191–200 of 216 posts
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As far as I know, no coal plants have ever resulted in a Chernobyl-scale effect.
Chernobyl is estimated to have a combined death toll of somewhat less than a thousand people over their lifetimes. Coal power plants kill ten times as many people every year when functioning as designed.
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That's your nose doing its job. The whole point of the nasal passages and mucus is to filter the air, the good thing about this filter is that it's easy to replace.
Oh, I know that! What I'm not sure of is whether the black mucus happens because of pollution or something else.
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It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.
Better or worse, it is difficult to get public support for moving from with terrible results that trickle out nearly invisibly over time to a system that still has disasters but whose disasters appear as a few big booms. Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be. The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the bes…
Over what time horizon?
The problem with Nuclear Fission is that it leaves behind waste that is no longer be put to any constructive use but...
1) Must be stored securely for decades, since it can be used in dirty bombs. 2) Must be stored safely for centuries/millennia, since it can leak in the environment an make a large area unsuitable for human dwelling over time frames way longer than any (most) of our current institutions have been around (and thus there is no guarantee that knowledge about the risks will be preserved).
This pretty much rules out any private, for-profit entity. The risk of their owners realizing the commercial benefits upfront and then disbanding the corporation without assuming the cost of cleanup is simply too high for this to be even considered from the point of view of the public good.
I am willing to give governments the benefit of doubt concerning requirement #1. They already have to deal with this type of problems and have the know how to do it, but the legal framework must be defined very clearly to prevent some demagogue from abjuring of commitments taken 20 years ago in the name of some pie-in-the-sky scheme. For requirement #2, it is impossible to be certain. Changes of regime do happen, and it would be unwise to expect any particular government to stay around for more than a couple of centuries.
There is only one institution known to me to have a proven record of muddling through and even waxing during uncertain times, (more or less) committing to a mission over millennia. And you can add knowledge preservation over dark ages as the cherry on top of the cake. So I guess you can have your nuclear power plan, and enjoy a relative certainty that it will continue to be taken care of, for as long as it needs to be, if you are willing to let the Catholic Church manage and operate it.
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They can? Even local chinese kids without 户口 can't go to local schools, to hear them tell it. That was one of the primary reasons students came to the school where I worked in 2010-11.
No first hand experience, but from what I can tell, children of legitimate Z visa holders can send their kids to local schools for a reasonable fee. See shanghaiexpat. It is also legal for expats to home school their kids (not legal for the locals). There is a strong sense of entitlement present in American culture which leads to unrealistic expectations when living abroad. This manifests as the so-called 'ugly Ameri…
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I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago. This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc. I was two years old when this picture was taken in…
That isn't brown air; it's a brown print. That's a sepia print of a black and white photo of white steam coming out of chimneys artificially crowded together by a long telephoto lens, taken at sunset, and excluding the sky as much as possible. Imagine another photo taken from the same spot, with a wide-angle lens that shows mostly sky and a bridge going off for miles, even the distant cars clearly visible through cle…
You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome.
I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "artificial" about the crowding of the smokestacks. I still live nearby; the difference between the air quality then and now is pronounced.
It's really an odd thing to do, to approach a stranger on the internet and suggest that their memories are false and any evidence that might support them is effectively fake. How does that go over at dinner parties?
This could amuse me, but it saddens me, of course. The reason this could almost amuse me is that I remember a conversation in 1982 in Taipei, soon after my first visit to China, with a student from France. He too had just been to China, and he thought China was a wonderful place, "Because it has no air pollution." (Compared to 1982 Taiwan, yeah, the P.R.C. had very little pollution because it had very little industri…
India's GDP is currently 1/4 that of China. Imagine how bad things will get in another 10 years, when India's GDP reaches China's current GDP.
Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-15/pollu...
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Fair question. My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap. That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, b…
I also think I read that more than 50% of the nuclear plants currently being built are in China. That is a big way that they will eventually combat this problem.
Yes, China has 40 GWe of nuclear power coming on-line in the next 5 years. The United States currently has 97 GWe of nuclear capacity, and China currently has 13 GWe.
But China is also building 40 GWe of coal plants each year.
This is what happens when you take 500 million peasants and turn them into urban factory workers within a period of 30 years. Demand grows so quickly that even the world's largest nuclear plant construction program will only account for a fraction of demand growth.
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What does that even mean? Who is dependent on what in that scenario?
The people receiving food stop working to secure food on their own. They grow entitled, and expect food aid. It's an observed phenomenon in Africa.
Here I was expecting.. "in the western world" ;D
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VPNs around the firewall are getting less reliable everymonth. The visa changes made in July are much more strict than before, getting a one year non work visa is only possible if you have Chinese family. The visa companies from before no longer exist. But I have a working visa so I don't care.
My one-year tourist visa was issued July 12th. Did I just squeak by?
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My one-year tourist visa was issued July 12th. Did I just squeak by?
The stricter rules took effect on July 31st. But are you referring to validity or length of stay? I've never heard of a tourist visa that allowed you to stay for a year even before the crackdown.