Even if we assume $10 a watt for nuclear, and $3 a watt for 20 years of fuel, that's still $13 billion for a a gigawatt of power for 20 years. A gigawatt from solar would cost over $30 billion.
That's if it would even be possible to build a gigawatt solar plant. The current largest plant has a peak of 60 megawatt.
Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Note that the fuel cost for nuclear is a small part of the cost. Huge increases in fuel cost wouldn't be as bad as other power sources.
Sure it is an engineering problem rather than a fundamental science problem. No one is claiming that getting power from the sun or wind is impossible, just impracticable. First let me say I'm all for hydroelectric and geothermal, both are quite practical wherever possible. Solar and wind on the other hand are almost never more practical than nuclear.
Solar and wind suffer from their intermediate production of power. On their current small scale this can be ignored, but if we were to get the bulk of power from them this would have to be addressed. There are ways of addressing it sure, build more than you need, store some, transmit some. There are problems though, over building and energy storage are wasteful and expensive. Transmitting excess only lessens the risk of not having enough power. Plus they are simply much more expensive than nuclear on a per watt basis even if they provided a constant output.
Nuclear wouldn't have these engineering challenges. It would fit in with the current grid just fine.
Coal is absolutely horrible. The fact that we are still building new coal power plants boggles my mind. Coal kills more people every year than nuclear power ever has.
Our power demands will increase every year. The main users of power are industrial and transportation which are already about as efficient as possible. People like to feel good about things like CFLs but residential lighting is such a tiny part of our power usage (Wiki claims 2.5%). Trying to lessen our power usage is just unrealistic, at best we can lessen the increase from year to year. Power is needed for everything in our modern world, and cheaper power will mean better lives for all.
I'm not against energy efficiency or even solar and wind power on a individual level. But they can't be scaled up to solve our power needs. Nuclear would have no problem providing all our power.
Why will we have to get our power from wind and solar in the long run? There's no reason why nuclear fission couldn't provide all the worlds power for the next 100 years. Any planning beyond that is a bit silly, we have no idea what kind of advances will be made in that time.
But if the only two possible choices for a leader were Stalin or Hitler, and Stalin was better than Hitler then he would be the best choice. Nuclear or fossil are the only two choices for power, we must choose whichever is better. Other power options like solar or wind simply can't provide the bulk of our power. Sure we may want them to, but they can't. To put it in the analogy it would be like instead of Hitler or Stalin picking Santa.
I have an 8gb flash based Meizu M3, which plays just about any audio or video format (FLAC and ogg included). It's made by a Chinese company, and does have some annoying bugs (sometimes VBR mp3s skip at the end of the track). I am happy with it though, as it has no sort of DRM or included software. Just a standard USB connection and is recognized as a mass storage device in XP. They don't sell the M3 anymore, but they have newer models.
But monoculture isn't exclusive to GM food. Many of the foods we eat have been selectively bred for the most desirable traits, and then cloned worldwide. I agree that monoculture is a problem, but it's not a new one. I think the solution is just to mandate that if you want to grow or sell food in our country your crops can't be greater than x% clones.
When I sign those silly credit card receipts I just scribble, I don't even bother trying to form anything even close to letters. I've never signed the back of a credit card, because no one looks (and now a days you rarely hand the card to anyone, you slide it yourself). No one has ever commented on my scribble.
I do make some effort on documents I consider important. Although I can't even remember the last time I signed something I considered important.
I've seen people that used "print" to sign their names. It was different from the print name because it was much closer to a scribble. You don't need to use cursive for a signature. Mine started as cursive, but has evolved into a scribble that I usually do the same way.
Tin foil over GPS antenna. Odometers are already made somewhat difficult to tamper with (at least more difficult than blocking a GPS signal). If it really became that much of a problem redesigned very tamper resistant odometers being mandatory would be less expensive and less invasive than the GPS being mandatory.
A rich country like the US shouldn't ever have a problem with water. Since there is no shortage of salt water, the only problem is the energy needed to convert it to fresh water. If people in the US didn't have such an irrational fear of anything called nuclear we could have plenty of energy for this and other things. I used "shouldn't" in the first sentence since it's unlikely people will become rational anytime soon.
