd realize it's non-existant), and that wall-safe full of NO INTEREST T-Bills just keeps getting fuller till the end of time.
The person doing it. The whole point is that while anonymity must be allowed for the effective functioning of a free society, it should not be encouraged because anonymity leads to a break down in civil discourse. "Not encouraging" does not have the same meaning as "discouraging", let alone "forbidding".
So, essentially, you're saying the status quo works just fine. So any talk of "not encouraging" is utterly meaningless, since we're going to go on the way we've always gone.
In addition, while it is certainly true that ""Not encouraging" does not have the same meaning as "discouraging", let alone "forbidding"" in normal English, it's not so clear that in the English used by the Government (any Government, not just our Government) that "not encourage" is somehow different from "discourage" or "forbid". See "War on Drugs" as an example that started out the one way, and ended up the other.
Use of anonymity when it is necessary, is critical to the proper functioning of free society. Using anonymity when it is unnecessary, just leads to people acting like arseholes.
I'll bite. Who gets to decide when it's necessary?
A craft, may I remind you, that has been having technical difficulties of late and caused more deaths than the original lunar capsule.
This is more than slightly misleading. We flew Apollo no more than 15 times, with a total of 45 men. The shuttle has flown rather more than 100 times, with rather more than 600 men. Yes, on shuttle disaster kills more than one Apollo disaster. But Apollo managed one disaster with only fifteen launches, shuttle took 100 launches to get to two disasters.
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No, it wasn't. The Canal Zone was occupied by the USA at the time, but that's not the same as saying it was "part of the U.S.", anymore than Frankfurt Germany was "part of the U.S." because American soldiers occupied Germany after WW2.
Let's see. From the article, it'll cost $22000, have a range of 62 miles, and be available outside China in 2011.
This doesn't look like it'll meet your expectations.
Not quite. I claim that the specific items I've read are secret. As I said, the contents of same are widely available, but I see no need to find them for you. Do try to read everything I type, not just the parts that (you think) support your prejudices.
The fact that you chose to look at a Wiki article, and then STOP LOOKING, is your issue.
Nor did I say you're not qualified to ask for information. I did pretty much say that you're not qualified to decide whether the information you get is meaningful or drivel. Because you're not. You're no more qualified to analyze nuclear issues than I am to analyze nanotechnology, or the biology of Black Smokers, or Appalachian Folkways.
The difference here is that I'm not ready to insist that I DO know whether any particular bit of nanotechnology, or the biology of Black Smokers, or Appalachian Folkways is true or false. You, on the other hand, are quite prepared to declare that you know that all published material (even the stuff you didn't bother to read) on an esoteric subject is false, or a lie perpetrated by an industrial group. When you get past the point of knowing all the answers, you can begin to learn.
As to specific points:
What part of "it varies from day to day, and even from reactor to reactor, much less from fuel rod design" did you have a hard time with? If I take two identical fuel rods, put one of them into Entergy's number one reactor in La, the other into the number two reactor, leave them there for six weeks, and then pull them out and measure them, I'll get different results. If I wait a day, I'll get different results on both again. Note, by the way, that I use those reactors as examples because they're near my home. I've never worked for Entergy, and never even seen the reactor buildings, much less the reactors.
Would you accept a statement to the effect of "smog levels for Los Angeles are 2ppm NOx" without wanting information like date and time, weather at the time, etc? Well, radioactivity of spent fuel rods would be like that, if numbers were presented to you - you don't even know enough to realize what questions you should ask to decide whether the numbers were typical or aberrant, anymore than the average person could do anything meaningful with a wingloading figure presented to them in the context of an airplane they question the safety of.
Well, no. HINT: Fuel rods have almost no Uranium in them. They're mostly structural metal. If the gas tank of your car were filled with U-235, it would explode. But it would also have more U-235 in it than a typical nuclear reactor. It might even have more than all the commercial reactors in the USA at any given time. Depending on the size of your gas tank, of course.
Your doubts are fascinating, but they
Well, no. Assuming you were married to the mother of the children (who were American Citizens, by definition), then you're next of kin to a minor American, and pretty much guaranteed to get permission to stay in the USA.
