If you get a security clearance, the documents you sign stipulate that anything you want to publish is subject to review before it can be released to the public.
And if you had a "writer" clearance in the SU - a membership to the Writers' Union (a professional organization of writers there) - you'd sign documents that stipulated your work is subject to editorial review before it could be released to the public. It was considerably more difficult to get a book out "officially" without such membership.
You can see how similar is this in form to what the Pentagon is doing. One difference is that publication money was never an issue, as the state was paying all the bills anyway.;)
And Soviet authors participated in "voluntary" censorship to the extent that they criticized their leadership & oligarchs anyways through extensive and satirical allegory that could pass the censors' review without diluting the message.
First, there were no "oligarchs" in the Soviet era, there were Politburo members. The oligarchs are a new development.
Second, satirical allegory, especially extensive one, was allowed (or passed censorship) on very rare occasions. Most censorship violations happened when unapproved books were distributed by Samizdat (self-publishing).
Third, this is largely irrelevant to the question is voluntary censorship a censorship. I am not implying that censorship is necessarily bad, I am just answering GP's question with an example.
So, is what the Pentagon is doing a form of censorship? Yes, it is, no doubt about it.
Will you care to share some of your knowledge on the topic of "exploration, economic viability, and classifying material as 'reserve'", or will you just wave your internet credentials?
For example, how are the published estimates of the US Department of Energy regarding US uranium reserves wrong, and why?
Uranium ore deposits are exactly like oil - known to a reasonable degree. New large deposits are as likely to be found as new large oilfields.
Uranium ore is classified by a metric called "maximum forward cost" (per kilo of ore). What is considered "cheap" has a MFC of $40. What is considered "extractable" costs $130 (but it doubles energy costs).
At _current_ rates of consumption, all uranium in those two categories will be used up in 50-70 years.
There's a lot more if you google for "uranium reserves".
Yes, it is called "voluntary" censorship, and worked very well for many years in the Soviet Union where famous authors would hide or modify their manuscripts for publishing.
It was derided and criticized by the West all along, and many books that were "unpublishable" in the USSR in their "unabridged" format were moved to the West and printed there.
My point is in that we should avoid pursuing ideological fantasies promoted by powerful lobbies without doing our own financial math first.
The nuclear "peace" power is a prime example of an economic ideological fantasy. (If you doubt me, see how it got started. Its nature hasn't changed much).
The nuclear industry is a prime example of a powerful lobby. Because it is related to "strategic weapons" the players don't even need money for government access.
GP is not providing facts or serious justification for his "Go Nuclear" slogan, he's just promoting the Indian government fantasy of nuclear energy - thorium reactors. He isn't probably thinking too much what it means and how it affects him financially.
The fact is, nuclear power doesn't pay for itself, not even if you put a sizable chunk of government money into it. Its costs and risks outweigh its benefits many, many times over, and have done so since day one.
You are not proposing any serious justification for it either.
Inventors and practitioners risking their own resources, failing or succeeding and freeing us of the need to use sticks and stones are fine and dandy, but the nuclear industry isn't an example of that.
Deficit spending on large projects for ideological reasons have brought many a powerful country to complete collapse.
Ukraine is doing many things out of desperation. Their economy was built on the premise of free energy from the USSR.
They were screwed badly by Putin several times. They still hold a monopoly over gas lines, but with the Northern and the Southern streams and the Russia-Bulgaria-Greece oil pipeline (which may or may not be built, depending on the weather in Sofia and Moscow) their leverage seems to be diminishing, so they are worried.
Re-opening those plants may well be a "strategic" initiative and have nothing to do with cost. People sometimes pay unreasonably high amounts for perceived "safety".
Since paying up by the government isn't popular, there's huge talk of electricity sales abroad as a justification. And since nuke tech is still kinda sensitive and "strategic", most calculations are kept secret.
As to the electricity sales from nuclear plants - of course I've heard the argument that exports of electricity are profitable many times, but I have yet to see a solid justification of it.
