What site? The site of a repository or the site of a wrecked truck?
Nuclear waste is not the only toxic waste that must be held in repositories forever. Your children's children have a lot of places to avoid, and nuclear material inhabits the least of those areas.
The site of the wrecked truck would NOT be uninhabitable for decades; in fact, it would be inhabitable in a matter of days to weeks, because it could be completely cleaned up. Completely. Cleaned. Up. In ways that other chemical spills could never be cleaned up, with the dangerous material gathered up and removed to its some holding place in a way that many other chemical contaminants never can be.
And there are holding places, probably closer to you than you think, probably holding more mobile and more immediately threatening things than nuclear waste, that will be around until geology itself takes care of them.
What does half-life have to do with it?
There is no half-life for arsenic-laced mine tailings that cover miles and miles of land. There is no half-life for mercury.
There is no half-life for heavy metals pollution and the half-life of many chlorinated compounds, like dioxins (e.g. agent orange), reaches well beyond a human lifetime. You claim that nuclear waste pushes the problem to the future. This is in no way unique. Not in terms of half-life. Certainly not in terms of volume.
Like I said, nuclear power produces toxic waste. That waste is *very* toxic. But you have a fundamental misconception of how much very toxic waste we deal with routinely. Nuclear waste is different, but not in many of the ways that you think it is.
Nuclear waste is among the most acutely dangerous wastes, but it comes in a much smaller volume than many other *very* toxic wastes that we produce, store, and avoid. It also comes in a package that, chemically and physically, is harder to 'lose' in the environment.
I'm not downplaying nuclear waste. I don't deny that it's a problem. I'm trying to express to you the gravity of the other wastes we deal with, and help you put them in perspective. The problem is that you never heard people talking in hushed tones about 'alumina bombs,' or that you never saw pictures of chromium VI leveling a city. The problem is that we do a good enough job of dealing with all of the other toxic substances out there that you have no appreciation for how much--and how dangerous--the other stuff is. When put in perspective, nuclear waste is a bad actor among bad actors, but not in all cases the worst. The problem is that without an appreciation for how truly bad the 'normal' toxic waste is, you think comparisons must necessarily be white-washing nuclear waste. The problem is that you will not understand the gravity of these substances, because you don't have to.
There is no arguing facts about nuclear waste when your first association is bombs, or when you think that 'thousands of years of toxicity' is something unique to radioactive waste, and not the norm, or when you think there are 'true' solutions for any of these things. You don't have to like, accept, or advocate for nuclear energy, but you can't make appeals to reason when you don't even know the real reasons why you should be concerned.
It would wreck my life if it squashed me. How would it affect future generations?
It wouldn't evaporate. It wouldn't spontaneously combust. It wouldn't get into the air and spread. It wouldn't leach into the ground. It could be removed completely. The same cannot be said for many other chemicals carried in much larger volumes. How much time have you spent fearing them?
Do you think it would be a mini Chernobyl? That the land would be poisoned? It wouldn't. Chernobyl was a fire of monstrous intensity caused by conditions that cannot be replicated by the truck accident. Chernobyl put the fuel into the air, where it could blanket a large area and be impossible to remove. That's not just unlikely for a truck wreck--it's physically and chemically impossible.
Not 'unlikely.' IMPOSSIBLE. As in 'roughly as possible as the wreck causing a black hole that consumes the earth.' Not able to happen.
I'm sorry to offend your preconceived notions, but:
1) Nuclear material is transported in very durable casks 2) They've never broken in an accident 3) Even if one broke, the contents don't explode, leak into the ground, or evaporate 4) The volume of nuclear material is miniscule compared to the huge volumes of explosive, leaking, or poison gassing materials that are moved in containers that are easily broken in accidents.
You're right, the danger is not "zero." But the the precautions taken to move huge, HUGE, HUUGE, volumes of instant death chemicals on the SAME FREEWAYS are not even close to those taken for nuclear material. Believe it or not, you're chancing it every day with things that could take out a whole city block (e.g. liquid chlorine) while you're worrying about something that would be ugly but that they'd just direct traffic around.
