I wonder how much of their workforce are just leeches who have a cushy job that produces little/no value to the company.
In my experience, at any company with more than 300 employees, roughly a third of the workers that have been employed there for more than 2 years are leeches. Why is it every place I work, the people that have been there the longest act like they own the company and feel justified in bullshitting most of the day? What is so special about a long time employee that has no work ethic?
The back end is AIX because most hospitals are running mainframes from the 70's and 80's and many run virtual server farms, etc so the AIX Iron is pretty much a necessity.
They have tons of Windows Servers in those farms though.
The AIX family of operating systems debuted in 1986, but I think you mean that whatever was running on those old mainframes, the systems evolved into iSeries and AIX (with DB2 or Oracle? or Postgres?). Anyway... your clues and edification appreciated. I was told by someone that had worked IT in healthcare for ages that they mostly used a very uncommon proprietary system... maybe they meant AIX, idk... but from what I have seen (at the place I contracted and another unrelated large hospital system I interviewed with) that you are correct... AIX is the hospital backbone now.
Worth mentioning (I'm sure you are aware): AIX only runs on IBM's Power architecture, so there is no way to virtualize or emulate it on x86, which is unfortunate. If you want to get intimate knowledge of it, you are forced to pay for the certification courses, and/or you have to get IBM hardware, RS/6000 or the like. Apple's PPC ANS machines ran a version of AIX, but only up to about AIX 4.3.
I've worked in healthcare - if there's a chance of leaking patient records, then the Information Security officer would have to sign off on any server after a full assessment.
way off topic here... but I have also worked in IT in healthcare... though a brief contract about a year ago at a large hospital. I was surprised to find the entire user network Windows XP based, but the back-end/applications were all on AIX. The AIX assets were secure and shielded from the outside. And the Windows team did a fine job of pushing security policy, but I could not help notice that all the Windows machines had Internet access, and all the applications ran through IE6 (except for a few terminal applications connected via ssh).
I guess its a pet peeve of mine that there is no way to convince a Windows admin that their Windows network might not be secure. Honestly, on the one hand, I had never seen a Windows network that was that as secure as that network was, but on the other hand... did I mention they were using Internet-facing XP machines with IE6? Their images as deployed were as hardened as could be, and their NOC guys were really on top of things because the only troubles I ran into had to do with rot and not security... but there was always this uncomfortable feeling like something wasn't right... like... why pay for Windows licenses and support when all you need is a browser (for internal apps) and a terminal? Yes... it is easy to criticize.
Anyhoo, for what its worth, I respected this Windows team, because unlike every other Windows shop I worked in, these guys didn't spend all day arrogantly stroking themselves about how secure they were... nor were they overly nervous about security. They just did their jobs, and took the problems as they came.
This is perhaps the first time I realized that Windows (esp. XP) can be nice because it is so well known, so well understood and familiar that everything that can go wrong has already gone wrong before, and thus a solution is immediately available (and this led me to questioning any IT department's rush to upgrade to Vista or 7... migration should be a slow process so that the new troubles, as they appear, are smaller and more isolated, giving time to grow a new IT troubleshooting catalog for the new systems).
I agree. If giving access troubles you, and if you (the OP) have access to the Internet from the internal network, run your CalDAV on port 80 and put your server... anywhere else in the world. Or just use Google Calendar.
Also, if professional, IT is disinterested in the content of your IT needs. This is why you can trust them: if you're not stealing anything, if you're not wrecking anything, if your server remains uncomprimised, they don't care. They just want asset management. They are not spies.
I wouldn't say the decline is subtle or incremental at all.
No, it really is. Your friend didn't buy the 3G, then after the first update everything was shit. But at each update, it worked a little worse, a little less responsive, than it did before the update, so that by 6 months after a new iPhone was released, the 3G user really starts to notice that things have slowed down from the original iOS version their phone came with. That's what I meant by incremental. What is really annoying is the only real solution to feature creep and slowness, downgrading firmware, if possible at all, is a true pain. If we were free to downgrade the system I don't think people would be as annoyed, but each update kills the ability to go back (short of extreme measures and complicated instructions). btw the 3G is identical in platform to the original iPhone (merely has a new baseband radio), which in tech years is ancient by now. I don't think many will sympathize with your friend... but I grant that if downgrading were easy, that 3G would be fine. Lesson learned... once Apple releases new hardware, ignore the temptation of new features... lock it in to the firmware that runs well, and stop upgrading.
