Is that true, or is it another fallacious argument aiming at representing nuclear industry as the poor, benevolent guy trying his best to go good but being thwarted by crazy, enraged, hateful, irrational, almighty hippies, luddites and joe-six-packs? Honest question here. I have a hard time figuring out how a bunch of idealist activists did prevent the development of safer nuclear reactor designs and, if they were so powerful as to be able to do that, how were people demonstrating in the streets by the thousands all over the world incapable of preventing the Iraq invasion for instance? This just doesn't cut it.
My feeling is that there is at least as much lies, blindness and dishonesty on the proponent side of NP than on the opposing side. In any case the condescending, contemptuous attitude towards NP skeptics that is so common here on slashdot in particular makes me strongly think that the issues at hand are definitely not as simple and clear-cut as the nuclear fanatics would like to make it appear.
Some reactions were truely priceless though. On March 16, 2011, AnonGCB (1398517) wrote:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
Well, containment chamber indeed! To which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
I guess this courageous gentleman has bought some cheap real estate and moved to Fukushima since. Or perhaps not?
that comment did make me curious enough to see how Slashdot fares at predicting the future
Pretty bad it seems since the posts in question were submitted after the first two major hydrogen explosions. In fact this level of blind faith in nuclear technology, akin to crazy religious bigotry, might be one of the reasons these accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) happened in the past, and probably will again in the future.
At worse, there may be a 0.1% increase in cancer risk due to radiation for the locals
The number of direct radiation deaths is one way of assessing the risks associated with the technology, but not necessarily a very reliable one. What I found notable about The Fukushima disaster is that things went for a while inches away from possibly destroying Japan as a country it seems - imagine a situation where the greater Tokyo area would heave had to be evacuated for a couple of months for instance.
I've found this story about US Atlas program in 1993:
Then, three years later, it was the Atlas program’s turn again. On March 25, 1993, an Atlas 1 lifted off from SLC-36B at Cape Canaveral AFS, carrying the first of the US Navy’s new UHF Follow-On communication satellites. The launch proved to an inauspicious start to the new program.
A mere 22 seconds after liftoff the vehicle’s sustainer engine began to lose thrust, ultimately reaching only 65% of its nominal thrust level at T+103 sec. The Centaur second stage performed normally, but was inadequate to the task of making up for the low performance of the sustainer. The payload ended up in an orbit far below the desired geosynchronous transfer orbit. The spacecraft used its own onboard propulsion system to climb to a higher orbit, but one that still proved to be too low to meet mission requirements.
Analysis showed that the sustainer thrust decay was due to a simple problem. The Atlas sustainer engine thrust level was controlled by a regulator that was adjusted by turning a screw. A set screw was to be tightened to ensure that the adjustment screw did not move due to in-flight vibration, and that had not been done properly. The result was another fatal Oops!
After all, they're the ones who prevented fuel rod recycling or the construction of new reactors.
Any citation to back that crap up? From what I understand fuel recycling has been hampered by technical complexity (breeder reactors), fear of uncontrollable proliferation in a full-scale Pu economy and non-competitivity in face of cheap uranium and oil. And the first obstacle in the construction of new reactors has always been that extending the operational life of existing ones, as was done in Japan and is currently done in Russia, is by far the most profitable move.
From my point of view one of the most serious obstacle against the credibility of nuclear energy is probably the smug and haughty attitude of those innumerable assholes ready to deny at any cost the shortcomings of their pet technology and to wipe off any legitimate concern as necessarily coming from so-called "ludites" and "joe-six-packs". Are you certain that you are not the blind idiot here?
This is/. I'm pretty sure many people here proud themselves a lot about knowing some basics about fission and feel so good at being able to mock and deride those poor "ludites" and "joe-six-packs" who may not. Doesn't totally compensate from being a loser with women but still help.
You'd have to know what services you truly need. I remove all obvioulsy uneeded services on any new CentOS installation but always stop at these ones: acpid, auditd, cpuspeed, haldaemon, irqbalance, messagebus, microcode_ctl and possibly kudzu and sysstat. Do I need them? I just have no idea and no willingness to try.
