It’s not really “funny” but it does make Australians look like idiots
January 22nd, 2009
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That’s not to say that Australians are idiots – certainly not all of them, because we get our fair share of extremely bright Australians here. This video, however, just makes me shake my head. What the hell kind of an idiot thinks this is funny. It’s only funny in an idiotic kind of way.
Diesel and electricity safe? Well, diesel is decently safe, assuming you don’t count those who are harmed or killed by the emissions it creates or consider the security and economic turmoil that relying on petroleum-based sources can cause you. Diesel can burn, although it doesn’t normally do so in a standing pool of liquid.
Electricity can electrocute you, but that doesn’t happen too often if you’re careful. However, if you consider that most electricity in Australia comes from coal, and for that matter, most electricity in the world comes from coal, it’s about as unsafe as energy comes.
Out of the three, I’d say uranium is the safest.
Now wait a second, are those even an audience laughing? Sure, the sound is a little off, but it comes in and out so fast, I’m inclined to think that’s just a laugh track. Well that’s good, they couldn’t find a group of Australians dumb enough to participate. Maybe it’s not such a bad reflection on the country.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Just LAME, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
What? I thought Brand Power was a bunch of companies that were trying to sell their brand name products. I guess, they must be funded by greenpeace or other nuclear safety groups in Australia.
Kind of related, you might not like this but I’m pleased Obama has included large spending for clean energy in the stimulus bill and not big hand outs to nuclear power industry. This is a good start for Obama and along with closing Gitmo I think this is a great sign for the future of his administration.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKTRE50L7BC20090122
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January 22nd, 2009 at 9:41 pm
The radioactivity emitted by various power sources in man-sieverts per gigawatt-year are coal: 4.0, nuclear: 2.5, geothermal: 2, peat: 2, oil: 0.5 and gas: 0.03. These are all extremely small amounts, and it is noteworthy that coal power stations emit more radioactivity than nuclear power stations. This is because coal contains small but significant amounts of uranium, and a small fraction of this is emitted into the atmosphere. The amounts of uranium vary with the type of coal, and the above figure is a world average obtained by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Bruce said:
Oh for sake of. You don’t get it do you? “Other nuclear safety groups” No. Nuclear is about the safest energy form around. and “large spending for clean energy” What do you define as “clean”? Your idea of what is green? I’ve got news for you and that’s that most of these projects are very nearly useless. Is that your idea of clean? Spending time and money and resources on erecting wind turbines that don’t do a thing for the good of national energy?
If you want to judge energy based on enviornmental impact versus the return then wind and solar turn out to be very very dirty. You spend lots of money and work digging up areas and setting concrete for these giant turbines and they barely do anything other than take a little tiny bit of slack off of the turbines at a big plant. Yeah that’s right, tear apart mountains for wind turbines. Wack bats and birds out of the sky. Drive locals crazy with the strobing they create. Build acres of panels that are full of cadmium and other toxic materials. Burn fuel to haul them in and install them. Do it all. What do you get in return? Almost nothing. Very nearly nothing. Sometimes worse than nothing!
Yeah, worse than nothing. Wind is so bad that it’s been known to stress the power grid more than it helps and therefore wind farms PAY the power company to take their power. That’s not clean! That’s not clean at all!
You know what wind and solar and that crap do for the enviornmental impact of mankind? They hurt it. Yeah, that’s right. Their return is measely and their cost is huge. That’s money that could be spent on many other worthy causes. They have their own enviornmental costs. Building them, for one. They arugably never repay it. Don’t tell me it’s that the grid is not smart enough, it’s the fact that politicians are not smart enough! These things increase reliance on gas-fired plants so much they drive up the cost of gas.
They’re not dirty, they’re filthy! They’re dishonest too, because they’re built on lies!
What about this statement “and not big hand outs to nuclear power industry. “
Are you stupid? You don’t think big companies are milking the system for dishonest bucks in wind and solar and crap??