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There's nothing sinister about it, it's simply more cost-effective that way.
While it appears in this particular instance that you are correct, there are other instances of breaking stuff or offering new releases that do seem nefarious. Vista, itself, seemed like it was not so much a new OS as it was a placeholder. As much as 7 is adored by everyone, I can't think of any good reason for a company with 10K installs of XP and Office 2003, Server 2003 (that they already own licenses for, that the IT dept. knows how to immediately fix ANYTHING that breaks) to update to 7 (and Office 2010, etc), even if all support and updates for that software disappears. And I'm not saying there is anything wrong with 7 and the new Office/Server, other than it doesn't really give the actual office user any new functionality that they're likely to need (before you start making a list of how great 7/Office 2010 is, try listing the essential things a user needs that can't be done in XP). Considering that new machines will come preinstalled with 7 and include a license with the purchase of the hardware, that is the way I would migrate... one new machine at a time, as hardware is replaced.
Maybe 7 isn't the best example (because by all accounts it is small, stable... and pretty). But look at the Adobe releases of Creative Suite. Every two years they want their pound of flesh from their install base, and while some will claim the new features are essential, I believe that is an enormous exaggeration... what it looks like is a company has saturated the market, already sold all they can... and now needs to recycle their customers.
Apple appears to be guilty of this kind of thing too, as they often drop support for relatively new hardware as incentive to buy today's new thing, or as they update their software the older hardware, which was working great before the updates, with each new update becomes more and more sluggish (I'd consider this Apple rot, the more you update, the more your user experience begins to suck, the more you want to get the new hardware). Apple seems better at this game than Microsoft or Adobe, as the decline of user experience is subtle and incremental.
It is even more monumental when you consider that solar development, compared to nearly every other energy solution, has been operating on a shoe string budget (no massive injection of government resources to develop it). The opposite makes nuclear energy that much less impressive (i.e. nuclear power is only "cheap" because governments have thrown hundreds and hundreds of billions dollars at it for 70 years).
This early settlement should have been expected. Geohot, as brilliant as he is at reverse-engineering, never seems to finish anything. He lacks the discipline to follow through to the bitter end. But on the other hand, he is not beholden to anyone. Donations are in effect gifts, and gifts have no strings attached. Unless one is personally sued by a multi-million dollar corporation, I don't think they have a right to judge Geohot's actions. And contrary to the idea of this being a victory for Sony, settlements do not establish legal precedent. A trial is a prerequisite of legal precedent. No trial, no precedent. Sony is still right where they started.
Yucca Mountain's capacity limit has no scientific basis
As proposed, Yucca would have been filled more than twice by now. But let's not gloss over that it was never built, and that all the waste is languishing in temporary containment open air pools near our 104 currently operating nuclear plants, and these temporary pools are all well over designed capacity.
You are ignoring the fact that breeder reactors would provide huge amounts of energy in the process. It's common to fixate on how nuclear waste is bad but ignore how much emissions-free electricity it is responsible for.
Considering the amount of waste we have, and the amount of reprocessed fuel breeder reactors consume, we'd need a lot more new breeder reactors than the number reactors at the 104 conventional nuclear power plants just to make a dent in it. So... 400 breeder reactors later, and there's so much electricity available they can't give it away. See the problem? Where is the investment return? We would have the electricity, and a nice plan to reduce the current waste, but no economic feasibility to return the investment cost of building 400 breeder reactors, which would surely exceed hundreds of trillions of dollars... and in the end only mitigates the waste issue by compacting it into sometimes even deadlier toxic waste, it doesn't eliminate it entirely.
Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry.
Far from true. The only well developed field is light water reactors using uranium dioxide fuel, but there's a lot more to reactor technology than that. Breeder reactor research has just scratched the surface.... Overbearing regulations on everything related to radiation and nuclear technology are slowing down progress in this area.
And again what you are talking about is very very very expensive, heavily government subsidized research... and still it pales to the sheer magnitude of resources we've already invested. The money still comes from somewhere, and it is still not being returned (presumably, electricity is sold back to investors (i.e. taxpayers) at a profit only realizable because the government subsidies do not require any investment return). And removing regulations is a ridiculous idea. Regulations were put in place as a direct response to nuclear incidents in regard to public safety, and complaining that this slows down research is not a valid reason to put the public at risk by simply removing them.