2. If you do need sshd running, install denyhosts.
3. If at all possible, run sshd on a nonstandard port.
#3 keeps the logs quiet from bots trying to jiggle a door handle that isn't there on 22.
No. You just shouldn't have SSH accessible from the outside, period. Use OpenVPN if you need remote access, it's free.
I hear this argument all the time on slashdot that we don't have those nice thorium/breeder/fusion reactors because of despicable greenies and nimbies or detestable "ludites" and "joe-six-packs" (and also this revoltingly idiot Jimmy Carter, compared to whom even W. Bush looks like a chess grand-master) but I don't buy it, it just doesn't cut it. Those people simply do not have such a political momentum. From my understanding breeder reactors have shown to simply be too complex and fragile to deploy on a commercial scale. Fusion energy is currently unreachable for engineering reasons. I'm not sure why thorium reactors have not been more developed lately but I suspect the reason is much more mundane, it's the same as why we don't have solar power plants: fossil fuels are simply too profitable to too many people to allow any serious investment in any other direction.
You put forth an argument regarding safety of NP and asked "what about it?", I told you I think it's bullshit and argued why, now you fork off about a question of price.
My point is that regarding risks and impact on life of each energy generation technology, intrinsic risks (basically, the worst case) as well as mitigated risks (i.e., the best we can do) need to be properly assessed and compared. Comparing intrinsic risks of coal to mitigated risks of NP doesn't bring much.
As many nuclear fanatics on this site, you sound to me as a very angry, choleric person, not as much interested in trying to figure out a rational answer to the specific question of what energy politics would be best for humanity as inn winning a dick contest where "your" technology would so much better than "my " technology. You say "look harder" but it appears to me that dismissing people's concerns about NP as ridiculous would also need some reevaluation, especially in light of recent events.
The page conveniently doesn't mention concentrated solar power, which is obviously the safest and cleanest, if possibly not the cheapest, way of producing usable energy bar none. However the price is high as long as externalities are not considered. The true price of energy generation for humanity once each and every components are taken into account (pollution, accidents, politics, crime, hidden costs) is still to be determined with precision imho. My bet is that on the very long term, i.e., if humanity is to survive a couple centuries, most energy will come from solar. Nuclear power will possibly be part of the mix but not in the form we're doing it today.
Panels have to be installed in order to be used
Nobody would fall from any roof if construction regulations that are enforced with NP would be applied to roofing. Similarly, coal would not be as much polluting nor as cheap if pollution regulations on par with those used for NP were enforced - all pollutants can be filtered expect possibly CO2, and even this one could be captured. These aspects are not inherent to the energy source, they're only consequence of a historical / cultural development.
it's a helpful contribution to our understanding of the risks.
No, it's partisan bullshit, at least in part. We should all aim at the truth, not at advancing our own agenda / pet technology. Renewable energy is not "my tech" like some other asshat said somewhere, neither is nuclear power the devil. I'm simply looking for some honest, objective, thorough assessment of the alternatives, which this page doesn't qualify for as far as I can see.
Small installations have pitiful energy efficiency
However they might be sufficient to provide solar A/C which might put a good welcome dent in the peak electricity usage of developed countries.
Suggesting that Europeans can use Sahara for this is a pipe dream to put it lightly, first we would have to move other nations from there
I have a hard time following your way of reasoning. Project Desertec is already doing this, and how woud it require to move anyone from there? We're already using coal, oil and uranium from other nations, how would using solar radiation be any different?
I say "Solar hasn't proven itself, it's immature technology, let's stop polluting with fossil and killing people with hydro, build nuclear instead while developing alternatives like fusion and solar"
I say "Nuclear as it is done today has proved itself an immature technology not suitable for long-term energy generation, thus you mentioning the need for breeders, reprocessing, etc; let's build solar thermal power plants while developing acceptable long-term alternatives like possibly thorium and fusion reactors."
