I agree that's an important difference. When you're doing something, it is useful to verify you're doing it right, and when something went wrong, it's valuable to analyse it afterward so you can fix it. But some big companies seem to think that producing piles of documentation about that is a worthy goal in itself, but I doubt anyone ever really reads that stuff.
There are many other sources of electricity. Sure, coal is worse than nuclear, but that's because coal is worse than every single power source. That doesn't make nuclear the best, it just makes it the second worst. (Or maybe third or fourth.)
My electricity comes from solar, wind, biomass and hydro.
50 deaths have been directly attributed to ration from the disaster. That doesn't mean there aren't more. The UN claims 9000 excess thyroid cancer deaths in the area.
The UN is talking about 9000 excess thyroid cancer deaths. Also, your WHO article says the directly attributed deaths are only plant workers and rescue workers. Exactly when deaths are "directly attributable", I don't know, but a problem with cancer is that it's often hard to trace the direct cause for any individual case, but cancer has clearly gone up quite a bit there.
Mind you, you don't even need a major nuclear accident for an increased cancer rate. Children near the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK also have an increased risk of cancer.
"Maybe you've heard of power storage" There's that whole consumption smoothing business that's a real bitch with solar. Power storage capacity in even Germany or Spain, with their huge amounts of renewables, is pitiful. Ideally you would have enough power storage to smooth consumption between the peak and trough loads in your area... in practice, that kind of infrastructure is expensive and largely nonexistent. The biggest consumption smoothing mechanism is calling up power plants and paying them to shut down, or paying power plants to have "spinning reserves," operations running at unprofitable levels that can be quickly ramped up.
This is a problem not just with solar, but with most forms of power production. Nuclear plants can't quickly change their power production to suit demand either. Only gas plants can really do that well. Oil possibly, but not coal.
But we're not yet at the point where this is actually a problem for solar. For the time being, it makes the most sense to take coal plants offline as soon as possible, and invest in a lot more solar. In the mean time, gas can take care of the variations in supply and demand. By the time we got rid of the coal plants and start receiving a significant amount of our energy from solar, the world will look very different, and then maybe we can start worrying about what to replace the gas plants with. But that's not an issue right now.
Please avoid the usual scaremongering headlines of the mass media regarding health and nuclear energy and remember that when deaths are accounted for energy produced, nuclear energy is the safest source we have around even compared with "renewable" energies.
Those numbers look very familiar. I believe they're based on the false assumption that less than 100 people ever died from nuclear accidents, which means they're only counting the deaths of workers in the plants, and omitting cancer related deaths among the civilian population. Admittedly, those are hard to count exactly, but for Chernobyl, for example, most official estimates range from 4000 to 9000. If you correct your figures for that, nuclear would be worse than solar, wind and hydro.
Are you sure that chart is based on the right figures? Many nuclear fan boys often claim that there are less than 100 deaths world wide caused by nuclear, completely ignoring the 6000+ deaths caused by Chernobyl (not to mention people still alive with birth defects and cancer). And even then nuclear barely comes ahead of wind and solar.
Compared to the processes used by the oil industry, nuclear is not harder to control.
Your choice of words suggests you think that means it's easy, but not being harder than "practically impossible" really doesn't mean much.
Nuclear isn't perfect, but it is the best we have.
It's not the best we have, it's the second worst we have. You only think it's the best because you look only at the two worst options. It's like being not quite as bad as China. It's like voting Democrat because the Republican guy is even worse. As long as "it's better than coal" is the best thing the pro-nuclear fans can come up with, I suggest we stay away from it.
Sure, maybe coast lines and fault lines are fundamentally too unsafe to build nuclear reactors there. But still people do build them there, because they need them there and it's too expensive to build them elsewhere. So in essence it's still greed that's the cause of the danger.
But what I meant was that this reactor (and others) were known to be unsafe. The IAEA warned about them a few years ago, and TEPCO and the relevant politicians basically ignored it. This is always going to be a vulnerability.
If you stop trying hard enough to make fusion work, it just stops working.
The problem is that you need to work so hard (= put so much energy into it) that fusion ends up costing energy rather than producing it.
I agree with you that efficient fusion would be far superior in fission and lack almost all of fission's problems, but it doesn't seem likely that a breakthrough will come soon. Waiting for fusion will cost too much time.
