Recyled Paper PDF
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I happen to live in the most densely populated country in Europe (if we forget Monaco and Vatican City for a moment), or more specifically, the most densely off-coast island in the world. This means that, for about 100 km around us (or if you live in one of those developing countries that don't use the metric system, 60 miles) there's nothing but sea. And what land there is, is either Sicily or Libya.
When I moved here, about 11 years ago, absolutely no recycling took place. Any rubbish you had, be it glass, plastic, paper, whatever, it all went in the (non-degradable) plastic bag and onto the Magħtab landfill.Now, Magħtab is a positively scary place. It was closed in 2004, under pressure from the European Union which Malta had just joined, but before that, everything was chucked there, including stuff that should probably never end up in a landfill. After closure and installation of gas wells and pipe systems, dioxin emissions went down by 99%, but I think the sea just on the other side of the coast road is still off-limits for swimmers, although that doesn't stop the nearby swimming pool/entertainment area from getting its water from that very sea.
These days,plastic and metal plus paper are separated. Obviously, this being a Mediterranean country where quite a few people simply don't care, not everybody does this, but as long as rubbish collection is free and on a daily basis, things are going quite OK.
But the point is, even though it may not be economically or even environmentally viable to recycle, there's always a price to pay if you don't. If it's more expensive to recycle, it's obviously too cheap to just throw things away. One can imagine that there would be riots in the streets in the USA if you introduced some tax on rubbish, but really, we do need to take this issue a bit more seriously. Just because you can doesn't mean you should convert vast tracts of land into landfills (well, except perhaps Utah). Ever figured what it would entail to build a half a mile high mountain of rubbish? You'll be wandering into Wall-E territory.
And as for nuclear power: unless those thorium reactors really work, or unless they manage to get that fusion reactor in France working, it's a dead end. Right now, we have an INES level 5 emergency about every 9 years. The last two of level 5 or higher were level 7: Chernobyl and Fukushima. Sure, they have even more space in Ukraine and Russia than they have in the USA (let's forget about population density in Japan for a moment), but it's a considerable tract of land that will be uninhabtible for a very, very long time. And if you want to know about some other effects, watch the documentary "Chernobyl Heart". Not to be recommended if you like children, though.
And then there's chemical waste. Let's not even go there.
So... I find the idea of "let's just throw it into a landfill because it's the cheapest" very disturbing. Because it may be cheaper for us, but how wil the situation be in 100 or 200 years?
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I can't think of Malta without thinking of Jon Doe Baker pretending to be an native american...
@Severity One said:
One can imagine that there would be riots in the streets in the USA if you introduced some tax on rubbish, but really, we do need to take this issue a bit more seriously.
There already is, but it's usually "metered" at a very rough rate*. The unit is basically "cans per week". ("Can" being as vague as you imagine-- I can put out a 20 gallon can or a 35 gallon can and it doesn't affect my rate. I'm not sure I'd press my luck with a 60 gallon can though...)
I can only assume you mean something like a tax based on weight, so if you reduce the weight of your garbage you pay less. That would be great, but I don't know if that is worthwhile considering the extra effort of the trash collector guys weighing each can as they empty it. I'm sure someone's proposed it before, and perhaps even piloted it, but I don't know who or where.
BTW, the point we were making above isn't that paper recycling is dumb because of landfill usage, it's that paper recycling is dumb because it's equally harmful to the environment as not recycling. All the "nasty environmental bits" of making paper have to be done whether the pulp is fresh farmed pulp or recycled pulp-- you don't save anything, environmentally, from recycling it.
*) Of course since "the USA" isn't a single political entity, and in fact we're talking about something that's governed at an extremely local level (county, city, or even neighborhood), the information I give doesn't reflect "the USA", only "my specific city in my specific State."
@Severity One said:
Just because you can doesn't mean you should convert vast tracts of land into landfills (well, except perhaps Utah).
First of all, you live on Malta, so I don't think you have a good perspective on just how BIG the planet is. At current rates, it would take billions of years to turn it into Wall-E planet.
Secondly, you have to remember that landfills offset their own costs by generating clean power. One of my beefs with the environmentalist movement is that they haven't updated their "message" since the early 70s, and a fuckload of things have changed since then... the aforementioned debunking of the flawed landfill study, the rise of fast-growing farmed lumber, landfill power generation, etc.
@Severity One said:
And as for nuclear power: unless those thorium reactors really work, or unless they manage to get that fusion reactor in France working, it's a dead end.
Oh! I wrote all that stuff, and I could have just read down this far and known right away you're full of shit. Damn, what a waste of my time.