If a tanker full of dry cleaning solvent (PCE) spilled, it would shoot straight down to the water table and spread for miles--and is pretty much impossible to clean up with current technology. If a cask of spent nuclear material broke open, it could be scraped up into another one (along with a couple truckloads of topsoil, worst case), and there would be NOTHING left.
If a train carrying nuclear material derailed in your city, odds are they'd just pick up the pieces of the train and put them on another train. If a train carrying ammonium nitrate derailed, you could sieve a few blocks through a fine screen. And that HAS happened.
So you're right, accidents happen. An accident with nuclear material would suck. But you live with much, much more dangerous things happening all around you all the time, and somehow you've made it this far.
OK, most of what we've been saying is speculative, but what you just said is dead wrong. Hot nuclear material is moved all the time--by truck, in the US, on public freeways--and has been for 60 years.
Maintaining a wind farm generates used gear oils and solvents/degreasers in volume; these are not trivial to dispose of. Turbines have finite lifespans and it takes a huge mass of them to generate any significant power. Compare the power generated, per kilogram of mass as constructed, between a nuclear power plant and a wind farm, and then consider the useful lifespan of that mass.
Really? You must not have gotten the memo about all of the semiconductor fabs that are Superfund sites. They don't generate toxic waste when they're being operated, but they generate a boat load when they're being manufactured. And they don't last forever, so you're going to keep on generating that waste.
All sources of power have waste associated with them, and some of that waste is toxic. Nuclear power generates *very* toxic waste, but that waste can also be condensed into a tinier volume (per joule of energy produced) than any other source of power. So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house, or you can have stadiums and stadiums of 'less' toxic (but still deadly) waste. That's what we deal with every day.
It's all about optimizing. I'm a huge fan of mixed power generation. Solar and wind should be in the mix, but we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend they're a panacea.
And Adobe figured that if they had a product with a lower price point, there'd convert some of those free users to paid users. That's all. Your mom doesn't need Adobe's professional suite to make LOLcats. She's either going to spend $50 on the 'home' version, or she's going to spend $0 and get you to pull down a copy of the full version from a torrent site.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Without massive piracy of Adobe's extremely expensive professional software, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. They were competing with free copies of their own stuff, not with 'second string image editors.'
What are you smoking? Nobody "actively seeks" Windows. Windows on your computer is like the milk in your latte; you have to actively seek an alternative. People might actively seek lattes, but they never say, "Make that with MILK please!!"
Purchasing departments don't think, "Gotta get Windows this year!" They might think, "We have Windows; is there any incentive to switch?" Or they might think, "We're not using Windows; is there any incentive to switch?"
Consumers don't think, "Man, so many choices... but I really want Windows!" They might think, "I'm building a gaming box; better grab copy of Windows." They might think, "I want a laptop, but I don't want a Mac. Looks like I'm getting Windows!"
If you think millions of people are out there saying, "But where can I get that with WINDOWS!?" you're an idiot. I'm sure there's a few, but there's probably just as many people carrying around lists of Linux-friendly peripherals.
Take a break for a second, haters, and consider this: a million-fold reduction in awful "Facex" products being shoveled out the door. I feel no sympathy for all the rubes who thought they had hit gold with "xbook," either.
I wish Apple had a trademark that could kill off all of the iProducts. It's like every marketing moron in the world suddenly got a promotion for pitching us iFood, iSoda, iPants, iComedies over iCable on iTVs, and iTrucks with iForce engines (fuck you, Toyota!).
The world has enough latent stupidity that it can certainly do without more iPowered Faceblogged Douchebooks.
I don't really care about Blender, but I would like to see terrywallwork learn to proofread. Which is an important skill. That helps eliminate weirdly distracting sentence breaks. That would make his 10th grade english teacher cry into her whiskey-infused morning coffee.
No, they don't. Look at any sleeping kid; their hands naturally curl. You don't think they're flexing their little muscles to hold them that way, do you? It requires muscle action to have your hand splayed out, not the other way around.
You do realize that most people don't run for exercise in garbage dumps or forests, right?
