As for the use of "close-in weapon system" (firing at approaching missiles instead of letting planes take them at a distance) an explanation can be: even a civil (discreet) ship can abruptly fire an anti-ship missile at close range. In such a case the sailors may like to have the darn "point defense" system as an aircraft will prolly be useless.
As for MS-Windows in the game, well... It compiles? Sink it!
> How much of that is the authors' fault, and how much is the media's fault for vectoring a statement found in the abstract, without first studying the full report to confirm that it was accurate?
The Chernobyl Forum (IAEA, OMS...) did publish the ''4000'' figure. Please access to those documents: OMS and IAEA, then let's read:
-=-=-=-=-=
20 Years Later a UN Report Provides Definitive Answers and Ways to Repair Lives
5 SEPTEMBER 2005 | GENEVA -- A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
=-=-=-=-=-
It was not UN-approved, it was not definitive (it was a draft, the definite one was published a few days ago, read below), the names of the scientists endorsing the ''A total of 4000 people could eventually die'' was not published, this very information (''total 4000 people'') was not in the draft report... In a word this abstract was pure BS.
Moreover they had a big press conference in order to announce this ''4000...'' thesis.
The the press relayed this ''4000, total'' thesis, and they did not publish a corrective document (from Sept, 2005 to April, 2006)
And now they discreetly publish the real definitive ONU-approved report, with a totally different info (''9000 in a small subset of the concerned population, and for a single illness'')
I know that the press is not always efficient but on this particular matter, well.. you decide. If you are a taxpayer don't forget that those IAEA/OMS/... people eat thanks to you in order to ''inform'' us, in order to decide.
Here is another funny excerpt (from the sharp'n good Nature):
-=-=-=-=-=
Melissa Fleming, a press officer working at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, who helped coordinate the report's publicity, says [... ] a decision was made to focus on the lower 4,000 figure [... ] "It was a bold action to put out a new figure that was much less than conventional wisdom." The figure has been removed from the final summary, however, published this month.
-=-=-=-=-=
Therefore, in a nutshell, "it is not true (this 4000 figure is not anymore a grand total in the definitive report) but we published it in order to lower other estimates, and it was a bold action. Is there a way to lie boldly?
... No problems... for the survivors, and those able to have childs.
Moreover let's scrutinize all this Chernobyl 'material' because disinformation rulz.
Sept. 2005: the Chernobyl Forum (IAEA, in fact), during a press conference, publishes an abstract of its draft report stating that 4000 people have and will die. But the name of the authors abstract and report was not known, it did not state that those 4000 people are from a small subset of the human beings concerned, the report did not contain the key sentence of the abstract, the report was presented as an UN report albeit it was not (it is published by agencies, and not published by UN), it was only a draft...
The abstract (''4,000 people will die from the effects of the 1986 accident at Chernobyl'') was largely propagated (see for example this BBC's account). It was not definitive nor adopted by the UN, albeit presented as such.
Therefore those guys induced the whole media into spreading the ''Chernobyl: 4000 people will die globally'' during 7 months, albeit their ''best'' minimization is ''9000 people will die from from solids cancers amongst the approx 7 million who were in the vicinity''
I beg to differ: most French (54%) want to stop the nuclear program. Source: IFOP poll, Sept. 2005 (French). The last megaproject (SuperPhenix) was cancelled by the government and approx 60 billion FRF were dissipated (French). Big nuke players, thru a fake 'public debate', try hard to press their EPR thing and good PR make it appear 'planned' everywhere even if it is officially not decided and has many opponents here.
In your comment you wrote 'We do expect our users to be able to distinguish between political propaganda and legitimate scientific sources.'. I'm affraid this is inadequate because, as already stated:
-=-=-=-=-
After reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body):...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it, in their own minds, it's a fact, it's true.
=-=-=-=-
A growing number of authors of disinformaton authored by big entitites is aware of this and acts accordingly, putting Wikipedia at risk.