The fact that it's using figures regarding the Chernobyl death toll that were later admitted as bogus and recanted should ring a bell. Also the notion of counting roof falls as a consequence of solar energy sounds to the very least like an extremely contrived argument to me, if not outright partisan bullshit. However the fact that I'm able to easily spot a few glaring crocks in an argument unfortunately doesn't make me magically able to come with better figures.
It's more related to effects of low doses of radiation
That sounds like a wild speculation - do you have any citation to this claim? I doesn't look very plausible to me that insurers are wary of people coming in 20 years and asking for compensation for their cancer, which they'll have a very tough time proving as caused by radioactivity. I'm pretty much convinced that they simply do not want to compensate for the potential loss of real estate and business in case some large city needs to be evacuated.
Look at radioactivity in polluted areas near Fukushima and then look at radiation levels in Ramsar in Iran
You asked earlier "is that all anti nuclear people can muster?" so I'll get back to you the same: is that all nuclear fanatics can muster? Of course if you decide that radio-isotopes at large in the environment are not a problem, then you have indeed solved the one annoying problem with nuclear energy:-)
Even if we consider the amount of land made unarable by this event, it compares favourably to, for example, hydro, let alone solar
I fail to see how solar captors on roofs or in the deserts shut down large extents of arable land.
Because big Oil has no subsidies?
I never said that oil had no subsidies, or that coal was not bad for your health and get a free pass regarding pollution. Only that NP would probably not be very viable if at all without huge public funding. Do not dismiss the fact that the existing nuclear technology is mostly a by-product of decades of military investments, all publicly funded. Renewable energy never have benefited from such massive investments, which is too bad imho.
All energy sources have effects on population.
Solar thermal energy doesn't have any of those drawbacks; now is it a viable energy source for all of our needs is open to debate.
The one with smallest effect on both population and environment is nuclear.
That's not a conclusion you can draw from the facts we have now. You might say that NP has been the least polluting energy generation in the last few decades. However we've been inches from a major disaster, and you're advocating multiplying the existing nuclear reactors park a hundred-fold, and deploying them in countries with very different standards regarding personal responsibility, corruption, accountability, technical expertise, education, etc. We might face in ten or twenty years a Fukushima-style accident where a whole megacity would have to be indeed evacuated, at which point your statement will not be true anymore. Even if you deem any new such accident simply impossible, because the designs are now so good that no degree of human stupidity, corruption and greed will ever be able to overcome them, you still assume that the waste are properly processed, which is far from a given.
Simple, complicated, whatever -- the lines have been drawn.
Really it's not a line, it's a large grey band, and it's moving all the time. What was considered unacceptable in the 60's is now totally boring.
But anyway, my point was not that the government will not be able to draw an arbitrary line and prosecute people according to the mood of the day. They can and they will, as you've stated, and very happily at that; they will never balk at using and showing their power. My point is simply that it will be useless in keeping porn off the non-xxx domains.
Using a.xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn
You would have for that to force all porn to use an.xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Basically this "black-list" approach is ridiculous, unenforceable and ineffective, and was simply devised from the start as a rip-off. To achieve the goal that you're proposing, the simple solution was to standardize a white-list approach, where sites that don't contain porn would advertise this fact using a HTTP header for instance. Then any site breaking the rule could be quickly and effectively reported and prosecuted.
Your lunatic rant means nothing. More expensive than thorium reactors? What the fuck are you talking about? There are currently no commercial thorium reactors in service, how do you think you're going to estimate their price?
Besides you keep on talking about my "assumptions", "my tech", etc. As I said you seem more interested in winning a dick contest than having any serious discussion about the desirable directions to take regarding our energy needs. Sincerely from what you wrote above you appear to me like a nasty raging lunatic spewing garbage from your mouth in place of arguments. Definitely not the rational mind you seem to fancy yourself as.
Indeed as you noted amongst all the trash you've spouted, the issue of the amount of energy that can reasonably be harvested from renewable sources is the very crux of the problem, and I very much would like to get more fact-based and soundly-argued elements about it. I definitely do have interest into this subject but I guess I'll be better off trying to get insights from more reasonable and tempered persons.