This is the real problem. The developed nations can do whatever we want (and we certainly should reduce our carbon output), but developing nations won't bother with this stuff. Carbon neutral sources of power are an option for devolved nations, but coal will be the cheapest source of power for the foreseeable future. The same with planting trees decades ahead of time, it simply isn't going to happen in devolving nations.
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Again developed nations should make every attempt to reduce carbon output, but how can we force the other 80% of the world's population to not use the same cheap and easy methods of growth that we used to get where we are?
The best way I can think of is to volunteer aid for carbon neutral power sources for any developing nations, mainly those currently putting out large amounts of CO2.
The problem with using plants is that they release any sequestered CO2 when they decompose. The excess CO2 is coming from fossil fuels where it was sequestered for millions of years. The only way to get rid of it is to find another way to sequester it on the order of at least thousands of years.
When it comes to things like a massively powerful government I think fear and mistrust are justified and good. The US Federal Government is the richest and most powerful entity on the face of the Earth, I don't think it's unreasonable to keep a close eye on it (power corrupts and all). You should hope that legislators, judges, police officers, etc are good and fair people, but the law should be written as if they are all assumed to be corrupt and evil.
First, overwriting with zeros is enough on any modern drive. No one has ever recovered anything from a drive that has simply been zeroed, even with a SEM. It's only been theorized that it could be possible. However, simply formatting a drive does not over write the data, so that is not enough to clear the data. http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted
However, the joke came from the guy saying he could recover about 50% of the bits on a zeroed drive. Since the bits can only be 0 or 1 simply guessing would yield 50% correct.
[i]Purposely[/i] destroying any part of a passport, and then trying to use it is almost certainly illegal. "Passports that are mutilated, altered, or damaged are no longer valid for travel." http://travel.state.gov/passport/fri/faq/faq_1741.html
However, if your RFID chip simply didn't work, and you didn't know why, then I'm sure they'd just manually enter the info.
Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
The original idea at the beginning of this thread is actually pretty clever. As said though, it does have flaws. I tried to figure out how the above heads and tails idea would allow it to work for more than one candidate, but couldn't. One method I came up with that I think would work would be giving a randomly selected color to everyone. Then if there are four candidates A, B, C, and D, there would be a chart with candidates as column headers, and colors as row headers. In each cell there would be a radio button. If you were a "blue" voter and wanted A you'd find A column then select the blue radio button. Then you'd just enter any random color votes for the other candidates. If you were being coerced into voting for B, you could simply give B a green vote first, then give A the blue vote as part of your supposedly random other votes.
Even with this I suppose the coercer could ask what color you were, if you told him green he could then tell you to give your green vote to his candidate, but also decide what other color votes to give to the others. Thus (likely) preventing your vote from going to his main opponent. Still this is better than being able to get your vote for him, effectively he just prevents you from voting, which can already be done.
The main problem I see is that this is rather complicated, and if there were problems understanding current ballots I can foresee a lot of people complaining about this.
Another idea would be to use that old urban legend ATM panic code idea. Where entering your PIN backwards would discount your vote. It has some problems, but it could be an additional layer of security.
At the end of the day though, nothing like this will be implemented. The code behind it won't be open, and will be filled with holes. It's a shame that a bunch of people commenting on a story in their free time can come up with some pretty decent mechanisms to secure something like this, but when the system is actually put into use it'll lack even basic security.
I said 0F to 100F is more useful because it lets you convey any typical temperature with two digits, and no negatives. In Celsius you are effectively wasting over half of your 2 digit range on temperatures that you rarely need to express.
I don't see how having 0 and 100 as the freezing and boiling points of water is very useful. Everyone knows what temperature water freezes in their used temperature scale. I could say that 0 and 100 are set approximately at the freezing point of salt water (road salt stops working), and body temperature. The point is that any temperature scale where 0 != absolute zero has an arbitrary zero point.
The main advantage to me of the metric system has been the prefixes which allow for having only one unit for each type of measurement, and then simply using powers of 10 to deal with very large or small numbers. This doesn't apply in temperatures, no one uses kilodegrees. So as far as I can see metric loses it's advantage. You can argue that freezing water makes a better 0, but really all you are arguing is that you prefer it that way. There is no obvious advantage to it. It'd be analogous to arguing for foot vs meter because you think one was a better size for daily measurements. Sure you can prefer one over the other, but don't claim one is obviously superior to the other based on that alone.
