Why not simply build a better reactor that can actually burn most of this long-lived waste down to stuff that isn't (relatively) so long lived?
Because you can't build something out of vaporware.
The big problem right now is that most of the waste is mildly radioactive, but it'll be mildly radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The problem with engineering is, do we REALLY think we can engineer a site that'll be good for 100+ millennia?
Which is why nuclear power never should have been allowed to be a thing in the first place.
We have the capability to reprocess fuel for extant solid fuel reactors and the capability to build newer reactor types that'll take said waste and cook it down to stuff that's more highly radioactive, but for FAR shorter periods.
Even if some of the vaporware turns into a thing, it's never going to make nuclear power cost-effective compared to alternatives. Alternatives than aren't an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.
Because solar simply CANNOT be baseline power.
The Baseline Bullshit canard is as trite as pretending the choice is coal vs nuclear. Golly gee wilickers, Batman, you think no one has realized you're not going to get much solar power on a cloudy day?
Coal and nuclear power are already moved hundreds of miles via power lines. All do you do with wind and solar is build out your generating capacity across the grid - same as you do for coal and nuclear power today. The faux concerns over batteries is also easily addressed by technology that is also used to store excess coal and nuclear power for rainy days: pumped storage hydroelectricity.
All the FUD on wind and solar power is easily answered by technology that was available in the 70's - and sometimes the 1870's. We have water towers and hydroelectric dams still in use that were built more than a century ago. So instead of building containment systems for radioactive materials, take that money and build pumped storage facilities. Zero nuclear waste and the biggest jobs program since WWII.
When their donations go to a single political party in mass
Other parties are free to court their votes. Isn't democracy neat that way?
ignore what the members want
See again about democracy. Don't like your union leadership? Vote them out. Any of you geniuses realize that's far more say you have, as opposed to the company's CEO?
Getting on to government employee unions, why would they even need to exist?
Because many municipalities are happy to pay workers poverty-level wages? How much rarified air is in your bubble for you to even ask such a question?
You want people to support unions? Take the political arm out of them
An unilaterally disarm against business interests who are constantly political? Who lobby for shit like overriding municipal minimum wage statues with state laws?
Nuclear waste handling is not something that the industry just realized was a problem as it has been considered since the inception of commercial power.
Doesn't change the fact that they've 1) ignored it 2) pushed immediate costs onto taxpayers 3) left future generations holding the nuclear waste bag.
Solar is the zeitgeist of environmentalists, and it has obvious merits, but it isn't base capacity that nuclear addresses and the economy demands.
Why spend ten years and ten billion dollars building a new nuclear plant when you can spend that rolling out a large amount of solar power in a fraction of the time. Long term, nuclear power is the ultimate in corporate welfare, being the most expensive power source ever invented by man.
The saying for this is "perfect is the enemy of good enough."
Which always seems to be said in the context of defending the indefensible. Nuclear power isn't an exception here.
So then, why do people cheer when a nuclear project gets killed?
Because they don't want their taxpayer dollars to be pissed away on the ultimate form of corporate welfare? Because they don't want to saddle future generations with an enormous waste problem? Because they took fifth grade econ and have heard the term "cost effective"?
They look at it in absolute terms instead of "fossil fuel nuclear wind/solar/etc."
As opposed to the binary terms of nuke fanboys, who pretend the choice is 1) support nuclear 2) love coal. Which, years after wind and solar have surpassed coal (and that's allowing coal to externalize its costs like nuclear) is a red herring.
Or, you know, if Luddite chicken-littles would stop blocking the building of breeder-type reactors that reuse their own fuel until what's left is much easier & safer to handle and dispose of.
No amount of vaporware is going to make nuclear power cost-effective. Stop trying to make the nuclear efficiency thing happen. It's not going to happen.
You do realize we already have 70k workers in the dept of labor including OSHA.
You do realize they stop a fraction. Of a percentage of abuses before they happen.
Unions are dying out because they've become corrupt and irrelevant.
You work for a living - if you didn't, you wouldn't be posting here. A worker being opposed to unions makes as much sense as a woman being opposed to having the right to vote or own property. Of course, you can't actually find any women that stupid.
That's what all that Thatcherite apologia translates to. You were the coddled child of bourgeois shitbags who wanted that whole workers-share-in-the-benefits-of-the-economy thing to be a passing phase in the post WWII era.