AFAIK no existing simulator/woofer can let us experiment what happens when a real heavy one (even not the very large ones, which are always mounted) talks. Having been at approx 5 meters of a 'KPV' (soviet 14.5x115mm), I was shocked by the amount of noise, smoke and gun moves. How can anyone unprepared think clearly near this?! A simulator may enhance tactics (teamwork, thru communication/command) but I doubt any can prepare for such shock.
Corporate results are tied to the sales, customers tend to buy only what they somewhat understand, most of them are NOT smart engineers and nearly all engineers are unable or too proud to efficiently hide their creations.
Therefore any performing corporation is made of a tiny core team of smart asses nicely encapsulated/surrounded by legions of morons fighting hard to hide the delicate stuff in order to sell it to... well, other corporations.
Some Wikipedia contributors quote, in non technical nor scientific articles, plain disinformation published by known entities, hoping that some readers (especially youngsters or in a hurry) will just memorize it then take it for granted. Sometimes this information is criticized/debunked by unknown bodies, which cannot be quoted in Wikipedia. In such cases Wikipedia lacks a way to help the reader keep his critical thinking awake. Is there anything planned against this, or at least is this problem considered?
Detailed version:
By fact many mean widely propagated information.
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some copy/paste of 'published' information, presented as 'facts', are pure and simple bullshit. For example because the authors omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie.
Moreover there is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the factual status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this confusion.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body):...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it it's a fact, it's true.
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor. For the time being some Wikipedia articles (outside of the tech and sci fields) relay plain disinformation.
As a sidenote: I experienced such mess (French) on Wikipedia fr: where an 'information' is presented as scientific albeit it is very easy to prove that this is not scientific and very crippled (here is an short abstract written in English).
We all know that a reader must not believe each and every published material ('tin-foil hat' ), but is there any effort planned to avoid letting WP becoming JAPKP (Just Another Parrot for Known Publishers of (even bad) information)?
> Kyoto mandates a reduction of CO2 emissions below the level of 1990
> In 1990 the French nukes were already operating for more than a decade.
> How could they further reduce emissions when their effect is included in the baseline?
My point is that nuclear power plants are not sufficient to solve the greenhouse-gas emission problem, nor they are the sole solution for grid-electricity producing devices. My point is to ask people saying that "nuke plants will solve the problem" to have some reality check in France (where, as a sidenote, the nuclear-produced part of the electricity produced in France regularly climbed for the last 30 years).
>> crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction")
> What's wrong here?
Writing the solution is wrong. It is, at best, a partial solution. Please check my previous comment.
And even on this field (grid-power) nuclear plants are not the best way because one has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline, therefore emit CO2...
> Could you be missing the difference between "reduction" and "elimination"?
Nope, and this is not the point.
> Would you care to explain how a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a bad thing
It's not a bad thing, but the "nuclear plants solve the problem" stance is bullshit.
> or how nuke plants emit greenhouse gases anyway?
One has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline. But this is only a side-effect, I'm OK to say that nuclear plants use do nearly not emit greenhouse gas. Other, less dangerous, approaches can do it (please read the already referenced comment).
>> "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"
> Another 4000 are estimated to die from cancer
I disagree. Your data came from a pro-nuke (UIC) comment on a flawed communiqué from pro-nuke agencies (IAEA...) which is not signed by anyone and is presented as an excerpt from a scientific report which is, in turn, only in draft stage and without any peer review nor clearly stated authors (i.e. this is not a scientific result). In fact this is plain BS. Please take a look at this analysis and let me know. This is an abstract, the complete document is in French (sorry about that) but some non-French speaking people found it somewhat easy to grasp as it often quotes English documents.
Among other information (read the complete anlysis) please check this "Nuclear News" (very serious and pro-nuke publication) article about it (page 46). Among numerous critics you will find that the main responsible for the "health" report (WHO's Dr Repacholi), said "The scientists did not want to include numbers for predicted deaths, but public relations officials had wanted them in the summary". Isn't it clear enough?
The "4000 deaths" commnuiqué is not science but plain disinformation.
