171–180 of 265 posts
Combined with lack of growth in exports, over which their economy is already expected to be heading into a crisis in the next few years, the impact of a long-term reduction in tourism has potentially serious national implications.
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Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? You're only concerned about the risks that impact you personally? That doesn't seem to be a common attitude: if it were, nobody would have complained about the Deepwater Horizon spill except people who lived on the Gulf coast. (And nobody would complain about nuclear power except those who had to live near a plant.)
>Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? No, it doesn't. It's a difference between risks taken willingly by the people who benefit from the outcome, and risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit. And it's obvious that it was meant that way. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
The largest part of that mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. Coal power has contaminated the entire planet to the point where any food from the ocean has to be limited for vulnerable people.
There is no way you can possibly say that coal doesn't impose risks on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit.
Coal is far more dangerous than nuclear by nearly every measure. The only reason it's more generally accepted is because that danger is spread out over a much wider area. Global coal power is analogous to a constant, ongoing Chernobyl, except instead of covering a small chunk of Europe, the same effects are diluted over the entire planet.
We all pay a measurable and fairly significant price for coal power generation in terms of shortened lives and increased chances of various disease. Nuclear power has not contaminated the planet to even remotely the same degree.
I personally think nuclear power can be made relatively safe, and that fears about accidents are exaggerated. I welcome disagreement there, but it's not possible to make a charitable comparison with coal in any way. The disparity in opinions and dangers between nuclear and coal is very real.
I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
"I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all." If you look around you'll find a lot more examples than these two, and you'll trace the root cause as illeg…
Many early people groups (nomads, pueblos, even manors and unfederated fifedoms), had optimized for small communities. Presumably they were not aware of the efficiency of centralized power, or capable of the centralization we can accomplish today. Some apparently were aware, and chose the benefits of small communities.
I believe we are now at a crossroads. We choose small communities and relinquish the convenience of centralized power, or we submit to the requirements of centralized power (lack of privacy, lack of individuality, etc).
I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
Its both cases of failing government oversight of these industries. Fukushima got worse and worse, because the company was basically doing and saying whatever they wanted (and seemingly still is) with the government just repeating it. Same goes for GMO. Its a good but potentially very dangerous technology. We should not simply allow it because a few billion USD in turnover and GDP growth are promised.
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it is almost impossible to find a situation where there is a singular human cause. But if you can focus in on a single technical decision that had such a large impact, you can at least focus attention on how that particular technical decision got made. Yes, many humans will have been involved even in that single technical decision; but it's still a lot more manageable to look into how it got made than to look at how…
> Could he have reasonably predicted that he would fall asleep at the wheel? Such things sometimes can't be predicted. If you fall asleep because of exhaustion, you don't necessarily see it coming (it happened to me several years back, one minute I was fine and the next I blacked out). You cannot criminally persecute a person for falling asleep. Only if he did something against the law, like also being under the infl…
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I guess nobody thought it would be overrun. But why would you even take that risk? Not to mention that tsunamis can easily reach 100 feet in wave height; I'm not sure you could build a seawall that could keep one out.
It would be easier to put the generators in bunkers and harden them. Besides, it was pretty clear to me reading the sequence of events at Fukushima that there was entirely too little thought given to backup decoupling - there was too much of a zipper effect of one failure leading to another. I'm not a lay person on this - I worked for 3 years on airliner designs, and much of that is finding ways to deal with failure…
Yes, that would work, as long as you also protected the switchgear and the power cabling leading to the pumps that serve the reactor.
The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers.
I think the nuke industry in general does pay attention to these things; I was actually somewhat surprised to find that the designers of Fukushima had missed such an obvious failure mode.
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Regulatory capture is a big problem. Regulatory capture is THE problem. Contrary to the parent post's claim, the problem is not with our "economic system". It's that, if you're going to regulate something (particularly something as complex as nuclear energy), then you need experts. And the only place to get those experts is from the industry. Generally, those people are naturally going to look at the industry from a…
>Regulatory capture is THE problem. This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)? Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part…
If it were unregulated by government, then yes. It's a bit misleading to say there would be absolutely nothing regulating the industry if government wasn't.
I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
Why is it fundamentally stupid to be opposed to it? Nuclear power in its current form presents tremendous, potentially country-altering downside when things (can and will) go wrong. Is this really the best humanity has got -- the side effect of a decades-old weapons program?
I'm so fucking sick of this. This level of ass-clownery makes Japan look so bad, and so diminishes its national prestige in the world, that it's almost like when Bush the junior was president of the USA. Yes, TEPCO is a private company. But it reflects on Japan the same way it would if the US government just left BP and Halliburton to decide entirely for themselves how to clean up the New Horizon oil rig disaster, wi…
You've not been paying much attention to the Japanese nuclear industry. This is the industry that allowed junior staff to mix nuclear materials together unsupervised, causing a chain reaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_...