Of course, if you weren't so married, then all bets are off, until and unless the mother died, at which time the conditions mentioned above would come into play again.
And yet, your response further reinforces my opinion that you'll be anti-nuke, no matter the evidence. I also suggested looking other places, choosing Wokipedia as the usual convenient starting point.
Don't worry, nothing will reassure you. Since you've decided that any actual evidence that you're mistaken is part of a plot by the nuclear industry to ensure that your children all have three heads and cancer, there's not much point to offering evidence. I had hoped that you were willing to start from basics and do the calculations yourself, rather than be presented with a bunch of evidence that you'd ignore if it didn't fit your preconceptions. My mistake.
Actually, most of those "theoretical calculations" were based on observed behaviour of reactors back in the day when we didn't know squat about the subject. You might also consider that "measurements" for a particular type of fuel rod wouldn't actually apply to any other type (not even to the same type put in a different reactor, really). Plus the fact that the measurements are different from day to day (shut the reactor down, walk inside, die. Or shut the reactor down, wait a day, walk inside, no problems).
You attribute vast cosmic powers to the nuclear industry, I see. Trust me on this, they're no more capable of keeping secrets for 50 years than General Motors. Rather less, since they're not so rich, nor so influential.
It's always nice to see someone who has admitted that he knows nothing about a subject identify salient features of the subject, and immediately realize that he knows more than anyone else about the subject. HINT: Get a degree in nuclear engineering and/or nuclear physics, then come back and talk about the subject.
Of course not. I said a post or two back that you weren't going to be convinced by any evidence. Alas, I don't have any interest in wasting time writing another dissertation on the subject just to give you more things to say "that CANNOT be true, my prejudices don't allow it!"
Sorry, the specific sources of my knowledge are not (last I looked) publically available. The content of those specific sources can be found in a lot of places, but I don't really feel a burning need to waste time trying to convince someone who has already decided that no evidence is sufficient.
I should like to point out, however, that you make all sorts of claims about the lack of safety of the waste, entirely without support. You even start by admitting you know nothing about the subject. It is arguable whether acknowledging authority in a subject is desirable, but arguing that ignorance is a valid starting point for discarding all authority is specious, at best.
Which must be why foreign governments are considering bailing out their automakers too, right?
Note also that you don't convert an SUV plant to making hybrids in "weeks", as you so blithely assert. Sure, you can shut the SUV plant down in weeks (at a cost in jobs), but you're not switching production so quickly as all that.
Big advantage foreign automakers had was that they didn't have all their eggs in one basket - they had their local markets, as well as the USA. The American Big Three don't really sell all that many cars outside the USA (mostly because the USA is the biggest market - everyone wants to break into the American market, few are racing to be the first to break into the Zimbabwe market).
Note that I'm not trying to justify the bailout. I disapprove of it on principle. But it's not the automakers' fault they built SUV's, so much as the customers' demand for SUV's.
The only reason to draw the line that far out is to justify opposing nuclear power. If you want to oppose nuclear power, go right ahead. But it makes as much sense to oppose it because "it smells bad" as because "we have to store the wastes for hundreds or thousands of years". It doesn't, and we don't.
Quite so. They're not corrosive, they're not going to seep through a metal wall, they're not going to be extremely radioactive for long. You mention Kr-85 as an example of the bugaboo of nuclear power. Half life is less than eleven years, and virtually 100% of emissions are betas (less than 0.01% gamma). It'll be a non-issue in a century, even with grossly pessimistic assumptions. With reasonable ones, it'll be a non-issue from the get-go (beta emissions don't penetrate paper, much less steel).
Actually, your arguments suggest that you'd be opposed to it no matter what. You know a few anti-nuke buzzwords, but have little, if any, clue about fission products (chemical or radioactive properties), and no idea at all whether they'd be "safe". But to MAKE SURE they're safe, you'll insist that the safety measures have to be practically unachievable.
While at the same time, not worrying at all about, say, mercury, which NEVER goes away. And is more toxic than any fission product.
