I'm curious why you really even need "random" data to "approach irreversibility" - wouldn't writing all zeroes, then all ones, then all zeroes, then all ones a few times effectively make the original data be "forgotten"? By then, every bit has previously been one, every bit has previously been zero, multiple times?
But, those diners, fast food restaurants, etc where you get a cup of coffee (with refills) for 99 cents have a lot of those same costs - rent, insurance, management, advertising, taxes, et. al. Why is it they can make money selling coffee for 99 cents but the coffee shop has to sell it for $3.99?
You did read the same thing I did, right? They *tried* using someone else's solution, and the solution did not fit their needs. If the existing solutions don't fit your needs, what else can you do other than roll your own? I guess you could drop the service/product altogether and just call it a day, but that doesn't sound like a great business model.
"You are also right on if the lawyer was not representing a covered entity. If they had acquired the information while representing a client bringing a lawsuit against a hospital then they aren't covered by HIPAA."
That seems rather a giant loophole. You mean if I sue a medical center and get medical records, I can do whatever the heck I want with them? That doesn't seem like it could possibly be right.
Wouldn't the court put you under some sort of non-disclosure order, if nothing else, if the court gives you access to private information you would not otherwise have?
"my tears will probably fall sideways upwards now."
Even worse, they just stay at the surface of your eyes and pool in your eyes so you can't see, which makes you cry more, and then you see even worse. . .
So, an Inalienable right is one you *start life with*. You're born with a body, a mind, and the ability to think and say what you want with your mouth, hand gestures, etc.
An Inalienable right is one which can only be taken away by the government, not given. Internet access is not something you are born with, so lets cut out this "Inalienable" nonsense right now.
AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cox Cable, Timewarner Cable, Local Telcos, Local Library Systems, Local School Districts, Universities (both public and private), State Governments, the Federal Government, ICANN, CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, to name but a few.
Seriously, nobody should be referring to the Yablakov book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Envirnoment". It has been reviewed by a number of scientific experts, and found to be complete junk science.
(Someone might note that the link I've provided is to a pro-nuclear blog and say the conclusion is biased, but the pro-nuclear blogger in question is simply citing someone else's review).
What I really mean to say is: Don't get all your numbers from anti-nuclear zealots and realize that the picture is not even close to as ambiguous as you portrayed here. There's science, and then there's bullshit, and you need to sort one from the other.
On the topic of Three Mile Island - why do Anti-nukes even bring it up? It's a meaningless historical event - nothing bad happened at TMI (well, some investors lost their investment). I used to think TMI was "something" because people always talk about it, but I started looking into it, and I can't find anything scary or bad about TMI - it showed that even when there was operator error, and they did the exact wrong thing, the containment still worked, the meltdown was stopped on the floor of the containment, and the public wasn't harmed.
"The price of the energy input is free and unchanging."
The price of the land, Wind Turbines, and additional long-distance low-loss transmission lines is very expensive. When you look at the cost of the "input" of a nuclear plant, it's almost free too - the fuel is a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power - it's the plants themselves that are so darn expensive (which is the same situation as wind).
If you actually compare the cost of Wind and Nuclear, Nuclear and On-land wind have similar costs (Wind is slightly cheaper according to the DOE estimates), while off-shore wind is much more expensive than either.
As for the waste, what are terrorists and terrorist supporting governments going to do with waste? You generally don't build bombs from nuclear waste, because it's a harder problem than building a bomb from enriched Uranium, or Plutonium bred in special purpose reactors (the plutonium in nuclear "waste" is "poisoned" by other isotopes of Plutonium which make it bad for bomb use; in theory, you might be able to seperate out the other isotopes, but enriching highly-radioactive waste is a very hard problem, from what I understand, and hard to hide from spy satellites).
"Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful."
Your statement is so vague as to be useless. It depends on the type and quantity of radioactive material leaked - the small quantity of tritium which has leaked at a number of reactors (and which got quite a bit of press) really is a pretty harmless sort of leak. Tritium is very weak to begin with, the quantities of the leaks are pretty small, and it very quickly dillutes to completely harmless levels in ground water, rivers, lakes, etc.