An official ONU report from 1995 (the real United Nations "General Assembly", not another IAEA document posing at it) states:
-=-=-=- SNIP -=-=-=-=-
[ LIQUIDATORS, who cleaned the disaster zone ]
20. These men, drawn mainly from the then Soviet army [... ] In the time
since, these people have dispersed across the former Soviet Union. Much of
the registering and tracing of their whereabouts is highly inaccurate, in
part because of the break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent socio-
economic changes. There is even uncertainty as to ho
> Couldn't this also be taken as evidence that France didn't go far enough with
> conversion to nuclear power? One can't deny that, in itself, nuclear power generation
> generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal
[...]
> Every little bit helps.
True, but as far as I understand reducing CO2 emission:
does not imply any nuclear plant,
will not be sufficient even if all electricity is produced through clean sources
There are more consistent arguments in my previous reply, plese let me know if there is a glitch in it.
> Maybe 50% of current CO2 is produced by transportation rather than industrial
> and power generation sources.
Nuclear plants can only replace power generation sources. In order to evaluate the real impact of power generation sources which don't emit CO2, let's compare the amount of CO2 emitted by existing "electricity production" facilities to all the other uses.
Amount of CO2 emitted in the US by sector in 1998 (million metric tons carbon per year):
Electricity production: 549.8
Industrial: 298.9 (477.7 minus 178.8)
Transportation: 484.2 (484.9 minus.7 from electricity)
Commercial: 60 (238.4 minus 178.4)
Residential: 92.6 (284.5 minus 191.9)
(Source: Energy Information Administration (mainly page 25))
Bottomline: electricity production accounts for 550 while the other players sum up to 936. And those 936 will be very hard to reduce because we will have to hackor replace every internal combustion engine, every classic heater... But we need (Kyoto) to reduce those emissions by at least 60% before 2050. Therefore the theory "nuclar plants will solve the greenhouse gas problem" is, as far as I understand, JAAL (Just Another Awful Lie).
Any thingie able to produce grid-electricity without polluting is interesting, but some write that nuclear plants are the only way. This is... well, you guessed it... JAAL, because most clean sources (sun, wind...) can do it.
In fact even the coal plants can be much cleaner, for example trough some clever design. Will be, in fact, instead of "can be", because some are building them right now. And don't think of it as some european gadget, see FutureGen.
Those clean sources, and even the clean coal-plants, do not produce dangerous waste and are more easy to build, run and dismantle than a nuclear plant. And they do not run amok, Chernobyl-style.
> 4000 people from Chernobyl? Wherever you are getting this from must be counting
> everyone that died in the area for whatever reason
> you know a lot more about this topic, and have a more developed
> opinon on it than I do. I probably can't win this argument, so, I'll let you have it.
I'm not trying to win arguments but by chance got to discover that there are numerous problems (biases, distorsion, omissions, lies...) in many published "information" from both sides (pro and anti -nuke altogether). The pros have huge resources, the anti play on the "fear" string. My proposal is: let's filter information very cautiously.
Is it a joke? Even very pro-nuke agencies think that it will kill approx 4000 persons, and this is based upon very very dubious data and methods (see below).
> Anyway, the site that you cite says that the 4000 people estimate is based on bad science.
Indeed. Official UN agencies try hard to let us think that the disaster will only kill 4000 persons, and the proposed site shows why it is not true, why the grand total is very probably way higher.
In France alone (2000 km from Chernobyl), a Nobel Prize (G. Charpak, physics, very pro-nuke) thinks that the disaster will kill approx 300 persons (French site). Many think that it will kill at least 100000 persons. Special bonus: don't neglect the teratogen and mutagen effects.
> you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7
> people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant
It did not irradiate an enormous area and did not release very dangerous stuff, some active during very long periods and some freely wandering around, flying with the wind. Is ther any possible comparison?
Most CO2 is produced thru small units, mainly home heating, cars and trucks.