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@Severity One said:
But the point is, even though it may not be economically or even environmentally viable to recycle, there's always a price to pay if you don't. If it's more expensive to recycle, it's obviously too cheap to just throw things away. One can imagine that there would be riots in the streets in the USA if you introduced some tax on rubbish, but really, we do need to take this issue a bit more seriously. Just because you can doesn't mean you should convert vast tracts of land into landfills (well, except perhaps Utah). Ever figured what it would entail to build a half a mile high mountain of rubbish? You'll be wandering into Wall-E territory.
@Severity One said:
So... I find the idea of "let's just throw it into a landfill because it's the cheapest" very disturbing. Because it may be cheaper for us, but how wil the situation be in 100 or 200 years?
Obviously, life on an island is very different from a having vast continental territory. And not all of the US is like that. Obviously there is Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc. But to ignore all of the land that's out there where we could be putting our garbage, and instead throwing our money out because it makes a few people feel better is really dumb.
Your mindset reminds me of the WWII Japanese plans to balloon bomb the US. They really had no clue as to the vastness and what the implications of that were. Also, Utah is has some of the most beautiful geography in the world, even after the minute carve-outs for landfills are made. I remember taking a drive out near 29 Palms with my wife, shortly after we moved to California (she grew up in New Jersey). She was absolutely astonished at the vastness of the land there, where you can easily see for tens of miles on a nice day. Until you've been out in a place like that, I don't think that you can really comprehend how not out of space we really are.
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@Severity One said:
It will be just the same, since as someone said it will take billions of years to run out of space for landfills. You have to understand that we have HUGE tracts of land.So... I find the idea of "let's just throw it into a landfill because it's the cheapest" very disturbing. Because it may be cheaper for us, but how wil the situation be in 100 or 200 years?
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@blakeyrat said:
All the "nasty environmental bits" of making paper have to be done whether the pulp is fresh farmed pulp or recycled pulp-- you don't save anything, environmentally, from recycling it.
And that says to me that you have no idea what you are talking about. Go spend some in a Kraft process pulp and paper mill and then compare it to what goes on in a paper mill fed from a recycled paper stream rather than spouting P&T BS.
You can put a paper mill running on recycled stock in an urban area. But you can smell a Kraft pulp from 30 miles away because they stink so bad from the chemicals used in that process. - and yes I know this from experience as I have worked in both types of plants.
My first day on the job in a Kraft mill and I was told "don't step in the puddles (of black liquor) - not only are they bad for you, they rot your safety boots".
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@blakeyrat said:
BTW, the point we were making above isn't that paper recycling is dumb because of landfill usage, it's that paper recycling is dumb because it's equally harmful to the environment as not recycling. All the "nasty environmental bits" of making paper have to be done whether the pulp is fresh farmed pulp or recycled pulp-- you don't save anything, environmentally, from recycling it.
Secondly, you have to remember that landfills offset their own costs by generating clean power. One of my beefs with the environmentalist movement is that they haven't updated their "message" since the early 70s, and a fuckload of things have changed since then... the aforementioned debunking of the flawed landfill study, the rise of fast-growing farmed lumber, landfill power generation, etc.
Does that include the cost and emissions coming from the fact that lumber farms are usually not located in urban areas, and the resulting loss of habitat for plant and animal species because you're using the space for lumber farms now? Or is that calculation missing from the "equally harmful"?
@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:
And as for nuclear power: unless those thorium reactors really work, or unless they manage to get that fusion reactor in France working, it's a dead end.
Oh! I wrote all that stuff, and I could have just read down this far and known right away you're full of shit. Damn, what a waste of my time.
Wait, hang on. So what you're saying is that a system where a total loss of power leads to a meltdown and rendering an area uninhabitable for tens or even hundreds of years does not have some inherent problems? I'm not talking about Chernobyl (although that had the potential of making the whole of Europe uninhabitable), where an inherently unsafe design (RBMK) combined with gross disregard for procedures led to the worst nuclear disaster ever. What I'm talkig about is Fukushima, in what many people consider to be the most technologically advanced country in the world. They were old designs, but hey, guess what: so are most reactors in the world.
I'm very well aware that wind, solar and wave energy cannot provide a base electricity load, and we need something that does, and for now, we don't have anything other than burning fossil fuel or using nuclear fission. The country that I live in gets a lot of sun (it's like California but without the wildfires, earthquakes or LA), and whereas the solar water heater works great, solar panels cannot be made profitable even here, even with a government subsidy.
But that doesn't take away the fact that nuclear fission as it is used now is a dead end, just like purely electric cars are.
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@Sutherlands said:
@Severity One said:
It will be just the same, since as someone said it will take billions of years to run out of space for landfills. You have to understand that we have HUGE tracts of land.So... I find the idea of "let's just throw it into a landfill because it's the cheapest" very disturbing. Because it may be cheaper for us, but how wil the situation be in 100 or 200 years?
And what species live there currently? Like I said, there's always a price to pay, even though you might not be able to express it in monetary value.