It could have been a bigger disaster, but it wasn't.
The fact that it wasn't is irrelevant because due to sheer luck. If I drunk drive, squid and by miracle don't kill anybody I don't deem my driving "safe". Fukushima showed in plain light how risky and unsafe NP as it is done today is, as all
insurers, who assess risks for a living, have cautiously decided already.
nuclear would still be killing less people than coal.
You seem to be very dense. The link clearly puts in light one of the greater risks of NP, which can render a large portion of land uninhabitable for a long period of time, how hard is it to understand? Fukushima had the potential of forcing a lengthy evacuation of Tokyo, would the wind have blown in the wrong direction, thus destroying Japan as we now it. NP has the potential to destroy a whole country in case of a very bad accident, which no other industrial process has. Limiting the risk to the direct killing of people by cancer is ridiculous, as anybody who truly tries to see things at their real value can see.
and they are still profitable
They are profitable because all R&D, waste management and risk insurance are shouldered by the public, as Fukushima has amply demonstrated if it still needed to be. The fact that you're not able to acknowledge that simply shows how blinded and deluded by your fanatism you are.
Lack of interest, lack of expertise, laziness, you name it. I would love to read some non-partisan assessment of the options regarding energy generation, including an objective estimation of the price and risk of each technology, and in fact I believe from the heated and mostly sterile "debates" (read: partisan bullshit) on sites like slashdot and others that such a study is indeed badly needed. However I personally feel totally incapable of conducting it.
The best attempt I've been able to find so far, way ahead of anything else, is this one. Interesting read indeed. At least this gives you the feeling you're listening to some reasonable, good-mannered and benevolent person, not the hateful raging lunatic that abound of slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that true, or is it another fallacious argument aiming at representing nuclear industry as the poor, benevolent guy trying his best to go good but being thwarted by crazy, enraged, hateful, irrational, almighty hippies, luddites and joe-six-packs? Honest question here. I have a hard time figuring out how a bunch of idealist activists did prevent the development of safer nuclear reactor designs and, if they were so powerful as to be able to do that, how were people demonstrating in the streets by the thousands all over the world incapable of preventing the Iraq invasion for instance? This just doesn't cut it.
My feeling is that there is at least as much lies, blindness and dishonesty on the proponent side of NP than on the opposing side. In any case the condescending, contemptuous attitude towards NP skeptics that is so common here on slashdot in particular makes me strongly think that the issues at hand are definitely not as simple and clear-cut as the nuclear fanatics would like to make it appear.
nothing even close to that quote ever appears
Some reactions were truely priceless though. On March 16, 2011, AnonGCB (1398517) wrote:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
Well, containment chamber indeed! To which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
I guess this courageous gentleman has bought some cheap real estate and moved to Fukushima since. Or perhaps not?
that comment did make me curious enough to see how Slashdot fares at predicting the future
Pretty bad it seems since the posts in question were submitted after the first two major hydrogen explosions. In fact this level of blind faith in nuclear technology, akin to crazy religious bigotry, might be one of the reasons these accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) happened in the past, and probably will again in the future.
At worse, there may be a 0.1% increase in cancer risk due to radiation for the locals
The number of direct radiation deaths is one way of assessing the risks associated with the technology, but not necessarily a very reliable one. What I found notable about The Fukushima disaster is that things went for a while inches away from possibly destroying Japan as a country it seems - imagine a situation where the greater Tokyo area would heave had to be evacuated for a couple of months for instance.
Simpler reaction: make this illegal. If you do this you're with the terrorists/child molesters. Case closed.
Or worse to some well-known (Guantanamo, Abu Graib) or lesser-known American one.
Or simply use a Truecrypt hidden volume.
Then, three years later, it was the Atlas program’s turn again. On March 25, 1993, an Atlas 1 lifted off from SLC-36B at Cape Canaveral AFS, carrying the first of the US Navy’s new UHF Follow-On communication satellites. The launch proved to an inauspicious start to the new program.
