No, but it’s not a matter of trust. The Navy is a military establishment and is not set up to run a public utility.
You know what, you may be right, but all the same, this thread got me to watch this really awesome video. Thank you for linking to it - I loved it.
Good thing the levers of power are in the hands of hard-headed realists. Businessmen, for the most part. Lucky us.
Well, your biting sarcasm has certainly convinced me that we should ignore a bountiful source of relatively clean energy on account of ill-informed paranoia and stupidity. Hey, look! A Benedict Arnold boss! Get 'im, lads!
Perhaps. One the first point, there is some heft to that. But finally, nuke power is inherently dangerous, it maufactures some of the most poisonous shit the world has ever known, shit that does for toxic what the sun does for hot. I am pleased and encouraged by the safety records for nuke power achieved by the French and Japanese. But that doesn’t settle the issue, in my mind. After all these years, we still haven’t resolved the waste storage issues, even as we are encouraged to rush pell-mell into more! Shit, hippies plan better than that! We know that which goes around, comes around. A lot of the rest of you are a little slow on the uptake. About forty years.
As well, I am inherently skeptical about programs urged upon me by the self same people who expect to profit thereby. I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking. The same guys who sold you a Corvair are selling you an SUV.
And lastly, touch upon the necessity. Nuke power is necessary to fuel a consumerist economy wildly out of control, the operative word being “consume”. I align myself with the techno-Amish on this one, if we used the good sense the Goddess gave us, we wouldn’t need to take such risks. You want doomsay: here, I’ll make it this simple: kill the consumer economy, or it will kill you.
Not the slightest idea what you’re on about here. Whazza “Benedict Arnold boss”? A running dog jackal of the ruling class? Alger Hiss? A Tory?
nitpick: The SL-1 was part of an Army program, not Navy. Cite.
With all due respect, the Navy does hide problems. Sometimes information is not released for many years. How do we know that other information is not hidden permanently? I agree with you that the Navy runs a tighter operation than most.
Nava, in your search for ethical solultions, which is in itself commendable, rarely should you base your own opinions of people or organizations on the second hand insights of one person with only one encounter with one tiny fraction of the membership of a group – especially if that person is the sort of fellow likely to interprete a “glare” as threatening.
Maybe many in Greenpeace have poor judgment. There are otherswith motives that are purely altruistic and ideas that are inspired. Why the need to put them all into one category?
No, I am not a member. But I do invite them in to supper when they show up at my front door.
Peace to all!
More sarcasm, elucidator! I thrive on it! (Pounds common message board desk.
Yes, yes, the hippies know best and none of the rest of us even consider the waste issues. Certainly, I presented nuclear power as a veritable panacea, a thermodynamics-defying source of free energy that comes with a free dishcloth and a smile.
Or maybe I’m just pragmatic about the relative benefits and costs of various generation methods, and believe that the problem of disposal, while tricky, is a far lesser one than the problems of what is easily the cheapest and most abundant form of power currently available to us, namely coal. Perhaps I just think it’s best to have this discussion in a sane manner, rather than screaming shrilly about THE TERRORISTS and worrying that someone might actually make a profit (gasp!) turning my lights on. If you paid any attention whatsoever, you’d notice that far more people than just plant builders are now pushing nuclear energy. Indeed, a growing number of environmentalists recognise that it represents perhaps the most realistic chance of cutting our emissions by any meaningful amount.
This is why it’s rather annoying that you simply turn up here and attempt argument by scorn. Some people are rightly complaining that Greenpeace are using ludicrous fearmongering and idiocy to poison what could be a sensible debate. The best you can do is pitch up and try and turn it round into some caricatured battle between the corporations (maaaaan) and the enlightened souls who want … well, something. What exactly does “kill the consumer economy” mean, anyhow? Are you able to tell me, in plain language? Do you even know?
So far, pretty much, yeah. But now that you mention it, where are you going to put it?
"Currently"being the operative word. Wind power is a small, but real, thing now. Many granola bowls ago, it was a fantasy, a wild eyed delusion that would earn one at best a pat on the head from the grown-ups, but mostly scorn and contempt. Had we put the resources then, had we funded the serious research then, where might we be now? Put it another way: would you opt for nuclear power if you didn’t have to? We both recognize there are dangers, disposal is “tricky”.
I’m sure that you do, far be it from you to stoop to character assassination and baseless derision.
I agree that intelligent and thoughtful people agree with you. Intelligent and thoughtful people also agree with me, people who hardly spend any time at all screaming, shrilly or otherwise. And I have indeed “paid any attention”, for a considerable bit of time, actually. Perhaps longer than you’ve been alilve.
Thankfully, you would never stoop to such.