Outside a few small hotspots in Japan, the increase in radiation level in most of the evacuation zone is still less than the background radiation at a lot of other places on Earth where people have been living for thousands of years.
But, the anti-nukes can't ever seem to grasp such nuance. Nuance is hard. Fear is easy.
As for those hotspots I mentioned, we now know ways to clean up those hotspots. There are techniques like phytoremediation and bioremediation which can potentially remove the Cesium using plants and have the land safe again in relatively short time.
That said, I think we can do better than current designs (though they have a really impressive safety record, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima). There are newer reactor concepts which can dramatically reduce the small remaining risks, such as passively cooled light water reactors (that is, reactors which stay cool without backup power), Molten Salt Reactors, and liquid metal reactors. I'm particularly a fan of Molten Salt Reactors - they appear like they would be almost perfectly safe in almost all circumstances. Liquid metal reactors I'm a bit more skeptical about, because the "most popular" design for such seems to use liquid Sodium metal, and Sodium is pretty flammable, so salts seem a wiser choice to me.
I thought MS are supposed to be Staunch Champions of the Freedom to Innovate, hardy har har.
Ridiculous - leveraging a few patents on minor functionality which might cover.00001 percent of Android functionality into a patent royalty which is out of all proportion to the "size" of MS's "contribution" to the product AND putting onerous development requirements on Android developers to hamstring it's future progress so that they're own platform can prevail not on its merits, but on their ability to control the competition with patents.
This is *everything* that's wrong with the software patent system.
So, how much does the ZINK paper cost? I imagine it's probably not exactly cheap. . . give away the printer, sell the ink^h^h^h^h paper.
I think one of the things that did the classic polaroid in was that those insta-developing glossy photos were pretty expensive. I don't fully recall, but seems like the cartridges of polaroid "film" were something like a dollar per picture or maybe a bit more. I mean, that's not completely out of reach of the public, of course, but with a $200 digital camera you can take thousands of photos at no additional cost, whereas it would cost you thousands of dollars to take thousands of pics with a polaroid.
I would suppose with this new digital polaroid, you probably have the option of only printing out the ones you really want to print, and just save the rest to an SD card like any other digital camera, so that should help control costs for their customers and encourage them to take lots more pictures, and perhaps even decide to print more.
Seriously, if there were aliens so advanced they invented rapid interstellar travel technology, what could they possibly want with Earth? Maybe just to observe us to document our evolution and culture? Sort of alien anthropologists/zoologists?
There's seriously nothing of value on earth, resource wise, which they shouldn't be able to collect a billion other places in the Universe. No, they don't want slave labor - high technology manufacturing, even here on earth, is far better than slave labor, and we are positing that their technology is far advanced of our own, so I have to reject the "Stargate SG-1" hypothesis - advanced aliens need no slaves, need no resources they can't get elsewhere, need no oil, coal or other hydrocarbon fuels, and they certainly wouldn't want our technology.
"except for one thing: it's not quite the whole picture. They also have a new API for opening documents. Applications which use this API now farm out all the file picking UI to a secure, OS-provided process, which has entitlements to read the user's Documents directory."
That totally makes sense. I thought years ago that something like that might be a good idea, instead of programs having arbitrary access to any file. That still allows the user to open files they need to open, while protecting others. I thought there had to be some sort of allowance for letting users open files outside the app dir.
Alright, fair enough. I think my main point may still stand however - the water might be polluted, but just from your nose, it's hard to tell what it's polluted *with* or where it came from.
"This means you must ask Apple for read or read/write entitlements for additional folders outside your Application Support folder before your app is approved."
In general, I'm not against the idea of security sandboxing most apps, since most apps should be able to happily do what they need to in the sandbox.
I am, however, a little confused about the restriction above? I've always been a fan of having user data files in a home directory (which pretty much every OS does right now, I think?). That makes it easy to backup user data without backing up the entire filesystem from the root folder down. Are these Application Support directories going to be in the user's home directory, or more like the application folders you find under the "Program Files" directory on a Windows computer? Sounds like the "Program Files" directory concept?