Question: Who’s the largest wind turbine company in the US? GE. Who’;s the largest nuclear reactor company in the US? GE! Lets see, who else: Westinghouse, Seimens, Hiatachi: Big in wind and solar and NUCLEAR. You know companies like Exon and BP have big wind and solar operations. Did you know that they’ve used wind and solar as a means of getting tax credits or as a means of getting land grants to eitther drill for oil or to just use to stop others from?
GAWD!
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January 22nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Bruce said:
-sigh- I was starting to get really optimistic about Obama’s potential energy plans. But on the bright side, he really isn’t doing much other than extending the credits that have already been there. That’s twenty billion dollars of waste over ten years, so it’s not too bad. I’d hoped he might be more in favor of nuclear energy in this, but this stimulus package is really not a big deal. I don’t expect it will be much other than another wasteful program.
Realistically, I don’t know that we can expect Obama to do much in the short term to help nuclear energy, but as long as he doesn’t do anything to hurt it either things will be okay in the long run. I don’t see any reason to think he’d be anti-nuclear, even if not as pro as I’d like. The status quo is not great, but there are several plants that are hopefully going to be constructed soon.
I really think in the end good energy policy and nuclear-based energy will win out, because it’s going to just become a necessity. I’d prefer we come to our senses before we’re forced into such a rude awakening, but either way, things will change sooner or later.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Engineering Edgar said:
This commenter sees everything filtered through a set of ultragreen lenses. He represents for the Left the same type of problem that the Religious were for the Right – dealing with them is going to result in a lot of compromises, most of which won’t make sense and most of which will be counterproductive.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:33 pm
It’s excruciating to watch that video knowing that there are people out there who will find it funny. I love good satire, but this isn’t it.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:33 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
Do you realize that for 20 B you could fund every fusion energy program in the world. Not one program- all of them. ITER, NIF, Focus fusion, polywell, Farnsworth reactors in every school, all the national labs. With this level of funding I would say that fusion would almost be a certainty. With this much we could even fund the advanced fission plants that have been sitting on the shelf since WW2. The kind of plants with 100% burning that Charles Barton keeps talking about. The kind of power that gives us $.005 a kWhr. Instead we are going to pursue every unworkable fad and create enormous waste and pollution, with nothing to show for it in the end. Just like the Carter days. Remember to set your thermostat to 55 at night.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
At JCarlton: I agree with you that it’s a waste that could otherwise do much good, but if you think that it’s outragious to spent 20 B over the course of ten years on fruitless programs that don’t really have huge benefits, then please don’t ever take a look at the whole US Federal budget. The amount of money thrown around on wasteful projects is staggering.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 am
Safe forms of energy like diesel and electricity? And uranium is supposedly not safe?
Hmmm…
Give a five year old a chunk of uranium, an uninsulated high voltage line and a bucket of diesel. Which one of these items is the only one they are NOT likely to kill themselves with?
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January 23rd, 2009 at 2:03 am
Bruce said:
Bruce, I used to think like you and I understand how it seems tempting because we’re fed stuff about wind and solar and how its the green/clean way to get energy. However, has it ever occurred to you that they keep saying this and it’s been going on for 30 years? Do you wonder why we’re not powering the world by wind and solar? If it were true that you could get free fuel like that then nobody could stop everyone from doing it. Why didn’t we go all renewable years ago? Why has no country gone all renewable now or any time?
I later learned a lot more about things and the truth of the matter is that there’s not enough power in sunlight or wind for us to pull out of it at any kind of reasonable cost. It boils down to being just an impossibility. Solar is basically hopeless for any kind of major use, except maybe for heating pools and stuff like that and wind might be a few percent of power at most, but it’s hard. It just can’t do it. We’ve tried for a long time but it’s not there.
There was a lot of excitement in the 1970’s on this and they put in a lot of money but it dried up when the promises for plentiful energy didn’t get met.
If you are opposed to nuclear energy then you have another option and that is fossil fuels. Those are the only two ways of doing it. We have plenty of coal and we can use that if you decide that is more desirable than nuclear but you have to then live with the emissions from it because clean coal is a misnomer. You can try to cut down energy use, good luck on that though, but you still need some energy and really we need a lot of it. Coal or nuclear take your pick?