The official message of many nuke-tenants is "nuke will solve the greenhouse-gas problem". This is pure BS, as a lab shows it right now. The lab name is 'France', where approximatively 80% of the electrical (grid power) is produced by nuclear plants.
Guess what? France missed by far the Kyoto objectives of greenhouse gas (and among them CO2) reduction, and those objectives were not ambitious (Details).
But all this information is not propagated as well as the usual pro-nuke BS.
Nuclear-vendors propagate the usual "nuclear power if safe, pigs can fly" crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction", "production of clean energy producers cost most energy thant they will produce", "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"...). One can understand that. But I wonder why some theoritically neutral (are they?) people relay it!?
>> But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major
>> flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let
>> the whole reactor blew away.
> I'd be interested to know if the problem is in the basic idea behind the design,
> or an implementation detail.
As far as I understand this was related to the implementation, because it was fixed without any overhaul. But:
some dubious implementation details can drive the whole thing into some unpleasant behaviour, therefore there is no 'detail' in the 'neglectable' meaning of this word
this one is now a detected and fixed bug, but who knows how many remain hidden in the machine, ready to play a trick? Is there any sure way to calculate the remaining risk, given the relative importance of this glitch, or given the fact that a few before its discovery the EPR was said 'secure'?
> It would have sucked if, say, quicksort was never pursued because the first implementer
> had inserted an off by one error that was tripped up under some obscure condition.
> If the underlying concepts are flawed, ditch it.
The stakes are different: there is no harm when a software glitches while you develop it. Even hardware development can be somewhat confined.
When an industrial piece of software or hardware fails we sometimes have a problem. When a nuclear reactor goes amok while running... well, we may have a major problem. A reactor integrates a huge amount of rare and complex software and hardware kept secret (no peer review), therefore there are numerous hidden glitches, and our ability to detect all bugs without running the beast full scale is void. But the effect of a glitch tripping during a run can be disastrous and adding protections will not save the day because it is often intrusive (creating more complexity, more composed glitches...). Just ask a computer security specialist about stacking firewalls up.
To sum things up the thing is probably buggy and some bugs may cost ten or hundreds thousands lives. I, for sure, will not run it.
>> As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under
>> risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
> If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go
> into a rest state.
True, but you put a realistic perimeter by writing If left by its own devices, and this is not reassuring because it means that, after some disaster, we will hear "Hey, this did not happen under normal conditions! There was some security-device tweaking!", Chernobyl-style.
> If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go
> into a rest state. That does not mean that nothing will go wrong, but it does mean
> that if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be overly disastrous.
I beg to disagree because this is only a shortcut. Various problems, most as disastrous as a reactor meltdown, can happen if something goes wrong. A good'ole and plain hole done while running the reactor, for instance, will probably be 'disastrous' (disastrous means 'thousand dead people, perennial contamination of large areas...').
There is a way to tighten the security: let's have all security managers of dangerous units (nuclear, chemical...) be host (permanently live), along with their whole family, inside the older or more clunky unit.
The top-notch European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) is under construction in Finland and theoritically a public debate will decide upon an implantation in France (but many think that this debate is biased towards pro-nuke).
This EPR project was presented in France as absolutely-sure-don't-worry-kids-it's-ok-no-glitch -ever-possible.
But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let the whole reactor blew away.
Let's hope that in such a case it will only kick the asses of those funny "this-reactor-is-absolutely-sure"-type guys.
On this matter... let's bet that the Chernobyl population got numerous "the reactor is sure!" insurances before the accident.
As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
My conclusion is that all those civil nuclear reactors seem pretty sure as long as:
no peer-review is used (in other words: no systematic searching of design and implementation flaws, therefore without any scientific approach)
they do not provoke any disaster
Nearly nobody wants one of them in his backyard. Go figure.
And let's not talk about nuclear waste, cleaning up, or the effects of a direct attack on those beasts.
As far as I understand they want to use various energy sources, including (but not limited to) "clean" coal-usage which benefit from various tricks ("pulverized coal", "fluidised bed"...) reducing the amount of emitted pollution. You can read that on their own website (French).