Second, historically, it's been very common to take a file from one program and use it in another - load a photo from a camera to the hard drive using a syncing application, then open the photo in a photo editor to touch up the photo, then maybe import the photo into a photo album, or a presentation manager.
It sounds like these restrictions would completely break that model of re-using data in multiple applications?
If you're smelling something, it may well be the fracking chems. The natural gas itself, as I understand it, is odorless. The "smell" you associate with gas from your stove or grill is another gas with which they 'dope' natural gas, so that you can smell the leak, otherwise you'd never know you had a leak.
I'm kind of split, on the one hand, I think this guy will be good for physical reconstruction of oil infrastructure, water, power, sewer, roads, etc.
However, having him as the very first PM might not work so well, because in addition to the physical aspect of reconstruction, an equally pressing issue in terms of having a clock which will run out quickly, is establishing a viable political system in the country - constitution, parliament, elections, etc.
I'm glad we have a point of agreement. As for me, I'm a sort of bread-basket person. I want to see continued government funding of R&D for solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass energy (and enabling technologies such as utility-scale energy storage systems). I think most of those technologies are just not really quite ready for production yet.
As for the vulnerability of nuclear plants, they do have some advantages - one, if you have hundreds of nuclear plants spread around the country, if an enemy takes out one or two plants, that doesn't significantly harm your energy supply - the other plants can probably make up the difference by increasing their output by 1/10 of one percent each.
Having a lot of nuclear plants spread around the country sounds pretty "distributed" to me. I'm a fan of small modular reactors based on the LFTR concept personally. They could be built in hardened, underground bunkers, air-cooled (don't need water cooling), and they keep a very small "inventory" of radioactive isotopes in the reactor at any given time - they can very frequently remove the waste, every day or every week, unlike current conventional reactors that keep a years (or 2-3 years) worth of fuel/waste in the reactor at any given time. This means that you can very much limit the amount of radioactive material which could possibly be spread if someone attacked a hardened LFTR down to a pretty miniscule amount.
With such small reactors based on LFTR tech, you could put thousands of them around the country. That'd make it pretty hard for an enemy state to take out your energy supply.
Of course, LFTR isn't ready today either, but it's very close. We could quickly get going on producing LFTRs, if the will were there. The technology is proven, and works. It just needs to be moved from "research reactor" designs to "commercial reactor" designs.
I also like the idea of using energy from all those nuclear reactors, combined with biomass, to create what might be described as "nuclear enhanced biofuels".
Right now, biofuels struggle, but combining nuclear energy with biomass energy can allow you to greatly increase the energy/quantity of the resulting liquid fuels. Basically, you use nuclear energy to drive electrolysis (or heat-based processes) to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water, then combine the hydrogen and oxygen with cellulose from plants to form methanol, dimethyl ether, or synthetic gasoline/diesel. (This is another technology which is not ready yet, but I think it would be good to pursue R&D to make it economically viable in the future; we know it's possible, we just haven't made it cost-effective yet).
You can say something is "evidence", but that doesn't actually make it evidence - at least, not evidence that other people necessarily accept. I'm a Christian, but the only thing I accept martyrdom as evidence of is that person's actual belief., and willingness to hold to that belief when strictly challenged.
However, someone's *sincere belief* is still not evidence of an external fact. There's several cases of people who've been let out of prison, after they were convicted on the testimony of people who *sincerely believed* the accused to be guilty, but for which later physical evidence showed they were wrongly accused.
People are *terrible* witnesses. I *almost* think all human testimony (other than technical expert witnesses) should probably be excluded from evidence in court cases. If the only thing to base a conviction on is eyewitness testimony, you've got a weak, weak case.
"we've heard for a while that thorium reactors will be better, but now that someone's actually building one, it turns out to be the wrong kind of thorium reactor."
If the reactor is almost exactly the same as the old kind of reactor, but you just fill it with a different fuel, why would you expect to get the benefits of a new reactor design?