Again I just feel Fahrenheit is better suited for dealing with weather, which is the primary use of temperatures in daily life. Temperatures rarely fall outside the 0-100 range, and when they do it conveys that they are extremes.
I agree that F is better than C for everyday use. Not only are the degrees more precise, but the range 0F-100F fits the normal experienced temperature range better. For scientific stuff you have to convert to K regardless of which you use normally.
My state, NJ, already has one of these laws, and I'm very much against it. While the Constitution doesn't have anything to say with how states assign electors and thus this isn't unconstitutional technically, I think it's certainly against the spirit of it. If you think something as fundamental as our presidential election system should be changed, fine, but at least go about it the correct way (constitutional amendment). Just because you can get away with something the wrong way, and it's something you want done doesn't mean you should do it that way.
I'm amazed at how shortsighted people are. They're willing to get their own pet law passed by any means necessarily, and in time when something they oppose is being passed the same way they won't even see the irony.
To review the current system, each state has a certain number of votes (based on HOR + Senate), each state decides how they want to vote and then they do. They can give every vote to whoever wins the state (most do), or they can give each vote to whoever gets more in the area represented by it (like NH). The problem is, since there is a large discrepancy in state populations the 11 most populated states have enough votes to decide on their own. This is the basis for this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact nonsense. However as being a member to the NPVIC will be a purely state matter they will be able to change it on a whim. If you get 11 state legislators to agree you effectively can pick anyone for President. What if they decided to give all their votes to a new party whose sole platform is exploiting the other states for everything they're worth?
The point is 11 states shouldn't decide the president, the nation as a whole should. I personally feel states don't have enough rights as it is (17th amendment), and I like the electoral college as it lets each state vote however it wants. However, I know that the bulk public doesn't understand or care about the complexities, and anything but direct democracy (which we'll never have regardless) sounds unpopular.
If you don't like the electoral college, please support a constitutional amendment. Don't get change by cheating the system. Don't allow 11 states to impose their will upon the rest (even if it's a "good" will in the short term). There's a reason why constitutional amendments are hard, because major changes to our system of government should be carefully considered.
However, if we get rid of all nuclear power worldwide as we should, then there would be no legitimate reason for the US or any other country to be fooling around with nuclear enrichment facilities of any kind. Without the ability to hide under the facade of "peaceful power research", bombing such weapons programs into oblivion before they yield weapons would no longer be the political impossibility that it currently is. Detecting such programs via isotope sniffing would also be greatly simplified.
So you think we should eliminate all forms of nuclear technology, including energy, and medical and you think there is any chance other countries will do the same? At the very least every world power with nuclear weapon now would have to agree to totally abolish nuclear technology, there is no way any of them would agree to anything of the sort, let alone all of them.
The genie is out of the bottle with nuclear, there is no way it's going to go away, and there is no reason for it to. Sure it would be great to live in a world without nuclear weapons, but we don't, and those weapons aren't going anywhere. No country is going to give up any meaningful amount of nuclear weapons, and they're definitely not going to give up nuclear energy and medicine. Even if nuclear weapons did ever go away we would come up with some other way to kill in mass.
Just because something has the word nuclear in it doesn't mean it's a deadly doomsday device. Nuclear power plants are quite safe, and they are simply the only realistic replacement for coal power plants. One needs to look no further than Germany and France to see this is so. Germany has committed to building no more nuclear power plants, and while they are building solar and wind in mass they are also building new coal power plants. I mean building new coal power plants today, it's crazy. We should be doing everything in our power to get rid of existing coal power, building more is insane. France on the other hand is building nuclear power plants in mass and now has so much power they export it to their neighbors.
The choice today is between coal and nuclear. Sorry, the other choices might sound nice, and in some places they can work, but we aren't going to replace our current (and increasing) production with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_photovoltaic_power_station
€250 million or $373 for 10 megawatt average. That's $37 per watt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_construction_cost_estimates
The recent high estimates are about $5-$8 per watt. A twenty year supply of nuclear fuel less than $1 a watt.
Even if we assume $10 a watt for nuclear, and $3 a watt for 20 years of fuel, that's still $13 billion for a a gigawatt of power for 20 years. A gigawatt from solar would cost over $30 billion.
