521–530 of 679 posts
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Massive displacement with ongoing disputes between residents and the government over whether it's safe to return seems like the obvious one.
Lawsuits from people who don't want to lose their government housing subsidies because they have an irrational fear of negligible radiation are the epic consequences? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/japan-fukushim...
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How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway. If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch. When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch? In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty r…
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
Sadly enough, the increased rollover standards have created huge A pillars that impede visibility. Citation: http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safet...
So in this case, illogical worry about rollovers causes an actual measurable increase in pedestrian accidents.
Kinda like our worries about nuclear safety ended up causing even more radioactive pollution from burning coal.
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Indeed. I suggest people check out part six of Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, that cover this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#... On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout. And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can'…
"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly." As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared. This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
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Solar doesn't have to be reliable; it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable. Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of to scale for the world.
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> But you lose an entire city once in a while. I can only see two cases of this. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl was early on and they pushed it well past what their safety ratings were. Fukushima, they messed up on the calculations on the 1000 year tsunami. The latter is definitely a more reasonable case to point to "things can go wrong". Because that was definitely human error. My issue though, is we're stuck wi…
From what I've heard (through two or three levels of separation), the regulatory agency on Nuclear power is stiflingly draconian. Getting any kind of new technology implemented is prohibitively difficult and expensive, which just adds to the list of disincentives in venturing into nuclear power.
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> The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.
Hold on, there's more than enough blame to go around. Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget. It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible…
It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.
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> But you lose an entire city once in a while. I can only see two cases of this. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl was early on and they pushed it well past what their safety ratings were. Fukushima, they messed up on the calculations on the 1000 year tsunami. The latter is definitely a more reasonable case to point to "things can go wrong". Because that was definitely human error. My issue though, is we're stuck wi…
From what I've heard (through two or three levels of separation), the regulatory agency on Nuclear power is stiflingly draconian. Getting any kind of new technology implemented is prohibitively difficult and expensive, which just adds to the list of disincentives in venturing into nuclear power.
That's a feature. It's why Harrisburg, PA is still populated.
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That's good calculation there, but the number we're concerned with is the amount of ∆v that the spacecraft has to generate itself. If you just get close enough to the sun, a spacecraft could use the solar wind and solar magnetic field to shed more velocity, until it is close enough to aerobrake in the sun's atmosphere. Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get anot…
The outermost layer of the Sun ends at 0.1 AU [1]. To put that in perspective, Mercury orbits at between 0.3 and 0.5 AU [2]. (It costs about 13 km / s to get to Mercury exiting from LEO.) It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Atmosphere [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.
If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.
If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant the sail deploys.
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From what I've heard (through two or three levels of separation), the regulatory agency on Nuclear power is stiflingly draconian. Getting any kind of new technology implemented is prohibitively difficult and expensive, which just adds to the list of disincentives in venturing into nuclear power.
Average time from final designs to shovel in the ground is about 10 years. So already your tech is obsolete by the time you start building. I do agree there should be TIGHT regulations, but there certainly is a limit. Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors.
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This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because: * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lo…
> renewable is the way to go Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether we choose nuclear or coal during the transition to 100% renewable (if it ever happens). > we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot > you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant I don't know if it's that bad. But again, is this worse than coal?