51–60 of 61 posts
One of the things that annoys me slightly is that while our news is loaded with the nuclear accidents, I haven't heard any mainstream media talk about this refinery fire caused by earthquake which had been raging for 10 days, putting who knows how much pollution in the air. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/japan-refinery-idU... http://www.flickr.com/photos/enciclopediapt/5523005370/
Nuclear accidents are scary because people don't understand reactors, they don't understand the actual dangers and there, frankly, haven't been a whole lot of them, so FUD can snowball. On the other hand, mine collapses, refinery fires, oil spills, explosions -- the causes of the day to day death toll of the fossil fuel supply chain (to say nothing of its use) is familiar, understandable and all too common. http://ww…
- people could have had bad first-hand experience with nuclear accidents. I lived 200km downwind from Chernobyl and had to run for cover when it rained first few months. My brother-in-law had his thyroid gland treated when he was 9. Sanitary food inspections still include contamination spot checks, 25 years later.
- Oil spills are largely non-argument. Oil is used primarily for gasoline production and has only fringe role in energy production.
- There is a great, clean fossil fuel in form of natural gas. It is indeed widely used, in some countries in Europe it accounts for 95% of energy production. Coal vs. nuclear is false dichotomy and mostly serves as rhetorical device of proponents of nuclear.
- Safety record of fossil fuel would be much, much higher if as much was invested for safety per TWh as for nuclear. That said, natural gas is still on par with nuclear w.r.t. safety.
- With mass adoption of nuclear, which is now mostly concentrated in places with high safety culture, the number and scale of disasters is bound to catch up. Extrapolate the accident trend for growth up to 50% energy share, and it would be more than simply linear.
- Waste management. Enough said.
- Overall attitude to opponents from nuclear advocates is off-putting. Just because someone has a different view on energy policy does not mean he is a simpleton, a fear-monger or illiterate.
I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in f…
There are two quite different possible complaints. 1. "I want good journalism but can't find it." 2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism." To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible). To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn'…
We should debate nuclear power on its merits and contingency planning, not just its risk profile. Do you remember how many people used the argument that deep water offshore drilling was safe because we used space age technology to prevent spills PRIOR TO the great Gulf spill?
We should improve plant designs and reprocessing technology or else we're just wasting money. We must continue improving testing and safety procedures or we're simply trigger happy screwups, not engineers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep downgrading the comment, superusers. Someday you'll end up keeping the place clean, the Digg way, after users just left.
Downvoting vacuous commentary hasn't helped yet. What would you suggest?
My comment was "frugal". But good. Definition of frugal: "Economical in the use or appropriation of resources; not wasteful or lavish; wise in the expenditure or application of force, materials, time, etc.; characterised by frugality; sparing; economical; saving; as, a frugal housekeeper; frugal of time."
So here it ends my last comment on HN.