That's if it would even be possible to build a gigawatt solar plant. The current largest plant has a peak of 60 megawatt.
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/07/test.html
Wind and solar are more expensive than nuclear, even if the fuel increased 100x in cost.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last
Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Note that the fuel cost for nuclear is a small part of the cost. Huge increases in fuel cost wouldn't be as bad as other power sources.
Sure it is an engineering problem rather than a fundamental science problem. No one is claiming that getting power from the sun or wind is impossible, just impracticable. First let me say I'm all for hydroelectric and geothermal, both are quite practical wherever possible. Solar and wind on the other hand are almost never more practical than nuclear.
Solar and wind suffer from their intermediate production of power. On their current small scale this can be ignored, but if we were to get the bulk of power from them this would have to be addressed. There are ways of addressing it sure, build more than you need, store some, transmit some. There are problems though, over building and energy storage are wasteful and expensive. Transmitting excess only lessens the risk of not having enough power. Plus they are simply much more expensive than nuclear on a per watt basis even if they provided a constant output.
Nuclear wouldn't have these engineering challenges. It would fit in with the current grid just fine.
Coal is absolutely horrible. The fact that we are still building new coal power plants boggles my mind. Coal kills more people every year than nuclear power ever has.
Our power demands will increase every year. The main users of power are industrial and transportation which are already about as efficient as possible. People like to feel good about things like CFLs but residential lighting is such a tiny part of our power usage (Wiki claims 2.5%). Trying to lessen our power usage is just unrealistic, at best we can lessen the increase from year to year. Power is needed for everything in our modern world, and cheaper power will mean better lives for all.
I'm not against energy efficiency or even solar and wind power on a individual level. But they can't be scaled up to solve our power needs. Nuclear would have no problem providing all our power.
Why will we have to get our power from wind and solar in the long run? There's no reason why nuclear fission couldn't provide all the worlds power for the next 100 years. Any planning beyond that is a bit silly, we have no idea what kind of advances will be made in that time.
But if the only two possible choices for a leader were Stalin or Hitler, and Stalin was better than Hitler then he would be the best choice. Nuclear or fossil are the only two choices for power, we must choose whichever is better. Other power options like solar or wind simply can't provide the bulk of our power. Sure we may want them to, but they can't. To put it in the analogy it would be like instead of Hitler or Stalin picking Santa.
I have an 8gb flash based Meizu M3, which plays just about any audio or video format (FLAC and ogg included). It's made by a Chinese company, and does have some annoying bugs (sometimes VBR mp3s skip at the end of the track). I am happy with it though, as it has no sort of DRM or included software. Just a standard USB connection and is recognized as a mass storage device in XP. They don't sell the M3 anymore, but they have newer models.
http://www.meizume.com/
But monoculture isn't exclusive to GM food. Many of the foods we eat have been selectively bred for the most desirable traits, and then cloned worldwide. I agree that monoculture is a problem, but it's not a new one. I think the solution is just to mandate that if you want to grow or sell food in our country your crops can't be greater than x% clones.
When I sign those silly credit card receipts I just scribble, I don't even bother trying to form anything even close to letters. I've never signed the back of a credit card, because no one looks (and now a days you rarely hand the card to anyone, you slide it yourself). No one has ever commented on my scribble.
I do make some effort on documents I consider important. Although I can't even remember the last time I signed something I considered important.
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/
I've seen people that used "print" to sign their names. It was different from the print name because it was much closer to a scribble. You don't need to use cursive for a signature. Mine started as cursive, but has evolved into a scribble that I usually do the same way.
Tin foil over GPS antenna. Odometers are already made somewhat difficult to tamper with (at least more difficult than blocking a GPS signal). If it really became that much of a problem redesigned very tamper resistant odometers being mandatory would be less expensive and less invasive than the GPS being mandatory.
A rich country like the US shouldn't ever have a problem with water. Since there is no shortage of salt water, the only problem is the energy needed to convert it to fresh water. If people in the US didn't have such an irrational fear of anything called nuclear we could have plenty of energy for this and other things. I used "shouldn't" in the first sentence since it's unlikely people will become rational anytime soon.