Just about everyone talking about the benefits of Thorium (at least outside of India) is talking about molten salt reactor/liquid fluoride thorium reactor technology.
I don't think BP really sees skimping on safety as a way to save money, not anymore. Reality has a way of asserting itself.
Companies will spend the money they need to in order to avoid spending more, at least if they're held accountable.
There's always the problem of the under-funded company which does something dangerous, causes an expensive mess, then declares bankruptcy, leaving the bill for others to pay. That is avoidable through responsible regulation - such as requiring a sufficient level of bonding or insurance before a company is allowed to attempt something which might be risky.
The fact of the matter is that having a sufficiently secure energy supply is a National Security issue. As such, it makes sense for the government to interfere and do what needs to be done to ensure we have enough energy supply which is independent of foreign sources, to maintain our national security.
I'm completely in favor of the government "interfering" in the energy market to ensure we have enough domestic energy.
"where the main costs (pollution) are entirely socialized."
Don't forget all the environmental damage from the coal mining industry - strip mining, mountain-top removal mining, etc.
I hear some saying, "But wait, nuclear plants require mining too - Uranium must be mined".
The difference is that one tonne of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something like 2 million tonnes of coal. Now, you have to mine more than one tonne of ore to get one tonne of enriched uranium, but it still requires much, much less mining.
If we used more efficient reactors (like a fast breeder reactor, or a LFTR - liquid fluoride thorium reactor), the reduction in mining would be far, far greater - in fact, it's estimated we could power the entire world using just the Thorium "tailings" from the mining of Rare Earth Elements used in modern electronics, electric cars, and other high-tech systems.
If we used fast breeder reactors, the U.S. could power itself for around 500 years, maybe longer, with NO additional mining, just by re-using our existing inventories of nuclear "waste" and "depleted uranium".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious why you really even need "random" data to "approach irreversibility" - wouldn't writing all zeroes, then all ones, then all zeroes, then all ones a few times effectively make the original data be "forgotten"? By then, every bit has previously been one, every bit has previously been zero, multiple times?
But, those diners, fast food restaurants, etc where you get a cup of coffee (with refills) for 99 cents have a lot of those same costs - rent, insurance, management, advertising, taxes, et. al. Why is it they can make money selling coffee for 99 cents but the coffee shop has to sell it for $3.99?
You did read the same thing I did, right? They *tried* using someone else's solution, and the solution did not fit their needs. If the existing solutions don't fit your needs, what else can you do other than roll your own? I guess you could drop the service/product altogether and just call it a day, but that doesn't sound like a great business model.
When you run the 75% off sale, you are supposed to first mark the price up by 150-200%. Nub got pwned.
"You are also right on if the lawyer was not representing a covered entity. If they had acquired the information while representing a client bringing a lawsuit against a hospital then they aren't covered by HIPAA."
That seems rather a giant loophole. You mean if I sue a medical center and get medical records, I can do whatever the heck I want with them? That doesn't seem like it could possibly be right.
Wouldn't the court put you under some sort of non-disclosure order, if nothing else, if the court gives you access to private information you would not otherwise have?
"my tears will probably fall sideways upwards now."
Even worse, they just stay at the surface of your eyes and pool in your eyes so you can't see, which makes you cry more, and then you see even worse. . .
So, an Inalienable right is one you *start life with*. You're born with a body, a mind, and the ability to think and say what you want with your mouth, hand gestures, etc.
An Inalienable right is one which can only be taken away by the government, not given. Internet access is not something you are born with, so lets cut out this "Inalienable" nonsense right now.
Let's see. . .
AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cox Cable, Timewarner Cable, Local Telcos, Local Library Systems, Local School Districts, Universities (both public and private), State Governments, the Federal Government, ICANN, CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, to name but a few.
Seriously, nobody should be referring to the Yablakov book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Envirnoment". It has been reviewed by a number of scientific experts, and found to be complete junk science.
http://atomicinsights.com/2011/10/devastating-review-of-yablokovs-chernobyl-consequences-of-the-catastrophe-for-people-and-the-environment.html
(Someone might note that the link I've provided is to a pro-nuclear blog and say the conclusion is biased, but the pro-nuclear blogger in question is simply citing someone else's review).