The bottomline is that many ecologists don't want us to burn coal all-the-way. They only ask for various sources, energy savings and, then, renewable energy. Many slightly different opinions exist upon the details and planning, one of them if for instance stated in one of their document (French) ("les antinucléaires ne prônent pas un retour au charbon, mais demandent l'utilisation du gaz à court terme, des économies d'énergie et enfin le recours aux énergies renouvelables.").
Nope, most ecologists want a mix of power sources. In France, for instance, many want to divert part the money funneled in nuclear-related research into some clean-energy work.
Slashdot Mirror
As for MS-Windows in the game, well... It compiles? Sink it!
History is made of loops.
Quake Custom Team Fortress, superb gameplay and (with a recent client) honorable graphics
Take a look at this short chronology and corresponding perspective on Wikipedia
There is a French version
--
Yep!
Well, maybe, dunno 'bout that.
Here is the link to Nature
The Chernobyl Forum (IAEA, OMS...) did publish the ''4000'' figure. Please access to those documents: OMS and IAEA, then let's read:
-=-=-=-=-=
20 Years Later a UN Report Provides Definitive Answers and Ways to Repair Lives
5 SEPTEMBER 2005 | GENEVA -- A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
=-=-=-=-=-
It was not UN-approved, it was not definitive (it was a draft, the definite one was published a few days ago, read below), the names of the scientists endorsing the ''A total of 4000 people could eventually die'' was not published, this very information (''total 4000 people'') was not in the draft report... In a word this abstract was pure BS.
Moreover they had a big press conference in order to announce this ''4000...'' thesis.
The the press relayed this ''4000, total'' thesis, and they did not publish a corrective document (from Sept, 2005 to April, 2006)
And now they discreetly publish the real definitive ONU-approved report, with a totally different info (''9000 in a small subset of the concerned population, and for a single illness'')
I know that the press is not always efficient but on this particular matter, well.. you decide. If you are a taxpayer don't forget that those IAEA/OMS/... people eat thanks to you in order to ''inform'' us, in order to decide.
Here is another funny excerpt (from the sharp'n good Nature): ... ] a decision was made to focus on the lower 4,000 figure [ ... ] "It was a bold action to put out a new figure that was much less than conventional wisdom." The figure has been removed from the final summary, however, published this month.
-=-=-=-=-=
Melissa Fleming, a press officer working at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, who helped coordinate the report's publicity, says [
-=-=-=-=-=
Therefore, in a nutshell, "it is not true (this 4000 figure is not anymore a grand total in the definitive report) but we published it in order to lower other estimates, and it was a bold action. Is there a way to lie boldly?
--
Nat, rants
Moreover let's scrutinize all this Chernobyl 'material' because disinformation rulz.
Sept. 2005: the Chernobyl Forum (IAEA, in fact), during a press conference, publishes an abstract of its draft report stating that 4000 people have and will die. But the name of the authors abstract and report was not known, it did not state that those 4000 people are from a small subset of the human beings concerned, the report did not contain the key sentence of the abstract, the report was presented as an UN report albeit it was not (it is published by agencies, and not published by UN), it was only a draft...
The abstract (''4,000 people will die from the effects of the 1986 accident at Chernobyl'') was largely propagated (see for example this BBC's account). It was not definitive nor adopted by the UN, albeit presented as such.
April 2006; the very same Chernobyl Forum discreetly publishes the definitive version of the report, where this 4000 figure was replaced (see page 106) by ''9000'', which was stated only for a subset of the Soviet population and for solid cancers (numerous other illnesses are radiation-induced). It was then accepted by the UN. See http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060417/full/440982 a.html, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4922508.stm
Therefore those guys induced the whole media into spreading the ''Chernobyl: 4000 people will die globally'' during 7 months, albeit their ''best'' minimization is ''9000 people will die from from solids cancers amongst the approx 7 million who were in the vicinity''
Lies, damn lies... and the Atomic Guys
Gandi.net was sold in September 2005, a new team is in charge.