The other "nuclear country" over there, Bulgaria, has tried to find market financing for a second nuke plant -- and failed, even when money was cheap in 2005-2007, and with the government taking over key risks.
The reason - with the fall of socialist industry, and the development of new, efficient sectors, there is now a power glut. Sales to the region just don't make enough dough - so a plant that used up over 30 or 40 billions us$ is generating about $0.5-0.7 mil in profits a year.
That is why it will be a commercial failure, and why nuclear power should not be a big priority in the search for alternatives.
You'll see I'm right in a few years, when the paper projects are built, and you realize they cost 10 or 20 times more than the initial estimates, produce less energy and a lot more radioactive waste to dispose of than you were expecting.
Well, we agree on that -- I am willing to allow spending on research and even some on tech development, provided there is no "intellectual property" involved where it is financed by taxes.
Once it gets into production, unless there are obvious economic externalities, it should be as adam smithy as possible.
Well, if I have to put it very precisely, there are a lot of nuclear options available, but most of them are, at the moment, closer to science fiction than to reality financially, and investing all our efforts into nuclear won't be the smartest decision:)
And fusion (the hot one) is still science fiction, even technically.
Well, I think it is quite reasonable to include a budget for safety in the bill of the future energy solutions. If you disagree, it is your opinion, and you're welcome to it, but it is a myopic and dangerous opinion.
Besides, it is really easy to disprove your absurd thesis.
I can be reasonably sure that the wind turbines in my farm aren't going to explode, due to fault or bad management, and pollute my property for decades.
Can I be sure that the Rossatom-built and operated nuclear power plant in a different country across the river with an unstable government and serious ethnic problems will be as safe?
Yes, in the context you try force on it, I did not raise the issue. You focus on past performance, which is not a guarantee of future results.
The real issue is that the only easily available way to have "cheap" nuclear energy is to cut safety costs. The numerous projects in countries that have less than stellar record in industrial safety is certainly something to be aware of./
Hence my comment on "safe and financially reasonable", I am not questioning the past record of the nuclear industry so much, as worrying about its future.
I'm happy to let the marketplace sort this out according to the normal laws of economics.
That is the problem. Nuclear energy has never-ever been tested in the free market. It is largely a byproduct of the nuclear weapons industry, in which costs were never a consideration.
I have yet to see a project for new plants, which do not require huge amounts of money (and huge amounts of fossil fuels as a bonus) to setup and operate.
Until nuclear energy in a really free market happens, it will not be a serious alternative, just a resource drain.
If you had read my comments and understood what was being discussed, you would have noted that safety is not an issue that is the point of discussion.
If you'd been as diligent in counting the indirect deaths caused by the nuclear industry (including, naturally, the victims of the nuclear weapons research and actual victim weapons, for we'd not have nuclear energy without the nukes) as you are in counting those other victims, it would have made an interesting comparison.;)
But you are not diligent, you're biased; and you do prefer to put your own strawmen up and fight them, so there is little point to keep pointing out how wrong you are.
A lot of people (including you) do not understand the fact that, unlike coal plants, in which you basically burn what you dig, uranium ore has to undergo a complex processing in which only a very very small fraction of it ends up as usable fuel.
That means that the production of the proverbial "pound of uranium", which contains energy of untold tons of coal, requires a huge and very expensive infrastructure to get it out of the earth, make it into yellow cake, and further enrich and process that until it is usable as fuel.
There is only so much cheaply available ore, and the proportion of uranium that is usable in it is very small.
Alternatives like breeding reactors have been around for a long-long time, but a reactor that produces fuel more economically than shifting gigatonnes of dirt and operating a complex and dangerous refinement process.
At current rates of consumption, the cheaply available ore, which produces this immensely expensive fuel will be gone.
Then the fuel will jump in cost a lot. If the current contracts and proposals of Rosatom in Turkey and Eastern Europe are any indication, the increase will make even the photo/wind alternative energy options seem cheap by comparison as early as 2030.
