Legalizing all drugs is not the answer either. Some drugs are very, very harmful
Legalizing does not mean inciting. On the very contrary once a drug is legal you can inform people about its effects, discourage its use and provide counseling and medical monitoring to the users, all this using money coming from the very persons who use the drug. In fact legalizing drugs and making them appear as the medical condition they really are mostly make them appear boring and may indeed turn people away from them, or at least from heavy, excessive use.
Also allowing people access to some drugs allow to totally and effectively ban the use of the most most dangerous ones. Nobody would be willing to take risks to get their hands on meth or PCP if pot and coke were available around the corner or by the physician.
Not much worse than alcohol IMHO. Also once legal you can provide information and warning about it, medial surveillance, counseling, all paid by the users. Basically acknowledging that drugs are part of human nature and actually deal with it. What's wrong with realism?
Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
"China is a racist country where the Han chinese population has more privileges than other races"
Meanwhile in the good US of A:
Although only about 12% of the American population is black, about half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black.
In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that the United States now has a greater percentage of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. "
I'm accepting the WHO report until the consensus changes
You don't seem to have read the link, which says that the WHO itself changed it stance on the matter in 2006:
Critically, the WHO itself issued a new statement. It said: "WHO estimates there may be up to 9,000 excess cancer deaths due to Chernobyl among the people who worked on the clean-up operations, evacuees and residents of the highly and lower-contaminated regions in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine."
It's not a matter of doing any research here, it's a matter of reading what's in front of your eyes.
You do believe in global warming, and don't believe in nuclear power - thereby qualifying you as a brainless
You seem to imply that renewable energy cannot possibly provide humanity with enough energy; this is really the crux of the problem. What makes it impossible according to you? The only roadblock I see regarding renewable energy is the one of price. The capacity seems to be here, however it might be more costly to build the plants to get all our energy from there than from nuclear. However even that is not clear, once we take into account the cost of externalities, risks (insurance), nuclear waste, and all the money that has previously been poured in nuclear R&D by the military.
And even in that case, if you end up concluding that renewables are indeed more expensive, I would still say so what? Lots of things are expensive and we still do them - buying chinese crap is not always the best choice, for instance for medical equipment like your pace-maker you may go for the more expensive alternative. Also the Iraq War for instance was and still is extremely expensive and still the US keeps on with it; how many GW of solar energy would have been bought with that money? Please answer that question, I'm genuinely interested.
So in the end it's really quite simple, there are only two possibilities:
You don't believe in renewable energy and you have solid, compelling arguments that it is indeed a dead end - not "it's more expensive", I mean really, it's physically impossible;
Or you don't believe in renewable energy by convenience and then you're really a motherfucking, asshole licking disgusting pile of stinking crap.
according to the World Health Organization [who.int], there will probably be around 4000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl,
Note however that this figure that everybody nuclear apologist is parroting is totally bogus and was discredited a long time ago. The fact that no thorough, independent estimate of the real health impact of Chernobyl was ever produced being probably part of the reason why people are so wary of the nuclear industry, and rightly so, as Fukushima has demonstrated so clearly.
The question is whether it's worse than an alternative source of energy.
To me the question is rather really whether renewable energy can provide what we need or not. The one and only argument that I personally regards as sensible about renewable energy is that of cost: if indeed it costs ten times more to produce the same amount of energy from solar thermal than from nuclear, then indeed we have a problem: since the total amount of money (i.e., work) that can be spent on building power plants is limited, NP may be "better" than renewables if it's indeed way cheaper. However from what I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong:
1. Current U235-based nuclear reactor designs are basically unsafe, as in lots highly radioactive material under high temperature and high pressure, doing all it can to escape its confinement, and needing tremendous efforts and care to be kept there; also produces large amount of nasty by-products that can't be satisfactorily dealt with;
2. The problem of fission by-products could theoretically be addressed by fast reactors, however no such reactor has been proven feasible commercially yet, despite billions of dollars/euros funneled into it. To effectively address the problem of nuclear waste there would need to be a large number of such reactors operating reliably, so this means we would need to invest untold billions of dollars/euros in that direction, in the remote hope that in the end we'll get a fully functional and safe reprocessing industry; keep in mind that we'll be moving then tons and tons of Pu239 and other nasty things around all the time, so it definitely would need to be very safe;
3. It looks like a lot of problems could be solved if we were able to run Th232 liquid-fuel reactors, which seem to have in theory all the qualities and none of the defects that we can dream of NR. However again these do not exist currently on utility scale and we may go into unforeseen problems when trying to build them; so we'll have here also to pour billions and billions of dollars/euros in research, tests, prototypes, etc, in the hope that we'll end up with a satisfactory, commercially viable LFTR. Basically it looks like we would really have to scratch almost everything that has been done with NP up to now and restart from scratch to do it as it should have been done from the start.