This is the real problem. The developed nations can do whatever we want (and we certainly should reduce our carbon output), but developing nations won't bother with this stuff. Carbon neutral sources of power are an option for devolved nations, but coal will be the cheapest source of power for the foreseeable future. The same with planting trees decades ahead of time, it simply isn't going to happen in devolving nations.
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Again developed nations should make every attempt to reduce carbon output, but how can we force the other 80% of the world's population to not use the same cheap and easy methods of growth that we used to get where we are?
The best way I can think of is to volunteer aid for carbon neutral power sources for any developing nations, mainly those currently putting out large amounts of CO2.
The problem with using plants is that they release any sequestered CO2 when they decompose. The excess CO2 is coming from fossil fuels where it was sequestered for millions of years. The only way to get rid of it is to find another way to sequester it on the order of at least thousands of years.
The US Constitution was last amended in 1992. Every part of the Constitution can be edited in whatever manner the changing times justifies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution
When it comes to things like a massively powerful government I think fear and mistrust are justified and good. The US Federal Government is the richest and most powerful entity on the face of the Earth, I don't think it's unreasonable to keep a close eye on it (power corrupts and all). You should hope that legislators, judges, police officers, etc are good and fair people, but the law should be written as if they are all assumed to be corrupt and evil.
First, overwriting with zeros is enough on any modern drive. No one has ever recovered anything from a drive that has simply been zeroed, even with a SEM. It's only been theorized that it could be possible. However, simply formatting a drive does not over write the data, so that is not enough to clear the data.
http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted
However, the joke came from the guy saying he could recover about 50% of the bits on a zeroed drive. Since the bits can only be 0 or 1 simply guessing would yield 50% correct.
[i]Purposely[/i] destroying any part of a passport, and then trying to use it is almost certainly illegal.
"Passports that are mutilated, altered, or damaged are no longer valid for travel."
http://travel.state.gov/passport/fri/faq/faq_1741.html
However, if your RFID chip simply didn't work, and you didn't know why, then I'm sure they'd just manually enter the info.
It looks like you are right. I just tried and in IE it does not hijack without the www.
I'm a comcast user in NJ, and invaliddomain135.net (no www) took me to their custom page.
This is the opt out link:
https://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/
Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
The original idea at the beginning of this thread is actually pretty clever. As said though, it does have flaws. I tried to figure out how the above heads and tails idea would allow it to work for more than one candidate, but couldn't. One method I came up with that I think would work would be giving a randomly selected color to everyone. Then if there are four candidates A, B, C, and D, there would be a chart with candidates as column headers, and colors as row headers. In each cell there would be a radio button. If you were a "blue" voter and wanted A you'd find A column then select the blue radio button. Then you'd just enter any random color votes for the other candidates. If you were being coerced into voting for B, you could simply give B a green vote first, then give A the blue vote as part of your supposedly random other votes.
Even with this I suppose the coercer could ask what color you were, if you told him green he could then tell you to give your green vote to his candidate, but also decide what other color votes to give to the others. Thus (likely) preventing your vote from going to his main opponent. Still this is better than being able to get your vote for him, effectively he just prevents you from voting, which can already be done.
The main problem I see is that this is rather complicated, and if there were problems understanding current ballots I can foresee a lot of people complaining about this.
Another idea would be to use that old urban legend ATM panic code idea. Where entering your PIN backwards would discount your vote. It has some problems, but it could be an additional layer of security.
At the end of the day though, nothing like this will be implemented. The code behind it won't be open, and will be filled with holes. It's a shame that a bunch of people commenting on a story in their free time can come up with some pretty decent mechanisms to secure something like this, but when the system is actually put into use it'll lack even basic security.
I said 0F to 100F is more useful because it lets you convey any typical temperature with two digits, and no negatives. In Celsius you are effectively wasting over half of your 2 digit range on temperatures that you rarely need to express.
I don't see how having 0 and 100 as the freezing and boiling points of water is very useful. Everyone knows what temperature water freezes in their used temperature scale. I could say that 0 and 100 are set approximately at the freezing point of salt water (road salt stops working), and body temperature. The point is that any temperature scale where 0 != absolute zero has an arbitrary zero point.