So, just to be clear…it is your position that GrP et. al. are purveyors of “ludicrous fearmongering and idiocy” and have no case, none whatsoever? That the issue is entirely settled in the same way as notions of “flat earth” and “Creationism” are entirely settled, that no intelligent and knowledgeable person disagrees with your profound wisdom? None? Anywhere? Anytime? If this is so, how would this “sensible debate” of which you speak even be possible? If what you say is verifiable as purest truth, the only sensible option is to throw ourselves at your feet and blubber for your forgiveness. (Hope for a pony, instead, your odds are better. Not much better, mind you, a list is being kept, and you’re not very nice…)
Oh, I think you do. You seem to have a modestly effective grasp of the language, I rather doubt the point is too obscure for you.
Thanks for the correction. All these years I thought it was Navy. Idaho Falls was strickly Navy & NRC in the Eighties. I must of assumed the SL-1 royal screw-up was a Navy mistake. In a way I am glad to hear it was a Army. This improves the Navy’s record.
Zoe: I am going to go with the theory that from the military the truth usually comes out. If they did not or could not cover up a loss nuclear weapon near Japan, I am guessing they would not or could not cover up any major plant leakages.
I might be naive on this count, but I still trust the Navy far more than Corporate America and especially more than an international. Can you imagine how Tyco or Enron might handle maintenance and construction?
Jim
Same way we do, contract it out to Halliburton/Brown and Root. “Run away! Run away!”
I could never understand the GP tactic of sending people out ina zodiac boat, to cut in front of a whaling ship at full speed. A mangled up zodiac and a dead bodies can really damage your propeller and rudder…I’d sue the buggers!
Maybe I suffer from the same skullbone-density problem, but I’m not sure what it means either.
I’d hardly contradict your suggestion that consumerism has grown beyond obscenity, but how do you propose to “kill” the economy? Global communism? Did you mean your “Amish” comment more literally than I first took it? We should usher in a new age of bicycles and candlelight?
I’m with you on finding alternative fuel sources, but if you honestly think there’s a way to convince the world’s population to stop coveting big, flashy, expensive, powerful automobiles and billions of dollars worth of flashy, expensive, essentially worthless consumer crap, I’m all ears.
I for one would like to know Greenpeace’s plan for replacing all the fossil and nuclear electrical generation in the US. I’d like to see their scientific, broad-spectrum peer-reviewed plan with cost-benefit analysis.
In 2005, 4,054,688 GWhr were generated by all sources in the US. Of that total, 364,519 GWhr were from hydroelectric and “other renewables.” In other words, about 9%.
Cite: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
Sadly, I can’t seem to find on their website their plan for replacing 91% of the US electrical generation with renewables, conservation, DSM, or anything else. I can however find a “scientific” article about their trespass of Didcot coal power station, which contains at least two major scientific/Engineering errors in it. At least I hope they’re errors, and not blatant lies.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/climate-campaigners-shut-down
Either way, it’s hard to respect someone that doesn’t respect the public enough to be accurate or truthful. Which is a shame, because the net goal of reducing fossil energy and increasing renewable energy is one that I and many other of the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil Engineers out there in the power industry share. I guess the difference is I’m doing something about it every week (just this morning, I officially approved a plan to reduce CO2 emissions by more than 200,000 tons per year at a power plant, and at last month I recommended a 25MW biomass plant be built), and Greenpeace, for a large part, is doing public relations stunts.
I think wind power is marvellous (I even find the farms pretty, and can’t understand those who complain about the sight), but it is both much more expensive and, in terms of capacity, highly unlikely to supply our needs within the next century, if ever. Personally, I’d like to see both developed, at the expense of fossil generation. I think nuclear fission in the short (read: 50 to 100 years) is indeed our best chance of reducing carbon emissions, and that the disposal problem is far more tractable than the problem of merrily pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Which makes it all the more strange that in response to what you must surely admit is crackpot scaremongering of the first order (do you think the Greenpeace advert is sensible?), the best you can offer is this tired old line about those naughty capitalists. Were the energy companies of the world run entirely by the very finest apparatchiks of the noble State, we would still have the same technologies on offer, with the same pros and cons. We’d still need a sane debate, and we could still do without ideological harpies preying on popular fears to make a point. I feel capable of admitting when people on “my side” are acting like dickheads; why do you feel compelled to throw up a smokescreen when Greenpeace are quite rightly accused of doing the same?
You’ve done rather a lot of reading between a great deal of lines, and come up with some absolute bollocks. My position is that Greenpeace, in reverting to this sort of base propaganda, are utterly abdicating any responsibility to enter in to a sensible debate whatsoever. You, by defending them with cheesy Fight The Man type arguments, are assisting wholeheartedly. That’s all.