For your several points about subsidies and R&D spending,
Not a refutation of my argument. Ignored because you have conceded that the cost is stratospheric, i.e. the only entities that have that kind of money are governments.
1. Who is "proliferators"? Some guilt-by-association neologism for nuclear power proponents?
I was simply referring to those that agree with the further proliferation of nuclear energy as the solution to the world's energy problems.
2. Despite the cost halving, solar is still far more expensive than other renewables and is already starting to suffer from diminishing returns.
Further note that the problem at Chernobyl was with a single reactor, unlike at Fukushima, where we have two different power plants operating multiple reactors each, with 4 of 6 reactors at Fukushima I in severe crisis. At Chernobyl we had a single explosion and a single rather large fire, unlike at Fukushima where we had four explosions, and several fires. Currently estimated radiation release at Fukushima is about a tenth of the Chernobyl radiation release. TEPCO officials now believe the radiation release at Fukushima may exceed that of Chernobyl.
Economically speaking, yes, nuclear waste is the biggest problem. Right now the US has enough nuclear waste to fill the proposed Yucca facility more than twice. No one can say what the cost of storing that waste will amount to in 150 years, or that is even possible to predict anything regarding society on that time scale. And breeder reactors are not a magic bullet... we'd need hundreds of breeder reactors to reprocess all that fuel. Also, your first point is false. At Fukushima, one of the overcrowded spent fuel ponds (which has evaporated), is releasing spent fuel into the environment.
Right now we have some serious unsolved issues with nuclear energy, but cost is the deepest pit. Nuclear reactors cannot be built without heavy government subsidies, and none have been built without them. Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry. We are in the proverbial hole. Proliferators just want to keep digging that hole deeper, as if somehow that is the solution to being trapped in a hole. But nearly every other energy source is getting cheaper.
Just as an example, the costs of solar has been more than halved in the last 10 years, and this done without heavy government investment. Over time, I'd estimate in the next 20 years, solar power will become as cheap, in reality, as proliferators claim that nuclear is now. But, again, solar energy research doesn't require enormous government subsidies and insane plant construction costs with triple failsafes, nor will it require outrageous insurance policies, nor will it require storing any waste for decades or centuries. Solar energy will continue to increase its energy density, making leaps and bounds in efficiency all the while decresing cost, while nuclear energy will... remain the same.
As a species, globally, since the 1940's, we've poured trillions of dollars into nuclear research and reactor construction, and hundreds of billions cleaning up a few nuclear incidents. We're no longer pouring big money into nuclear research, not on the scale of several decades ago. Solar is making significant technological advances from small labs and startup energy firms, very impressive advances in the last 10 years alone with only a modest investment. We've figured out nuclear energy... we went at it so fast and so hard, other than piling on the failsafes, there's not much left to discover about fission: this is what it costs, this is what it will continue to cost, and these incident possibilities are the dangers.
Solar energy (again, solar is just an example... I'm not married to it) has had perhaps a hundredth of a percent of the amount invested into it that nuclear has had... and there are still advancements being made. Solar will be cheaper than nuclear in mere decades from now, and the more we research and invest, the better solar gets, and the cheaper the power will be. This is not the case for fission. No amount of further research or massive resource investment will make nuclear power any less expensive. We need to keep nuclear around, of course, until it meets economic equilibrum with the cost of alternatives, but it is nonsense to suggest adopting nuclear energy across the board as the future solution to the world's energy needs, espescially at the expense of not developing cleaner alternative energies.
Pity that the nuclear problems seemed to overshadow all the vastly more important and tragic aspects of the quake and tsunami.
Quite. Fukushima is not a global wake up call to the dangers of unbridled nuclear energy proliferation. Even if the tsunami will just be a mere harmless memory in 20 years, and Fukushima will still be news a hundred years from now, we should dismiss any discussion of Fukushima or nuclear perils. We must bury discussion of Fukushima because nuclear energy proliferators are done discussing it, and their twisted facts concerning, say, the deaths caused by Chernobyl (43! that's all! It killed 43 people and not thousands upon thousands in the years since the incident... those people died of cancer and we don't know how they got it). Fukushima hasn't killed anyone. It remains the safest nuclear incident evar. No... any reports cancer deaths in the vicinity of Fukushima in the next 100 years will be coincidence.