Had you bothered to read what I wrote, you'd see no discussion of environmental issues there. That makes half of your incoherent rambling irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is, umm, "feasibility".
It seems also that you have a thing for quoting Wikipedia and linking to Google searches. This is a common Slashdot failure, but -- if you follow your links AND are able to read and comprehend, which you're obviously struggling with, you'll see that breeder reactors of any type require the use hugely expensive and exotic materials, and as such make no financial sense.
As for the Indians having insanely huge number of projects (in plural) for building thorium reactors - okay, cool. Wake me up when they have them working, and when the said reactors are contributing to their economy enough to offset the costs of development and construction.
In fact, wake me up when you find one single nuclear power generation program that has been able to break even on its own, without piggybacking a nuclear weaponry sector behind it to absorb the costs.
Yes, reactors of many types have been built. The problem (and my point) is that none of those experimental reactors built have delivered the safe and inexpensive power that was promised.
Worse, none have even shown that the respective technology has the potential to become safe and inexpensive.
The cold fusion was a lame joke, although in terms of feasibility it is in the same ballpark.
Also, you're making the assumption that oil consumption will grow exponentially. It won't, once the physical limitations on production hit, the free market will disappear, oil consumption will split in two - government-regulated and rationed one, and an insignificant, super-expensive black market.
The vast majority of users (which currently makes up the demand), will have to do without, so consumption will probably decrease.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get a security clearance, the documents you sign stipulate that anything you want to publish is subject to review before it can be released to the public.
And if you had a "writer" clearance in the SU - a membership to the Writers' Union (a professional organization of writers there) - you'd sign documents that stipulated your work is subject to editorial review before it could be released to the public. It was considerably more difficult to get a book out "officially" without such membership.
You can see how similar is this in form to what the Pentagon is doing. One difference is that publication money was never an issue, as the state was paying all the bills anyway. ;)
And Soviet authors participated in "voluntary" censorship to the extent that they criticized their leadership & oligarchs anyways through extensive and satirical allegory that could pass the censors' review without diluting the message.
First, there were no "oligarchs" in the Soviet era, there were Politburo members. The oligarchs are a new development.
Second, satirical allegory, especially extensive one, was allowed (or passed censorship) on very rare occasions. Most censorship violations happened when unapproved books were distributed by Samizdat (self-publishing).
Third, this is largely irrelevant to the question is voluntary censorship a censorship. I am not implying that censorship is necessarily bad, I am just answering GP's question with an example.
So, is what the Pentagon is doing a form of censorship? Yes, it is, no doubt about it.
Okay, cool.
Will you care to share some of your knowledge on the topic of "exploration, economic viability, and classifying material as 'reserve'", or will you just wave your internet credentials?
For example, how are the published estimates of the US Department of Energy regarding US uranium reserves wrong, and why?
Thanks.
Go educate yourself, please.
Uranium ore deposits are exactly like oil - known to a reasonable degree. New large deposits are as likely to be found as new large oilfields.
Uranium ore is classified by a metric called "maximum forward cost" (per kilo of ore). What is considered "cheap" has a MFC of $40. What is considered "extractable" costs $130 (but it doubles energy costs).
At _current_ rates of consumption, all uranium in those two categories will be used up in 50-70 years.
There's a lot more if you google for "uranium reserves".
Considering how easy it was to leak several years of electronic communications, maybe you're doing it already ;)
Yes, it is called "voluntary" censorship, and worked very well for many years in the Soviet Union where famous authors would hide or modify their manuscripts for publishing.
It was derided and criticized by the West all along, and many books that were "unpublishable" in the USSR in their "unabridged" format were moved to the West and printed there.
No.
My point is in that we should avoid pursuing ideological fantasies promoted by powerful lobbies without doing our own financial math first.
The nuclear "peace" power is a prime example of an economic ideological fantasy. (If you doubt me, see how it got started. Its nature hasn't changed much).
The nuclear industry is a prime example of a powerful lobby. Because it is related to "strategic weapons" the players don't even need money for government access.