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January 23rd, 2009 at 2:24 am
Uranium is pretty dangerous. I’m opposed to nuclear because they always say it is safe but look at what happened in Russia and now they say it is safe again. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I don’t want to chance it. the difference with a nuclear axident is that it’s basically the end of the world or a lot of it and that makes it different then anything else we do. That’s not a danger I want to even consider. as I understand it the uranium is safe because it is under layers and layers of rock that are there to protect us and when we go disturbe it is when there is trouble. I think we need to leave it there.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 am
Lucia8 said:
Lucia8, your comment reeks if ignorance, genuine or simulated. If genuine, be glad, for you have arrived at a haven of scientific reason, and reading the contents of this site with an open, skeptical and enquiring mind will lead you to a much better understanding of the issues on which you presume to comment. If simulated for trolling purposes, your comments will serve the pro-nuke purpose well, as assertion-based arguments have usually come to grief here on the hard reefs and shoals of mathematics and the physical sciences.
Of course, you can redeem yourself (at least partially) by including some scientific reasons for your assertions and some figures and/or references to back them up.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 10:43 am
DV82XL said:
So, DV82XL, gow do you feel about the anti-uranium mining efforts in Australia. If I recall correctly, you’re a Canadian. When I watched the video, I was thinking it would be funny to see the end have a message “This message brought to you by the Uranium Mining Association of Canada.” Canada and Australia are basically tied for first place in the rundown of countries with large deposits of high grade ore. Some sources put Australia number one and some put Canada. I guess it depends on how you measure it.
I’m just saying, you know, your homeland wouldn’t exactly be hurt by seeing their biggest competitor on the international uranium market go away.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 11:25 am
Lucia8 said:
If you are talking about Chernobyl that was in Ukraine, not Russia. And noone ever said the soviet RBMK reactors were safe. The rest of the world did not build that type of reactor because they were inherently dangerous. The Soviets chanced it because RBMK-reactors were the only nuclear power producing reactors that allowed cheap natural uranium as fuel while at the same time producing nuclear weapon plutonium.
The rest of the world looked closely at what this meant for safety and decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, and gave up the “advantage” of cheap uranium and nuclear weapon plutonium in favour of safety. Instead we built mostly lightwater moderated PWR and BWR reactors from which you cannot get weapons plutonium, nor can you use cheap unenriched uranium as fuel. We did that because it’s safe, whereas the Soviet RBMK reactors were not.
Lucia8 said:
Then how do you explain that going on our 30′th year after the Three Mile Island meltdown, we still are not measuring any deaths, not any injuries and not any cancer cases? That was a nuclear accident and a bad one at that. Why are we still here? How do you explain that? Are we just imagining that we are here or is your statement wrong?
Chernobyl… 23 years ago. That was a very bad accident where the reactor actually blew up and released a huge plume of fallout. I don’t know how any accident could be any worse than that. Yet as of 2002 we are seeing only 56 dead… and only 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, no increase in leukemia. We are still here. How can we be still alive if your statement is true? Explain please Lucia.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Q said:
Well Canada produces more, but Australia has larger proven reserves, so call it as you like. As for any advantage, you do know that both Canadian and Australian uranium mining companies have properties in each others countries, and are involved in joint projects at home and in other places around the world, so I don’t see that there would be any real point in suppressing one over the other.
Why Australia never went for CANDU’s is beyond me – they could have had the same technology transfer deal that India got at the time when AECL was desperate to establish an international market in the face of competition from the LWR manufacturers.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Michael Karnerfors said:
RBMK reactors were not used for production of weapon plutonium – in fact the Soviets did not reprocess spent RBMK fuel. The only connection to nuclear weapons was that since all of the Soviet Union’s enrichment capacity was already working flat-out for weapons at the time it first considered civilian nuclear power, their first nuclear power stations had to be able to run on natural uranium (hence the graphite moderator).
Graphite reactors can be safe too if they use gas cooling (in fact, almost all of the nuclear power stations here in Britain are CO2-cooled graphite reactors). Gas-cooled reactors have a potential to operate at higher temperatures (and thus higher efficiencies), but they generally must be larger in size than water-cooled reactors of the same power rating. It is thanks to the US Navy (who needed high power-density in their shipborne reactors – this rules out gas cooling) that water-cooled reactors now dominate the world market.
