271–280 of 398 posts
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Sounds like an opportunity for some enterprising Valley folk to disrupt nuclear! I can't wait for Nucly, the only reactor control panel for iOS and Android.
AirIMBY lets you rent out your back yard as a nuclear waste disposal site.
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Ad hominem much? Try doing your own research rather than casting aspersions. Mutant fish turning up in the Pacific. Japanese fishermen unable to catch fish. Deleting that food source has very strong repercussions for the survival of the human race, let alone a highly radioactive payload that is god knows where and likely in the water table.
There was nothing ad hominem in my previous post, but now here is some: I'm talking about nuclear industry, but it seems you are talking about captain planet or teenage mutant turtles... Mutations happen regardless of nuclear spills. They are a driving force of evolution. Now more seriously: The human race would easily survive without seafish. Maybe in smaller numbers, but for example in the inlands people eat much l…
If you really want to go down that route then the human race can easily survive without clean air, water, ground or any animal life on this planet. Why would we need any of that? We, at least a few of us, could just as well be living in sealed underground bunkers powered by thermal energy while eating mushrooms all day and recycling our pee and sweat. Doesn't that sound like a lovely future? ;)
>A century ago not much seafish was available in the inlands, yet the European inland population was comparable in numbers to the current population.
They didn't need seafish because they did have enough land for agriculture, many other places, especially insular nation states and Asia in general, did not and do not have that luxury. I also doubt that current European inland population numbers are in any way comparable with the population numbers of a century ago, back in 1900 global population didn't even break 2 billion, now we are at over 7 billion.
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So far the number of nuclear plant incidents has been pretty minor especially considering how many nuclear plants are in operation. Meanwhile how many people have died in propane bottling plant explosions? In coal mining? In off-shore drilling incidents? It's not perfectly safe, not even close, but it's statistically one of the least dangerous power generation methods.
Statistically, it's very safe to be a turkey on a turkey farm until shortly before Thanksgiving. A lot of stuff that is theoretically guaranteed to be a disaster looks very safe and profitable until shortly before disaster strikes.
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
http://www.ajc.com/business/psc-approves-georgia-power-rate-...
"January 2013: $1.05, third part of the three-tiered rate increase; 31-cent increase for energy-efficiency programs; 85-cent increase for Plant Vogtle
Note: Figures are amounts added or reduced on a typical monthly bill based on usage of 1,000 kilowatt hours"
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Sounds like an opportunity for some enterprising Valley folk to disrupt nuclear! I can't wait for Nucly, the only reactor control panel for iOS and Android.
AirIMBY lets you rent out your back yard as a nuclear waste disposal site.
There was massive financial fraud at Westinghouse. Even though the nuclear industry is in a downturn, the troubles at Westinghouse are self inflicted - Toshiba bought them, but found out almost all of the unit's profits are misreported, leading to them spending money on "nothing" basically. The unit earned no money and was threatening to sink Toshiba the entire keiretsu. This is Toshiba trying to save itself by closi…
I just don't think Japanese companies have a process on dealing with foreign M&As and fraud mitigation. When Hitachi acquired the spanish manufacturing company AnsaldoBreda, there were similar fraud accusations.
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There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https…
This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it. The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
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> Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues. I have a fundamental mistrust of the industry and our government's ability to properly regulate it. That mistrust is based on historical facts. Even with newer designs, I think human error and regulatory capture is too dangerous to make nuclear viable.
>...That mistrust is based on historical facts What historical facts would those be? Historically nuclear has been about the safest form of mass power when looking at accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the re…
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There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https…
One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.