So in the end whichever way you look at it NP does look as a risky bet; on the other hand with renewable energy it is extremely simple: the Sun bathes the Earth on average with five thousands times the total current energy consumption of humanity, including oil, gas, coal and nuclear. This energy is very diluted and available mostly in the form of wind, rain (hydro) and light (solar thermal and photovoltaic), and we would need to be able to collect and distribute about 0.2% of it to solve once and for all the question of energy for humanity. There are no unknowns here, except for the drop in price that can be obtained from economies of scale and improvements in technology, and there are no drawbacks whatsoever, except for that crucial question: how much would it cost? In other words: how much of an effort is it for humanity as a species, and is it worth the trouble, considering that we would then solve the problem not only for us but also for our sons, grand-sons and all of the generations that are to come.
In other words: are we willing to do the sacrifice? The former generations sacrificed a lot for us (think WWI, WWII). Or we willing to sacrifice a bit for the next ones, meaning for instance to work a tad more, possibly to pay a bit more for electricity, for our sons and daughters? There lies the crux of the question.
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear.
Stop calling any crap terrorism. Terrorism is when you try to further some political agenda by instilling terror in civilian populations with violence. The situation at hand has nothing to do with that. Words have a meaning.
images of child sexuality feed the lusts of depraved individuals to the extent they are compelled to act
We did you get that bullshit from? You are totally deluded; in fact you are the wet dream of all the cynical politicians who rely on the gullible idiots for their election.
Big news. As one of my teachers said once, the philosophy of 99% of the people on this planet can be accurately summarized in a few words: "Me good, you bad."
We're still right about the radiation killing approximately nobody*.
... yet. What you conveniently fail to consider is that nobody's concerned about the acute effects of radation, except possibly for the plant workers on site; people are wary of the long-term consequences, and rightly so. Also cancers are just part of the story, there are also the teratogenic effects to consider, which open a whole new chapter of this grim tale.
The radiation release is still small in scope compared to Chernobyl, for a plant commissioned in 1971, which actually makes it OLDER than chernobyl by 6 years(commissioned in 1977).
As I said in an earlier post, the nuclear apologists have adopted lately a new and very convenient frame of reference for nuclear disasters, i.e., Chernobyl = very serious (obviously, it was the stinking commies), and even that part is not clear, anything less = a walk in the park, obviously because you see, it's "not as bad as Chernobyl". Well a third grader knows that "smaller than huge" doesn't equal small, in fact it can perfectly be huge too.
Personally, I'd like to see us decommissioning these old reactors in faver of newer, safer reactors.
One problem I see here is that at the time they were built, these reactors were declared "perfectly safe" and the people who protested them were "luddites", "joe-six-packs", "tree-hugging hippies", etc. Now the discourse has changed and all of a sudden these reactors are not so safe in fact, first they are old now, but also their designs leave some to be desired after all. But the newer ones are perfectly safe right? And again anyone daring emitting any doubt about that is an idiot, correct?
Again as I said previously, I don't think the general public really fear nuclear power because of ignorance, as nuclear apologists like to believe. I'd say they distrust the nuclear industry, and possibly rightly so. Please show us that we really should trust you.
That's false, the earthqake was of intesity 9.0 with an epicenter about 150 km from Fukushima; the resulting ground acceleration was within (theoretical) design tolerance at unit 1. What is really amazing is (choose one or more): that the reactors were not able to withstand the damage, that TEPCO had been notified about that by the IAEA in the past, that it had simply ignored the warnings and that there are still people praising them for the robustness of their engineering.
Unfortunately those new plants are at present no more commercially viable than breeder reactors or fusion reactors.; they look nice on paper and in the lab but they aren't going to be a solution to any of our problems anytime soon. And going to full-scale, on-the-field deployments of an unmature technology without doing all the necessary research, testing, tuning, etc, before might not be the best of ideas; in fact it is precisely what has been done with current nuclear reactors, with the consequences we're facing now.