A mere 22 seconds after liftoff the vehicle’s sustainer engine began to lose thrust, ultimately reaching only 65% of its nominal thrust level at T+103 sec. The Centaur second stage performed normally, but was inadequate to the task of making up for the low performance of the sustainer. The payload ended up in an orbit far below the desired geosynchronous transfer orbit. The spacecraft used its own onboard propulsion system to climb to a higher orbit, but one that still proved to be too low to meet mission requirements.
Analysis showed that the sustainer thrust decay was due to a simple problem. The Atlas sustainer engine thrust level was controlled by a regulator that was adjusted by turning a screw. A set screw was to be tightened to ensure that the adjustment screw did not move due to in-flight vibration, and that had not been done properly. The result was another fatal Oops!
The Ariane rocket was brought down by a forgotten rag in 1990.
After all, they're the ones who prevented fuel rod recycling or the construction of new reactors.
Any citation to back that crap up? From what I understand fuel recycling has been hampered by technical complexity (breeder reactors), fear of uncontrollable proliferation in a full-scale Pu economy and non-competitivity in face of cheap uranium and oil. And the first obstacle in the construction of new reactors has always been that extending the operational life of existing ones, as was done in Japan and is currently done in Russia, is by far the most profitable move.
From my point of view one of the most serious obstacle against the credibility of nuclear energy is probably the smug and haughty attitude of those innumerable assholes ready to deny at any cost the shortcomings of their pet technology and to wipe off any legitimate concern as necessarily coming from so-called "ludites" and "joe-six-packs". Are you certain that you are not the blind idiot here?
This is /. I'm pretty sure many people here proud themselves a lot about knowing some basics about fission and feel so good at being able to mock and deride those poor "ludites" and "joe-six-packs" who may not. Doesn't totally compensate from being a loser with women but still help.
There, fixed that for you.
1. Don't run services you don't need.
You'd have to know what services you truly need. I remove all obvioulsy uneeded services on any new CentOS installation but always stop at these ones: acpid, auditd, cpuspeed, haldaemon, irqbalance, messagebus, microcode_ctl and possibly kudzu and sysstat. Do I need them? I just have no idea and no willingness to try.
2. If you do need sshd running, install denyhosts. 3. If at all possible, run sshd on a nonstandard port.
#3 keeps the logs quiet from bots trying to jiggle a door handle that isn't there on 22.
No. You just shouldn't have SSH accessible from the outside, period. Use OpenVPN if you need remote access, it's free.
I hear this argument all the time on slashdot that we don't have those nice thorium/breeder/fusion reactors because of despicable greenies and nimbies or detestable "ludites" and "joe-six-packs" (and also this revoltingly idiot Jimmy Carter, compared to whom even W. Bush looks like a chess grand-master) but I don't buy it, it just doesn't cut it. Those people simply do not have such a political momentum. From my understanding breeder reactors have shown to simply be too complex and fragile to deploy on a commercial scale. Fusion energy is currently unreachable for engineering reasons. I'm not sure why thorium reactors have not been more developed lately but I suspect the reason is much more mundane, it's the same as why we don't have solar power plants: fossil fuels are simply too profitable to too many people to allow any serious investment in any other direction.
Ore who rapes them to be even more eloquent.
And a bullet in the back of the head (pointing downwards in order to preserve the eyes for organ harvesting).
"Why a four year old child could understand this. Run out and get me a four year old child, I can't make head or tail out of it." -- Groucho Marx
You put forth an argument regarding safety of NP and asked "what about it?", I told you I think it's bullshit and argued why, now you fork off about a question of price.
My point is that regarding risks and impact on life of each energy generation technology, intrinsic risks (basically, the worst case) as well as mitigated risks (i.e., the best we can do) need to be properly assessed and compared. Comparing intrinsic risks of coal to mitigated risks of NP doesn't bring much.
As many nuclear fanatics on this site, you sound to me as a very angry, choleric person, not as much interested in trying to figure out a rational answer to the specific question of what energy politics would be best for humanity as inn winning a dick contest where "your" technology would so much better than "my " technology. You say "look harder" but it appears to me that dismissing people's concerns about NP as ridiculous would also need some reevaluation, especially in light of recent events.