But more realistically, 'barefoot runners' can buy shoes that are more like moccasins. They essentially provide tough-but-flexible soles, while giving the same freedom-of-movement that you have with a natural, barefoot stride. They encourage you to run more on the balls of your feet, rather than on your heels. In fact, Nike makes a 'barefoot' shoe, and so do many others.
And the really hardcore barefoot runners just (gasp) suck it up and build some callouses. There's a bunch of big-league marathoners that run the whole race with skin to pavement.
In this case, the physical objects themselves, arrayed in any useful storage space, are almost certainly a better medium for information storage/retrieval than a computerized database.
Funny, but that's what professional witnesses are for: they often spend a lot of time teaching the jury how probability and statistics justify their opinion.
...except that Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project long before it was finished, which resulted in his takeover of the Macintosh as his personal fief. So no, Lisa isn't a good example at all.
I can't say anything about the Apple TV, but there's plenty of history about the Lisa and Macintosh available online. You should consider reading some of it; it's an interesting story.
I know, but you probably wouldn't believe it if I told you.
I'm curious, but it doesn't really matter, because you missed the point entirely. I was pointing out that research into flora is a major part of medicine these days, regardless of what Dr. Drew spouted on LoveLine. If anything, I'm probably going to be on your side, as long as you can show me some resources--I didn't realize I was going to have to write a treatise on H. Pylori just to show you that bacteria are more than just the provenance of the Whole Foods probiotics counter.
I mean, for Christs' sake, I was pointing out that there's research into problems that may be caused by NOT having H. Pylori. Wouldn't that be supporting evidence for your position?
My point--and I'll try it again--is that doctors (e.g. Drew, and your family physician) can be wrong, can be behind the times, and can be attention-grabbing without knowing the state of their art. That doesn't mean that the "medical establishment" is teaching all doctors to use the napalm pills first, and damn the patient's diet.
What you call "alternative medicine," I'd call "medicine," with the caveat that the natural remedies have to be REAL remedies. That means that they have a statistically significant effect on the problem, not just anecdotal evidence. Yogurt falls under that very nicely, as do a lot of other foods and botanicals. Homeopathy and overpriced herbal supplements do not.
Good doctors don't want to over-prescribe antibiotics. Good doctors tell you the tricks, when the tricks are known to work. Bad doctors and overworked doctors will write you a script just to get you out of the office. That's an indictment of our health care delivery, not the state of the "medical establishment."
But if it helps for you to have a "medical establishment" bogeyman out there to justify your choice not to vaccinate your kids, or to give them honey tea to get over the plague, that's your business. See? I can play straw-man argument, too;-)
This is not "alternative medical thinking." Alternative Medical Thinking would be making a homeopathic yogurt dilution and believing that the spirit of the yogurt was imprinted on the solvent. Doctors (like Dr. Drew) are professionals, just like programmers. They can be wrong, or behind the times, or attention-grabbing without actually being representative of the state of their field.
Treating and encouraging your natural bacterial flora is mainstream medicine, and the yogurt trick for encouraging health "down there" is something a lot of doctors will pass along. I can't speak to your personal experience, but anecdotes =/= mainstream medicine. Your family physician will probably also tell you to eat some yogurt when they give you antibiotics to clear up some strep throat or another nasty bacteria, because it'll help replenish the good bacteria in your gut that you have been eliminating, and keep you from getting a monster case of the runs.
And there are the studies on GM bacteria mouthwashes, to colonize your mouth with bacteria that out-compete your old, cavity-causing flora with something safer. And the studies that show that while we've generally eliminated the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers, we've also caused some downstream problems because those bacteria were part of a balancing act in the ecosystem in there. The bacterial flora are a hot areas of research.
I'm not a doctor, but I have a degree in bioengineering, and I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
to test them all, then the EPA should accredit private labs to do the testing and the manufacturer should pay the labs to produce certified results that meet EPA requirements.
The accreditation doesn't even have to cost the taxpayer anything, because the EPA can charge the labs for it.
Slashdot Mirror
What site? The site of a repository or the site of a wrecked truck?
Nuclear waste is not the only toxic waste that must be held in repositories forever. Your children's children have a lot of places to avoid, and nuclear material inhabits the least of those areas.
