Is Britain Secretly Funding Its Nuclear Submarine Program? (nytimes.com) 108
Why is the U.K. funding a risky $22 billion joint project with China to produce electricity at twice the cost? mdsolar quotes a nuclear specialist from the University of Oxford:
...it only makes sense if one considers its connection to Britain's military projects -- especially Trident, a roving fleet of armed nuclear submarines, which is outdated and needs upgrading. Hawks and conservatives, in particular, see the Trident program as vital to preserving Britain's international clout...the government and some of its partners in the defense industry, like Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, think a robust civilian nuclear industry is essential to revamping Britain's nuclear submarine program...
Merging programs like research and development or skills training across civilian and military sectors helps cut back on military spending. It also helps maintain the talent pool for nuclear specialists. And given the long lead times and life spans of most nuclear projects, connections between civilian and military programs give companies more incentives to make the major investments required. One might say that with the Hinkley Point project, the British government is using billions of Chinese money to build stealth submarines designed to deter China.
The Op-Ed -- published in The New York Times -- calls for more openness about military spending, arguing "If Britain's energy policy were solely about energy, rather than also about defense, the nuclear sector would be forced to stand on its own two feet."
Merging programs like research and development or skills training across civilian and military sectors helps cut back on military spending. It also helps maintain the talent pool for nuclear specialists. And given the long lead times and life spans of most nuclear projects, connections between civilian and military programs give companies more incentives to make the major investments required. One might say that with the Hinkley Point project, the British government is using billions of Chinese money to build stealth submarines designed to deter China.
The Op-Ed -- published in The New York Times -- calls for more openness about military spending, arguing "If Britain's energy policy were solely about energy, rather than also about defense, the nuclear sector would be forced to stand on its own two feet."
mdsolar (Score:2, Informative)
I know, ad hominem and all that, but nuclear is the only direct, carbon free, base load power source.
Either carbon dioxide emissions matter, in which case the price of generation is irrelevant, or they don't, and everyone can continue to use natural gas and coal for cheap base load.
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If, of course, you choose to ignore the tiny little problem of nuclear waste, for which the current policy is "it's not my generation's problem".
Call back when we have viable fusion power.
Re:mdsolar (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear waste is only a problem because we make it one by refusing to reprocess spent fuel and have some mind numbingly strict storage requirements that really don't make all that much sense.
If we could re-process the spent fuel, two things would happen. 1st the physical amount of high level waste would go DOWN because we would be taking the inert and low level stuff out of the fuel assemblies. Much of the really nasty stuff would decay more quickly on it's own and could be separated out into a much lower volume. Some of this high level stuff could be "burned off" faster by putting it to high levels of neutron flux, making the problem even smaller. 2nd, we'd have a lot of very useful fissionable material that we could then use to generate power with a lot fewer high level waste products.
So, nuclear power is indeed a long term environmental issue, but the technology to deal with this issue is well known and understood. Which leaves the "problems" really limited to cleaning up the "accidents" at these plants, which here to fore has been relatively easy with two notable exceptions. Chernobyl, which was just plain stupidity in both operations and risky design, and The plants in Japan which suffered though TWO natural disasters, both of which were well beyond designed limits and where 2 decades older than the state of the art today.
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You're largely correct. The technically kind of correct. The very best kind of correct. But. Political issues are typically the hardest nut to crack. And they are extraordinarily real. Slashdotters generally don't like to admit this (how many post start with 'just .....?) but you cannot simply wave away crackpot voters, slimeball politicians, annoying defense issues and a host of other squishy things.
We don't have a rational way of disposing high level nuclear waste and I cannot imagine us getting su
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This is simply NOT true. We have a LOT of ways to get rid of HIGH level waste and the best is to separate it into concentrated high level stuff and not so radioactive stuff that we can reuse.
You can usually convert the high level stuff into medium to low levels by exposing it to neutron flux to accelerate the radioactive decay, or if it's the REALLY high level stuff, you just put it into short term storage and wait for nature to take its course. It may take 20 years, but if it's high level stuff it mean
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Yeah, really good argument
also called "Just keep doing it (whatever has failed) HARDER"
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Yea, you don't seem to understand the facts then. We originally planned reprocessing as part of the fuel cycle. It wasn't until the 70's that the plan got put on hold.
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They wound up selling metal grade Plutonium by the ton, rather than pay for storage and guarding.
And yes,they are in real trouble with long term storage, just like us.
The salt caves did not serve, with subsidence and water intrusion
Because reprocessing isn't even a good bandaid.