Seems to me it'd be simpler to solve the world's food resource problem by figuring out how the plants do it... then cut out the middle man and do it ourselves. Screw farming... I'll be at the beach.
Seems like no matter whtat they did, it just got worse, so I'm having difficulty seeing the control you seem to think they have over the reactors in crisis at Fukushima. They're raising the severity level to maximum. Ah, there it is... they are controlling how severe it is? Then why don't they just make it less severe?
Had there not been any nuclear incidents, perhaps. But once you take into account the cleanup costs ($230 billion for Chernobyl, $1 billion for TMI, $12 billion for Fukushima, $120 billion for Windscale, $? million for SL-1, $? for Tokaimura), and take into account the cost of collecting and storing the nuclear waste for centuries, and take into account construction costs with triple failsafes, and take into account the cost of insurance, and take into account the cost of educating technicians, nuclear energy becomes the most expensive energy available. By far. If not heavily subsidized by the United States government, civilian nuclear reactors would never have been built in the US – they would have been far too expensive.
he bought up lots of stock in Dewars and Gordons during Prohibition and sold it soon after repeal for a huge profit.
that just seems like a logical, shrewd investment move that anyone could do, whether they're in the business or not.
Totally. Doing illegal drugs is immoral, usually victimless, but immoral and disgusting, because its illegal. However, few actions approach what amounts to one of the greatest goods of the American dream: making a fortune off of the habits of the immoral criminal drug user, and in general, if possible, the misery of others. That's what makes this country great. You can on the one hand be completely offended by what someone else does even when you aren't aware of it, and yet still sleep at night knowing you are doing the right thing by providing that immoral person with the means to commit those heinous acts of intoxication. I don't know why rich people get such a bad rap.
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I wonder how much of their workforce are just leeches who have a cushy job that produces little/no value to the company.
In my experience, at any company with more than 300 employees, roughly a third of the workers that have been employed there for more than 2 years are leeches. Why is it every place I work, the people that have been there the longest act like they own the company and feel justified in bullshitting most of the day? What is so special about a long time employee that has no work ethic?
Isn't the data actually stored in the plastic, rather than the metal?
So wouldn't recovering the data just be a case of putting something reflective on the back of it? e.g., placing a blank CD on top of the erased one.
No. The data is stored on tiny pips and pits in the metal.
The back end is AIX because most hospitals are running mainframes from the 70's and 80's and many run virtual server farms, etc so the AIX Iron is pretty much a necessity.
They have tons of Windows Servers in those farms though.
The AIX family of operating systems debuted in 1986, but I think you mean that whatever was running on those old mainframes, the systems evolved into iSeries and AIX (with DB2 or Oracle? or Postgres?). Anyway... your clues and edification appreciated. I was told by someone that had worked IT in healthcare for ages that they mostly used a very uncommon proprietary system... maybe they meant AIX, idk... but from what I have seen (at the place I contracted and another unrelated large hospital system I interviewed with) that you are correct... AIX is the hospital backbone now.
Worth mentioning (I'm sure you are aware): AIX only runs on IBM's Power architecture, so there is no way to virtualize or emulate it on x86, which is unfortunate. If you want to get intimate knowledge of it, you are forced to pay for the certification courses, and/or you have to get IBM hardware, RS/6000 or the like. Apple's PPC ANS machines ran a version of AIX, but only up to about AIX 4.3.
I was thinking the same thing. What can we digest and derive energy from that isn't sugar?
I've worked in healthcare - if there's a chance of leaking patient records, then the Information Security officer would have to sign off on any server after a full assessment.
way off topic here... but I have also worked in IT in healthcare... though a brief contract about a year ago at a large hospital. I was surprised to find the entire user network Windows XP based, but the back-end/applications were all on AIX. The AIX assets were secure and shielded from the outside. And the Windows team did a fine job of pushing security policy, but I could not help notice that all the Windows machines had Internet access, and all the applications ran through IE6 (except for a few terminal applications connected via ssh).
I guess its a pet peeve of mine that there is no way to convince a Windows admin that their Windows network might not be secure. Honestly, on the one hand, I had never seen a Windows network that was that as secure as that network was, but on the other hand... did I mention they were using Internet-facing XP machines with IE6? Their images as deployed were as hardened as could be, and their NOC guys were really on top of things because the only troubles I ran into had to do with rot and not security... but there was always this uncomfortable feeling like something wasn't right... like... why pay for Windows licenses and support when all you need is a browser (for internal apps) and a terminal? Yes... it is easy to criticize.