Hate to say this, noone bothers with this because back in the seventies, it became clear that no amount of rational debate would make a hill of beans difference. Some people think nuclear power is the Devil (you seem to be one), some people don't. Evidence is not relevant to either side, really.
Umm, no. They'd mostly be happy to deal with it. But it's against the law to deal with it. The government REQUIRES the nuclear industry to handle radioactive wastes the way it does (including the part about sticking in a pool of water and forgetting it). The government makes it illegal to reprocess fuel rods (as much as 20% of the fissionables remain in a used fuel rod, n
Umm, no. Americans bought SUV's by the (if you'll excuse the phrase) ton. If the "average" American had been wanting fuel-efficient cars, that's what the automakers would have produced.
As was, they produced what the market demanded - big, comfortable vehicles (that just happened to be larger than most armoured cars), and sold them by the (if you'll excuse teh expression) ton.
Then, a miracle happened - oil prices went through the ceiling, and Americans decided they didn't want SUV's anymore. Suddenly, the automakers were stuck with inventory and factories making things noone wanted to buy. Hence, the bailout.
Oddly enough, since oil prices have collapsed, I see a lot more SUV's on the road than I did this past summer....
What I'm saying is that Congress isn't the one who has to change to stop it. WE have to change. All 300,000,000+ of us. Congress will give us what we ask for, and what we've been asking for, for decades now, is more government spending every year.
When WE decide that we've had enough, we'll change things. Until then, there's no point in blaming Congress for our overspending.
Hint: as long as YOU (and all the other "you" out there) look at the federal budget and say "well, I don't like that part over there, or this part, or the other one, but THIS LITTLE BIT HERE that affects ME PERSONALLY I approve of", then we're doomed.
And before you ask, my own "THIS LITTLE BIT HERE" is NASA. Yeah, we ALL have them, even (especially) the "reformers". Which is why we're where we are today.
Beta emitters are pretty much harmless as well. Your bed will protect you from a beta-emitter.
Note that "natural uranium" isn't really terribly radioactive. Slightly more so than granite, I'll admit, but not terribly much more.
Note also that the longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is. And the shorter the half-life, the quicker it's gone. Just draw a comfortable line in the sand, and you're good to go.
And note finally that fission products inside fuel rods won't emit anything outside the fuel rods but gammas (and neutrons, if you make the conditions just perfect - say, like the inside of a nuclear reactor). So you can safely ignore the alpha emitters and the beta emitters. And frankly, the gamma emitters aren't all that much of a problem either, really, since the metal of the rod is a gamma shield (depending on design, it'll block, say, 1/3 to 2/3 of the gammas from leaking onto your floor.
Seriously, nuclear reactor waste is more of a problem than the stuff I put out on the curb every Wednesday and Saturday for pickup. But it's not the Incredible Nightmare To All Of Civilization it's frequently made out to be. It's certainly less a problem than mercury pollution.
It's only the "absolute worst realistic disaster" because we have to include abysmal human stupidity in our plans for worst case. Chernobyl happened largely because the Soviet equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to run an interesting test that required that EVERY SINGLE SAFETY FEATURE be turned off, and after that the plant had to be put into an unsafe condition deliberately (the condition they wanted was a simulated meltdown, in fact) in order to prodcue the problem.
Actually talking to (and listening to) any competent reactor operator before the test were run would have aborted that test and prevented the disaster. But Soviet scientist/beaurocrats are just like American ones - they're sure they know more than the peons in the field.
Let's see if I can get through to you. I doubt it, but let's try one last time. If we filled the House and Senate with "honest men in power who put principle ahead of re-election", they could cut spending by 50%. Then they'd all fail of re-election, since the people who voted them in would be grossly offended that Great Aunt May no longer had her Medicare and Social Security to live on. The new officeholders would be chosen by the people to restore those cuts, and would do so. End of story.
Do you remember the last time a Congress proposed any budget cuts? I do. 1995. The didn't actually CUT the budget, so much as NOT INCREASE it as much as previous years. The President lambasted them, the media lambasted them, the public generally believed the President and the Media, and the cuts were defeated.