No, as I said above, but this time I found back the relevant comment, the battery backup system is for "for instrumentation and control only, NOT [to] run the large scale cooling equipment". So from my understanding the coolant circulation stopped as soon as the tsunami hit because 1. the main power was taken out by the earthquake 2. the diesel generators were taken out by the tsunami (fuel tanks gone) 3. the decay heat steam pumps could not or were not used for whatever reason. At that moment there was no way to avoid a meltdown.
Slashdot Mirror
Legalizing all drugs is not the answer either. Some drugs are very, very harmful
Legalizing does not mean inciting. On the very contrary once a drug is legal you can inform people about its effects, discourage its use and provide counseling and medical monitoring to the users, all this using money coming from the very persons who use the drug. In fact legalizing drugs and making them appear as the medical condition they really are mostly make them appear boring and may indeed turn people away from them, or at least from heavy, excessive use.
Also allowing people access to some drugs allow to totally and effectively ban the use of the most most dangerous ones. Nobody would be willing to take risks to get their hands on meth or PCP if pot and coke were available around the corner or by the physician.
People might start to take the word "democracy" seriously.
Or start to believe that society might be here to help them, not oppress them!
alcohol is still a very serious social problem, killing and hurting more than pretty much anything else
And the problem was totally solved during prohibition right?
Not much worse than alcohol IMHO. Also once legal you can provide information and warning about it, medial surveillance, counseling, all paid by the users. Basically acknowledging that drugs are part of human nature and actually deal with it. What's wrong with realism?
I like your approach to the problem, I'm sure it would work magic. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
they also obscure the problem, and its potential solutions.
The problem is prohibition and the solution is to stop it. Difficult to grasp?
"China actively oppresses its citizens"
From this interesting read:
Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
"China is a racist country where the Han chinese population has more privileges than other races"
Meanwhile in the good US of A:
Although only about 12% of the American population is black, about half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black.
In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that the United States now has a greater percentage of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. "
“Fascism is, shut your mouth; Democracy is, talk all you want..."
I am offended. Please go directly to jail.
I'm accepting the WHO report until the consensus changes
You don't seem to have read the link, which says that the WHO itself changed it stance on the matter in 2006:
Critically, the WHO itself issued a new statement. It said: "WHO estimates there may be up to 9,000 excess cancer deaths due to Chernobyl among the people who worked on the clean-up operations, evacuees and residents of the highly and lower-contaminated regions in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine."
It's not a matter of doing any research here, it's a matter of reading what's in front of your eyes.
You do believe in global warming, and don't believe in nuclear power - thereby qualifying you as a brainless
You seem to imply that renewable energy cannot possibly provide humanity with enough energy; this is really the crux of the problem. What makes it impossible according to you? The only roadblock I see regarding renewable energy is the one of price. The capacity seems to be here, however it might be more costly to build the plants to get all our energy from there than from nuclear. However even that is not clear, once we take into account the cost of externalities, risks (insurance), nuclear waste, and all the money that has previously been poured in nuclear R&D by the military.
And even in that case, if you end up concluding that renewables are indeed more expensive, I would still say so what? Lots of things are expensive and we still do them - buying chinese crap is not always the best choice, for instance for medical equipment like your pace-maker you may go for the more expensive alternative. Also the Iraq War for instance was and still is extremely expensive and still the US keeps on with it; how many GW of solar energy would have been bought with that money? Please answer that question, I'm genuinely interested.
So in the end it's really quite simple, there are only two possibilities:
Does this sound ok to you?
according to the World Health Organization [who.int], there will probably be around 4000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl,
Note however that this figure that everybody nuclear apologist is parroting is totally bogus and was discredited a long time ago. The fact that no thorough, independent estimate of the real health impact of Chernobyl was ever produced being probably part of the reason why people are so wary of the nuclear industry, and rightly so, as Fukushima has demonstrated so clearly.
The question is whether it's worse than an alternative source of energy.
To me the question is rather really whether renewable energy can provide what we need or not. The one and only argument that I personally regards as sensible about renewable energy is that of cost: if indeed it costs ten times more to produce the same amount of energy from solar thermal than from nuclear, then indeed we have a problem: since the total amount of money (i.e., work) that can be spent on building power plants is limited, NP may be "better" than renewables if it's indeed way cheaper. However from what I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong:
So in the end whichever way you look at it NP does look as a risky bet; on the other hand with renewable energy it is extremely simple: the Sun bathes the Earth on average with five thousands times the total current energy consumption of humanity, including oil, gas, coal and nuclear. This energy is very diluted and available mostly in the form of wind, rain (hydro) and light (solar thermal and photovoltaic), and we would need to be able to collect and distribute about 0.2% of it to solve once and for all the question of energy for humanity. There are no unknowns here, except for the drop in price that can be obtained from economies of scale and improvements in technology, and there are no drawbacks whatsoever, except for that crucial question: how much would it cost? In other words: how much of an effort is it for humanity as a species, and is it worth the trouble, considering that we would then solve the problem not only for us but also for our sons, grand-sons and all of the generations that are to come.