Anyhoo, for what its worth, I respected this Windows team, because unlike every other Windows shop I worked in, these guys didn't spend all day arrogantly stroking themselves about how secure they were... nor were they overly nervous about security. They just did their jobs, and took the problems as they came.
This is perhaps the first time I realized that Windows (esp. XP) can be nice because it is so well known, so well understood and familiar that everything that can go wrong has already gone wrong before, and thus a solution is immediately available (and this led me to questioning any IT department's rush to upgrade to Vista or 7... migration should be a slow process so that the new troubles, as they appear, are smaller and more isolated, giving time to grow a new IT troubleshooting catalog for the new systems).
I agree. If giving access troubles you, and if you (the OP) have access to the Internet from the internal network, run your CalDAV on port 80 and put your server... anywhere else in the world. Or just use Google Calendar.
Also, if professional, IT is disinterested in the content of your IT needs. This is why you can trust them: if you're not stealing anything, if you're not wrecking anything, if your server remains uncomprimised, they don't care. They just want asset management. They are not spies.
I'm not so sure. Couldn't this be Iranian retaliation for Stuxnet?
If you refuse to make rich man river...
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Give a man a river, he drowns. But Rich Man River, he don't say nothin', he just keeps rolling...
I wouldn't say the decline is subtle or incremental at all.
No, it really is. Your friend didn't buy the 3G, then after the first update everything was shit. But at each update, it worked a little worse, a little less responsive, than it did before the update, so that by 6 months after a new iPhone was released, the 3G user really starts to notice that things have slowed down from the original iOS version their phone came with. That's what I meant by incremental. What is really annoying is the only real solution to feature creep and slowness, downgrading firmware, if possible at all, is a true pain. If we were free to downgrade the system I don't think people would be as annoyed, but each update kills the ability to go back (short of extreme measures and complicated instructions). btw the 3G is identical in platform to the original iPhone (merely has a new baseband radio), which in tech years is ancient by now. I don't think many will sympathize with your friend... but I grant that if downgrading were easy, that 3G would be fine. Lesson learned... once Apple releases new hardware, ignore the temptation of new features... lock it in to the firmware that runs well, and stop upgrading.
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Google sent me an email to let me know. I don't see a download link where they say it should be.
There's nothing sinister about it, it's simply more cost-effective that way.
While it appears in this particular instance that you are correct, there are other instances of breaking stuff or offering new releases that do seem nefarious. Vista, itself, seemed like it was not so much a new OS as it was a placeholder. As much as 7 is adored by everyone, I can't think of any good reason for a company with 10K installs of XP and Office 2003, Server 2003 (that they already own licenses for, that the IT dept. knows how to immediately fix ANYTHING that breaks) to update to 7 (and Office 2010, etc), even if all support and updates for that software disappears. And I'm not saying there is anything wrong with 7 and the new Office/Server, other than it doesn't really give the actual office user any new functionality that they're likely to need (before you start making a list of how great 7/Office 2010 is, try listing the essential things a user needs that can't be done in XP). Considering that new machines will come preinstalled with 7 and include a license with the purchase of the hardware, that is the way I would migrate... one new machine at a time, as hardware is replaced.
Maybe 7 isn't the best example (because by all accounts it is small, stable... and pretty). But look at the Adobe releases of Creative Suite. Every two years they want their pound of flesh from their install base, and while some will claim the new features are essential, I believe that is an enormous exaggeration... what it looks like is a company has saturated the market, already sold all they can... and now needs to recycle their customers.
Apple appears to be guilty of this kind of thing too, as they often drop support for relatively new hardware as incentive to buy today's new thing, or as they update their software the older hardware, which was working great before the updates, with each new update becomes more and more sluggish (I'd consider this Apple rot, the more you update, the more your user experience begins to suck, the more you want to get the new hardware). Apple seems better at this game than Microsoft or Adobe, as the decline of user experience is subtle and incremental.
Apple has already released a workaround for this issue:
iOS Settings/Store/AppleID/Sign Out
Also, it appears NYC is also helping out with the issue.
It is even more monumental when you consider that solar development, compared to nearly every other energy solution, has been operating on a shoe string budget (no massive injection of government resources to develop it). The opposite makes nuclear energy that much less impressive (i.e. nuclear power is only "cheap" because governments have thrown hundreds and hundreds of billions dollars at it for 70 years).