You’re too kind. I can of course quite clearly see what the phrase means in its literal sense. What I am trying to get out of you is whether there is even the tiniest element of realism contained in what, on its face, is an utterly vacuous statement. What, specifically, does it mean? Do you want us to do away with money? Stop “consuming”? Consuming what? What is, to you, an acceptable way for us to live our lives, and how do you envisage it happening without production and consumption? Is it a tawdry little communist fantasy in which we all weave wicker baskets to carry our terry-cloth’d young’uns to playschool, eat plantain mush and thatch our huts with the skins, or do you have anything resembling a useful goal in mind? There doesn’t seem to be much point having a debate on energy policy with someone who thinks we can magic away our needs, and I’d quite like to know whether that’s you or not. Phrases like “kill the consumer economy” do not fill me with a great deal of hope.
No sweat.
Incidentally, I was told, back when I was a Navy nuke, that while Naval reactors are designed to operate at 50% of their theoretical safety margin, commercial reactors have their operating limits set to allow operation in the neighborhood of 90% (so as to allow for profitability). A submarine or aircraft carrier doesn’t need to pull a profit, so the extra safety designed in doesn’t detract from its reason for being built.
I was told this by an officer, though, so take that with as much salt as you find appropriate. 
With respect, I think that the officer was either completely incorrect or else it was an honest mis-statement of capacity factor. Capacity factor is the ratio of:
Actual generation in a year, MW*hr
Maximum possible MW * 8760 hr
Many nuclear plants do operate at capacity factors above 90% because it is profitable - however, that has little relation to safety factor. Safety factors on many critical systems of commercial nuclear equipment are often 300%, and for things like the ABWR are as much as 1000% (or more, IIRC some pumping systems have 3000% safety factors).
Another way that the statement could be an honest mistake by the officer is in terms of the maximum steam pressure. It would be true that there may only be a 10% margin in maximum steam pressure on a commercial nuclear plant (same as a coal plant), but that does not equate directly to a relative safety factor. While it’s true that a plant which operates near its margins would see more steam-side failures, the relationship is nowhere near linear, and the difference between, say, 75% and 90% of maximum steam pressure may not be easy to measure between standard maintenance outages.
Yes, obviously it makes so much more sense to continue undiminished economic support of the terrorism sponsors. :rolleyes:
Hokay. I will interpret your statement to mean that you advocate the socioeconomic platform of Pol Pot.
If you want your statement to be interpreted in some other way, I’m afraid that you will have to go into a great deal of fine detail.
A supportable position, but nonetheless a debateable position.
I’ve offered a bit more than that, that is what you have seized upon in an effort to portray my opinions as hopelessly compromised by ideology. The essence of my point is my distrust of self-interested advocacy. Doesn’t make them wrong, mind you, merely arouses my skepticism. Capitalism isn’t inherently “naughty”, unless you think greed is naughty. As a matter of fact, I do. I have it on Good Authority.
Answering an argument not made. Not about big government statism vs the miracles of the free market. Its about feasibility, reliability, and risk. About which we disagree.
So it is your opinion that the only dishonest debating here is occuring entirely on one side?
I had not noticed such admirable even handedness on your part, when and where did you express such? Was it before or after “hysterical” and “ludicrous fearmongering”? Greenpeace’s excesses and exaggerations are immaterial, they prove nothing beyond the rhetorical skills of Greenpeace. If all you wanted to establish was Greenpeace’s failure in the one instance, it would hardly be worth the verbiage. But you seem intent on bagging larger game, and seek to use this as ammunition. The truth of a proposition is not measured by the character of its proponent, that is the very essence of the ad hominem fallacy.
Not even close. For my own two bits, the vulnerability of nuke sites to terrorist attack is definitely a second-tier argument, a comparatively minor point, such that the larger argument will not stand or fall upon its resolution. GrP can be entirely wrong on this point and it will rate nothing more than a shrug, I fear stupidity far more than malice.
An invitation to the Mother of All Hijacks. Suffice to say that future historians (knock wood…) will gasp in awe at the wealth we have generated and gasp in horror and dismay at the ways in which we squandered it. How many different kinds of dog food do we need? What sane society would offer tax incentives to promote the purchase of SUV’s?
(Hence the throwaway line “techno Amish” to describe a worldview that seeks to use our technological advances to decrease our dependency and to use education to decrease the empty consumerism which is its root cause. To advocate such change at the “root cause” is the very meaning of the word “radical”. I am not convinced that people are born with a deep craving for loud, shiny crap, I believe that are perverted that way by…well, us. I should like us to stop.)