What I really mean to say is: Don't get all your numbers from anti-nuclear zealots and realize that the picture is not even close to as ambiguous as you portrayed here. There's science, and then there's bullshit, and you need to sort one from the other.
On the topic of Three Mile Island - why do Anti-nukes even bring it up? It's a meaningless historical event - nothing bad happened at TMI (well, some investors lost their investment). I used to think TMI was "something" because people always talk about it, but I started looking into it, and I can't find anything scary or bad about TMI - it showed that even when there was operator error, and they did the exact wrong thing, the containment still worked, the meltdown was stopped on the floor of the containment, and the public wasn't harmed.
"The price of the energy input is free and unchanging."
The price of the land, Wind Turbines, and additional long-distance low-loss transmission lines is very expensive. When you look at the cost of the "input" of a nuclear plant, it's almost free too - the fuel is a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power - it's the plants themselves that are so darn expensive (which is the same situation as wind).
If you actually compare the cost of
Wind and Nuclear, Nuclear and On-land wind have similar costs (Wind is slightly cheaper according to the DOE estimates), while off-shore wind is much more expensive than either.
As for the waste, what are terrorists and terrorist supporting governments going to do with waste? You generally don't build bombs from nuclear waste, because it's a harder problem than building a bomb from enriched Uranium, or Plutonium bred in special purpose reactors (the plutonium in nuclear "waste" is "poisoned" by other isotopes of Plutonium which make it bad for bomb use; in theory, you might be able to seperate out the other isotopes, but enriching highly-radioactive waste is a very hard problem, from what I understand, and hard to hide from spy satellites).
"Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful."
Your statement is so vague as to be useless. It depends on the type and quantity of radioactive material leaked - the small quantity of tritium which has leaked at a number of reactors (and which got quite a bit of press) really is a pretty harmless sort of leak. Tritium is very weak to begin with, the quantities of the leaks are pretty small, and it very quickly dillutes to completely harmless levels in ground water, rivers, lakes, etc.
Outside a few small hotspots in Japan, the increase in radiation level in most of the evacuation zone is still less than the background radiation at a lot of other places on Earth where people have been living for thousands of years.
But, the anti-nukes can't ever seem to grasp such nuance. Nuance is hard. Fear is easy.
As for those hotspots I mentioned, we now know ways to clean up those hotspots. There are techniques like phytoremediation and bioremediation which can potentially remove the Cesium using plants and have the land safe again in relatively short time.
That said, I think we can do better than current designs (though they have a really impressive safety record, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima). There are newer reactor concepts which can dramatically reduce the small remaining risks, such as passively cooled light water reactors (that is, reactors which stay cool without backup power), Molten Salt Reactors, and liquid metal reactors. I'm particularly a fan of Molten Salt Reactors - they appear like they would be almost perfectly safe in almost all circumstances. Liquid metal reactors I'm a bit more skeptical about, because the "most popular" design for such seems to use liquid Sodium metal, and Sodium is pretty flammable, so salts seem a wiser choice to me.
I thought MS are supposed to be Staunch Champions of the Freedom to Innovate, hardy har har.
Ridiculous - leveraging a few patents on minor functionality which might cover .00001 percent of Android functionality into a patent royalty which is out of all proportion to the "size" of MS's "contribution" to the product AND putting onerous development requirements on Android developers to hamstring it's future progress so that they're own platform can prevail not on its merits, but on their ability to control the competition with patents.
This is *everything* that's wrong with the software patent system.
So, how much does the ZINK paper cost? I imagine it's probably not exactly cheap. . . give away the printer, sell the ink^h^h^h^h paper.
I think one of the things that did the classic polaroid in was that those insta-developing glossy photos were pretty expensive. I don't fully recall, but seems like the cartridges of polaroid "film" were something like a dollar per picture or maybe a bit more. I mean, that's not completely out of reach of the public, of course, but with a $200 digital camera you can take thousands of photos at no additional cost, whereas it would cost you thousands of dollars to take thousands of pics with a polaroid.