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@OzPeter said:
But you can smell a Kraft pulp from 30 miles away because they stink so bad from the chemicals used in that process. - and yes I know this from experience as I have worked in both types of plants.
Is that where they make the cheese as well?
My first day on the job in a Kraft mill and I was told "don't step in the puddles (of black liquor) - not only are they bad for you, they rot your safety boots".
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@PJH said:
@OzPeter said:
Nah .. its a factory where they make pulp fiction books dedicated to the band KraftwerkBut you can smell a Kraft pulp from 30 miles away because they stink so bad from the chemicals used in that process. - and yes I know this from experience as I have worked in both types of plants.
Is that where they make the cheese as well?
My first day on the job in a Kraft mill and I was told "don't step in the puddles (of black liquor) - not only are they bad for you, they rot your safety boots".
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@Severity One said:
Wait, hang on. So what you're saying is that a system where a total loss of power leads to a meltdown and rendering an area uninhabitable for tens or even hundreds of years does not have some inherent problems? I'm not talking about Chernobyl (although that had the potential of making the whole of Europe uninhabitable), where an inherently unsafe design (RBMK) combined with gross disregard for procedures led to the worst nuclear disaster ever. What I'm talkig about is Fukushima, in what many people consider to be the most technologically advanced country in the world. They were old designs, but hey, guess what: so are most reactors in the world.
I'm very well aware that wind, solar and wave energy cannot provide a base electricity load, and we need something that does, and for now, we don't have anything other than burning fossil fuel or using nuclear fission. The country that I live in gets a lot of sun (it's like California but without the wildfires, earthquakes or LA), and whereas the solar water heater works great, solar panels cannot be made profitable even here, even with a government subsidy.
But that doesn't take away the fact that nuclear fission as it is used now is a dead end, just like purely electric cars are.
Hey now, I work in the nuclear industry, and it's not nearly as bad as you claim it to be.
You're correct that the Fukushima designs were old, but you didn't mention that they weren't allowed to upgrade them even after power loss was considered as a concern because of resistance from environmentalist organizations.
Since the Fukushima incident, my employer's received a lot of orders for upgrading plant cooling systems to work for extended periods of time without power. Our new plant, four of which are being built in China in the next few years, stores the water high above the core, so cooling occurs by way of gravity. If the plant loses power it will have enough water to cool it for a week. During this week without power, mechanical systems will detect the loss of power and shift the plant into its lowest possible operating status. In this state, the plant is designed so that natural processes like condensation and airflow and other things I don't entirely understand are enough to keep the plant cool indefinitely - all without anyone touching a button. It's pretty cool stuff. Heck, you can fly a plane into our new plant and the reactor won't be harmed at all.
Nuclear fission is dangerous to be sure, but danger is inversely proportional to the amount of safety systems and training surrounding the thing. Cars are dangerous, but everyone drives them. Nuclear energy is on its way to becoming the cleanest, most efficient, and safest energy option.
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I only hope that the French test donut works, so they can build one that is actually intended to produce energy. Then there's the test-test-donut in England to make sure the test-donut in France works properly.
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@Severity One said:
What I'm talkig about is Fukushima, in what many people consider to be the most technologically advanced country in the world.
Nope, no logical fallacy to see here. Move along.
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@dhromed said:
I only hope that the French test donut works, so they can build one that is actually intended to produce energy. Then there's the test-test-donut in England to make sure the test-donut in France works properly.
I'm hungry
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@Severity One said:
Wait, hang on. So what you're saying is that a system where a total loss of power leads to a meltdown and rendering an area uninhabitable for tens or even hundreds of years does not have some inherent problems?
Is there any system of power generation without inherent problems? Let's not raise the bar for nuclear above where it is for coal burning plants, 'kay? Because right now, people are bitching about nuclear power that:
1) Produces far more power-per-installation than coal
2) Kills far, far fewer people than year than coal (still precisely zero in the US, I believe. If you count uranium mining accidents, that goes up of course)
3) EVEN ADMITS LESS RADIATION INTO THE ATMOSPHERE THAN COALThe double-standard pisses me off. Coal is worse than nuclear in every way. Every. Way. Environmentalists give it a pass, I guess, because it's old and established. If you're going to be a hard-ass on nuclear, fine, but you have to be a hard-ass on coal too-- and when you are, and when those plants all go dark and we're fucking sitting around a candle, that's on your fucking head.
But until the environmentalist movement pulls its head out of its ass and starts paying attention to that huge-ass elephant in the room, it's nothing but hypocritical blather to me. If you want standards, fine! Let's have standards. Let's have the *same* standards regardless of power generation type. Then let's see how well coal compares to nuclear.
The US Navy has run reactors safely on ships and submarines during adverse weather, hell during combat conditions, for almost 60 years now. It certainly can be done; the skills exist. The people exist. The training programs that produce those people exist. We have thousands of them here in the US, right in our own military. Maybe civilian-run plants are a bad idea; fine! Let's have those Navy personnel run them. They've already proven they can do the job.