It's very nice that you believe that. History has shown that the techniques you favour for the government WILL NOT WORK. Like it or not, Social Security and Medicare are effectively untouchable. Like it or not, Debt Servicing is untouchable. Like it or not, the rest of the budget is largely untouchable.
In the last case, it's mostly because the only real effect of touching "the rest of the budget" (except DoD) would be to kill any infrastructure spending whatsoever. You remember "infrastructure spending", don't you? It's what Obama is promising as the Way to Prosperity for All America.
Of course, there's the DoD. We could zero their budget, and pay off the Debt in 15 years or so. Of course, it would put more Americans out of jobs than letting the Big Three fail would do. Quite possibly many times more people. Or do you really think that laying off several million soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, plus the civilian employees of the Defense Department, plus the people who supply the Defense Department (for a start, we can look at Chrysler, Boeing, LockMar, etc....) would be good for the economy? Especially given that unemployment benefits would also have gone the way of the dodo bird before the DoD did?
Alternatively, we cut the DoD's budget by 25% across the board. Only 25% of the pain, which still means more new unemployed than losing the Big Three, buy hey, it helps, right? Yah, it means that if you can keep the same people in Congress and the White House for the next SIXTY years, we'll have paid the debt down. Assuming that we hold ALL OTHER SPENDING CONSTANT. Which we can't do, since Social Security and Medicare are what's called Entitlements in this country.
In case you're interested, and Entitlement is something where the budget is only guesstimated every year. The actual payout is whatever it has to be to cover ALL the people who fit the definitions of eligibility. Which means that it'll continue to grow for at least the next 30 years.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that the federal budget is largely untouchable. NOT because the Congress and Senate and Whitehouse are corrupt and self-serving, but because the Dear People want all that spending. The real solution to government sp
Hiroshima was being rebuilt by 1949. It began rebuilding in 1945. By 1955, Hiroshima's population was back to pre-war levels.
Note, by the way, that Berlin has not reached pre-war population levels yet. Note that in absolute numbers, Berlin has regained about as much population post-war as Hiroshima has, but Berlin was a much larger city. Note that Berlin took until about 1990 to recover the population that Hiroshima did in ten years.
Doesn't help much if your turbines are here, though.
So, we'd have to build wind turbines in two (or three, or four, or more) places to get consistent output from one of them at a time. Was the cost of two (or three, or four, or more) wind turbines per unit output included in the estimate?
Wind is potentially very useful as an adjunct to our main power generation. It won't replace our main power generation method, though. Until we have nothing else to use. Which won't be for a long time.
Define "exposed". Define "at risk".
That said, if the fuel rod has sat in a tank of water for six months, you can store it safely under your bed with no risk whatsoever, unless you're worried about terrorists breaking in to steal it to make an atom bomb. Stupid terrorists, because there isn't enough fissionable in a fuel rod to make an atom bomb, and processing one into an atom bomb is going to expend a lot of terrorists (hot uranium is dangerous - cold is fine. And by hot I don't mean radioactive, I mean melting metal hot).
TWO fuel rods gets a bit more complicated, of course. They're designed to not do nasty stuff in isolation, but two or more placed closely enough together with other conditions being met (those conditions won't be met by accident unless you have a LOT more than two) can be problematic.
Even the most insanely conservative estimates don't require storage for a million years. Realistically, storage for a hundred years is probably unnecessary, unless you're working hard to justify not using nuclear power.
Note that the overwhelming majority (>> 99%)of the radioactivity produced by nuclear waste is stone cold within a week of reactor shutdown.
The overwhelming majority of what's left at that point in stone cold in six months.
The overwhelming majority of what's left after six months is stone cold in five years.
And after that, you've got things that can safely be stored under your bed as far as the radioactivity is concerned - alpha emitters with a long half-life are basically harmless unless you eat them.
You bring back memories, indeed you do. I really was taught to use a slipstick in High School. Calculators were very new, and not considered acceptable for use in science classes at the time, so we were taught slide rule basics in Chem class.