It's rolling trains full of high level, century lethal radiocargo on predictable tracks that can be hijacked
That or heavily armed
either w
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Solar beats it? Not on your life.... Solar is a really dirty business that uses a lot of energy. Building those solar cells is an environmental nightmare in it's own right, you just don't notice it because most of the bad stuff is done overseas these days but it produces hazardous chemical waste and uses scads of energy. When you get done with all the building, then solar struggles to produce more energy than it uses in production of the equipment before it is worn out.
Or to coin an old phrase: "Stick th
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And the billions spent on non-proliferation "preventative military actions" should burden all commercial nukes (same theory)
MOST solar are predicated on Gallium, indium, aluminum and phosphorous.
None of them but indium is scarce to speak of, nor uses particularly dangerous chemicals in and of themselves.
Maximizing profit means using more, rather than less, recycling of the HF based etchants and as for energy consumption, MAYBE you should look at the difference between the costs of ore processi
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tiny little problem
Well at least you agree it's a tiny little problem like most of the rest of the world who aren't afraid of the terrorist boogeymen and thus don't decide to reprocess.
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If, of course, you choose to ignore the tiny little problem of nuclear waste, for which the current policy is "it's not my generation's problem". Call back when we have viable fusion power.
It's only a problem because we allow it to be one. There are many solutions to the problem...most of the best of which we have said no to for primarily political reasons, namely from the Cold War at that.
We could re-use it for things that have lower fissile material requirements, etc.
Or we could change the space treaties to allow it to be sent into the sun. It's not like we don't send nuclear material into space already - most satellites are powered through either solar and/or nuclear, and many deep s
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Or we could change the space treaties to allow it to be sent into the sun.
Do you have any idea what kind of energy it takes to send something to the sun? Earth's orbital speed is around 70,000 mph, that's 70,000 mph you have to decelerate your payload.
Speaking of the payload, nuclear waste consists of heavy atoms. Heavier than lead, or gold. Have fun getting that even into earth/sun orbit at an acceptable cost.
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You don't have to decelerate the entire 70,000 mph, because you're not trying to land softly on the sun. All you actually have to do is lower the periapsis of your orbit such that it ends up inside the sun. I mean, we got probes to Mercury, which would have required additional energy to actually be captured in orbit, which we don't care about in this case.
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All you actually have to do is lower the periapsis of your orbit such that it ends up inside the sun.
Okay, what's the minimum delta-v required to pull that off?
we got probes to Mercury
Yeah -- With payload masses ranging from 1/2 to 1 metric ton... Without in-depth research, there seem to be at least 70,000,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US alone -- and that doesn't include the equally heavy radiation shielding etc. For the foreseeable future, this won't work. Cheap mass-driver launches might help at some point.
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Okay, what's the minimum delta-v required to pull that off?
The best answer I could find (without a ton of effort, honestly) is this [stackexchange.com]. I have no idea how the calculation is done, so I can't comment on the accuracy, but the claim is that a bi-elliptic transfer could potentially do it in between 3000-8000 m/s (from LEO). Take that for what it's worth.
we got probes to Mercury
Yeah -- With payload masses ranging from 1/2 to 1 metric ton...
Fair enough.
Without in-depth research, there seem to be at least 70,000,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US alone
Whoa, I think you're off by an order of magnitude. According to this [nei.org], the entire industry has only produced 76,430 metric tons in the last 4 decades, and is currently generating between about 2,000 metric tons
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Whoa, I think you're off by an order of magnitude.
Uh, yes. I meant kg, not tons, my bad. My source was treehugger [treehugger.com] though, not sure how serious their data is.
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Or we could change the space treaties to allow it to be sent into the sun.
Do you have any idea what kind of energy it takes to send something to the sun? Earth's orbital speed is around 70,000 mph, that's 70,000 mph you have to decelerate your payload.
Well, we don't really care at what speed it hits the sun at, nor what damage is done to the vessel carrying it. For all that matters it could be a simple slingshot manuever to set it on the right trajectory so the craft could even be re-usable - e.g re-usable stage 1 and 2 rockets to move to orbit (see SpaceX), stage 3 connects to an existing orbiter that then takes its times (6 month? year? doesn't really matter) to set the item on trajectory, and returns. Stage 3 departs from orbiter and without using any
Re:mdsolar (Score:5, Informative)
Call back when we have viable fusion power.
Fusion produces high levels of neutron flux, creating radioactive isotopes in the reactor structure. It is somewhat cleaner than fission, but the waste problem doesn't just magically go away.
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I know about this, but it's a problem that poses itself only when you dismantle an old plant, or otherwise substitute materials in a running one, so the amount and frequency of waste is much lower, plus we're talking of nuclear isotopes of otherwise stable materials, activated by the neutron flux. Once the flux stops, they tend to decay pretty quickly. I'm not saying that the waste problem goes away, just that it's manageable within a lifetime.
tritium (Score:2)
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"Call back when we have viable fusion power."
