That's all fine, but for example Fukushima is still not under control, and may still cause enormous harm.
That kind of stuff is why we need to get rid of nuclear power altogether. All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes.. and of course, to a lesser extent, people who rationalize not moving away from nuclear power.
Fukushima was an unsafe design. Chernobyl was both an unsafe design and being operated in an obviously risky and neglegent way when it failed. These kinds of disasters won't happen with more modern reactors that already exist. Even if they do, making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe. The world is full of uninhabited and uninhabitable places.
Fukushima was a standard design. Built by European and US companies in the same style as dozens of plants in Germany.
This is not "Fukushima was unsafe". If you say "Fukushima was unsafe", then half of Germany’s reactors are unsafe.
Shutting them down was the only option.
> making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe
You are talking about Japan. A country with one of the highest population densities worldwide. Declaring a whole province – and one with lots of history – off-limits is not going to happen. Currently they’ve been digging out the ground in half of the province.
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EDIT: Some more info:
Fukushima was a Boiling Water Generator built by General Electrics. Reactors of the exact same design are Krümmel (Germany), Brunsbüttel (Germany), Philippsburg (Germany), Isar (Germany). Krümmel and Brunsbüttel had constant issues, including the town next to it having the highest cancer rate on the planet.
The same design used by Fukushima is described in Wikipedia as "the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor".
The design was unsafe. The company knew this. In fact it had been known for 35 years. It was not unfixably unsafe, and in fact 5 of the 10 reactors had been upgraded. These 5 shut down properly during the Tsunami and survived without problems.
The main design flaw was that the vital emergency cooling equipment was sited in an unprotected building outside the protected reactor. This is especially troubling if you site your reactor on a Tsunami-ridden coast. It's less of a problem in the middle of Germany, where there are no Tsunamis. Or to put it another way: if you have a Tsunami reaching the middle of Germany, a meltdown at these powerplants is going to be among the least of your problems.
Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement" over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
It doesn't make sense to say it's hard to demonstrate improvements when it's not even under our control.
But demonizing nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
> Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement"
> over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of
> earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
Gee, what a great idea! In fact, a slightly improved reactor was operating in the other Fukushima plant, and all its reactors were shut down safely after being hit by the same Tsunami.
More modern designs are safer still. For example, there are designs that do not require external power for a shutdown at all.
I'm sure that the people behind Chernobyl and Fukushima were no less convinced that the design was safe and operated perfectly fine, than you are convinced that modern reactors are safely designed and operated correctly.
All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes..
No, unfortunately, that's not all that's holding us back. There are still some pretty substantial, e.g., storage and transmission problems with the renewables.
Unless you want us to keep burning coal or some other nonsense like that...
There are no storage or transmission problems. Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
Build power lines from everywhere to everywhere, and refit transformer stations to be up to the load of users producing more than using, and you fix that, too. (Incidentally, in Germany we’re having a huge debate about a huge powerline currently, NIMBY is one of the worst things that happened)
> Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.
That type of storage has no dam that could fail – you take two lakes, one higher than the other, connect them with a tunnel, and place a turbine in the tunnel. Now you can push the water up (store energy) or let it flow down (produce energy).
That's debatable. Coal is known to cause far more deaths than nuclear. Even Fukushima was nothing compared to the 10's of thousands killed by the tsunami.
"Far more" is even an understatement. Coal kills more people every year than nuclear ever has, and that still holds true even if you include the two bombs dropped on Japan in "nuclear."
Yes. Perfectly working coal produces more radiation than perfectly working nuclear.
When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
When nuclear has incidents, like the plants of Brunsbüttel and Krümmel that frequently had leaks, you end up with the highest leukemia quote worldwide [1].
Krümmel had major issues, with nuclear fuel being found in the area around the reactor, outside, on the ground, with the power plant leaking coolant frequently, and more incidents. [1]
Mismanagement with Nuclear can lead to far more problems than mismanagement with coal.
> When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
Yeah. No.
"Coal mining accidents resulted in 5,938 immediate deaths in 2005, and 4746 immediate deaths in 2006 in China alone according to the World Wildlife Fund"
So each year more deaths from coal accidents alone than the entire predicted, somewhat speculative and hard to ever prove death toll from Chernobyl over the next 20 or so years.
Of course not. We shouldn't have governments at all, because all they do is exploit us. That's why they exist.
All you need to see is that they're taking our money by force, and you can make sense of everything they do - it's all about keeping us blind to the exploitation so that they can keep on doing it.
King's had "The Divine Right" to rule over everyone else, and governments have "The Social Contract", which amounts to the same thing.
