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Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous, in the same way that religious conservatives like STDs such as HIV - because they provide a grounding
by asciilifeform 18y ago
Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous, in the same way that religious conservatives like STDs such as HIV - because they provide a grounding in reality for some of their pathological whining and blind hatreds.
- Retric 18y agoI agree that extreamly radioactive substances tend to be valueable, but there is a lot of low grade waste that's not worth reprocessing. It's not cost effective to do anything with reactor walls after you decomission a reactor. Granted these things tend to become less dangerous over time, but dumping that stuff into a large geologicaly stable hole in the ground seems like a great option.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoAnother effective way to deal with the low grade waste is to pulverize it and spread the dust in the wilderness. Or mix it with concrete and build a school with it. A concrete example: In terms of radiation dose, a depleted uranium cutting board is equivalent to granite countertops. Most low level radioactive waste is just not that dangerous. Dilution is as effective as storage.
- sp332 18y agoThat's what they said about dumping garbage in the ocean.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoThe main issue with garbage is volume/surface area. Fishing nets are huge. The volume of low level nuclear waste is so low as to be negligable.
- ramchip 18y agoImagine the public uproar there would be if a school were built with anything that sounds like "nuclear waste". Also, AFAIK depleted uranium comes from the enrichment process, not from the actual reactor.
- asciilifeform 18y agoAmusingly, every American school I've ever been inside was built of cinderblock - a type of brick made from the fairly radioactive ashes from the exhaust of coal power plants. Don't take my word for it, ask a kid to take a Geiger counter to school one day. (I wonder if that is an expellable offense in our times?)
- adrianwaj 18y agoThere was a recent thread about amateur rockets: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583550 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583550 The technology is becoming more accessible and cheaper. Why not just pack the most dangerous nuclear waste onto a rocket and blast it out of the atmosphere and out of any orbit, perhaps into the sun?? The risk is something happening to the rocket on the way up. It sounds absurd but there's a lot more radioactive things in space, and costs for such a procedure seem to be lowering.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doesn't seem too bright.
- billswift 18y agoRockets DO fail. Scattering dangerous radioactive waste over a large area doens't seem too bright.
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- asciilifeform 18y agoIt should be noted that the force with which the contents of an exploding rocket hit the ground is not infinite, and objects have been built to withstand it. In particular, the casing of the plutonium bricks used in the radiothermal generators which powered certain space probes had this property.
- ensignavenger 18y agoI'm religious and conservative (Don't know if I'm a "religious conservative", though- depends on your definition, I guess) and I most certainly do NOT like STD's! I am not worried about contracting one myself, but I don't want any one else to either. I don't do those sorts of things (pre/extra marital sex) but I have friends who do, and I don't want them to get an STD.
- biohacker42 18y agoYou are a rational human being. Your type is quiet and doesn't make the headlines. The "religious conservatives" who do make the headlines are not like you.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoYes. Unfortunately we live in a world on the web where people who are religious, atheists, conservative, liberal, or whatever are put into little boxes and made fun of. This is what passes for wisdom anymore (instead of rational, clear discussion about beliefs and issues)
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- rw 18y agoSome anti-nuclear activists do. Have you only ever seen whiny and blind activism?
- stuff4ben 18y agoYour argument is ridiculous. I know of no religious conservatives or anyone else for that matter who like STDs. You should research a little more before spewing your own blind hatred since many religious conservatives donate their time and money to eliminate those same diseases as well as poverty, hunger, and others laudable goals. Obviously one can go on and on about the various good things that religious conservatives do. My point was that it is disingenuous to portray all religious conservatives as a group that enjoys the pain and suffering of fellow human beings in order to further their goals.
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- asciilifeform 18y ago> know of no religious conservatives or anyone else for that matter who like STDs Then you willfully ignorant, at best: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hiv+god's+punishment&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq= http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hiv+god's+punishmen... I stand by my argument. Whether or not they openly claim to like STDs, religious conservatives and, say, HIV are natural friends. To the extent that the fundamentalist religions actually believe in their stated goals of discouraging promiscuous and homosexual conduct, the popular fear of HIV et al helps to make sexual mores more Victorian than they otherwise would be. If and when we exterminate all STDs (a pocket-sized instant tester costing <$100 would do just that, and may be around the corner) and develop perfect unobtrusive birth control (say, immunocontraceptives currently being tested), sexual taboos will eventually go the way of the taboo on working on Sundays. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct will be viewed as revolting anachronisms.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoWay to take an unrepresentative part to mean the whole. Stop generalizing. That google search proves nothing except that there are a bunch of vocal idiots on the internet. It's not like that's something foreign. Don't make up silly hypothetical "if" statements. Let us look at reality: contraceptives are supported by most religious people. To say that religion is against contraception is to look at outmoded views from again, an unrepresentative part of an entire religion. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct are already viewed by many as revolting anachronisms -- so you're just using a hypothetical statement to make an incorrect generalization to support the viewpoint you hold. You're wrong.