GP is not providing facts or serious justification for his "Go Nuclear" slogan, he's just promoting the Indian government fantasy of nuclear energy - thorium reactors. He isn't probably thinking too much what it means and how it affects him financially.
The fact is, nuclear power doesn't pay for itself, not even if you put a sizable chunk of government money into it. Its costs and risks outweigh its benefits many, many times over, and have done so since day one.
You are not proposing any serious justification for it either.
Inventors and practitioners risking their own resources, failing or succeeding and freeing us of the need to use sticks and stones are fine and dandy, but the nuclear industry isn't an example of that.
Deficit spending on large projects for ideological reasons have brought many a powerful country to complete collapse.
Good luck.
I sincerely hope that you beat the odds, and that the people who are doing the spending also get back enough out of it.
Yep, you still need a metric assload of processing to turn the ISL output into fuel.
Besides, it is only deposits in sandstone allow ISL.
Finally, the cost and availability of ISL is already reflected in the numbers I provide anyway.
So can I keep sleeping? :)
Ukraine is doing many things out of desperation. Their economy was built on the premise of free energy from the USSR.
They were screwed badly by Putin several times. They still hold a monopoly over gas lines, but with the Northern and the Southern streams and the Russia-Bulgaria-Greece oil pipeline (which may or may not be built, depending on the weather in Sofia and Moscow) their leverage seems to be diminishing, so they are worried.
Re-opening those plants may well be a "strategic" initiative and have nothing to do with cost. People sometimes pay unreasonably high amounts for perceived "safety".
Since paying up by the government isn't popular, there's huge talk of electricity sales abroad as a justification. And since nuke tech is still kinda sensitive and "strategic", most calculations are kept secret.
As to the electricity sales from nuclear plants - of course I've heard the argument that exports of electricity are profitable many times, but I have yet to see a solid justification of it.
The other "nuclear country" over there, Bulgaria, has tried to find market financing for a second nuke plant -- and failed, even when money was cheap in 2005-2007, and with the government taking over key risks.
The reason - with the fall of socialist industry, and the development of new, efficient sectors, there is now a power glut. Sales to the region just don't make enough dough - so a plant that used up over 30 or 40 billions us$ is generating about $0.5-0.7 mil in profits a year.
That is why it will be a commercial failure, and why nuclear power should not be a big priority in the search for alternatives.
You'll see I'm right in a few years, when the paper projects are built, and you realize they cost 10 or 20 times more than the initial estimates, produce less energy and a lot more radioactive waste to dispose of than you were expecting.
Nope, the figures I quote are estimates of current uranium ore deposits that is easily available at a low cost.
There is a lot of uranium in the crust, but most of it isn't in that category.
Your information is outdated and incorrect.
Well, we agree on that -- I am willing to allow spending on research and even some on tech development, provided there is no "intellectual property" involved where it is financed by taxes.
Once it gets into production, unless there are obvious economic externalities, it should be as adam smithy as possible.
Well, if I have to put it very precisely, there are a lot of nuclear options available, but most of them are, at the moment, closer to science fiction than to reality financially, and investing all our efforts into nuclear won't be the smartest decision :)
And fusion (the hot one) is still science fiction, even technically.
Well, I think it is quite reasonable to include a budget for safety in the bill of the future energy solutions. If you disagree, it is your opinion, and you're welcome to it, but it is a myopic and dangerous opinion.
Besides, it is really easy to disprove your absurd thesis.
I can be reasonably sure that the wind turbines in my farm aren't going to explode, due to fault or bad management, and pollute my property for decades.
Can I be sure that the Rossatom-built and operated nuclear power plant in a different country across the river with an unstable government and serious ethnic problems will be as safe?
And sorry for the dimwit, I got carried away.
Yes, in the context you try force on it, I did not raise the issue. You focus on past performance, which is not a guarantee of future results.