@Severity One said:
(although that had the potential of making the whole of Europe uninhabitable)
Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. You can be anti-nuclear if you want, but make sure your arguments pass the sniff test and, buddy, that one stinks.
@Severity One said:
What I'm talkig about is Fukushima, in what many people consider to be the most technologically advanced country in the world.
Yeah, and look how bad-- oh wait nothing really happened. Other than media hype.
@Severity One said:
They were old designs, but hey, guess what: so are most reactors in the world.
Part of the reason for that in the US at least is because "environmentalist" groups keep blocking new plant construction-- since we're already reliant on the old plants for power grid base load, because the "environmentalist" groups don't offer any reasonable alternatives, and since the new plants are constantly in a state of blocked, the only choice is to keep the older plants going longer than they should.
In other words, this is a problem that "environmentalist" groups create. So no, you can't really count it as a weakness of nuclear power because if the industry was left to its own devices, those plants would be retired on schedule. (Probably.) (And I'm talking about the US, I can't speak for other countries.)
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@serguey123 said:
I'm hungry
It's a donut filled with superheated plasma contained by magnetic fields, and lined on the inside with beryllium tiles.
Still hungry?
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@dhromed said:
It's a donut filled with superheated plasma contained by magnetic fields, and lined on the inside with beryllium tiles.
Classic filling?
@dhromed said:
Still hungry?
Yep
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@serguey123 said:
Classic filling?
Yeah, it's the "new traditional", with the original dating back 13.2 billion years. Current usage is isolated to various hot spots around the cosmos.
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@dhromed said:
Current usage is isolated to various hot spots around the cosmos.
That's relatively speaking, of course.
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@blakeyrat said:
The double-standard pisses me off. Coal is worse than nuclear in every way. Every. Way. Environmentalists give it a pass, I guess, because it's old and established. If you're going to be a hard-ass on nuclear, fine, but you have to be a hard-ass on coal too-- and when you are, and when those plants all go dark and we're fucking sitting around a candle, that's on your fucking head.
Holy carbon emission Batman, I didn't know that! Thanks for pointing that out!
Honestly, do you usually work with pre-school children, that you expect everybody else to be a moron? Did I ever state that burning coal was alright? Hmm, let's see... nope, I didn't. Sorry about that.
I know perfectly well that burning fossil fuels is way more damaging than 'burning' uranium. In that respect, it could almost be funny that the Germans decided (again) to close all their nuclear power stations, without having a plan of where to get to get their electricity from. They're still happily harvesting and burning lignite. Have you ever seen one of those German bucket excavators? Or the holes they create in the landscape? "Huge" doesn't even begin to cover it. Hey, perhaps they'll get their power from France instead. And guess where the French are getting most of their electricity from? Bingo.
But you're missing the point, intentionally or not, that I'm trying to make: then when things go wrong with nuclear, they go wrong in a very bad way.
@blakeyrat said:
The US Navy has run reactors safely on ships and submarines during adverse weather, hell during combat conditions, for almost 60 years now. It certainly can be done; the skills exist. The people exist. The training programs that produce those people exist. We have thousands of them here in the US, right in our own military. Maybe civilian-run plants are a bad idea; fine! Let's have those Navy personnel run them. They've already proven they can do the job.
This is according to the school of thinking that since it has never gone wrong before, it will never go wrong. Thing is, statistically speaking, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. You can invent all sorts of safety procedures, but you cannot exclude the possibility of things going wrong, and going wrong in a bad way. You just have to wait long enough.
My estimate is that we'll see another INES level 7 event before 2040. Also, I think you forgot to mention TMI.
@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:
(although that had the potential of making the whole of Europe uninhabitable)
Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. You can be anti-nuclear if you want, but make sure your arguments pass the sniff test and, buddy, that one stinks.
Really? So why were the Russians using miners to dig a room under the reactor? That wouldn't have anything to do with the nuclear fuel slowly burning through the reactor floor towards the ground water, by any chance?
@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:
What I'm talkig about is Fukushima, in what many people consider to be the most technologically advanced country in the world.
Yeah, and look how bad-- oh wait nothing really happened. Other than media hype.
Except that a large part of Fukushima prefecture is off-limits due to high radiation levels. Heck, people are living in The Zone again, so it can't be too bad, right?
@blakeyrat said:
In other words, this is a problem that "environmentalist" groups create. So no, you can't really count it as a weakness of nuclear power because if the industry was left to its own devices, those plants would be retired on schedule. (Probably.) (And I'm talking about the US, I can't speak for other countries.)
I'm far from an environmentalist. And I lost al confidence in groups like Greenpeace after the Brent Spar affair. (Although, if Wikipedia is to be believed, there was some truth in the claims they made. But this is Wikipedia, and their claims were still off by quite a bit.)