Why?
The page conveniently doesn't mention concentrated solar power, which is obviously the safest and cleanest, if possibly not the cheapest, way of producing usable energy bar none. However the price is high as long as externalities are not considered. The true price of energy generation for humanity once each and every components are taken into account (pollution, accidents, politics, crime, hidden costs) is still to be determined with precision imho. My bet is that on the very long term, i.e., if humanity is to survive a couple centuries, most energy will come from solar. Nuclear power will possibly be part of the mix but not in the form we're doing it today.
Panels have to be installed in order to be used
Nobody would fall from any roof if construction regulations that are enforced with NP would be applied to roofing. Similarly, coal would not be as much polluting nor as cheap if pollution regulations on par with those used for NP were enforced - all pollutants can be filtered expect possibly CO2, and even this one could be captured. These aspects are not inherent to the energy source, they're only consequence of a historical / cultural development.
it's a helpful contribution to our understanding of the risks.
No, it's partisan bullshit, at least in part. We should all aim at the truth, not at advancing our own agenda / pet technology. Renewable energy is not "my tech" like some other asshat said somewhere, neither is nuclear power the devil. I'm simply looking for some honest, objective, thorough assessment of the alternatives, which this page doesn't qualify for as far as I can see.
Small installations have pitiful energy efficiency
However they might be sufficient to provide solar A/C which might put a good welcome dent in the peak electricity usage of developed countries.
Suggesting that Europeans can use Sahara for this is a pipe dream to put it lightly, first we would have to move other nations from there
I have a hard time following your way of reasoning. Project Desertec is already doing this, and how woud it require to move anyone from there? We're already using coal, oil and uranium from other nations, how would using solar radiation be any different?
I say "Solar hasn't proven itself, it's immature technology, let's stop polluting with fossil and killing people with hydro, build nuclear instead while developing alternatives like fusion and solar"
I say "Nuclear as it is done today has proved itself an immature technology not suitable for long-term energy generation, thus you mentioning the need for breeders, reprocessing, etc; let's build solar thermal power plants while developing acceptable long-term alternatives like possibly thorium and fusion reactors."
The fact that it's using figures regarding the Chernobyl death toll that were later admitted as bogus and recanted should ring a bell. Also the notion of counting roof falls as a consequence of solar energy sounds to the very least like an extremely contrived argument to me, if not outright partisan bullshit. However the fact that I'm able to easily spot a few glaring crocks in an argument unfortunately doesn't make me magically able to come with better figures.
It's more related to effects of low doses of radiation
That sounds like a wild speculation - do you have any citation to this claim? I doesn't look very plausible to me that insurers are wary of people coming in 20 years and asking for compensation for their cancer, which they'll have a very tough time proving as caused by radioactivity. I'm pretty much convinced that they simply do not want to compensate for the potential loss of real estate and business in case some large city needs to be evacuated.
Look at radioactivity in polluted areas near Fukushima and then look at radiation levels in Ramsar in Iran
You asked earlier "is that all anti nuclear people can muster?" so I'll get back to you the same: is that all nuclear fanatics can muster? Of course if you decide that radio-isotopes at large in the environment are not a problem, then you have indeed solved the one annoying problem with nuclear energy :-)
Even if we consider the amount of land made unarable by this event, it compares favourably to, for example, hydro, let alone solar
I fail to see how solar captors on roofs or in the deserts shut down large extents of arable land.
Because big Oil has no subsidies?
I never said that oil had no subsidies, or that coal was not bad for your health and get a free pass regarding pollution. Only that NP would probably not be very viable if at all without huge public funding. Do not dismiss the fact that the existing nuclear technology is mostly a by-product of decades of military investments, all publicly funded. Renewable energy never have benefited from such massive investments, which is too bad imho.
All energy sources have effects on population.
Solar thermal energy doesn't have any of those drawbacks; now is it a viable energy source for all of our needs is open to debate.