Does anyone here know why the Soviets used water cooling in the RBMK (given that this is dangerous when combined with graphite moderator) rather than gas cooling? Would gas-cooled reactors have needed parts too large for the Soviet industry of the time to fabricate?
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January 23rd, 2009 at 1:56 pm
George Carty said:
My guess is that it was the cheapest, simplest method of doing things. Just pump water through the reactor in tubes and thus create steam to feed off the shelf turbines.
A gas cooled reactor would have to operate at higher temperatures to be effecient. Higher temperatures would complicate the materials and construction. Gas cooling would be at higher pressures and would require a lot more effort in terms of gas tanks and regulators and such.
The RBMK’s were built, at least in part, for political reasons, to show how efficiently the Soviet Union could build reactors. They were cranked out without much concern for quality control or design safety. It was a flawed system. When the government told you to build a reactor in a year you had too choices: have it ready in a year, smile and say its safe while crossing your fingers that it wouldn’t cause problems OR tell them you can’t have it ready in their time and budget because that would pose safety risks. If you choose the later you’d lose your nice job as a nuclear engineer and end up in the bread lines with everyone else. They’d find someone else to do it who would not make such trouble.
If you look at Chernobyl, especially, there are so many gross and glaring issues and places where corners were cut and shoddy construction was used. For one thing, every major power reactor in the rest of the world has a containment structure. Chernobyl was designed to have a containment structure that would be considered very sub-standard in the rest of the world. It was supposed to have a rudimentary and basic reinforced structure. However, when constructed this was skipped entirely. It had no containment structure. Furthermore, much of the structure was constructed of flammable materials.
The design had other flaws that applied in general and especially to certain examples constructed. The control rod mechanism on Chernobyl was sub-standard and prone to jamming. The core did not have the embedded temperature and neutron sensors it was supposed to have. The top of the reactor lacked any reinforced containment, because this would have been expensive for such a large reactor core. The control rods were a flawed design that had too much graphite on the tips.
Then don’t even get me started on how Chernobyl was operated. The reactor, as shoddy as it was, would not have caused any harm if it had just been operated in the manner it was supposed to be.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
George Carty said:
I stand corrected. I’ll just say that they could be used for plutonium production then since you could change fuel elements while the reactors was running.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Rockin Joe said:
Actually, mankind has spent most of its history living in a sustainable way. Native Americans and African tribal societies understood how to live with nature for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes they over stressed the environment but they learned from their mistakes – unlike modern times where we are destroying the environment and we need more than ever to focus on renewable energy in my opinion. But instead we have used all this technology before looking at the long term consequences down the line and all the negative they indeed would eventually have.
I know you guys (Edgar) are down on renewable power but I still think the investment is good and we should really give it a good try and research, but maybe more research about how to store energy to overcome the shortcoming of wind and sun not always, being on. Hopefully Obama will also increase resources for that as well. Also maybe solar panels contain bad chemicals but the point is they are in the solar panel not being released and there isn’t a risk of solar panels melting down and blowing up.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Bruce said:
Give me a break!
Bruce said:
You obstreperously refuse to listen to the arguments presented, and just mouth the party line. Don’t you get it? Wind and solar guarantee dependence on natural gas. That’s the reason it’s getting support. It’s that simple.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Native Americans did NOT live in a sustainable way except by accident. Their livelihood was so precarious that they were seldom able to populate at levels capable of causing serious damage. They usually lacked technological ability to dig, kill, modify, plant or do any work at a scale large enough to cause problems. When they could, they did. More than one species was hunted to extinction.
We were told in elementary school that ‘The Indians used every part of the buffalo.’ This was more or less true – there weren’t many buffalo parts they didn’t use. But that didn’t mean they used every part of every buffalo they killed. Given the option (especially before horses and guns) they would stampede a heard of buffalo off a cliff, then cut out the best parts of a few of them. It was a good idea too. Walking up to a herd of buffalo with a bow and arrow for a little meat was difficult and dangerous.