The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations. Strong security measures are vital, but what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to nuclear power, as long as it is safe and cost effective. But I really doubt whether it can be both at the same time.
But it also kicks families out of the house where they've lived for generations. It built a wall that separates farmers from their fields. Israel goes out of its way to disrupt the lives of normal Palestinian families. It's not oppressive to the people it likes, but it is oppressive to the people it oppresses. The fact that there are also people who are not oppressed by the Israeli government doesn't change this simple fact.
What surprises me a bit about Guy Fawkes masks as symbol of freedom, is that Guy Fawkes fought on the side of an oppressive government against a rebellious upstart Republic that wanted autonomy and freedom of religion. Fawkes was a religious extremist, and had no interest whatsoever in real freedom.
But I admit I've never seen V for Vendetta. Apparently that movie trumps historic fact.
There's a big difference between hating Jews and hating an oppressive regime. Not all Jews support Israel. I think that deserves to be pointed out every once in a while.
You think that code was written with less process? Less testing? Less code review? I think the process for 777 software is quite a bit heavier than that for your average webshop.
The real point though is this: wasn't Agile supposed to reduce the reliance on process, and increase the focus on people? TFA sounds like that didn't quite work out.
Patents have the same problem. They may work well with single inventors inventing steam engines and telephones, but it doesn't scale well to multinational pharma and software companies.
Only 3 Oracle claims left? Only a few days ago I heard about Oracles proposal to reduce the number of claims to 30, and Google's counter proposal to reduce them to 20. 3 seems rather extreme, doesn't it?
I just hope it helps rather than hurts Google's attempt to invalidate all those patents.
Slashdot Mirror
(well it didn't go wrong, it suffered an earthquake and tsunami).
So that was a good thing? I'm confused.
I agree that's an important difference. When you're doing something, it is useful to verify you're doing it right, and when something went wrong, it's valuable to analyse it afterward so you can fix it. But some big companies seem to think that producing piles of documentation about that is a worthy goal in itself, but I doubt anyone ever really reads that stuff.
Why would I? I'm using other options.
There are many other sources of electricity. Sure, coal is worse than nuclear, but that's because coal is worse than every single power source. That doesn't make nuclear the best, it just makes it the second worst. (Or maybe third or fourth.)
My electricity comes from solar, wind, biomass and hydro.
50 deaths have been directly attributed to ration from the disaster. That doesn't mean there aren't more. The UN claims 9000 excess thyroid cancer deaths in the area.
The UN is talking about 9000 excess thyroid cancer deaths. Also, your WHO article says the directly attributed deaths are only plant workers and rescue workers. Exactly when deaths are "directly attributable", I don't know, but a problem with cancer is that it's often hard to trace the direct cause for any individual case, but cancer has clearly gone up quite a bit there.
Mind you, you don't even need a major nuclear accident for an increased cancer rate. Children near the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK also have an increased risk of cancer.
But how many deaths from Chernobyl? Some people claim it only caused 30-60 deaths, which sounds like the number of plant workers that died.
"Maybe you've heard of power storage"
There's that whole consumption smoothing business that's a real bitch with solar. Power storage capacity in even Germany or Spain, with their huge amounts of renewables, is pitiful. Ideally you would have enough power storage to smooth consumption between the peak and trough loads in your area... in practice, that kind of infrastructure is expensive and largely nonexistent. The biggest consumption smoothing mechanism is calling up power plants and paying them to shut down, or paying power plants to have "spinning reserves," operations running at unprofitable levels that can be quickly ramped up.
This is a problem not just with solar, but with most forms of power production. Nuclear plants can't quickly change their power production to suit demand either. Only gas plants can really do that well. Oil possibly, but not coal.
But we're not yet at the point where this is actually a problem for solar. For the time being, it makes the most sense to take coal plants offline as soon as possible, and invest in a lot more solar. In the mean time, gas can take care of the variations in supply and demand. By the time we got rid of the coal plants and start receiving a significant amount of our energy from solar, the world will look very different, and then maybe we can start worrying about what to replace the gas plants with. But that's not an issue right now.
Nuclear could well be the cleanest and safest of the dirty and unsafe energy sources. But how does it compare to clean and safe energy sources?