But the thing is, nuclear power is inherently unsafe. The basic problem is our ever-increasing demand for electricity, and I don't see an easy solution to that. Go back to one small TV and one telephone (not mobile) in the house? Drop our computers and start using mechanical calculators again? Get rid of air conditioners and just have a siesta in the afternoon? So no, I don't see a short-term solution, or even a medium term, and I don't see an alternative for nuclear fission for the next 100 years.
And I do think that I have every right to find it scary: not based on scaremongering, but based on reading as much as I can on nuclear accidents, particularly Chernobyl. And do watch "Chernobyl Heart". It's not a lot of fun. You'll see a child with its brain in a sack just outside the back of its skull, that sort of thing.
We can't put all of our deserts full of solar panels, and we can't put wnd turbines everywhere. I have my sincere doubts about the sustainability of these, not to mention the environmental impact
But nuclear fission is untenable in the long run. And you'll have to come up with some better arguments than "it's never gone wrong before" or "you're talking rubbish" to convince me otherwise.
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Nuclear fission plant, operating for 30 years, goes wrong in the same way as Fukushima.
A coal plant, or collection of coal plants equal to the output of the above nuclear plant, operating for 30 years normally.
The question is, which is worse? Then take the least bad option. I'm considering TCO, including mining of fuel and dismantling at the end of its lifetime.
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@Severity One said:
But you're missing the point, intentionally or not, that I'm trying to make: then when things go wrong with nuclear, they go wrong in a very bad way.
That point is wrong, too. If you'd said something like, "People have an irrational fear of all things nuclear, and believe that a 'meltdown' is equivalent to a holocaust," then you'd have a point. Now, it's true that it's possible to have something catastrophic happen, and certainly that's happened once, but it was practically on purpose.
Humans are very bad at judging risks with small probabilities, especially when they don't really understand the consequences. You've demonstrated that nicely.
@Severity One said:
But nuclear fission is untenable in the long run. And you'll have to come up with some better arguments than "it's never gone wrong before" or "you're talking rubbish" to convince me otherwise.
I don't think anyone here cares about convincing you. What difference would it make? You live in an inconsequential country that will basically have to live with everyone else's decisions. More importantly is not allowing your ignorance to go unchallenged.
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What ignorance exactly? I haven't come to this conclusion from a "hug the trees" standpoint, but from reading and basing my conclusions on that. You may challenge my conclusions, but don't brush off my distrust of nuclear fission power as ignorance. What I've seen so far is ad hominem attacks, and with the exception of "lettucemode", no attempt at using the same sort of logic that you'd need in developing software.
And it's the whole argument of "we have enough space, who cares" that irks me. You used to have more than plenty of Passenger Pigeons at some point. Where are they now? You also almost managed the same with buffalo and your national symbol, the bald eagle.
To me, all these nuclear proponents seem like people who focus on the technological aspect of things, and gloss over the environmental aspect. It's like heroin: it's a damn good painkiller, but it has a couple of undesirable side-effects.
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@Severity One said:
What ignorance exactly? I haven't come to this conclusion from a "hug
the trees" standpoint, but from reading and basing my conclusions on
that. You may challenge my conclusions, but don't brush off my distrust
of nuclear fission power as ignorance. What I've seen so far is ad hominem attacks, and with the exception of "lettucemode", no attempt at using the same sort of logic that you'd need in developing software.You've generalized Chernobyl in an entirely inappropriate way, ignoring the rest of the history of nuclear fission power plants. These issues were already pointed out, but all you care about is what amounts to a mediocre tragedy in the history of 20th century communism. I suppose you're also probably thinking that things like Three Mile Island and Fukushima were much worse in terms of actual consequences than they actually were.
@Severity One said:
And it's the whole argument of "we have enough space, who cares" that irks me. You used to have more than plenty of Passenger Pigeons at some point. Where are they now? You also almost managed the same with buffalo and your national symbol, the bald eagle.
So, your point is that if I think about something completely different than the problem at hand, I might come to a different conclusion? Are you disagreeing with the fact that space for landfill isn't a problem in the US? Or that once again, you don't really care about actual facts that get in the way of your emotional decision making?
@Severity One said:
To me, all these nuclear proponents seem like people who focus on the technological aspect of things, and gloss over the environmental aspect. It's like heroin: it's a damn good painkiller, but it has a couple of undesirable side-effects.
Life has undesirable side effects. It's about trade offs. Of course, it's not surprising that using inappropriate metaphors like nuclear power being heroin, you think nuclear power is a bad idea.