The "Let's wait for..." argument is a trap. As soon as we do get viable fusion power, the flat-earth lobby will come up for a reason to come out against it. Ditto with thorium or the liquid-fueled molten salt designs which use current-generation nuclear waste as a fuel.
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To make nuclear power viable requires switching one country over and using that country as an example. So take a smaller 2nd world country struggling with importing energy (gas, coal, oil) and those costs resulting in energy shortages and switch them over to nuclear and electric vehicles. Charge for the electricity based upon the actual cost to produce, plus a small margin, rather than crippling it with market rates and massive profit margins and the world will follow when that country succeeds after it's e
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After those medium-term isotopes have popped off, the main problem with dumping waste is that you would be throwing away the unburned 95% of the fissionable elements in the original fuel. This is why we need to open Yucca Mountain as a safe place to dry-store this stuff until we build reactors that can burn up that remaining usable fuel. Yucca already almost finished, and the $5 billion has already been spent on it. Trump or Johnson just needs to open it and start receiving spent fuel.
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That is what UK is counting on.
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* Very near snorkel depth...
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Nor the countless driving hours to guard the warehoused high level radiowastes for the next 600 years
nor the enormous costs of wars to keep open access to the monopolists who set the world price for IMOX, yellowcake and Thorium Floride fuels.
Oh, wait, compared with solar?
Total LOSER!
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I know, ad hominem and all that, but nuclear is the only direct, carbon free, base load power source.
... except for hydro and geothermal.
Besides, the UK doesn't really need "base load", they need intermittent power that can be brought on-line quickly when there is a gap in wind and solar. Like gas turbines.
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"... except for hydro and geothermal."
Now try to build a hydro or a geothermal plant in any area infested with Greens.
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Now try to build a hydro or a geothermal plant in any area infested with Greens.
Most greenies that I know are pro-geothermal. Geothermal using pressurized injection can cause minor tremors, but that isn't much of a problem if they are in lightly populated rural areas.
Anyway, green opposition to dams and geothermal is weak compared to their opposition to nukes.
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it's nuclear or nothing
"Nothing" is actually a pretty good option. Incandescent bulbs are still common in the UK, while LED bulbs now cost half a pound. Variable speed DC motors, attic insulation, motion sensors on street lights, etc. often pay for themselves in a few years. There is plenty of room for reducing or shifting demand.
(noting that geothermal is actually nuclear
Only if you are a pedantic idiot. Geothermal energy is no more "nuclear" than solar, wind, wood, coal, or gas. All energy is ultimately nuclear, but that isn't what "nuclear power" means.
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How is geothermal nuclear?
Solar, wind, wood, coal or gas aren't, in any way.
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How is geothermal nuclear?
The heat in the earth is the result on radioactive decay, mostly from thorium, over the last few billion years.
Solar, wind, wood, coal or gas aren't, in any way.
Solar energy comes from the sun, which is powered by nuclear fusion. Wind, wood, coal and gas are just indirect forms of solar energy.
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Hydro exists. Providing baseboard a hell of a lot longer than nukes.
Re:mdsolar; not entirely accurate (Score:2)
However, nuke is the only one that that is not site-specific.
We need more nukes, but not the Gen 3 BS. We need SMRs.
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Is Britain Secretly Funding Its Nuclear Submarine Program?
Maybe.
Why is the U.K. funding a risky $22 billion joint project with China to produce electricity at twice the cost? mdsolar quotes a nuclear specialist from the University of Oxford: ...it only makes sense if one considers its connection to Britain's military projects -- especially Trident
No it doesn't. The UK already imports a couple GW via horrendously expensive HVDC cable from France. Plus if they wanted it to apply to their defense program they
Deaths per terawatt... (Score:1, Interesting)
Just the deaths per terawatt statistics of nuclear compared to everything else should make people rethink nuclear energy.
I wonder what the world would be like had the 3MI not happened, and Carter's permanent moratorium on new power reactor construction not happened. Energy too cheap to meter, perhaps?
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Yes, because all the mining deaths related to coal, or oil extraction deaths, or mining deaths related to the rare earths or metal required for wind, solar, geothermal, or waves don't count at all.
Never mind the deaths resulting from the health hazards of extracting and burning coal or burning oil. Derp.
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Just the deaths per terawatt statistics of nuclear compared to everything else should make people rethink nuclear energy.
