Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
The case for nuclear...

Bloke on another forum I visit wrote:

The fact that coal is worth some $50+ billion a year in export revenue is certainly a troubling issue for the Australian Government. Put a blanket ban on it and our economy would certainly take a big hit crippling Qld and the federal budget. Then the argument goes that these countries, such as Japan and China will simply continue to burn coal as they can get it else where, and in China's case they source 90% themselves it's just that their bonkers growth rate means we can sell to them as well.

I reckon it would be a disaster if we didn't explore all avenues first before going nuclear, but at the same time we don't have an eternity as each set of projects having an ~15 year turn around time, we would hit 2050 before we know it. One only has to read some prominent works from ANU scientists to see that the solar revolution has been promised since 1970 to be just around the corner. If you want to get cynical you will say the coal industry pushed this view as they knew solar had no immediate future but could win them the short term battle over Nuclear, now we bare the climate change realities we can't hide behind coal anymore, large scale solar has to deliver soon.

I base my acceptance of nuclear as a last resort on:
-The assumption that world wide socialism will not break out, thus our standard of living will still rest on competitive market forces for the foreseeable future and production will not be massively halted in the coming years,
- That the state of society is in some ways (health, education etc.) largely improved by the supply of stable baseload electricity, and
- The following work by physicist Bernard Cohen on the relative rating of risks, his is an attempt to seek an objective look at the risks of nuclear in the USA UNDERSTANDING RISK vs those we already accept in our lives.

How it's calculated is that the total years lost are summed and then divided by the overall population. e.g. if 10 out of a 100 die at an age where they have 30 years remaining due to smog, we get (10*30*365)/100 = 1095 days lost on average per person.

Some of the table:

LOSS OF LIFE EXPECTANCY (LLE) DUE TO VARIOUS RISKS
TABLE 1
Activity or risk* LLE (days)

Living in poverty 3500
Being male (vs. female) 2800
Cigarettes (male) 2300
Heart disease* 2100
Being unmarried 2000
Being black (vs. white) 2000
Socioeconomic status low 1500
Working as a coal miner 1100
Cancer* 980
30-lb overweight 900
Grade school dropout 800
Sub-optimal medical care* 550
Stroke* 520
15-lb overweight 450
All accidents* 400
Alcohol*230
Motor vehicle accidents 180
Drug abuse* 100
Air pollution* 80
Small cars (vs. midsize) 60
Married to smoker 50
Drowning* 40
Speed limit: 65 vs. 55 miles per hour* 40
Radiation worker, age 18-65 25
Firearms* 11
Birth control pills 5
All electricity nuclear (UCS)* 1.5 (using the concerned scientists data)
Peanut butter (1 Tbsp./day) 1.1
Hurricanes, tornadoes* 1
Airline crashes* 1
Dam failures* 1
Living near nuclear plant 0.4
All electricity nuclear (NRC)* 0.04 (more friendly data)

*asterisks indicate averages over total U.S. population; others refer to those exposed.

Interesting to note that technically it would be safer to build more power plants to keep people in bigger cars, than to simply all drive small cars at the same current speed limits.
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
Yes, you read right, according to some data you are almost three times as likely to die of peanut butter as you are of nuclear power generation.
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
AussieReaper
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
+5,761|6340|what

Spark wrote:

Yes, you read right, according to some data you are almost three times as likely to die of peanut butter as you are of nuclear power generation.
Well, peanut butter causes an alergic reaction and your esophagus can close over. It's actually a more frequent occurance now days, especially in young children. Scientists put it down to the fact that homes are cleaner, far more germ free, and children don't pick up the exposures at an early age and so lose the immunities they should have developed naturally.
https://i.imgur.com/maVpUMN.png
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
Well, obviously then we need to have protests in the streets with skeletons shouting "NO PEANUT BUTTER" and blockade roads where trucks are carrying peanut butter.

(Yes, I already knew what you said there )
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

Its probably easier to identify death by a food allergy rather than the possible long term effects of radiation, like cancer.  Though you wont hear me argue against the paranoia surrounding nuclear power. Those paranoid people are probably doing far worse things voluntarily to their bodies.. they're also the same people who think the Lhc is going to cause the earth to fall in on itself, and modern cell phones cause cancer.
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
that last one is also wtf
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

Yea.. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas … in-cancer/
The video says it all really.
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5545|London, England

Kmar wrote:

Its probably easier to identify death by a food allergy rather than the possible long term effects of radiation, like cancer.  Though you wont hear me argue against the paranoia surrounding nuclear power. Those paranoid people are probably doing far worse things voluntarily to their bodies.. they're also the same people who think the Lhc is going to cause the earth to fall in on itself, and modern cell phones cause cancer.
With the way the Fukushima plant has been saturating the cable news networks you'd think they're all in the pocket of the oil and coal companies. They've turned it into THE story even though what they are reporting on isn't nearly as bad as they are trying to make it out to be
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6293|eXtreme to the maX

Spark wrote:

Yes, you read right, according to some data you are almost three times as likely to die of peanut butter as you are of nuclear power generation.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren are unlikely to suffer if I choose to eat peanut butter.