Further, when you say ‘Native Americans’ you are talking about a hugely diverse group with social systems more diverse than we can imagine. There was little communication and little history. Each generation of each group did whatever worked for them given the personality and power situation it found itself in.
Small groups like that tend to be dominated by the strongest and most brutal members who have little constraint placed on them.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Bruce said:
The societies you are talking about are not exactly prime examples of how we would ever want to live. First you’re picking a narrow section of the group. “Native American” for example, means any original inhabitant of the Americas. Surely you would not consider the practices of some of those groups “Sustainable.” Many of those in Central America had vast civilizations with palaces, sporting events, elitism and slaves who spent their lives carving out mountainsides to get gold for the emperor. For their time, some of those societies did more to shape the enviornment than many others.
Then we have the Africans. I assume the North Africans and Egyptians are excluded. So we’re left with the quinticential hunter-gatherers.
These groups were forced to consume less by their lack of technology and their basic nomadic tendencies. They lived short, brutal lives and never managed to achieve a large population. We can argue about why this happened, but the truth is that most of those in pre-columbian North America were limited to nomadic and rough existence. The lack of technology to produce food and shelter lead to common inter-tribal warfare. What do you do when you can’t grow enough to feed your own people? You fight your neighbors to steal their food.
As Chuck says, the Native Americans did some very serious damage. They hunted species to extinction. Some tribes in the US Southwest are believed to have been wiped out because they were too dependent on a few crops which failed in a drought year. Sustainable?
Yes, they’d heard buffalo off of cliffs and most of those they did were not eaten because the whole method of hunting that way generally produces more meat than you can eat before it rots.
But in any case, lumping togehter “Native Americas” is really ignorant of the diversity of the group to the point of being insulting to them. Native Americans included peaceful groups, war-like tribes, wonderers, great civilization builders and many things in between.
Happily, most Native Americans today live modern, comfortable and healthy lives. Too bad this can’t be said of much of Africa. They still live as they did centuries ago. The “Sustainable” way. Dirt poor, dangerous, unhealthy, short and unfufilling lives. people in such a lifestyle have no time to consider the greater things in life becasue they are too busy working their fingers to the bone to feed themselves in a constant battle for life which they generally lose before growing very old. One drought or infection away from death at all times in life. It is a brutal, tragic way to live.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I don’t know how ’sustainable’ the activities of said groups were in the full context of things. A minimal enviornmental impact is achieved by a small population. At the highest point the Americas were populated by something like 100-80 million and on average it was as low as 60 million. That’s all of it from the tip of South America to the tundra of Alaska and including the West Indies and coastal islands. Today it is closer to one billion+
Go tell one billion plus people to do all their cooking and heating with charcoal and to crap outside. We’ll see how big an impact it has on ground water quality and air quality. Then tell me if you think its ’sustainable’
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January 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Q said:
Better yet make those that think that this is such a noble lifestyle do it themselves. I have had it with these white-bread moralists, sitting in their parents house, on bandwidth they don’t pay for lecturing me on how to live. At least in the Sixties the back-to-the-land hippies went out and tried to live the life that they preached. that’s how they found out the hard way that it took more than a copy of Walden Two in your back pocket and a lid of hash to make a rural utopia.
Pick a wilderness area and drop them in with a 100 gram bag of salt and a knife, come back and get them in a month and see if they’ve changed their minds about ’sustainable living.’
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January 23rd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I agree, DV8, but the salt and knife aren’t sustainable. Neither are jeans. Drop ‘em in naked and empty handed.