--
http://www.makarevitch.org/rant/rant.html
Facts, damn facts... and the IAEA.
-=-=-=-=- ...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it, in their own minds, it's a fact, it's true.
After reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body):
=-=-=-=-
A growing number of authors of disinformaton authored by big entitites is aware of this and acts accordingly, putting Wikipedia at risk.
It is also, AFAIK, to somewhat put it into perspective, for example by revealing patent lies.
AFAIK no existing simulator/woofer can let us experiment what happens when a real heavy one (even not the very large ones, which are always mounted) talks. Having been at approx 5 meters of a 'KPV' (soviet 14.5x115mm), I was shocked by the amount of noise, smoke and gun moves. How can anyone unprepared think clearly near this?! A simulator may enhance tactics (teamwork, thru communication/command) but I doubt any can prepare for such shock.
Therefore any performing corporation is made of a tiny core team of smart asses nicely encapsulated/surrounded by legions of morons fighting hard to hide the delicate stuff in order to sell it to... well, other corporations.
Detailed version:
By fact many mean widely propagated information.
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some copy/paste of 'published' information, presented as 'facts', are pure and simple bullshit. For example because the authors omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie.
Moreover there is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the factual status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this confusion.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body): ...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it it's a fact, it's true.
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor. For the time being some Wikipedia articles (outside of the tech and sci fields) relay plain disinformation.
As a sidenote: I experienced such mess (French) on Wikipedia fr: where an 'information' is presented as scientific albeit it is very easy to prove that this is not scientific and very crippled (here is an short abstract written in English).
We all know that a reader must not believe each and every published material ('tin-foil hat' ), but is there any effort planned to avoid letting WP becoming JAPKP (Just Another Parrot for Known Publishers of (even bad) information)?
There is a detailed perspective (French), and a potential solution (WebDSign, English).
> Kyoto mandates a reduction of CO2 emissions below the level of 1990
> In 1990 the French nukes were already operating for more than a decade.
> How could they further reduce emissions when their effect is included in the baseline?
My point is that nuclear power plants are not sufficient to solve the greenhouse-gas emission problem, nor they are the sole solution for grid-electricity producing devices. My point is to ask people saying that "nuke plants will solve the problem" to have some reality check in France (where, as a sidenote, the nuclear-produced part of the electricity produced in France regularly climbed for the last 30 years).
>> crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction")
> What's wrong here?
Writing the solution is wrong. It is, at best, a partial solution. Please check my previous comment.
And even on this field (grid-power) nuclear plants are not the best way because one has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline, therefore emit CO2...
> Could you be missing the difference between "reduction" and "elimination"?
Nope, and this is not the point.
> Would you care to explain how a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a bad thing
It's not a bad thing, but the "nuclear plants solve the problem" stance is bullshit.
> or how nuke plants emit greenhouse gases anyway?
One has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline. But this is only a side-effect, I'm OK to say that nuclear plants use do nearly not emit greenhouse gas. Other, less dangerous, approaches can do it (please read the already referenced comment).
>> "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"
> Another 4000 are estimated to die from cancer
I disagree. Your data came from a pro-nuke (UIC) comment on a flawed communiqué from pro-nuke agencies (IAEA...) which is not signed by anyone and is presented as an excerpt from a scientific report which is, in turn, only in draft stage and without any peer review nor clearly stated authors (i.e. this is not a scientific result). In fact this is plain BS. Please take a look at this analysis and let me know. This is an abstract, the complete document is in French (sorry about that) but some non-French speaking people found it somewhat easy to grasp as it often quotes English documents.
Among other information (read the complete anlysis) please check this "Nuclear News" (very serious and pro-nuke publication) article about it (page 46). Among numerous critics you will find that the main responsible for the "health" report (WHO's Dr Repacholi), said "The scientists did not want to include numbers for predicted deaths, but public relations officials had wanted them in the summary". Isn't it clear enough?
The "4000 deaths" commnuiqué is not science but plain disinformation.