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I see nuclear fission for public power generation as an old technology, that once showed much promise, but now creates more problems than it solves. I do not doubt that fission generation is fairly safe in the short term: there are heaps of reactors happily making power around the globe, and I would personally prefer to live near a modern fission reactor than the oil storage facility I currently live near. Major nuclear accidents at power plants have been relatively few and far between in the 50 or so years since fission power became mainstream.
Having said that, I don't see fission as an answer. Reactors create radioactive waste. Even in it's safest form, this waste can not simply be put into a landfill, and most folk do not want to have spent nuclear fuel anywhere near them. Of course, you can always have a reactor of a type that creates (for example) plutonium that folk may want to recycle into weapons. Nuclear waste is a big problem. I am aware that there are many people trying to mitigate this problem, but a big problem it remains. Also, proliferation. We are starting to see this now. Who likes the idea of Derpistan or the Democratic Republic of Duhgeria building reactors and dealing with high-level waste? If fission power is as feasable as proponents seem to think it is, what will stop them? Supply? Maybe, because uranium is a finite resource, that needs to be mined and processed, and there might not be enough for everyone who wants it.
Coal sucks. So does nuclear fission. There are no easy answers here, but there is a lot of energy flying around that we just have not worked out how to harness safely yet. More cash for R&D, less hostility for new ideas.
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@Severity One said:
Holy carbon emission Batman, I didn't know that! Thanks for pointing that out!
Honestly, do you usually work with pre-school children, that you expect everybody else to be a moron? Did I ever state that burning coal was alright? Hmm, let's see... nope, I didn't. Sorry about that.
But you're missing the point, intentionally or not, that I'm trying to make: then when things go wrong with nuclear, they go wrong in a very bad way.
First of all, most environmentalists literally don't think about that point. Since the coal plants already exist, and since approval for new coal plants doesn't appear on the 11 o'clock news, they're invisible to the environmentalist movement.
Secondly, you think nuclear is bad. You think fossil fuels are worse. Ok. So what's your plan? How do we keep society functioning? You're dictator of the world, make a call.
@Severity One said:
Also, I think you forgot to mention TMI.
I said zero fatalities, I meant zero fatalities. If you think people died from the TMI incident, then you're drifting way into "conspiracy theory" territory and there's no point in debating with you.
@Severity One said:
@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:
(although that had the potential of making the whole of Europe uninhabitable)
Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. You can be anti-nuclear if you want, but make sure your arguments pass the sniff test and, buddy, that one stinks.
Really? So why were the Russians using miners to dig a room under the reactor? That wouldn't have anything to do with the nuclear fuel slowly burning through the reactor floor towards the ground water, by any chance?
Assume it did, for a moment. Explain how that makes "the whole of Europe uninhabitable." In fact, I'll be generous: why don't you assume all of the reactors at the Chernobyl complex melted down, not just one of them. Please, enlighten me.
Look, I'm not fucking stupid ok? I'm pretty sure you're not fucking stupid, although you are if you think TMI caused fatalities. If you want to have a debate, how about you make points based on facts? Because "Chernobyl had the potential to make the whole of Europe uninhabitable" is not based on facts, it's based on bullshit and you know it and I know it so stop pretending.
@Severity One said:
Except that a large part of Fukushima prefecture is off-limits due to high radiation levels.
Yeah...? Did you have a point you were getting to or...
@Severity One said:
Heck, people are living in The Zone again, so it can't be too bad, right?
Some people living in the Exclusion Zone never left it in the first place. And, as a matter of fact, it wasn't nearly as bad as the Soviets thought it would be. The Zone is a good defensive barrier for the site, but 99% of it is perfectly healthy.
@Severity One said:
But the thing is, nuclear power is inherently unsafe.
Nothing's inherently safe. I don't know why you brought this up twice. You need to spent a few hours talking to an insurance adjuster, they have a great perspective on how the real world works.
@Severity One said:
The basic problem is our ever-increasing demand for electricity, and I don't see an easy solution to that.
Oh I see. So instead of building nuclear plants, we should just force everybody in the world to lower their quality of life. I see you have a very intelligent, reasonable, and not-at-all stupidly worthless ideas here.
@Severity One said:
So no, I don't see a short-term solution, or even a medium term, and I don't see an alternative for nuclear fission for the next 100 years.
But they're "inherently unsafe!" Le gasp!
@Severity One said:
And I do think that I have every right to find it scary: not based on scaremongering, but based on reading as much as I can on nuclear accidents, particularly Chernobyl.
You have every right to find it scary, you even have the right to spread bullshit like "Chernobyl had the potential to make Europe uninhabitable" if you want. Of course, I have the right to call you an idiot, and I certainly have the right to call you a liar. And if you're in a position to make a decision on the construction of a new power plant, you have a responsibility to learn the facts and make the right decision. Right now we're just dicking around in the Internet. But if you're at a ballot box, you need to fucking know, you can't make decisions based on "ooo I feel heebie jeebies".