The site of the wrecked truck would NOT be uninhabitable for decades; in fact, it would be inhabitable in a matter of days to weeks, because it could be completely cleaned up. Completely. Cleaned. Up. In ways that other chemical spills could never be cleaned up, with the dangerous material gathered up and removed to its some holding place in a way that many other chemical contaminants never can be.
And there are holding places, probably closer to you than you think, probably holding more mobile and more immediately threatening things than nuclear waste, that will be around until geology itself takes care of them.
What does half-life have to do with it?
There is no half-life for arsenic-laced mine tailings that cover miles and miles of land. There is no half-life for mercury.
There is no half-life for coal ash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
There is no half-life for alumina sludge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident
There is no half-life for heavy metals pollution and the half-life of many chlorinated compounds, like dioxins (e.g. agent orange), reaches well beyond a human lifetime. You claim that nuclear waste pushes the problem to the future. This is in no way unique. Not in terms of half-life. Certainly not in terms of volume.
Like I said, nuclear power produces toxic waste. That waste is *very* toxic. But you have a fundamental misconception of how much very toxic waste we deal with routinely. Nuclear waste is different, but not in many of the ways that you think it is.
Nuclear waste is among the most acutely dangerous wastes, but it comes in a much smaller volume than many other *very* toxic wastes that we produce, store, and avoid. It also comes in a package that, chemically and physically, is harder to 'lose' in the environment.
I'm not downplaying nuclear waste. I don't deny that it's a problem. I'm trying to express to you the gravity of the other wastes we deal with, and help you put them in perspective. The problem is that you never heard people talking in hushed tones about 'alumina bombs,' or that you never saw pictures of chromium VI leveling a city. The problem is that we do a good enough job of dealing with all of the other toxic substances out there that you have no appreciation for how much--and how dangerous--the other stuff is. When put in perspective, nuclear waste is a bad actor among bad actors, but not in all cases the worst. The problem is that without an appreciation for how truly bad the 'normal' toxic waste is, you think comparisons must necessarily be white-washing nuclear waste. The problem is that you will not understand the gravity of these substances, because you don't have to.
There is no arguing facts about nuclear waste when your first association is bombs, or when you think that 'thousands of years of toxicity' is something unique to radioactive waste, and not the norm, or when you think there are 'true' solutions for any of these things. You don't have to like, accept, or advocate for nuclear energy, but you can't make appeals to reason when you don't even know the real reasons why you should be concerned.
It would wreck my life if it squashed me. How would it affect future generations?
It wouldn't evaporate. It wouldn't spontaneously combust. It wouldn't get into the air and spread. It wouldn't leach into the ground. It could be removed completely. The same cannot be said for many other chemicals carried in much larger volumes. How much time have you spent fearing them?
Do you think it would be a mini Chernobyl? That the land would be poisoned? It wouldn't. Chernobyl was a fire of monstrous intensity caused by conditions that cannot be replicated by the truck accident. Chernobyl put the fuel into the air, where it could blanket a large area and be impossible to remove. That's not just unlikely for a truck wreck--it's physically and chemically impossible.
Not 'unlikely.' IMPOSSIBLE. As in 'roughly as possible as the wreck causing a black hole that consumes the earth.' Not able to happen.
I'm sorry to offend your preconceived notions, but:
1) Nuclear material is transported in very durable casks
2) They've never broken in an accident
3) Even if one broke, the contents don't explode, leak into the ground, or evaporate
4) The volume of nuclear material is miniscule compared to the huge volumes of explosive, leaking, or poison gassing materials that are moved in containers that are easily broken in accidents.
You're right, the danger is not "zero." But the the precautions taken to move huge, HUGE, HUUGE, volumes of instant death chemicals on the SAME FREEWAYS are not even close to those taken for nuclear material. Believe it or not, you're chancing it every day with things that could take out a whole city block (e.g. liquid chlorine) while you're worrying about something that would be ugly but that they'd just direct traffic around.
If a tanker full of dry cleaning solvent (PCE) spilled, it would shoot straight down to the water table and spread for miles--and is pretty much impossible to clean up with current technology. If a cask of spent nuclear material broke open, it could be scraped up into another one (along with a couple truckloads of topsoil, worst case), and there would be NOTHING left.