The answer is not the same if we try to store spent nuclear fuel using current technology.
Fuck Israel
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
synroc
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
SenorToenails
Veritas et Scientia
+444|6317|North Tonawanda, NY
breeder reactors
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
That too, although I like the molten salt thorium reactors as a path to go down myself. Cheap, abundant fuel. No chance of a meltdown (as the fuel is already molten). Waste is very difficult to weaponize.
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.

“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.

Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.

Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.

Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were “strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us — so we think of all possible alternative explanations.”

Physicists outside the Fermilab circle said they regarded the results, which have been widely discussed in physics circles for several months, with a mixture of awe and skepticism.

“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”

But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.

The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”

The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
Well well well. Has CERN had its thunder stolen (although obviously the LHC is meant to do much much more than just find the Higgs)
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Poseidon
Fudgepack DeQueef
+3,253|6725|Long Island, New York
siiiiiiick

Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

Poseidon wrote:

siiiiiiick

http://vimeo.com/21294655
I started to say posted before.. but, I did in the mod forums .
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6962|Moscow, Russia

Poseidon wrote:

siiiiiiick

http://vimeo.com/21294655
wow
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
Runs_with_sciss0rs
Well butter my buscuit
+121|6379|14072

AussieReaper wrote:

Spark wrote:

Yes, you read right, according to some data you are almost three times as likely to die of peanut butter as you are of nuclear power generation.
Well, peanut butter causes an alergic reaction and your esophagus can close over.
Naw they are talking about eating too much peanut butter can lead to increased chance of liver cancer. But that's 1 tbsp/day for many many years. Peanuts can grow a mold called something like aspargillus, which is a carcinogen linked to liver cancer. When they truck peanuts into the factories they have to test for the levels of the mold, and if the one batch fails, they'll just mix it into a batch of peanuts with a low level. So the same amount of mold is there, it's just spread out. Workers at peanut factories have to wear protective gear so they aren't exposed.
eusgen
Nugget
+402|6979|Jupiter

Kmar wrote:

Yea.. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas … in-cancer/
The video says it all really.
"Not only is the type of radiation from cell phones harmless, the amount of it is too small to hurt us" - This sounds sketchy...
Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

eusgen wrote:

Kmar wrote:

Yea.. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas … in-cancer/
The video says it all really.
"Not only is the type of radiation from cell phones harmless, the amount of it is too small to hurt us" - This sounds sketchy...
Really? How so?
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
Physics community is currently buzzing like a box full of bees.

http://www.livescience.com/13853-higgs- … -cern.html
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6862|Canberra, AUS
The link to Woit's blog that kicked this off is here. Basically someone claims to have leaked an internal CERN memo that details a blip in their data indicating something previously undetected at a mass of 115GeV which is basically where they expect the Higgs to be. But it's a much bigger blip then they expected, which is very interesting.

Obviously this is just rumour though. No confirmation of any sort that this is actually legitimate, let alone the possibility that the data - if real! - is just a statistical anomaly.

Oh, and obviously folks at CERN aren't happy (not publicly ofc). This is very raw data and it does none of the 3000 scientists there any good if this is released without first being checked, rechecked, validated and presented in an agreeable manner. But obviously leaks of this kind aren't new.

Last edited by Spark (2011-04-24 20:55:44)

The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
AussieReaper
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
+5,761|6340|what

Spark wrote:

is just a statistical anomaly.

Spark wrote:

which is basically where they expect the Higgs to be
https://i.imgur.com/maVpUMN.png
Kmar
Truth is my Bitch
+5,695|6788|132 and Bush

Spark wrote:

The link to Woit's blog that kicked this off is here. Basically someone claims to have leaked an internal CERN memo that details a blip in their data indicating something previously undetected at a mass of 115GeV which is basically where they expect the Higgs to be. But it's a much bigger blip then they expected, which is very interesting.

Obviously this is just rumour though. No confirmation of any sort that this is actually legitimate, let alone the possibility that the data - if real! - is just a statistical anomaly.

Oh, and obviously folks at CERN aren't happy (not publicly ofc). This is very raw data and it does none of the 3000 scientists there any good if this is released without first being checked, rechecked, validated and presented in an agreeable manner. But obviously leaks of this kind aren't new.
hmm http://news.discovery.com/space/rumored … pgn=twnws1
Xbone Stormsurgezz
Uzique
dasein.
+2,865|6658
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual. http://mixlr.com/the-little-phrase/

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