@Severity One said:
But nuclear fission is untenable in the long run. And you'll have to come up with some better arguments than "it's never gone wrong before" or "you're talking rubbish" to convince me otherwise.
If you're talking bullshit, you bet your ass I'm calling your bullshit out. I'm still calling it out.
How many decades of data do you need before you can be convinced of its safety record? What is the cutoff?
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@boomzilla said:
You live in an inconsequential country that will basically have to live with everyone else's decisions.
I think a lot of this ignorance is based on his crazy-ass "I live on a packed tiny island" perspective. Obviously you wouldn't build a nuclear power plant on a fucking 7-mile-long island packed with tens of thousands of people... that would be an unnecessary and stupid risk. I think Severity One is just assuming the rest of the world is exactly like Malta, and thus there's no place on the planet where it's safe to build a nuclear power plant.
Of course, one of our floating nuclear power plants (we also use them as aircraft carriers) would power the fuck out of your island in an emergency for months if it had to, and we wouldn't even send you a bill. We would, however, try to unload Joe Don Baker again, that guy sucks.
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@Severity One said:
This is according to the school of thinking that since it has never gone wrong before, it will never go wrong. Thing is, statistically speaking, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. You can invent all sorts of safety procedures, but you cannot exclude the possibility of things going wrong, and going wrong in a bad way. You just have to wait long enough.
My estimate is that we'll see another INES level 7 event before 2040.
I would argue that because things have gone wrong in the past, we are in fact more prepared here in the future. I can't argue with the black box you've thrown up ("If you just wait long enough, something bad will happen!") because it's not verifiable, but during my employment I've learned about the massive undertaking to make nuclear fission safe. As a result of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, an international effort was created to prevent such events from happening again. Since the internet happened, they've had a system to log and view any nuclear incident, no matter how small, from any other country in the world. Not to mention that safety requirements are getting more strict all the time. Earlier, I said that our new plant can withstand a plane crash...that's because it's now US law that any new plant constructed in the US has to be plane-resistant. World events of all kinds are constantly being analyzed and prepared for from the perspective of nuclear safety.
Every nuclear power plant in the US is at least twice as safe as required by law. When our new plant design is built, it will be around ninety-six times as safe as required by law. If you have a problem with that, contact your congressman.
@Shagen said:
I see nuclear fission for public power generation as an old technology, that once showed much promise, but now creates more problems than it solves....Reactors create radioactive waste. Even in it's safest form, this waste can not simply be put into a landfill, and most folk do not want to have spent nuclear fuel anywhere near them. Of course, you can always have a reactor of a type that creates (for example) plutonium that folk may want to recycle into weapons. Nuclear waste is a big problem. I am aware that there are many people trying to mitigate this problem, but a big problem it remains.
Correction: It was a big problem, but we solved it a long time ago. Nuclear waste is safely transported to large long-term storage containers that are miles underground. These containers are required by law to show that, as a result of their design, the waste within them will have a negligible effect on the world above for the next 100,000 years. At least, that's the European law - I forget what number of years the US requires but it is a little less. Again, if you think it should be longer, contact your congressman.
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@Shagen said:
Having said that, I don't see fission as an answer. Reactors create radioactive waste. Even in it's safest form, this waste can not simply be put into a landfill, and most folk do not want to have spent nuclear fuel anywhere near them. Of course, you can always have a reactor of a type that creates (for example) plutonium that folk may want to recycle into weapons. Nuclear waste is a big problem.
The nuclear waste problem could be more manageable if we reprocessed plutonium and uranium from spent fuel rods to be used to generate power. Unfortunately, the US doesn't do this for political reasons based on the Non-Proliferation Treaty. There are also economical/technical pros and cons to be weighed.
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@lettucemode said:
Correction: It was a big problem, but we solved it a long time ago. Nuclear waste is safely transported to large long-term storage containers that are miles underground. These containers are required by law to show that, as a result of their design, the waste within them will have a negligible effect on the world above for the next 100,000 years. At least, that's the European law - I forget what number of years the US requires but it is a little less. Again, if you think it should be longer, contact your congressman.
HA! We can't even agree to put the stuff in a mountain in one of the most godforsaken places on earth. And "your" congressman likely had his hands in that outcome. The Feds still own most of the state of Nevada, but for various reasons, have decided that we can't even put the stuff in the middle of nowhere. So mostly, IIRC, it's stored in pools at the site where it was generated.
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All we need to do is live with no electricity for the next 100 years and all thing environMENTAL will be automagicaly fixed.
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@boomzilla said:
So mostly, IIRC, it's stored in pools at the site where it was generated.
It's true. I've seen it with me own two eyes.
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@Nagesh said:
All we need to do is live with no electricity for the next 100 years and all thing environMENTAL will be automagicaly fixed.
No power?
How the fuck am I supposed to play Assassin's Creed?