I would suppose with this new digital polaroid, you probably have the option of only printing out the ones you really want to print, and just save the rest to an SD card like any other digital camera, so that should help control costs for their customers and encourage them to take lots more pictures, and perhaps even decide to print more.
I think the Libyans might have a different perspective. . .
Seriously, if there were aliens so advanced they invented rapid interstellar travel technology, what could they possibly want with Earth? Maybe just to observe us to document our evolution and culture? Sort of alien anthropologists/zoologists?
There's seriously nothing of value on earth, resource wise, which they shouldn't be able to collect a billion other places in the Universe. No, they don't want slave labor - high technology manufacturing, even here on earth, is far better than slave labor, and we are positing that their technology is far advanced of our own, so I have to reject the "Stargate SG-1" hypothesis - advanced aliens need no slaves, need no resources they can't get elsewhere, need no oil, coal or other hydrocarbon fuels, and they certainly wouldn't want our technology.
"except for one thing: it's not quite the whole picture. They also have a new API for opening documents. Applications which use this API now farm out all the file picking UI to a secure, OS-provided process, which has entitlements to read the user's Documents directory."
That totally makes sense. I thought years ago that something like that might be a good idea, instead of programs having arbitrary access to any file. That still allows the user to open files they need to open, while protecting others. I thought there had to be some sort of allowance for letting users open files outside the app dir.
So, another high-quality slashdot summary lol.
Alright, fair enough. I think my main point may still stand however - the water might be polluted, but just from your nose, it's hard to tell what it's polluted *with* or where it came from.
"This means you must ask Apple for read or read/write entitlements for additional folders outside your Application Support folder before your app is approved."
In general, I'm not against the idea of security sandboxing most apps, since most apps should be able to happily do what they need to in the sandbox.
I am, however, a little confused about the restriction above? I've always been a fan of having user data files in a home directory (which pretty much every OS does right now, I think?). That makes it easy to backup user data without backing up the entire filesystem from the root folder down. Are these Application Support directories going to be in the user's home directory, or more like the application folders you find under the "Program Files" directory on a Windows computer? Sounds like the "Program Files" directory concept?
Second, historically, it's been very common to take a file from one program and use it in another - load a photo from a camera to the hard drive using a syncing application, then open the photo in a photo editor to touch up the photo, then maybe import the photo into a photo album, or a presentation manager.
It sounds like these restrictions would completely break that model of re-using data in multiple applications?
If you're smelling something, it may well be the fracking chems. The natural gas itself, as I understand it, is odorless. The "smell" you associate with gas from your stove or grill is another gas with which they 'dope' natural gas, so that you can smell the leak, otherwise you'd never know you had a leak.
I'm kind of split, on the one hand, I think this guy will be good for physical reconstruction of oil infrastructure, water, power, sewer, roads, etc.
However, having him as the very first PM might not work so well, because in addition to the physical aspect of reconstruction, an equally pressing issue in terms of having a clock which will run out quickly, is establishing a viable political system in the country - constitution, parliament, elections, etc.
I wish him the best of luck with that.
I'm glad we have a point of agreement. As for me, I'm a sort of bread-basket person. I want to see continued government funding of R&D for solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass energy (and enabling technologies such as utility-scale energy storage systems). I think most of those technologies are just not really quite ready for production yet.
As for the vulnerability of nuclear plants, they do have some advantages - one, if you have hundreds of nuclear plants spread around the country, if an enemy takes out one or two plants, that doesn't significantly harm your energy supply - the other plants can probably make up the difference by increasing their output by 1/10 of one percent each.