If a train carrying nuclear material derailed in your city, odds are they'd just pick up the pieces of the train and put them on another train. If a train carrying ammonium nitrate derailed, you could sieve a few blocks through a fine screen. And that HAS happened.
So you're right, accidents happen. An accident with nuclear material would suck. But you live with much, much more dangerous things happening all around you all the time, and somehow you've made it this far.
Read.
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html
OK, most of what we've been saying is speculative, but what you just said is dead wrong. Hot nuclear material is moved all the time--by truck, in the US, on public freeways--and has been for 60 years.
Oh really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources
Looks more like that depends on the source of your numbers, and that the range of prices can imply that either one can be favorable.
Maintaining a wind farm generates used gear oils and solvents/degreasers in volume; these are not trivial to dispose of. Turbines have finite lifespans and it takes a huge mass of them to generate any significant power. Compare the power generated, per kilogram of mass as constructed, between a nuclear power plant and a wind farm, and then consider the useful lifespan of that mass.
Nothing is free.
Really? You must not have gotten the memo about all of the semiconductor fabs that are Superfund sites. They don't generate toxic waste when they're being operated, but they generate a boat load when they're being manufactured. And they don't last forever, so you're going to keep on generating that waste.
All sources of power have waste associated with them, and some of that waste is toxic. Nuclear power generates *very* toxic waste, but that waste can also be condensed into a tinier volume (per joule of energy produced) than any other source of power. So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house, or you can have stadiums and stadiums of 'less' toxic (but still deadly) waste. That's what we deal with every day.
It's all about optimizing. I'm a huge fan of mixed power generation. Solar and wind should be in the mix, but we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend they're a panacea.
And Adobe figured that if they had a product with a lower price point, there'd convert some of those free users to paid users. That's all. Your mom doesn't need Adobe's professional suite to make LOLcats. She's either going to spend $50 on the 'home' version, or she's going to spend $0 and get you to pull down a copy of the full version from a torrent site.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Without massive piracy of Adobe's extremely expensive professional software, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. They were competing with free copies of their own stuff, not with 'second string image editors.'
What are you smoking? Nobody "actively seeks" Windows. Windows on your computer is like the milk in your latte; you have to actively seek an alternative. People might actively seek lattes, but they never say, "Make that with MILK please!!"
Purchasing departments don't think, "Gotta get Windows this year!" They might think, "We have Windows; is there any incentive to switch?" Or they might think, "We're not using Windows; is there any incentive to switch?"
Consumers don't think, "Man, so many choices... but I really want Windows!" They might think, "I'm building a gaming box; better grab copy of Windows." They might think, "I want a laptop, but I don't want a Mac. Looks like I'm getting Windows!"
If you think millions of people are out there saying, "But where can I get that with WINDOWS!?" you're an idiot. I'm sure there's a few, but there's probably just as many people carrying around lists of Linux-friendly peripherals.
Take a break for a second, haters, and consider this: a million-fold reduction in awful "Facex" products being shoveled out the door. I feel no sympathy for all the rubes who thought they had hit gold with "xbook," either.
I wish Apple had a trademark that could kill off all of the iProducts. It's like every marketing moron in the world suddenly got a promotion for pitching us iFood, iSoda, iPants, iComedies over iCable on iTVs, and iTrucks with iForce engines (fuck you, Toyota!).
The world has enough latent stupidity that it can certainly do without more iPowered Faceblogged Douchebooks.
I don't really care about Blender, but I would like to see terrywallwork learn to proofread. Which is an important skill. That helps eliminate weirdly distracting sentence breaks. That would make his 10th grade english teacher cry into her whiskey-infused morning coffee.
More importantly, how does it do with Silverlight? Because I'm much more likely to watch a streaming movie on Netflix than I am on YouTube =p
No, they don't. Look at any sleeping kid; their hands naturally curl. You don't think they're flexing their little muscles to hold them that way, do you? It requires muscle action to have your hand splayed out, not the other way around.
You do realize that most people don't run for exercise in garbage dumps or forests, right?