Please avoid the usual scaremongering headlines of the mass media regarding health and nuclear energy and remember that when deaths are accounted for energy produced, nuclear energy is the safest source we have around even compared with "renewable" energies.
Those numbers look very familiar. I believe they're based on the false assumption that less than 100 people ever died from nuclear accidents, which means they're only counting the deaths of workers in the plants, and omitting cancer related deaths among the civilian population. Admittedly, those are hard to count exactly, but for Chernobyl, for example, most official estimates range from 4000 to 9000. If you correct your figures for that, nuclear would be worse than solar, wind and hydro.
Yes, but how is that relevant to the discussion?
Are you sure that chart is based on the right figures? Many nuclear fan boys often claim that there are less than 100 deaths world wide caused by nuclear, completely ignoring the 6000+ deaths caused by Chernobyl (not to mention people still alive with birth defects and cancer). And even then nuclear barely comes ahead of wind and solar.
Compared to the processes used by the oil industry, nuclear is not harder to control.
Your choice of words suggests you think that means it's easy, but not being harder than "practically impossible" really doesn't mean much.
Nuclear isn't perfect, but it is the best we have.
It's not the best we have, it's the second worst we have. You only think it's the best because you look only at the two worst options. It's like being not quite as bad as China. It's like voting Democrat because the Republican guy is even worse. As long as "it's better than coal" is the best thing the pro-nuclear fans can come up with, I suggest we stay away from it.
Sure, maybe coast lines and fault lines are fundamentally too unsafe to build nuclear reactors there. But still people do build them there, because they need them there and it's too expensive to build them elsewhere. So in essence it's still greed that's the cause of the danger.
But what I meant was that this reactor (and others) were known to be unsafe. The IAEA warned about them a few years ago, and TEPCO and the relevant politicians basically ignored it. This is always going to be a vulnerability.
If you stop trying hard enough to make fusion work, it just stops working.
The problem is that you need to work so hard (= put so much energy into it) that fusion ends up costing energy rather than producing it.
I agree with you that efficient fusion would be far superior in fission and lack almost all of fission's problems, but it doesn't seem likely that a breakthrough will come soon. Waiting for fusion will cost too much time.
Fusion has never been achieved? Really? Maybe you should read something about the subject first. Even some very basic news could help you a lot.
Of course fusion has been achieved. Plenty of times. The problem is that it costs more energy than it produces. That's all.
The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations. Strong security measures are vital, but what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to nuclear power, as long as it is safe and cost effective. But I really doubt whether it can be both at the same time.
But it also kicks families out of the house where they've lived for generations. It built a wall that separates farmers from their fields. Israel goes out of its way to disrupt the lives of normal Palestinian families. It's not oppressive to the people it likes, but it is oppressive to the people it oppresses. The fact that there are also people who are not oppressed by the Israeli government doesn't change this simple fact.
What surprises me a bit about Guy Fawkes masks as symbol of freedom, is that Guy Fawkes fought on the side of an oppressive government against a rebellious upstart Republic that wanted autonomy and freedom of religion. Fawkes was a religious extremist, and had no interest whatsoever in real freedom.
But I admit I've never seen V for Vendetta. Apparently that movie trumps historic fact.
There's a big difference between hating Jews and hating an oppressive regime. Not all Jews support Israel. I think that deserves to be pointed out every once in a while.
So much for your vaunted innocent until proven guilty, eh? I knew that was a load you didn't really believe in.
In thew US that concept has been dead for some time. Mind you, some European countries are doing their best to follow in those footsteps.
My son's mother would work quite well for me.
You think that code was written with less process? Less testing? Less code review? I think the process for 777 software is quite a bit heavier than that for your average webshop.
The real point though is this: wasn't Agile supposed to reduce the reliance on process, and increase the focus on people? TFA sounds like that didn't quite work out.
Patents have the same problem. They may work well with single inventors inventing steam engines and telephones, but it doesn't scale well to multinational pharma and software companies.
Only 3 Oracle claims left? Only a few days ago I heard about Oracles proposal to reduce the number of claims to 30, and Google's counter proposal to reduce them to 20. 3 seems rather extreme, doesn't it?
I just hope it helps rather than hurts Google's attempt to invalidate all those patents.