Well, no. The federal budget is mostly "must spend" items. Much less than half of it is even optional, and by "optional" I mean things like the Defense Department, HUD, Interior, that sort of thing. Doesn't leave many reasonable options to cut. If the Defense Department budget were zeroed (which would, in itself, bring on a massive recession, like it or not), then we'd still be better than a decade away from paying off the national debt.
The only way to pay the debt down would be to start slashing the "must spends", like Social Security and Medicare. And if you try that in Washington, bad things happen to you, your political party, and everyone who knows you.
Don't notice many steps he seems to be taking that will LOWER the debt, really. Rather the reverse. "We can" is a nice idea, really it is. However, practicality requires us to look at the real world, not the dream world. And in the real world, "no, we can't" is a better picture of reality. Not unless you can convince the overwhelming majority of voters to support cuts that affect THEM PERSONALLY. It's easy to get people to support a budget cut that affects a stranger, it's a lot harder to get their support for something that affects Aunt May.
Meaningless. Every one of those federal jobs represents some way for a Congresscritter to convince a donor to give him the big money for his next election. Which means no meaningful cuts will be made in anything (except NASA, which has few friends in Congress).
I'm not trying to suggest that we shouldn't pay down our debt. We should, most emphatically. However, our debt has grown large enough that any plan to pay it down must consider decades, not years. It's not going to happen by 2020. It's not going to happen by 2030. Probably not by 2040. And that's if we even bother to try. Which I doubt we will.
That said. the assumption that lowering spending is even an option is just silly. It's been tried, from time to time. And it never works. People get used to the idea of the government providing certain services, and resist the idea of removing them. Especially people in government, whose power depends on an ever-increasing amount of money to dole out in exchange for campaign contributions.
We won't go bankrupt from SS/Medicare payouts anyway. We'll raise taxes just enough to cover the extra costs, and continue down our merry road to ruin. And next time SS/Medicare needs more funds, we'll do the same. Until the tax rates are ruinous, of course. Guess what happens then?
Good plan, that. So, since we have about 10 years left till we reach that point, we need to increase taxes across the board by about 50% to pay the debt down (the real debt, not the intra-governmental lending that accounts for some of the debt, but which is nothing more than moving money from your left hip-pocket to your right hip-pocket and claiming you now have twice as much money).
Good luck on getting that passed, and better luck on getting re-elected after you do it.
Umm, no.
What happens is that the SS revenue is spent on Social Security every year. Then the leftover funds are transferred to the General Fund, in exchange for NO INTEREST T-Bills. Then the money is spent.
When SS needs more money than is coming in every year, they will NOT be able to miraculously redeem those NO INTEREST T-bills. What will happen is that the Government will issue more interest bearing T-Bills to pay the difference. Sort of exactly like the deficit spending they're doing now that people hate so much.
This will continue until and unless the government raises SS taxes on the working people to cover the difference. Which will, of course, happen right away - the government doesn't really want to admit that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is a meaningless example of flim-flammery.
Net effect: we pay taxes, government spends the revenue gained any way it damn well pleases. SS Trust Fund NEVER gets used (because if it were used, we'd realize it's non-existant), and that wall-safe full of NO INTEREST T-Bills just keeps getting fuller till the end of time.
So, essentially, you're saying the status quo works just fine. So any talk of "not encouraging" is utterly meaningless, since we're going to go on the way we've always gone.
In addition, while it is certainly true that ""Not encouraging" does not have the same meaning as "discouraging", let alone "forbidding"" in normal English, it's not so clear that in the English used by the Government (any Government, not just our Government) that "not encourage" is somehow different from "discourage" or "forbid". See "War on Drugs" as an example that started out the one way, and ended up the other.
Two words: Dixie Chicks.
I'll bite. Who gets to decide when it's necessary?
This is more than slightly misleading. We flew Apollo no more than 15 times, with a total of 45 men. The shuttle has flown rather more than 100 times, with rather more than 600 men. Yes, on shuttle disaster kills more than one Apollo disaster. But Apollo managed one disaster with only fifteen launches, shuttle took 100 launches to get to two disasters.