Having a lot of nuclear plants spread around the country sounds pretty "distributed" to me. I'm a fan of small modular reactors based on the LFTR concept personally. They could be built in hardened, underground bunkers, air-cooled (don't need water cooling), and they keep a very small "inventory" of radioactive isotopes in the reactor at any given time - they can very frequently remove the waste, every day or every week, unlike current conventional reactors that keep a years (or 2-3 years) worth of fuel/waste in the reactor at any given time. This means that you can very much limit the amount of radioactive material which could possibly be spread if someone attacked a hardened LFTR down to a pretty miniscule amount.
With such small reactors based on LFTR tech, you could put thousands of them around the country. That'd make it pretty hard for an enemy state to take out your energy supply.
Of course, LFTR isn't ready today either, but it's very close. We could quickly get going on producing LFTRs, if the will were there. The technology is proven, and works. It just needs to be moved from "research reactor" designs to "commercial reactor" designs.
I also like the idea of using energy from all those nuclear reactors, combined with biomass, to create what might be described as "nuclear enhanced biofuels".
Right now, biofuels struggle, but combining nuclear energy with biomass energy can allow you to greatly increase the energy/quantity of the resulting liquid fuels. Basically, you use nuclear energy to drive electrolysis (or heat-based processes) to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water, then combine the hydrogen and oxygen with cellulose from plants to form methanol, dimethyl ether, or synthetic gasoline/diesel. (This is another technology which is not ready yet, but I think it would be good to pursue R&D to make it economically viable in the future; we know it's possible, we just haven't made it cost-effective yet).
You can say something is "evidence", but that doesn't actually make it evidence - at least, not evidence that other people necessarily accept. I'm a Christian, but the only thing I accept martyrdom as evidence of is that person's actual belief., and willingness to hold to that belief when strictly challenged.
However, someone's *sincere belief* is still not evidence of an external fact. There's several cases of people who've been let out of prison, after they were convicted on the testimony of people who *sincerely believed* the accused to be guilty, but for which later physical evidence showed they were wrongly accused.
People are *terrible* witnesses. I *almost* think all human testimony (other than technical expert witnesses) should probably be excluded from evidence in court cases. If the only thing to base a conviction on is eyewitness testimony, you've got a weak, weak case.
"we've heard for a while that thorium reactors will be better, but now that someone's actually building one, it turns out to be the wrong kind of thorium reactor."
If the reactor is almost exactly the same as the old kind of reactor, but you just fill it with a different fuel, why would you expect to get the benefits of a new reactor design?
Just about everyone talking about the benefits of Thorium (at least outside of India) is talking about molten salt reactor/liquid fluoride thorium reactor technology.
I don't think BP really sees skimping on safety as a way to save money, not anymore. Reality has a way of asserting itself.
Companies will spend the money they need to in order to avoid spending more, at least if they're held accountable.
There's always the problem of the under-funded company which does something dangerous, causes an expensive mess, then declares bankruptcy, leaving the bill for others to pay. That is avoidable through responsible regulation - such as requiring a sufficient level of bonding or insurance before a company is allowed to attempt something which might be risky.
The fact of the matter is that having a sufficiently secure energy supply is a National Security issue. As such, it makes sense for the government to interfere and do what needs to be done to ensure we have enough energy supply which is independent of foreign sources, to maintain our national security.
I'm completely in favor of the government "interfering" in the energy market to ensure we have enough domestic energy.
"where the main costs (pollution) are entirely socialized."
Don't forget all the environmental damage from the coal mining industry - strip mining, mountain-top removal mining, etc.
I hear some saying, "But wait, nuclear plants require mining too - Uranium must be mined".
The difference is that one tonne of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something like 2 million tonnes of coal. Now, you have to mine more than one tonne of ore to get one tonne of enriched uranium, but it still requires much, much less mining.
If we used more efficient reactors (like a fast breeder reactor, or a LFTR - liquid fluoride thorium reactor), the reduction in mining would be far, far greater - in fact, it's estimated we could power the entire world using just the Thorium "tailings" from the mining of Rare Earth Elements used in modern electronics, electric cars, and other high-tech systems.
If we used fast breeder reactors, the U.S. could power itself for around 500 years, maybe longer, with NO additional mining, just by re-using our existing inventories of nuclear "waste" and "depleted uranium".