The real issue is that the only easily available way to have "cheap" nuclear energy is to cut safety costs. The numerous projects in countries that have less than stellar record in industrial safety is certainly something to be aware of./
Hence my comment on "safe and financially reasonable", I am not questioning the past record of the nuclear industry so much, as worrying about its future.
I'm happy to let the marketplace sort this out according to the normal laws of economics.
That is the problem. Nuclear energy has never-ever been tested in the free market. It is largely a byproduct of the nuclear weapons industry, in which costs were never a consideration.
I have yet to see a project for new plants, which do not require huge amounts of money (and huge amounts of fossil fuels as a bonus) to setup and operate.
Until nuclear energy in a really free market happens, it will not be a serious alternative, just a resource drain.
Because it is a requirement, dimwit.
If you had read my comments and understood what was being discussed, you would have noted that safety is not an issue that is the point of discussion.
;)
If you'd been as diligent in counting the indirect deaths caused by the nuclear industry (including, naturally, the victims of the nuclear weapons research and actual victim weapons, for we'd not have nuclear energy without the nukes) as you are in counting those other victims, it would have made an interesting comparison.
But you are not diligent, you're biased; and you do prefer to put your own strawmen up and fight them, so there is little point to keep pointing out how wrong you are.
Have fun.
A lot of people (including you) do not understand the fact that, unlike coal plants, in which you basically burn what you dig, uranium ore has to undergo a complex processing in which only a very very small fraction of it ends up as usable fuel.
That means that the production of the proverbial "pound of uranium", which contains energy of untold tons of coal, requires a huge and very expensive infrastructure to get it out of the earth, make it into yellow cake, and further enrich and process that until it is usable as fuel.
There is only so much cheaply available ore, and the proportion of uranium that is usable in it is very small.
Alternatives like breeding reactors have been around for a long-long time, but a reactor that produces fuel more economically than shifting gigatonnes of dirt and operating a complex and dangerous refinement process.
At current rates of consumption, the cheaply available ore, which produces this immensely expensive fuel will be gone.
Then the fuel will jump in cost a lot. If the current contracts and proposals of Rosatom in Turkey and Eastern Europe are any indication, the increase will make even the photo/wind alternative energy options seem cheap by comparison as early as 2030.
Had you bothered to read what I wrote, you'd see no discussion of environmental issues there. That makes half of your incoherent rambling irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is, umm, "feasibility".
It seems also that you have a thing for quoting Wikipedia and linking to Google searches. This is a common Slashdot failure, but -- if you follow your links AND are able to read and comprehend, which you're obviously struggling with, you'll see that breeder reactors of any type require the use hugely expensive and exotic materials, and as such make no financial sense.
As for the Indians having insanely huge number of projects (in plural) for building thorium reactors - okay, cool. Wake me up when they have them working, and when the said reactors are contributing to their economy enough to offset the costs of development and construction.
In fact, wake me up when you find one single nuclear power generation program that has been able to break even on its own, without piggybacking a nuclear weaponry sector behind it to absorb the costs.
Yes, reactors of many types have been built. The problem (and my point) is that none of those experimental reactors built have delivered the safe and inexpensive power that was promised.
Worse, none have even shown that the respective technology has the potential to become safe and inexpensive.
The cold fusion was a lame joke, although in terms of feasibility it is in the same ballpark.
Dream on. And write to Putin, Merkel and everyone else who are opting for the classical solution instead of some dream projects.
This too.
If any of these stories about non-biological origin of oil were true, why have Russian oil fields developed in the 50s and 60s gone dry?
Why is Russia investing a lot of money to develop new fields?
Where's that "topping from below" gone?
Just curious, seriously.
"but the exponential growth of oil consumption"
Also, you're making the assumption that oil consumption will grow exponentially. It won't, once the physical limitations on production hit, the free market will disappear, oil consumption will split in two - government-regulated and rationed one, and an insignificant, super-expensive black market.
The vast majority of users (which currently makes up the demand), will have to do without, so consumption will probably decrease.
So, it is quite possible oil can outlast uranium.