131–140 of 188 posts
Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight? Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times…
> $6.6 billion will end world hunger My understanding is that the only places that are starving is places like Gaza and South Sudan which are poor and actively under attack. Do you have a source for how we can spend <$10b and solve world hunger?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In seriousness, probably not, unless US "intellectual property" law gets worse somehow. Short phrases fall under trademarks rather than copyrights, and even then it needs to be something that would cause commercial confusion, and very few people are going to buy a Tolkien book expecting a nuclear reactor or vice-versa.
I thought that was mostly about coincidentally similar names. Does it change when one is explicitly a reference to the copyrighted work? It's not like Thiel just thinks that Valar and Palantir and Anduril etc are all just nice sounding words, he's built a brand out of companies named after Tolkien's stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.
"Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years" There are dozens of other decay products with various hazardous properties. Scientific hubris can't be made safe, and societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management. =3
Great, that means it is not very radioactive, and an alpha emitter, so unless you ingest it is not particularly harmful.
> societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management
Do you have evidence that the spent nuclear fuel from power stations has killed people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion. The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make s…
That's about what I would expect from an organization named Government Accountability Office: hold the government accountable to its written guidelines (or at least report on how well it's doing at meeting them).
Again, devil's advocate
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why am I supposed to care? Because plutonium sounds scary?
>And why am I supposed to care? Indeed, one persons opinion is not really all that important, but one is alive because of decisions made long before they were born. >Because plutonium sounds scary? Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic in trace exposures. Some people don't get a chance to learn form their mistakes. Best of…
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/aug/09/rorycarroll . Or does the biochemistry of Pu particularly depend on the isotope?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although the argument does look fundamentally reasonable, I think its biggest weakness is it doesn't make an attempt to prioritise - yes taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made. Which is more valuable? We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation…
the utility of wealth is not linear. a billionaire getting $100 probably has no use for it and they wont notice either way. but a homeless person getting $100 makes a big difference for them no matter if they use it to buy new clothes and apply for a job or spend it all on liquor. redistribution is actually good by itself because it maximizes the total wellbeing of society. all the negative effects on economic output…
Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight? Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3
I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago. I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I was under the impression that if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power. Is that not the case?
Only under certain circumstances is it financially worth harnessing this power. I think of space probes and their RTGs. They use alpha emitters like Pu-238, to minimize the shielding requirements.
As for the rest of the stuff, dry casks are good enough. Reprocessing isn’t currently economical while uranium is so cheap, although the vitrification of the fission products can help immobilize the worst radiation emitters, but really the UO2 structure does a decent job of keeping things put.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about. Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can. The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them…
Whether or not waste is reprocessed there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of. It's merely a matter of volume produced per unit of energy. Either approach is entirely reasonable. The inability of the US to formally approve a permanent disposal site is purely political. Still, at this point enough other countries have managed to do so that we might eventually be able to pay to export our waste to one…
Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And why am I supposed to care? Indeed, one persons opinion is not really all that important, but one is alive because of decisions made long before they were born. >Because plutonium sounds scary? Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic in trace exposures. Some people don't get a chance to learn form their mistakes. Best of…
> Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/aug/09/rorycarroll . Or does the biochemistry of Pu particularly depend on the isotope?