An official ONU report from 1995 (the real United Nations "General Assembly", not another IAEA document posing at it) states:
-=-=-=- SNIP -=-=-=-=-
[ LIQUIDATORS, who cleaned the disaster zone ]
20. These men, drawn mainly from the then Soviet army [ ... ] In the time
since, these people have dispersed across the former Soviet Union. Much of
the registering and tracing of their whereabouts is highly inaccurate, in
part because of the break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent socio-
economic changes. There is even uncertainty as to ho
> conversion to nuclear power? One can't deny that, in itself, nuclear power generation
> generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal
[...]
> Every little bit helps.
True, but as far as I understand reducing CO2 emission:
There are more consistent arguments in my previous reply, plese let me know if there is a glitch in it.
> and power generation sources.
Nuclear plants can only replace power generation sources. In order to evaluate the real impact of power generation sources which don't emit CO2, let's compare the amount of CO2 emitted by existing "electricity production" facilities to all the other uses.
Amount of CO2 emitted in the US by sector in 1998 (million metric tons carbon per year): .7 from electricity)
Electricity production: 549.8
Industrial: 298.9 (477.7 minus 178.8)
Transportation: 484.2 (484.9 minus
Commercial: 60 (238.4 minus 178.4)
Residential: 92.6 (284.5 minus 191.9)
(Source: Energy Information Administration (mainly page 25))
Bottomline: electricity production accounts for 550 while the other players sum up to 936. And those 936 will be very hard to reduce because we will have to hackor replace every internal combustion engine, every classic heater... But we need (Kyoto) to reduce those emissions by at least 60% before 2050. Therefore the theory "nuclar plants will solve the greenhouse gas problem" is, as far as I understand, JAAL (Just Another Awful Lie).
Any thingie able to produce grid-electricity without polluting is interesting, but some write that nuclear plants are the only way. This is... well, you guessed it... JAAL, because most clean sources (sun, wind...) can do it.
In fact even the coal plants can be much cleaner, for example trough some clever design. Will be, in fact, instead of "can be", because some are building them right now. And don't think of it as some european gadget, see FutureGen.
Those clean sources, and even the clean coal-plants, do not produce dangerous waste and are more easy to build, run and dismantle than a nuclear plant. And they do not run amok, Chernobyl-style.
> 4000 people from Chernobyl? Wherever you are getting this from must be counting
> everyone that died in the area for whatever reason
No. This '4000' figure comes from recent (2005, September) evaluation by pro-nukes and is is very probably way underestimated.
> opinon on it than I do. I probably can't win this argument, so, I'll let you have it.
I'm not trying to win arguments but by chance got to discover that there are numerous problems (biases, distorsion, omissions, lies...) in many published "information" from both sides (pro and anti -nuke altogether). The pros have huge resources, the anti play on the "fear" string. My proposal is: let's filter information very cautiously.
Is it a joke? Even very pro-nuke agencies think that it will kill approx 4000 persons, and this is based upon very very dubious data and methods (see below).
> Anyway, the site that you cite says that the 4000 people estimate is based on bad science.
Indeed. Official UN agencies try hard to let us think that the disaster will only kill 4000 persons, and the proposed site shows why it is not true, why the grand total is very probably way higher.
In France alone (2000 km from Chernobyl), a Nobel Prize (G. Charpak, physics, very pro-nuke) thinks that the disaster will kill approx 300 persons (French site). Many think that it will kill at least 100000 persons. Special bonus: don't neglect the teratogen and mutagen effects.
> you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7
> people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant
It did not irradiate an enormous area and did not release very dangerous stuff, some active during very long periods and some freely wandering around, flying with the wind. Is ther any possible comparison?
The official message of many nuke-tenants is "nuke will solve the greenhouse-gas problem". This is pure BS, as a lab shows it right now. The lab name is 'France', where approximatively 80% of the electrical (grid power) is produced by nuclear plants.
Guess what? France missed by far the Kyoto objectives of greenhouse gas (and among them CO2) reduction, and those objectives were not ambitious (Details).