I've worked at union and non union auto manufacturers, including with Tesla, and unionizing is the worst option for both employer and employees. When you lose any motivation to work hard, the incentive to not be a lazy piece of shit disappears too.
This "unions only protect the lazy" bullshit is dependent on the notion that not only are you going to be happy doing your own work, but your work plus Bob's down the hall whenever he feels like slacking off. No human is built that way - unless you're in an abusive Biff Tannen/George McFly situation, in which case George is going to be doing Bill's work even at an anti-union shop. And it's not like all of you Calvinist shitweasels haven't worked with any number of slackers at union-free companies who got away with all kinds of shenanigans because they were the boss's buddy.
Unions were necessary and were a force for protecting employees' interests.
Unions act as a counterbalance to corporate greed. Has corporate greed disappeared? Have companies stopped killing their workers to save a few pennies on the dollar in profits? Have they stopped demanding their workers make huge pay and benefit cuts to up quarterly dividends - even as the company is enjoying all-time high profits?
Unions now are primarily political action committees.
Uh huh. And how do you propose they counterbalance the (infinitely more funded) political action committees from big business? You expecting them to unilaterally disarm as the latter engages in shenanigans like getting "small government" Republicans to override city-based minimum wage increases with state laws?
Kind of like how we could just do away with the FDA, because drug fiascos like Vioxx are a thing of the past. We can all trust our corporate overlords not to put their own greed above the interests of their own workers and customers...
I would see the union manager come around in his $1000 suits (a lot at the time). He didn't actually seem to be doing good for the employees, but it looked like he sure was doing good for himself.
Anecdotes and confirmation bias in an anti-union post, how original. But you don't see people questioning the very concept of banking because of Well's Fargo fraudulently signing people up for accounts they didn't ask for.
A recent report [chicagofed.org] from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that compares tax rates in the US and Germany shows that the difference is quite a bit more than "not by much". By almost any measure of tax burden (other than corporate taxes), Americans have a significantly lower tax burden.
Low taxes have high costs. Like shitty infrastructure that kills people. Like paying thousands per year for health insurance premiums....and then having to pay another $4000+ out of pocket before meeting your deductible. Like having the finest trail transportation available with 19th century technology. Like graduating with five figures of student loan debt you can never discharge. Like enjoying your paltry Social Security benefits for a whopping two years before you die.
Things people in socialist-icky countries mostly (or completely) don't have to worry about. Low taxes have high costs.
Which is the irritating problem with following the J. J. Abrams method of story arc creation (ie. just make it up as you go along and hope that it all works out in the end). Mass Effect was a great example of this too, with its extremely half-assed conclusion to an otherwise well-written story.
That's why reason why if I were god of the universe I would make a mandate that all story arcs must be run past Joss Wheadon or JMS for quality control. B5 in particular had flexibility in characters and story arcs (like squishing what would have been season 4 and 5 into one when they thought it wasn't getting renewed) but the major elements were all planned out from the beginning.
Phantom Menace was garbage, whether you're a SW fanboy or not.
Which is why I brought it up. But it sucked because Lucas sucks at writing and directing, not because "it had been toooo looong". Contrast the prequels to Force Awakens, or even better, Rogue One - good movies that came out long after the original trilogy.
I don't think Valve ever came up with a story that was strong enough to conclude HL2 after episodes 1 & 2
That's just going back to the 'can't live up to the hype' chestnut.
not to mention other games which came out after that and pushed the bar even higher, such as Mass Effect 2
Since you bring up Mass Effect, it's a good thing it didn't take EA ten years after ME3 to come out with Andromeda, or else people would have used the 'toooo looong' talking point to excuse that game's flaws.
The other problem is that a lot of people were expecting HL2:E3 as a DLC to conclude the story of HL2, so you'd have to produce this epic finale for very little financial return.
How so? Valve had a good idea on episodic content - maintain production on a franchise with more frequent but smaller releases. So they sell HL2:E3 for $25, then proceed on to Half Life 3, Episodes 1 through Whatever. This is when they should have split the company into a Game Development division and a Steam Store devision.