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My brother was a nuke engineer for the US Navy and served on a US carrier and explained more to me than I ever really wanted to know about how nuclear power plants work. To say the Navy reactors are safe is very accurate. Based off of the way he described it, even if the carrier gets hit by enough torpedeos, missiles, and other stuff to sink it, none of the reactors would go meltdown nor would there be a huge nuclear explosion. As soon as one of the guys pushes one of the many conviently located large red buttons, one of the automated safeties triggers, or the structural integrity of the reactor room fails the rods drop and nuclear reaction stops. Then to add some icing to the cake, it is a ship so under extreme destruction of the ship and the containment gets destroyed too the rods would drop into the sea water which would cool them and also kill/prevent any possible nuclear reaction. At that point there would be the radiation issue, but I think that would be the least of your problems with a sunk carrier.
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@dhromed said:
No power?
How the fuck am I supposed to play Ass Creed?
The way we used to do it: outside.
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@erikal said:
@dhromed said:
No power?
How the fuck am I supposed to play Ass Creed?
The way we used to do it: outside.
In my day we called it "jailbreak".
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@blakeyrat said:
It doesn't sound like we should be taking environmentalist advice from a Maltese man.
I just came across this article, "In praise of petroleum". Obviously, about oil rather than nuclear, but the larger point stands:
But precisely because such spills are relatively rare (and getting rarer), we don't see such images routinely. So when these images are presented to us, they stir our emotions.
Trouble is, by focusing on such photos we get a distorted view of the bigger picture, one that includes oil's manifest benefits.
Not surprisingly, Malta generates electricity from oil, which makes sense for an island. Hawaii is one of the few places in the US that still relies on burning oil for electricity.
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@erikal said:
@dhromed said:
No power?
How the fuck am I supposed to play Ass Creed?
The way we used to do it: outside.
Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted.
He he he he
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
It doesn't sound like we should be taking environmentalist advice from a Maltese man.
I just came across this article, "In praise of petroleum". Obviously, about oil rather than nuclear, but the larger point stands:
But precisely because such spills are relatively rare (and getting rarer), we don't see such images routinely. So when these images are presented to us, they stir our emotions.
Trouble is, by focusing on such photos we get a distorted view of the bigger picture, one that includes oil's manifest benefits.
Not surprisingly, Malta generates electricity from oil, which makes sense for an island. Hawaii is one of the few places in the US that still relies on burning oil for electricity.
I read some psychology article on the internet somewhere that said that people perceive an event's danger level based on two factors:
- The visibility of the event
- How "in control" of the event they perceive themselves to be
So for example, the average person will tell you that sharks are more dangerous than vending machines, even though vending machines kill more people per year in the US than sharks. Same concept applies to that article.
Also, blakey, the "Terms of Use" link in your signature doesn't go to that post in which you detailed your terms of use. It goes to some thread about Pikachu. On purpose?
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@lettucemode said:
vending machines kill more people
How? Overpriced softdrinks? cholesterol? diabetes? Gravity? Deathmatch over the last item? The world must know!
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@lettucemode said:
Also, blakey, the "Terms of Use" link in your signature doesn't go to that post in which you detailed your terms of use. It goes to some thread about Pikachu. On purpose?
HOLY FUCK SOMEONE FINALLY NOTICED!
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@serguey123 said:
@lettucemode said:
vending machines kill more people
How? Overpriced softdrinks? cholesterol? diabetes? Gravity? Deathmatch over the last item? The world must know!
Idiots shake them to get free product, and the machines fall on them. So... "gravity."
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@serguey123 said:
@lettucemode said:
vending machines kill more people
How? Overpriced softdrinks? cholesterol? diabetes? Gravity? Deathmatch over the last item? The world must know!
The food gets stuck, so people try to reach in and grab it or shake the machine and it falls over and crushes them.
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@blakeyrat said:
@serguey123 said:
@lettucemode said:
vending machines kill more people
How? Overpriced softdrinks? cholesterol? diabetes? Gravity? Deathmatch over the last item? The world must know!
Idiots shake them to get free product, and the machines fall on them. So... "gravity."
Jinx! Buy me a coke.
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@lettucemode said:
Jinx! Buy me a coke.
Fuck that, I'll just shake the machine until one of them shifts loose and-- OH NOOOOOOOoo
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I'm not sure 6 minutes later counts as Jinx. But I'll take that coke since blakey can't have it.
*shakes vending machine*
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@Sutherlands said:
I'm not sure 6 minutes later counts as Jinx. But I'll take that coke since blakey can't have it.
*shakes vending machine*
.. from another thread... wasn't it The Tommyknockers that had a floating killer coke machine which despatched a nosey reporter?
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@Cassidy said:
wasn't it The Tommyknockers that had a floating killer coke machine which despatched a nosey reporter?
No, it was Duggan, the policeman.