I wonder what the world would be like had the 3MI not happened, and Carter's permanent moratorium on new power reactor construction not happened. Energy too cheap to meter, perhaps?
There's been new nuclear plants that have gone online since Carter. It's primarily the EPA, Green Peace, and the liberals that don't want and get in the way of Nuclear - despite it being the safest of all energy technologies, with the fewest injuries/deaths world wide - even when you take into account 3MI, Chernobyl, and Fukishima. It's one of those delicious ironies - find something that does what they like, and they'll still find something to complain about in order to reject it.
It sounds like... (Score:2)
Re:It sounds like... (Score:5, Funny)
Britain is an island mon, like Hawaii or Jamica. We got the blue skies every day. Never rains, just a tropical paradise. Britain's sheep grow spandex instead of wool.
Re: Close (Score:3)
...Britain's sheep grow spandex instead of wool.
Close... fallout from Chenobyl ended raining down on the Welsh highlands (West side of UK island) causing a ban on the sale of farm animals in affected areas (mainly sheep): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-w... [bbc.co.uk]
In total, 344 Welsh farms were put under restrictions, with animals' radiation levels monitored before they were allowed to be sold at market. The number of failing animals peaked in 1992, but some still recorded higher levels of caesium as recently as 2011.
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Unsurprisingly, when it is cloudy, it also tends to be windy ......
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mdsolar (Score:1)
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One proposed alternative to Hinckley Point was for Rolls Royce to build a fleet of "small modular reactors", i.e. nuclear sub reactors -- maybe thar was what the "obscure" document was talking about, because the whole point of Hinckley point is that there is no UK civil nuclear industry -- Hinckley is a French/German design, built by France and financed by France and China.
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No it isn't. A *stopped* one is, on average.
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No, because it makes no sense -- there is basically no commonality at all between a huge PWR like the EPR and the tiny little things in subs. Amusingly, one of the proposed alternatives to Hinckley Point was to buld lots of "small modular reactors" which basically proposed bulding lot's of nuclear sub reactors and installing them in every industrial estate -- if that plan had been followed maybe he'd have had a point...
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No, the alternative to nuclear ain't carbon, that's the only point I might agree with those nuclear nutcracks.
Yes it is. It's the only thing with the energy density required.
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But Thor... I... um... MY god carries a hammer! YOUR god died nailed to a cross? Any solar panels NOW?
You forgot to log in MDSOLAR.. (Score:1)
Remember, when you post, remember to log in, otherwise people dont realise you are shilling your own crap!
Two nations separated by common fantasy (Score:2, Funny)
Trump: I will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it
May: I will build a new nuclear submarine fleet and make China pay for it
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"Two nations separated by common fantasy"
Well, except for the fact that Trump quite openly and repeatedly said the first, whereas May not only never acknowledged- let alone "admitted" the truth of- the "story" and certainly hasn't come close to saying anything like the second quote even allowing for paraphrasing... but also that the only "evidence" that this might even be the case is an unsubstantiated article that speculates on some vague connection between Hinkley Point and Trident without explaining clearly how that might work (i.e. how the ove
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President Trump, we have good news and bad news.
The good news is that Mexicans agreed to build the wall. In fact over forty million Mexican volunteers totally finished it in a matter of weeks.
The bad news is that they built it while standing on our side.
Why build one (Score:3)
Clever mdsolar (Score:2)
Publishing an article which promises to have some kind of anti-nuclear scandal but behind a paywall so we can't fact check it. Clever mdsolar. You've finally found a way to win.
Peter Wynn Kirby (Score:5, Informative)
I started to read through the NYTimes article, and about half-way through realized that it's an opinion piece. I had to check the summary just to make sure I didn't get baited.
I looked up the author, Peter Wynn Kirby.
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff... [ox.ac.uk]
"Peter Wynn Kirby is an environmental specialist, ethnographer, and Research Fellow in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford"
So you'd think this guy would have a PhD in geology, chemistry, or one of the other physical sciences. Nope, his PhD is in Social Anthropology from Cambridge. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but that's hardly what I'd call a "nuclear specialist from the University of Oxford" as the summary states.
Not to mention that this falls under Betteridge's Law....
Hanlon's Razor (Score:1)
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
And as we have demonstrated repeatedly over the last few years, we have a metric (soon to be imperial) fuck-ton of stupidity!
Has mdsolar jumped the shark? (Score:4, Funny)
I think most of us have suspected for some time that mdsolar is a shill for the nuclear industry, paid to make supporters of renewable energy look ridiculous, but this latest screed is just too over the top and risks exposing his true agenda.