Articles on HL3 invariably contain the cop-out comments that "it couldn't live up to the hype" so Valve might as well pass on it. Except that's crap - there's gaps between classic games and movies all the time but that doesn't stand in the way of them getting made. It was 8 years between the release of Deus Ex: Invisible War and Human Revolution, but that didn't stop the sequel from being a critical and financial success. Or when the thing is made, it's used as an excuse for dreck - the problem with Phantom Menace wasn't Jar Jar or Lucas's shitty directing, it's because the fanboys just couldn't be happy with any sequel./sarcasm
No, what's happened here is that Valve has gotten fat and lazy off of Steam. Why do all the haaaard wooork of actually making something when they can just charge a percentage as a publisher? It's a shame that Valve didn't spin off it's game development into a subsidiary ten years ago, to leave it's Steam team focused on the store and a Game team to focus on Portal 3, Half Life 3, and a Portal Life to wrap up that universe.
If you oppose nuclear you must have two functioning brain cells and know it is completely unjustifiable based on cost alone
FTFY. Cost is the reason new plants aren't being built, not hippies who can't even stop oil pipelines from being built. No plant has ever been constructed that hasn't been completely and utterly reliant on taxpayer funding and support.
Disagree? Name the plant that puts the full cost of mining, construction, operation, security, insurance and storing waste for hundreds to thousands of years into the rates it charges its customers.
So, leaking evidence of war crimes to a responsible organization is treason now? The founders were a bunch of elitists pricks, but one thing they did right was to specifically define treason in the Constitution so it couldn't be abused for purely political purposes.
Like what you're doing right now.
There is a right way to do things, sometimes even several right ways.
Except there isn't. The "proper" channels are based around properly shutting down information getting out about mass government lawbreaking and war crimes. Case in point:
Manning didnt do any of them.
Except she raised concerns within the "chain of command" and was blown off, just like Snowden, just like John Kiriakou. This talking point has as much behind it as the "blood on her hands" canard: nothing.
All these people took an Oath of Office to protect the Constitution, not cover up crimes against humanity. Which means Manning was following her oath, not being a traitor. Which also brings up other questions: why is it that you authoritarians calling Manning a traitor but DGAF about the torture and war crimes revealed by Manning. Why is Dick Cheney (and his staff) never called a traitor for outing a covert CIA agent, who worked to stop loose nukes, for purely political purposes?
Oh, look, the "if you oppose nuclear you must love coal" canard. It was an annoying false dichotomy before wind and solar became cost competitive with coal, and that was allowing coal to externalize most of its costs. Now it's just dumb.
And your other example is.....another hard working, successful guy. Who was also extremely competitive. How about that part time manager of a Sears store who's greatest accomplishment in life was a diploma from his community college?
So as far as I can tell from the recorded history, the only two men who bedded both Ava Gardner and Lana Turner were both shorter than 5' 6" tall. For those two tomatoes, I'd chop 5 inches off my legs.
Well, no argument there, except both ladies were within one inch of being 5'5" themselves. Not like Tom Cruise, who had a stepping stool for his portraits with Nicole Kidman.
Education, poverty, unemployment, health care are all better after Chavez nationalized the oil industry and used its profits to improve the lives of the common people instead of the pocketbooks of the ultrarich
Short, funny little Mickey Rooney scored some of the hottest babage in the world, and it wasn't because of his wallet, since the women he banged were all much more successful than him. Elizabeth Taylor, Lana Turner, even Ava fucking Gardner, who on a scale of 1 to 10 was like an 18.
Rooney was famous, rich, funny, and hard working - he had 130 more acting credits to his name than the three actresses you listed combined. Now if you could dig up evidence that Taylor, Turner and Gardner all banged a moderately amusing part-time manager of a Sears store, that would be more impressive.
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Why yes, yes they do! Most of the Palm team came from Neuton, which Apple started in the 90's. So who copied who again?
So you're going to help environmentalists take care of capitalism? It is what is directly responsible for both low wages and mass pollution.
Because you can't build something out of vaporware.
Which is why nuclear power never should have been allowed to be a thing in the first place.
Even if some of the vaporware turns into a thing, it's never going to make nuclear power cost-effective compared to alternatives. Alternatives than aren't an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.
The Baseline Bullshit canard is as trite as pretending the choice is coal vs nuclear. Golly gee wilickers, Batman, you think no one has realized you're not going to get much solar power on a cloudy day?