The main advantage to me of the metric system has been the prefixes which allow for having only one unit for each type of measurement, and then simply using powers of 10 to deal with very large or small numbers. This doesn't apply in temperatures, no one uses kilodegrees. So as far as I can see metric loses it's advantage. You can argue that freezing water makes a better 0, but really all you are arguing is that you prefer it that way. There is no obvious advantage to it. It'd be analogous to arguing for foot vs meter because you think one was a better size for daily measurements. Sure you can prefer one over the other, but don't claim one is obviously superior to the other based on that alone.
Again I just feel Fahrenheit is better suited for dealing with weather, which is the primary use of temperatures in daily life. Temperatures rarely fall outside the 0-100 range, and when they do it conveys that they are extremes.
I agree that F is better than C for everyday use. Not only are the degrees more precise, but the range 0F-100F fits the normal experienced temperature range better. For scientific stuff you have to convert to K regardless of which you use normally.
My state, NJ, already has one of these laws, and I'm very much against it. While the Constitution doesn't have anything to say with how states assign electors and thus this isn't unconstitutional technically, I think it's certainly against the spirit of it. If you think something as fundamental as our presidential election system should be changed, fine, but at least go about it the correct way (constitutional amendment). Just because you can get away with something the wrong way, and it's something you want done doesn't mean you should do it that way.
I'm amazed at how shortsighted people are. They're willing to get their own pet law passed by any means necessarily, and in time when something they oppose is being passed the same way they won't even see the irony.
To review the current system, each state has a certain number of votes (based on HOR + Senate), each state decides how they want to vote and then they do. They can give every vote to whoever wins the state (most do), or they can give each vote to whoever gets more in the area represented by it (like NH). The problem is, since there is a large discrepancy in state populations the 11 most populated states have enough votes to decide on their own. This is the basis for this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact nonsense. However as being a member to the NPVIC will be a purely state matter they will be able to change it on a whim. If you get 11 state legislators to agree you effectively can pick anyone for President. What if they decided to give all their votes to a new party whose sole platform is exploiting the other states for everything they're worth?
The point is 11 states shouldn't decide the president, the nation as a whole should. I personally feel states don't have enough rights as it is (17th amendment), and I like the electoral college as it lets each state vote however it wants. However, I know that the bulk public doesn't understand or care about the complexities, and anything but direct democracy (which we'll never have regardless) sounds unpopular.
If you don't like the electoral college, please support a constitutional amendment. Don't get change by cheating the system. Don't allow 11 states to impose their will upon the rest (even if it's a "good" will in the short term). There's a reason why constitutional amendments are hard, because major changes to our system of government should be carefully considered.
However, if we get rid of all nuclear power worldwide as we should, then there would be no legitimate reason for the US or any other country to be fooling around with nuclear enrichment facilities of any kind. Without the ability to hide under the facade of "peaceful power research", bombing such weapons programs into oblivion before they yield weapons would no longer be the political impossibility that it currently is. Detecting such programs via isotope sniffing would also be greatly simplified.
So you think we should eliminate all forms of nuclear technology, including energy, and medical and you think there is any chance other countries will do the same? At the very least every world power with nuclear weapon now would have to agree to totally abolish nuclear technology, there is no way any of them would agree to anything of the sort, let alone all of them.
The genie is out of the bottle with nuclear, there is no way it's going to go away, and there is no reason for it to. Sure it would be great to live in a world without nuclear weapons, but we don't, and those weapons aren't going anywhere. No country is going to give up any meaningful amount of nuclear weapons, and they're definitely not going to give up nuclear energy and medicine. Even if nuclear weapons did ever go away we would come up with some other way to kill in mass.
Just because something has the word nuclear in it doesn't mean it's a deadly doomsday device. Nuclear power plants are quite safe, and they are simply the only realistic replacement for coal power plants. One needs to look no further than Germany and France to see this is so. Germany has committed to building no more nuclear power plants, and while they are building solar and wind in mass they are also building new coal power plants. I mean building new coal power plants today, it's crazy. We should be doing everything in our power to get rid of existing coal power, building more is insane. France on the other hand is building nuclear power plants in mass and now has so much power they export it to their neighbors.
The choice today is between coal and nuclear. Sorry, the other choices might sound nice, and in some places they can work, but we aren't going to replace our current (and increasing) production with them.