This early settlement should have been expected. Geohot, as brilliant as he is at reverse-engineering, never seems to finish anything. He lacks the discipline to follow through to the bitter end. But on the other hand, he is not beholden to anyone. Donations are in effect gifts, and gifts have no strings attached. Unless one is personally sued by a multi-million dollar corporation, I don't think they have a right to judge Geohot's actions. And contrary to the idea of this being a victory for Sony, settlements do not establish legal precedent. A trial is a prerequisite of legal precedent. No trial, no precedent. Sony is still right where they started.
Yucca Mountain's capacity limit has no scientific basis
As proposed, Yucca would have been filled more than twice by now. But let's not gloss over that it was never built, and that all the waste is languishing in temporary containment open air pools near our 104 currently operating nuclear plants, and these temporary pools are all well over designed capacity.
You are ignoring the fact that breeder reactors would provide huge amounts of energy in the process. It's common to fixate on how nuclear waste is bad but ignore how much emissions-free electricity it is responsible for.
Considering the amount of waste we have, and the amount of reprocessed fuel breeder reactors consume, we'd need a lot more new breeder reactors than the number reactors at the 104 conventional nuclear power plants just to make a dent in it. So... 400 breeder reactors later, and there's so much electricity available they can't give it away. See the problem? Where is the investment return? We would have the electricity, and a nice plan to reduce the current waste, but no economic feasibility to return the investment cost of building 400 breeder reactors, which would surely exceed hundreds of trillions of dollars... and in the end only mitigates the waste issue by compacting it into sometimes even deadlier toxic waste, it doesn't eliminate it entirely.
Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry.
Far from true. The only well developed field is light water reactors using uranium dioxide fuel, but there's a lot more to reactor technology than that. Breeder reactor research has just scratched the surface. ... Overbearing regulations on everything related to radiation and nuclear technology are slowing down progress in this area.
And again what you are talking about is very very very expensive, heavily government subsidized research... and still it pales to the sheer magnitude of resources we've already invested. The money still comes from somewhere, and it is still not being returned (presumably, electricity is sold back to investors (i.e. taxpayers) at a profit only realizable because the government subsidies do not require any investment return). And removing regulations is a ridiculous idea. Regulations were put in place as a direct response to nuclear incidents in regard to public safety, and complaining that this slows down research is not a valid reason to put the public at risk by simply removing them.
For your several points about subsidies and R&D spending,
Not a refutation of my argument. Ignored because you have conceded that the cost is stratospheric, i.e. the only entities that have that kind of money are governments.
1. Who is "proliferators"? Some guilt-by-association neologism for nuclear power proponents?
I was simply referring to those that agree with the further proliferation of nuclear energy as the solution to the world's energy problems.
2. Despite the cost halving, solar is still far more expensive than other renewables and is already starting to suffer from diminishing returns.
You obviously made this up, perhaps you believe it, but it is still false. Solar continues to be more viable over time. Whereas, Nuclear power is not getting any less expensive.
Further note that the problem at Chernobyl was with a single reactor, unlike at Fukushima, where we have two different power plants operating multiple reactors each, with 4 of 6 reactors at Fukushima I in severe crisis. At Chernobyl we had a single explosion and a single rather large fire, unlike at Fukushima where we had four explosions, and several fires. Currently estimated radiation release at Fukushima is about a tenth of the Chernobyl radiation release. TEPCO officials now believe the radiation release at Fukushima may exceed that of Chernobyl.
Economically speaking, yes, nuclear waste is the biggest problem. Right now the US has enough nuclear waste to fill the proposed Yucca facility more than twice. No one can say what the cost of storing that waste will amount to in 150 years, or that is even possible to predict anything regarding society on that time scale. And breeder reactors are not a magic bullet... we'd need hundreds of breeder reactors to reprocess all that fuel. Also, your first point is false. At Fukushima, one of the overcrowded spent fuel ponds (which has evaporated), is releasing spent fuel into the environment.
Right now we have some serious unsolved issues with nuclear energy, but cost is the deepest pit. Nuclear reactors cannot be built without heavy government subsidies, and none have been built without them. Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry. We are in the proverbial hole. Proliferators just want to keep digging that hole deeper, as if somehow that is the solution to being trapped in a hole. But nearly every other energy source is getting cheaper.