Coal and nuclear power are already moved hundreds of miles via power lines. All do you do with wind and solar is build out your generating capacity across the grid - same as you do for coal and nuclear power today. The faux concerns over batteries is also easily addressed by technology that is also used to store excess coal and nuclear power for rainy days: pumped storage hydroelectricity.
All the FUD on wind and solar power is easily answered by technology that was available in the 70's - and sometimes the 1870's. We have water towers and hydroelectric dams still in use that were built more than a century ago. So instead of building containment systems for radioactive materials, take that money and build pumped storage facilities. Zero nuclear waste and the biggest jobs program since WWII.
Other parties are free to court their votes. Isn't democracy neat that way?
See again about democracy. Don't like your union leadership? Vote them out. Any of you geniuses realize that's far more say you have, as opposed to the company's CEO?
Because many municipalities are happy to pay workers poverty-level wages? How much rarified air is in your bubble for you to even ask such a question?
An unilaterally disarm against business interests who are constantly political? Who lobby for shit like overriding municipal minimum wage statues with state laws?
Doesn't change the fact that they've 1) ignored it 2) pushed immediate costs onto taxpayers 3) left future generations holding the nuclear waste bag.
Why spend ten years and ten billion dollars building a new nuclear plant when you can spend that rolling out a large amount of solar power in a fraction of the time. Long term, nuclear power is the ultimate in corporate welfare, being the most expensive power source ever invented by man.
Which always seems to be said in the context of defending the indefensible. Nuclear power isn't an exception here.
Because they don't want their taxpayer dollars to be pissed away on the ultimate form of corporate welfare? Because they don't want to saddle future generations with an enormous waste problem? Because they took fifth grade econ and have heard the term "cost effective"?
As opposed to the binary terms of nuke fanboys, who pretend the choice is 1) support nuclear 2) love coal. Which, years after wind and solar have surpassed coal (and that's allowing coal to externalize its costs like nuclear) is a red herring.
No amount of vaporware is going to make nuclear power cost-effective. Stop trying to make the nuclear efficiency thing happen. It's not going to happen.
You do realize they stop a fraction. Of a percentage of abuses before they happen.
You work for a living - if you didn't, you wouldn't be posting here. A worker being opposed to unions makes as much sense as a woman being opposed to having the right to vote or own property. Of course, you can't actually find any women that stupid.
It's not that people don't want to be seen when they venture out in public. It's that they don't want to be tracked. There's a difference.
That's what all that Thatcherite apologia translates to. You were the coddled child of bourgeois shitbags who wanted that whole workers-share-in-the-benefits-of-the-economy thing to be a passing phase in the post WWII era.
This "unions only protect the lazy" bullshit is dependent on the notion that not only are you going to be happy doing your own work, but your work plus Bob's down the hall whenever he feels like slacking off. No human is built that way - unless you're in an abusive Biff Tannen/George McFly situation, in which case George is going to be doing Bill's work even at an anti-union shop. And it's not like all of you Calvinist shitweasels haven't worked with any number of slackers at union-free companies who got away with all kinds of shenanigans because they were the boss's buddy.
Dumb.
Fuck.
Er.
Eee.
Unions act as a counterbalance to corporate greed. Has corporate greed disappeared? Have companies stopped killing their workers to save a few pennies on the dollar in profits? Have they stopped demanding their workers make huge pay and benefit cuts to up quarterly dividends - even as the company is enjoying all-time high profits?
Uh huh. And how do you propose they counterbalance the (infinitely more funded) political action committees from big business? You expecting them to unilaterally disarm as the latter engages in shenanigans like getting "small government" Republicans to override city-based minimum wage increases with state laws?
Kind of like how we could just do away with the FDA, because drug fiascos like Vioxx are a thing of the past. We can all trust our corporate overlords not to put their own greed above the interests of their own workers and customers...
Anecdotes and confirmation bias in an anti-union post, how original. But you don't see people questioning the very concept of banking because of Well's Fargo fraudulently signing people up for accounts they didn't ask for.
Low taxes have high costs. Like shitty infrastructure that kills people. Like paying thousands per year for health insurance premiums....and then having to pay another $4000+ out of pocket before meeting your deductible. Like having the finest trail transportation available with 19th century technology. Like graduating with five figures of student loan debt you can never discharge. Like enjoying your paltry Social Security benefits for a whopping two years before you die.
Things people in socialist-icky countries mostly (or completely) don't have to worry about. Low taxes have high costs.