The one with smallest effect on both population and environment is nuclear.
That's not a conclusion you can draw from the facts we have now. You might say that NP has been the least polluting energy generation in the last few decades. However we've been inches from a major disaster, and you're advocating multiplying the existing nuclear reactors park a hundred-fold, and deploying them in countries with very different standards regarding personal responsibility, corruption, accountability, technical expertise, education, etc. We might face in ten or twenty years a Fukushima-style accident where a whole megacity would have to be indeed evacuated, at which point your statement will not be true anymore. Even if you deem any new such accident simply impossible, because the designs are now so good that no degree of human stupidity, corruption and greed will ever be able to overcome them, you still assume that the waste are properly processed, which is far from a given.
Simple, complicated, whatever -- the lines have been drawn.
Really it's not a line, it's a large grey band, and it's moving all the time. What was considered unacceptable in the 60's is now totally boring. But anyway, my point was not that the government will not be able to draw an arbitrary line and prosecute people according to the mood of the day. They can and they will, as you've stated, and very happily at that; they will never balk at using and showing their power. My point is simply that it will be useless in keeping porn off the non-xxx domains.
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn
You would have for that to force all porn to use an .xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Basically this "black-list" approach is ridiculous, unenforceable and ineffective, and was simply devised from the start as a rip-off. To achieve the goal that you're proposing, the simple solution was to standardize a white-list approach, where sites that don't contain porn would advertise this fact using a HTTP header for instance. Then any site breaking the rule could be quickly and effectively reported and prosecuted.
Your lunatic rant means nothing. More expensive than thorium reactors? What the fuck are you talking about? There are currently no commercial thorium reactors in service, how do you think you're going to estimate their price?
Besides you keep on talking about my "assumptions", "my tech", etc. As I said you seem more interested in winning a dick contest than having any serious discussion about the desirable directions to take regarding our energy needs. Sincerely from what you wrote above you appear to me like a nasty raging lunatic spewing garbage from your mouth in place of arguments. Definitely not the rational mind you seem to fancy yourself as.
Indeed as you noted amongst all the trash you've spouted, the issue of the amount of energy that can reasonably be harvested from renewable sources is the very crux of the problem, and I very much would like to get more fact-based and soundly-argued elements about it. I definitely do have interest into this subject but I guess I'll be better off trying to get insights from more reasonable and tempered persons.
It could have been a bigger disaster, but it wasn't.
The fact that it wasn't is irrelevant because due to sheer luck. If I drunk drive, squid and by miracle don't kill anybody I don't deem my driving "safe". Fukushima showed in plain light how risky and unsafe NP as it is done today is, as all insurers, who assess risks for a living, have cautiously decided already.
nuclear would still be killing less people than coal.
You seem to be very dense. The link clearly puts in light one of the greater risks of NP, which can render a large portion of land uninhabitable for a long period of time, how hard is it to understand? Fukushima had the potential of forcing a lengthy evacuation of Tokyo, would the wind have blown in the wrong direction, thus destroying Japan as we now it. NP has the potential to destroy a whole country in case of a very bad accident, which no other industrial process has. Limiting the risk to the direct killing of people by cancer is ridiculous, as anybody who truly tries to see things at their real value can see.
and they are still profitable
They are profitable because all R&D, waste management and risk insurance are shouldered by the public, as Fukushima has amply demonstrated if it still needed to be. The fact that you're not able to acknowledge that simply shows how blinded and deluded by your fanatism you are.
Lack of interest, lack of expertise, laziness, you name it. I would love to read some non-partisan assessment of the options regarding energy generation, including an objective estimation of the price and risk of each technology, and in fact I believe from the heated and mostly sterile "debates" (read: partisan bullshit) on sites like slashdot and others that such a study is indeed badly needed. However I personally feel totally incapable of conducting it.
The best attempt I've been able to find so far, way ahead of anything else, is this one. Interesting read indeed. At least this gives you the feeling you're listening to some reasonable, good-mannered and benevolent person, not the hateful raging lunatic that abound of slashdot.
You didn't read the link.