Betteridge doesn't work here.... (Score:2)
If you have competition in something, one of the easiest ways to keep them guessing is to hide the costs behind it. Companies keep secrets from another (e.g. "trade secrets", "private financial records", etc...). Countries do the same thing.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
There's about 0 overlap between civilian nuclear reactors and submarine powerplants. The UK might as well hide the SSBN budget inside the NHS.
The cost for a new nuclear submarine powerplant has been openly discussed already, making it unlikely they'd try to hide that cost now.
Then again, it's an mdsolar submission, so par for the course.
Navy (Score:2)
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But that's exactly the opposite of what the article reported says -- they claim civilian nuclear power is a trojan horse for the military, now you're claiming the military is subsidising civil nuclear power. Please get back to us when you've got your story straight.
By tbe way, the UK is not the US and the 2010's are not the 1960's.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
The UK has has 3 historic nuclear issues to think about.
In the very early days it trusted the USA to share atomic work as an equal. The UK never got anything back and had to start its own expensive work.
Tube Alloys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "The United States terminated cooperation after the war ended."
That was a huge issue that shaped the UK's thinking on ever trusting the US again for generations.
"The cost for a new nuclear submarine power plant" would be in buying US turnkey stock or a shared US platform again.
The second issue is Scotland and the one site the UK really needs to work on its subs. With the EU, calls for Scotland to alter its role in the UK again, having a new site in England is now more vital.
"Britain will lose nuclear capability for 20 years if Scotland votes for independence" (24 Oct 2012)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
A new site for fuel, modern sub repair and work within England would be a new cost.
As for the overlap, recall the origins of the materials, Capenhurst Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Sellafield, Chapelcross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], the use of the Magnox reactors. Recall how long Calder Hall was kept running for military plutonium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Tritium from Chapelcross. Dual-purpose sites, with electric power production.
The history of the UK's thinking on power production and its military needs is very easy to find.
So now the new reactors are been considered. What new weapon designs would be needed to replace Trident?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
" One othe the public options considered was:
Maybe it's about saving lives, not money? (Score:2)
The global rate of deaths per trillion kWH for coal power is 100,000.
The global rate of deaths per trillion kWH for coal power is 4,000.
The global rate of deaths per trillion kWH for hydroelectric power is 1,400.
The global rate of deaths per trillion kWH for wind power is 150.
The global rate of deaths per trillion kWH for nuclear power is 90.
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Er, that second one, 4,000 deaths per trillion kWH? That was supposed to be natural gas, not coal.
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That 40kg or so of Plutonium per year from Dimona would be going into a few bombs that could cause a few deaths.
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Yeah, see, I'm not ESR, the guy who's been editing the Jargon File since the late 1980s, and who added entries like "Fisking". I'm just an archivist, of every version I've been able to lay my hands on. The only agenda involved in the Jargon File Text Archive is making as much of the File's history as available as possible to everyone; I've got versions, from before and after ESR started editing, that were previously not collected anywhere else.
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Conversely your coal figures include mining accidents and an estimate of deaths from pollution.
It's a bit hard to draw a comparison so putti
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Actually, no, the source I'm using for that nuclear death estimate number explicitly includes deaths from accidents in making material for nuclear weapons, waste handling, uranium mining (both accidents and radiation exposure), no-linear-threshold analysis of radiation exposure, the maximal estimates of Chernobyl and Fukushima deaths (including the deaths from evacuation-related stress in Fukushima), and so on.
It's the sources that don't do that that come up with stupid things like "Zero civilian nuclear de
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Well that is a pleasant change and the first time I've seen someone here arguing this point doing such a thing.
I usually get people trying to push the "fly ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste" angle at me, which is ridiculous on so many levels especially since the heavy metals (apart from mercury) end up in the bott
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My hat is leadfoil, you insensitive clod!
Re:Loony 1 gets Op-Ed in NYT, loony 2 posts on /. (Score:4, Funny)
One has to balance the practicalities between effectiveness and usefulness.
I imagine lead would do a much better job at blocking alien mind-reading technology than tin; however, tinfoil would be lighter and easier to wear. If the leadfoil is too heavy to wear when walking the dog, who really is going to use it?
Tin foil might only block out some alien technologies and leadfoil blocks them, but let's face it; no-one is going to wear the leadfoil in public unless they're crazy, So it's tinfoil for me all the way. Might not work as well, but at least it is wearable.
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See, [glances around, drops voice to whisper] it's not... not the aliens... it's the... the... RADIASHUN! Cuz NUKYULAR!
Think about it: (Score:2)
What do you see?
Aluminum foil.
It's almost as if someone didn't want the public to have easy access to proper tin foil.
Think about it.
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I still use tin for the hat, but my briefs are lead-lined!