That's why reason why if I were god of the universe I would make a mandate that all story arcs must be run past Joss Wheadon or JMS for quality control. B5 in particular had flexibility in characters and story arcs (like squishing what would have been season 4 and 5 into one when they thought it wasn't getting renewed) but the major elements were all planned out from the beginning.
Which is why I brought it up. But it sucked because Lucas sucks at writing and directing, not because "it had been toooo looong". Contrast the prequels to Force Awakens, or even better, Rogue One - good movies that came out long after the original trilogy.
That's just going back to the 'can't live up to the hype' chestnut.
Since you bring up Mass Effect, it's a good thing it didn't take EA ten years after ME3 to come out with Andromeda, or else people would have used the 'toooo looong' talking point to excuse that game's flaws.
How so? Valve had a good idea on episodic content - maintain production on a franchise with more frequent but smaller releases. So they sell HL2:E3 for $25, then proceed on to Half Life 3, Episodes 1 through Whatever. This is when they should have split the company into a Game Development division and a Steam Store devision.
Articles on HL3 invariably contain the cop-out comments that "it couldn't live up to the hype" so Valve might as well pass on it. Except that's crap - there's gaps between classic games and movies all the time but that doesn't stand in the way of them getting made. It was 8 years between the release of Deus Ex: Invisible War and Human Revolution, but that didn't stop the sequel from being a critical and financial success. Or when the thing is made, it's used as an excuse for dreck - the problem with Phantom Menace wasn't Jar Jar or Lucas's shitty directing, it's because the fanboys just couldn't be happy with any sequel. /sarcasm
No, what's happened here is that Valve has gotten fat and lazy off of Steam. Why do all the haaaard wooork of actually making something when they can just charge a percentage as a publisher? It's a shame that Valve didn't spin off it's game development into a subsidiary ten years ago, to leave it's Steam team focused on the store and a Game team to focus on Portal 3, Half Life 3, and a Portal Life to wrap up that universe.
FTFY. Cost is the reason new plants aren't being built, not hippies who can't even stop oil pipelines from being built. No plant has ever been constructed that hasn't been completely and utterly reliant on taxpayer funding and support.
Disagree? Name the plant that puts the full cost of mining, construction, operation, security, insurance and storing waste for hundreds to thousands of years into the rates it charges its customers.
So, leaking evidence of war crimes to a responsible organization is treason now? The founders were a bunch of elitists pricks, but one thing they did right was to specifically define treason in the Constitution so it couldn't be abused for purely political purposes.
Like what you're doing right now.
Except there isn't. The "proper" channels are based around properly shutting down information getting out about mass government lawbreaking and war crimes. Case in point:
Except she raised concerns within the "chain of command" and was blown off, just like Snowden, just like John Kiriakou. This talking point has as much behind it as the "blood on her hands" canard: nothing.
All these people took an Oath of Office to protect the Constitution, not cover up crimes against humanity. Which means Manning was following her oath, not being a traitor. Which also brings up other questions: why is it that you authoritarians calling Manning a traitor but DGAF about the torture and war crimes revealed by Manning. Why is Dick Cheney (and his staff) never called a traitor for outing a covert CIA agent, who worked to stop loose nukes, for purely political purposes?
Oh, look, the "if you oppose nuclear you must love coal" canard. It was an annoying false dichotomy before wind and solar became cost competitive with coal, and that was allowing coal to externalize most of its costs. Now it's just dumb.
And your other example is.....another hard working, successful guy. Who was also extremely competitive. How about that part time manager of a Sears store who's greatest accomplishment in life was a diploma from his community college?
Well, no argument there, except both ladies were within one inch of being 5'5" themselves. Not like Tom Cruise, who had a stepping stool for his portraits with Nicole Kidman.
Maybe after the CIA gives up on formenting violent unrest as a pretext for regime change. When are you?
Education, poverty, unemployment, health care are all better after Chavez nationalized the oil industry and used its profits to improve the lives of the common people instead of the pocketbooks of the ultrarich
Facts are stubborn things.
Rooney was famous, rich, funny, and hard working - he had 130 more acting credits to his name than the three actresses you listed combined. Now if you could dig up evidence that Taylor, Turner and Gardner all banged a moderately amusing part-time manager of a Sears store, that would be more impressive.