In other words: are we willing to do the sacrifice? The former generations sacrificed a lot for us (think WWI, WWII). Or we willing to sacrifice a bit for the next ones, meaning for instance to work a tad more, possibly to pay a bit more for electricity, for our sons and daughters? There lies the crux of the question.
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear.
One thing's for sure you are an idiot.
Stop calling any crap terrorism. Terrorism is when you try to further some political agenda by instilling terror in civilian populations with violence. The situation at hand has nothing to do with that. Words have a meaning.
You can't have it both ways.
Well when it's for the purpose of fucking you sheeple we definitely can and do.
To my knowledge the woman hasn't taken a single intercourse
FTFY
images of child sexuality feed the lusts of depraved individuals to the extent they are compelled to act
We did you get that bullshit from? You are totally deluded; in fact you are the wet dream of all the cynical politicians who rely on the gullible idiots for their election.
Big news. As one of my teachers said once, the philosophy of 99% of the people on this planet can be accurately summarized in a few words: "Me good, you bad."
We're still right about the radiation killing approximately nobody*.
... yet. What you conveniently fail to consider is that nobody's concerned about the acute effects of radation, except possibly for the plant workers on site; people are wary of the long-term consequences, and rightly so. Also cancers are just part of the story, there are also the teratogenic effects to consider, which open a whole new chapter of this grim tale.
The radiation release is still small in scope compared to Chernobyl, for a plant commissioned in 1971, which actually makes it OLDER than chernobyl by 6 years(commissioned in 1977).
As I said in an earlier post, the nuclear apologists have adopted lately a new and very convenient frame of reference for nuclear disasters, i.e., Chernobyl = very serious (obviously, it was the stinking commies), and even that part is not clear, anything less = a walk in the park, obviously because you see, it's "not as bad as Chernobyl". Well a third grader knows that "smaller than huge" doesn't equal small, in fact it can perfectly be huge too.
Personally, I'd like to see us decommissioning these old reactors in faver of newer, safer reactors.
One problem I see here is that at the time they were built, these reactors were declared "perfectly safe" and the people who protested them were "luddites", "joe-six-packs", "tree-hugging hippies", etc. Now the discourse has changed and all of a sudden these reactors are not so safe in fact, first they are old now, but also their designs leave some to be desired after all. But the newer ones are perfectly safe right? And again anyone daring emitting any doubt about that is an idiot, correct?
Again as I said previously, I don't think the general public really fear nuclear power because of ignorance, as nuclear apologists like to believe. I'd say they distrust the nuclear industry, and possibly rightly so. Please show us that we really should trust you.
That's false, the earthqake was of intesity 9.0 with an epicenter about 150 km from Fukushima; the resulting ground acceleration was within (theoretical) design tolerance at unit 1. What is really amazing is (choose one or more): that the reactors were not able to withstand the damage, that TEPCO had been notified about that by the IAEA in the past, that it had simply ignored the warnings and that there are still people praising them for the robustness of their engineering.
Unfortunately those new plants are at present no more commercially viable than breeder reactors or fusion reactors.; they look nice on paper and in the lab but they aren't going to be a solution to any of our problems anytime soon. And going to full-scale, on-the-field deployments of an unmature technology without doing all the necessary research, testing, tuning, etc, before might not be the best of ideas; in fact it is precisely what has been done with current nuclear reactors, with the consequences we're facing now.
No, as I said above, but this time I found back the relevant comment, the battery backup system is for "for instrumentation and control only, NOT [to] run the large scale cooling equipment". So from my understanding the coolant circulation stopped as soon as the tsunami hit because 1. the main power was taken out by the earthquake 2. the diesel generators were taken out by the tsunami (fuel tanks gone) 3. the decay heat steam pumps could not or were not used for whatever reason. At that moment there was no way to avoid a meltdown.
What you say is so obvious it doesn't even need mentioning. Trying to reason with the joe-six-packs luddites is an exercice in futility anyway.