- tvon 18y ago> Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous (...) That really doesn't make any sense. They are opposed to nuclear power because they don't perceive it to be safe (which they learned from disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), if it was perceived to be safe then they wouldn't be opposed to it. It's not like they hate the power it would give or the jobs i wold create, there is no other agenda for them to oppose it on (unless you're talking about astroturfing campaigns by alternatives, in which case I misunderstood you). Extreme religious conservatives are another story (and I add 'extreme' because someone can be religious, conservative, and perfectly sane).
- asciilifeform 18y ago> It's not like they hate the power it would give Please read the writings of the prominent environmentalists. Many of them want humans to hurry up and go extinct. Not necessarily in so many words, but anyone who advocates a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is in fact calling for the murder of the billions of people who are alive only due to agriculture, of a kind which depends on modern energy sources.
- tvon 18y agoYou are applying extreme positions held by a minority to broad groups of people who don't hold those positions. To imply that being an environmentalist means advocating a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle is absurd. Honestly it's starting to sound a bit hypocritical given your original statement.
- asciilifeform 18y agoI'm not simply talking about openly declared human-extinction advocates. The death by starvation of billions is a logical consequence of perfectly mainstream environmentalist platforms - pushing for the elimination of nuclear power, factory farming, pesticides, genetically-engineered crops, and other technologies which make our historically-unprecedented abundance of food and other necessities possible. I simply don't care about anyone's stated goals. What I care about is the logically inevitable results of the changes they are pursuing.
- thingie 18y agoI have already heard that it's in fact good that drugs have so many negative effects, because otherwise almost everyone would use them. But author of the idea wasn't able to explain why would it matter, if there were no negative effects. Because drugs are bad anyway, mmmkay? Sadly, this way of thinking isn't that uncommon :/ (and not limited to religious conservatives)
- cia_plant 18y agoIf it is irrational to fear a nuclear catastrophe, then why are the nuclear companies indemnified against exactly such a catastrophe by the Price-Anderson act? The industry has repeatedly lobbied for this act, so it seems that they are also afraid. Various reports have been produced by the NRC which attempt to "prove" that the chance of a catastrophe is low (1 in a million or what have you). The methodology of these studies is somewhat laughable: a catalogue of all possible failures is created, and a probability is estimated for each one; then the probabilities are multiplied by the consequences of the failure. So, there might be an estimate that a tornado will hit a plant every 100 years; given that a tornado hits a plant, there is a 1 in 10 chance that the containment will fail; and so on. Anyone who has worked in software knows that it is absurd to try to catalogue all failure modes of a complex system. Additionally, these reports have been marred by corruption. The Reactor Safety Study, produced in 1975, was eventually repudiated by the NRC in 1979. It was enormously misleading, summarizing the risks of nuclear power in terms of "early fatalities," whereas the cumulative fatalities from radiation exposure are far more serious. It is based on these sorts of flawed, self-serving studies that the nuclear industry brags about how "safe" its practices are. Overall, I find the tone of the nuclear debate very disappointing. Nuclear supporters seem to pretend that anti-nuclear activists are just irrational, with no arguments worth worrying about. There is not even an acknowledgment that there are still hard problems to solve with nuclear, or that mistakes were made in the past.
- asciilifeform 18y agoCoal power plants steadily spew radioactive ash into the atmosphere. This is an empirically verifiable fact. And I have yet to see an anti-nuke activist give a rat's ass about dead coal miners - of whom there is a never-ending, steady flow. You lose.
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- jfornear 18y agoComments like this should not be condoned on HN...
- Tichy 18y agoSorry, but that conspiracy theory does not add up. If they would not honestly believe the stuff was dangerous, they would have no reason to be against it.
- Adam503 18y agoTell us all how anti-nuclear activists caused Chernobyl. Ohhh... they didn't. "Nuclear submarine leaked radioactive waste into British waters, secret report reveals The Royal Navy's main nuclear submarine base has repeatedly leaked radioactive waste into the sea, previously secret documents show. Radioactive coolant and contaminated water were accidentally dumped into the sea at Faslane, near Glasgow, at least three times in recent years. And an internal Navy report described a 'recurrent theme' of failures to follow safety rules. The nuclear watchdog said problems were so serious it would have considered shutting the base down had it been a civilian operation - but it has no such legal powers over military sites...." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1173881/Nuclear-submarine-leaked-radioactive-waste-British-waters-secret-report-reveals.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1173881/Nuclear-subm... THIS is why the anti-nuclear movement is as strong as it is. They know the military and the nuclear industry HIDES serious accidents, Sometimes the military makes the accidents state secrets, and the radioactive material is left right where it spilled. This British Sub base has trashed the surrounding countryside and the people live near the base will be starting to drop dead from weird cancers any day now. Not to mention all of the former Soviet Navy bases are trashed by subs leaking radioactive waste.