Politicians "not understanding" something is an age-old excuse. They don't even give a fuck about anything besides themselves, because they're psychopaths.
They're smart too, because otherwise they wouldn't have managed to climb up the hierarchy of political power to their current positions, what with all the other smart psychopaths jockeying for position along with them.
So if it's in a politician's personal interest to vote X on whatever, then he will do so. If it's not, then he won't. It's as simple as that.
Understanding has nothing to do with it. It's not like they couldn't get someone to help them understand, if they wanted to.
Also, the Australian government (along with any others that can) has been doing the things listed in the article already. They don't need permission from themselves.
> The plaintiffs/petitioners presented only a tenuous case that their records were actually collected, which reduced their perceived likelihood of success on the ultimate merits of the case enough that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction.
So let's see.. Because a person can't prove to the government that the government is violating its own rules, the government decides that the person doesn't actually have a case, even though everyone knows the government is spying on everyone, and thus violating its own rules.
Rright. So even if the government decided the case against itself, i.e. forbade itself from spying on everyone, why would anyone think they'd actually curtail their spying activities?
If a wolf had been eating sheep left and right, and suddenly declared he'll stop doing that because eating sheep is Ba-a-a-ad, would the sheep have reason to believe he'd actually stop?
Eating sheep is in the wolf's nature, and he's never had a problem with it before, so why would he stop? It would serve the wolf's interests to distract/placate the sheep though, so that they'd be easier to eat!
Try, if you can, to imagine that the government is not a single monolithic entity. Or you could just go through your comment and replace every instance of "government" with "people" for all the sense that would make.
There really is a difference between NSA staff and the average American. For that matter, there is also a difference between a federal judge and the average American. This "well next time be sure to vote for a good candidate!" horseshit is tiresome.
[EDIT:] Apparently this is not clear to everyone, but there is a logical difference between the proposition that two sets differ in some salient respect (e.g. that only those in the NSA may "illegally" spy on other Americans, with impunity), and the proposition that they differ in every respect. A careful reading of the previous paragraph will reveal that I have claimed the former.
> There really is a difference between NSA staff and the average American.
What a terribly silly thing to say.
"there is a difference between people who work at X and the average American."
You are claiming that every single employee that works at NSA can in no way, shape, or form be considered an average American. All 30-50k or however many of them there are, they just can't be average Americans?
I mean, I totally agree. I bet they don't have lives outside of work. Probably none of them have kids. I bet they've never been married, or divorced. I'm sure they all rent under pseudonyms, none of them actually buy a house.
Hobbies, pshaw, all they care about is their job, and breaking the law as often as they can. Every single one, a zealot to the cause, insanely loyal to their employer. They don't have bad days at work, or don't feel like going in, because damn it, they're different than the average American.
I mean, there's no way that they just need to put food on the table, or can't leave the area because they have joint custody of their children. That kind of thing only happens to the average American, not NSA employees. By gosh, the horror of even considering that most of them are in fact average Americans, I'm getting tremors down my spine just thinking about it.
You lose credibility when you don't realize that the DC Circuit (the one in this story) and the CAFC (the target of your misplaced jab about patents) are completely different courts.
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that everyone refuses to vote for anyone but the lesser of two evils, and then people are shocked and appalled that an evil of any kind got elected?
Look, all you need to know about the government is that they take our money by force. If the masses benefited from having a government, they wouldn't need to do that.
No seriously. Think about it. It really is as simple as that. Apple doesn't have to force people to buy their devices.
People aren't extorted for their benefit, but the extorter's, even if the extortion is shrouded in brainwashing, propaganda, rituals and so on.
So once you accept that taxation is extortion and politicians are psychopaths, you'll start being able to make sense of the insanity of the world.
We already live in an anarcho-capitalist society. It's just that in the U.S., there is a government that has managed to convince most of the others in the area to acquiesce to it. Those few alternate governments that do arise aren't able to convince the U.S. Government and its subsidiaries to choose a different arbitrator than the ones they currently go to.
If you can explain how to construct an Anarcho-capitalist society that somehow prevented a sufficiently militarily strong government from deciding not try to dominate or collude with all other governments operating in its territory, I would love to hear it.
> There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good.
Those people are psychopaths, and they're actually not even offended - they're just pretending to be. They just enjoy playing games, fucking with people, causing frustration/anger/arguing/confusion, etc.
Basically it's just propaganda. They're using complicated econospeak trying to confuse you into thinking that everything is alright.
In reality, nothing has been fixed since 2008, and Western economies are in shambles behind the scenes. It's a confidence game. At this point, investors are close to losing confidence, and when they do, a big crash will happen.