Just as an example, the costs of solar has been more than halved in the last 10 years, and this done without heavy government investment. Over time, I'd estimate in the next 20 years, solar power will become as cheap, in reality, as proliferators claim that nuclear is now. But, again, solar energy research doesn't require enormous government subsidies and insane plant construction costs with triple failsafes, nor will it require outrageous insurance policies, nor will it require storing any waste for decades or centuries. Solar energy will continue to increase its energy density, making leaps and bounds in efficiency all the while decresing cost, while nuclear energy will... remain the same.
As a species, globally, since the 1940's, we've poured trillions of dollars into nuclear research and reactor construction, and hundreds of billions cleaning up a few nuclear incidents. We're no longer pouring big money into nuclear research, not on the scale of several decades ago. Solar is making significant technological advances from small labs and startup energy firms, very impressive advances in the last 10 years alone with only a modest investment. We've figured out nuclear energy... we went at it so fast and so hard, other than piling on the failsafes, there's not much left to discover about fission: this is what it costs, this is what it will continue to cost, and these incident possibilities are the dangers.
Solar energy (again, solar is just an example... I'm not married to it) has had perhaps a hundredth of a percent of the amount invested into it that nuclear has had... and there are still advancements being made. Solar will be cheaper than nuclear in mere decades from now, and the more we research and invest, the better solar gets, and the cheaper the power will be. This is not the case for fission. No amount of further research or massive resource investment will make nuclear power any less expensive. We need to keep nuclear around, of course, until it meets economic equilibrum with the cost of alternatives, but it is nonsense to suggest adopting nuclear energy across the board as the future solution to the world's energy needs, espescially at the expense of not developing cleaner alternative energies.
Pity that the nuclear problems seemed to overshadow all the vastly more important and tragic aspects of the quake and tsunami.
Quite. Fukushima is not a global wake up call to the dangers of unbridled nuclear energy proliferation. Even if the tsunami will just be a mere harmless memory in 20 years, and Fukushima will still be news a hundred years from now, we should dismiss any discussion of Fukushima or nuclear perils. We must bury discussion of Fukushima because nuclear energy proliferators are done discussing it, and their twisted facts concerning, say, the deaths caused by Chernobyl (43! that's all! It killed 43 people and not thousands upon thousands in the years since the incident... those people died of cancer and we don't know how they got it). Fukushima hasn't killed anyone. It remains the safest nuclear incident evar. No... any reports cancer deaths in the vicinity of Fukushima in the next 100 years will be coincidence.
Seems to me it'd be simpler to solve the world's food resource problem by figuring out how the plants do it... then cut out the middle man and do it ourselves. Screw farming... I'll be at the beach.
it's serious but not out of control.
Seems like no matter whtat they did, it just got worse, so I'm having difficulty seeing the control you seem to think they have over the reactors in crisis at Fukushima. They're raising the severity level to maximum. Ah, there it is... they are controlling how severe it is? Then why don't they just make it less severe?
Tom rules.
Had there not been any nuclear incidents, perhaps. But once you take into account the cleanup costs ($230 billion for Chernobyl, $1 billion for TMI, $12 billion for Fukushima, $120 billion for Windscale, $? million for SL-1, $? for Tokaimura), and take into account the cost of collecting and storing the nuclear waste for centuries, and take into account construction costs with triple failsafes, and take into account the cost of insurance, and take into account the cost of educating technicians, nuclear energy becomes the most expensive energy available. By far. If not heavily subsidized by the United States government, civilian nuclear reactors would never have been built in the US – they would have been far too expensive.
There's the traditional one... and then there's the one for misspelled words, made-up words, internet anachronisms, lolcat and 1337-speak.
he bought up lots of stock in Dewars and Gordons during Prohibition and sold it soon after repeal for a huge profit.
that just seems like a logical, shrewd investment move that anyone could do, whether they're in the business or not.
Totally. Doing illegal drugs is immoral, usually victimless, but immoral and disgusting, because its illegal. However, few actions approach what amounts to one of the greatest goods of the American dream: making a fortune off of the habits of the immoral criminal drug user, and in general, if possible, the misery of others. That's what makes this country great. You can on the one hand be completely offended by what someone else does even when you aren't aware of it, and yet still sleep at night knowing you are doing the right thing by providing that immoral person with the means to commit those heinous acts of intoxication. I don't know why rich people get such a bad rap.