Moreover we discover, in another "lab" (England), that, in addition to all the known problems (waste, disaster...), any nuke plant dismantling produces a huge amount of very 'hot' (radioactive) crap, as revealed by the corresponding costs (always rising) and planning (delay: 100 years, and counting).
But all this information is not propagated as well as the usual pro-nuke BS.
Nuclear-vendors propagate the usual "nuclear power if safe, pigs can fly" crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction", "production of clean energy producers cost most energy thant they will produce", "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"...). One can understand that. But I wonder why some theoritically neutral (are they?) people relay it!?
>> flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let
>> the whole reactor blew away.
> I'd be interested to know if the problem is in the basic idea behind the design,
> or an implementation detail.
As far as I understand this was related to the implementation, because it was fixed without any overhaul. But:
> It would have sucked if, say, quicksort was never pursued because the first implementer
> had inserted an off by one error that was tripped up under some obscure condition.
> If the underlying concepts are flawed, ditch it.
The stakes are different: there is no harm when a software glitches while you develop it. Even hardware development can be somewhat confined.
When an industrial piece of software or hardware fails we sometimes have a problem. When a nuclear reactor goes amok while running... well, we may have a major problem. A reactor integrates a huge amount of rare and complex software and hardware kept secret (no peer review), therefore there are numerous hidden glitches, and our ability to detect all bugs without running the beast full scale is void. But the effect of a glitch tripping during a run can be disastrous and adding protections will not save the day because it is often intrusive (creating more complexity, more composed glitches...). Just ask a computer security specialist about stacking firewalls up.
To sum things up the thing is probably buggy and some bugs may cost ten or hundreds thousands lives. I, for sure, will not run it.
>> risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
> If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go
> into a rest state.
True, but you put a realistic perimeter by writing If left by its own devices, and this is not reassuring because it means that, after some disaster, we will hear "Hey, this did not happen under normal conditions! There was some security-device tweaking!", Chernobyl-style.
> If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go
> into a rest state. That does not mean that nothing will go wrong, but it does mean
> that if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be overly disastrous.
I beg to disagree because this is only a shortcut. Various problems, most as disastrous as a reactor meltdown, can happen if something goes wrong. A good'ole and plain hole done while running the reactor, for instance, will probably be 'disastrous' (disastrous means 'thousand dead people, perennial contamination of large areas...').
There is a way to tighten the security: let's have all security managers of dangerous units (nuclear, chemical...) be host (permanently live), along with their whole family, inside the older or more clunky unit.
This EPR project was presented in France as absolutely-sure-don't-worry-kids-it's-ok-no-glitch -ever-possible.
But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let the whole reactor blew away.
Let's hope that in such a case it will only kick the asses of those funny "this-reactor-is-absolutely-sure"-type guys.
On this matter... let's bet that the Chernobyl population got numerous "the reactor is sure!" insurances before the accident.
As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
My conclusion is that all those civil nuclear reactors seem pretty sure as long as:
- no peer-review is used (in other words: no systematic searching of design and implementation flaws, therefore without any scientific approach)
- they do not provoke any disaster
Nearly nobody wants one of them in his backyard. Go figure.And let's not talk about nuclear waste, cleaning up, or the effects of a direct attack on those beasts.
The Truth Shall Make You Free
Here is a different, albeit somewhat documented, point of view: http://www.exile.ru/2003-October-02/war_nerd.html
The bottomline is that many ecologists don't want us to burn coal all-the-way. They only ask for various sources, energy savings and, then, renewable energy. Many slightly different opinions exist upon the details and planning, one of them if for instance stated in one of their document (French) ("les antinucléaires ne prônent pas un retour au charbon, mais demandent l'utilisation du gaz à court terme, des économies d'énergie et enfin le recours aux énergies renouvelables.").
Nope, most ecologists want a mix of power sources. In France, for instance, many want to divert part the money funneled in nuclear-related research into some clean-energy work.