But more realistically, 'barefoot runners' can buy shoes that are more like moccasins. They essentially provide tough-but-flexible soles, while giving the same freedom-of-movement that you have with a natural, barefoot stride. They encourage you to run more on the balls of your feet, rather than on your heels. In fact, Nike makes a 'barefoot' shoe, and so do many others.
And the really hardcore barefoot runners just (gasp) suck it up and build some callouses. There's a bunch of big-league marathoners that run the whole race with skin to pavement.
Thank you, I was going to say the same thing.
In this case, the physical objects themselves, arrayed in any useful storage space, are almost certainly a better medium for information storage/retrieval than a computerized database.
Funny, but that's what professional witnesses are for: they often spend a lot of time teaching the jury how probability and statistics justify their opinion.
Ever heard of a billion dollar buggy-whip company?
Because if there ever has been one, it is Iridium.
...except that Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project long before it was finished, which resulted in his takeover of the Macintosh as his personal fief. So no, Lisa isn't a good example at all.
I can't say anything about the Apple TV, but there's plenty of history about the Lisa and Macintosh available online. You should consider reading some of it; it's an interesting story.
I know, but you probably wouldn't believe it if I told you.
I'm curious, but it doesn't really matter, because you missed the point entirely. I was pointing out that research into flora is a major part of medicine these days, regardless of what Dr. Drew spouted on LoveLine. If anything, I'm probably going to be on your side, as long as you can show me some resources--I didn't realize I was going to have to write a treatise on H. Pylori just to show you that bacteria are more than just the provenance of the Whole Foods probiotics counter.
I mean, for Christs' sake, I was pointing out that there's research into problems that may be caused by NOT having H. Pylori. Wouldn't that be supporting evidence for your position?
My point--and I'll try it again--is that doctors (e.g. Drew, and your family physician) can be wrong, can be behind the times, and can be attention-grabbing without knowing the state of their art. That doesn't mean that the "medical establishment" is teaching all doctors to use the napalm pills first, and damn the patient's diet.
What you call "alternative medicine," I'd call "medicine," with the caveat that the natural remedies have to be REAL remedies. That means that they have a statistically significant effect on the problem, not just anecdotal evidence. Yogurt falls under that very nicely, as do a lot of other foods and botanicals. Homeopathy and overpriced herbal supplements do not.
Good doctors don't want to over-prescribe antibiotics. Good doctors tell you the tricks, when the tricks are known to work. Bad doctors and overworked doctors will write you a script just to get you out of the office. That's an indictment of our health care delivery, not the state of the "medical establishment."
But if it helps for you to have a "medical establishment" bogeyman out there to justify your choice not to vaccinate your kids, or to give them honey tea to get over the plague, that's your business. See? I can play straw-man argument, too ;-)
This is not "alternative medical thinking." Alternative Medical Thinking would be making a homeopathic yogurt dilution and believing that the spirit of the yogurt was imprinted on the solvent. Doctors (like Dr. Drew) are professionals, just like programmers. They can be wrong, or behind the times, or attention-grabbing without actually being representative of the state of their field.
Treating and encouraging your natural bacterial flora is mainstream medicine, and the yogurt trick for encouraging health "down there" is something a lot of doctors will pass along. I can't speak to your personal experience, but anecdotes =/= mainstream medicine. Your family physician will probably also tell you to eat some yogurt when they give you antibiotics to clear up some strep throat or another nasty bacteria, because it'll help replenish the good bacteria in your gut that you have been eliminating, and keep you from getting a monster case of the runs.
And there are the studies on GM bacteria mouthwashes, to colonize your mouth with bacteria that out-compete your old, cavity-causing flora with something safer. And the studies that show that while we've generally eliminated the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers, we've also caused some downstream problems because those bacteria were part of a balancing act in the ecosystem in there. The bacterial flora are a hot areas of research.
I'm not a doctor, but I have a degree in bioengineering, and I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
Sigh... looks like I need to l2preview =(
Bullshit. If the EPA can't
to test them all, then the EPA should accredit private labs to do the testing and the manufacturer should pay the labs to produce certified results that meet EPA requirements.
The accreditation doesn't even have to cost the taxpayer anything, because the EPA can charge the labs for it.