Have any of you ever read ‘home is the Sailor’ by Robin Graham? It turns out that with a jeep, an axe, a gun, a few simple tools, a lot of exhausting work, and several hundred thousand dollars, a young couple can easily live off the land for years.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
I know. The country declared war on poverty and poverty won. Just go through Washington and see all the pretty buildings. Just look at the ruins that are our central cities, the relics of failure and urban renewal that wasn’t. I used to work in a national lab and the place was littered with stuff from past projects, though the the national labs are pretty good about squeezing and reusing to keep things going. But the country is littered with bridges to nowhere. What is interesting is the areas that could use infrastructure improvements the most don’t get them. We have this culture in Washington that has been robbing us blind and its just going to get much worse.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
To me Chernobyl has been an indictment of the old soviet system rather than nuclear power. The RBMK’s flaws were the the flaws of the system, not of basic nuclear engineering principles. The result was the inevitable product of the planned economic system. It was also, bad as is was, the worst environmental industrial disaster in the Soviet Union. Russia is littered with the terrible consequences of the planned economy while at the time the same people who talked about sustainability were talking about how environmentally clean the Communists were.
drbuzz0 said:
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January 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
jcarlton said:
Well, I’m going to have to disagree on the “ruins that are our central cities” because a lot of the urban areas of the US are pretty damn good. New York City, for example, it has some rundown portions, but there is plenty of the city that has been well taken care of and expanded. Although this is generally not through government programs but rather due to private real estate development. Las Vegas is another example of a city that is far from run down.
Of course, this is likely to be slowing in the next few years as the economy has taken a hit, but it’s still not like all the cities of the US are ruins. Many are good shape. But I’d say that those that do well do so despite government programs and not because of it.
If anything, the limitations of cities and the bad areas can be blamed on the government.
I detest government waste, programs that eat literally hundreds of billions of dollars. Many of these programs are useless or of very little use. Pork for bridges to nowhere, billions upon billions thrown at things like building bridges to nowhere.
There’s more to it than that though. Government bidding processes are basically designed to make companies slow and ineffecient. They encourage contractors to drag their feet. They force tight specs and they demand things that make no sense, like allocating money explicitly for buying new equipment when the government already owns suitable equipment – that stuff is sold as surplus at a loss instead. Contractors are constantly encouraged to charge the maximum and given the ability to force out competitors and avoid any penalties for shoddy work.
The government literally seems to believe it employs people in order to give them money and benefits, as opposed to do a job. Hence the workforce for basic things is often enormous and for other things is inadequate.
One thing that really pisses me off that the government does, however, is spending too little money on projects that are almost complete or are complete and need minimal maintiance. While the government spends billions on useless projects it lets facilities like Fermilab almost become lost. Places like Fermilab represent huge investments of national treasure and the government can’t pay the minimal cost to keep them going? How about the NR-1?
It is absolutely maddening when the government spends tens of billions of dollars on a project and then when it’s 99% complete they decide that it’s too expensive. A few hundred million dollars to complete it and they cut it short and thus lose the entire initial investment. Classic example: The Apollo program. NASA is very prone to such problems. They spend years and billions on the NASP and then scrapped it. Billions more on Venturestar and then they decided that it was not workable and scrapped it. Ditto the Magnum and the Delta Clipper.
It’s sickening but there seems to be a pattern with many government projects
1. Decide that we’ll do it at a cost of billions
2. Invest billions and get half way done
3. Decide we won’t do it. Mothball the project
4. Sell equipment as surplus at a huge loss
5. Change mind, restart the project. Buy back fixtures at a loss
6. Change mind again, mothball it.
7., Change mind again, restart it
8. Change mind again, decide it’s not worth finishing.
9. Sell equipment again, at a loss
10. Decide maybe that was a bad idea
11. Investigate restarting project… decide it’s not worth it
12. Change mind… commission another study
13. Restart project
14. Decide its unworkable. Tear everything down. Justify it by saying we’ve already spent billions and don’t want to spend more.
15. Decide it was workable after all. Return to step one.
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January 24th, 2009 at 3:17 am
DV82XL said:
Not all of them. That was only the super crazy hard core hippies. My uncle was a big time hippie and he lived with my grandparents for a long time and went to a lot of concerts and festivals. He also went to a lot of protests of different types and early green movement stuff. He talked about going to live off the land and that crap. He never did though, not that I know of.
The funny thing is that he is STILL a hippie. He’s a 60 year old hippie. He’s an undying supporter of the Green party. I don’t think he ever did go live on the land but he still talks like that. Basically he bounces between low paying jobs. Oh well, I guess that’s how it goes.
He’s managed to live a good part of his life without ever coming to terms with reality.
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January 24th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
One thing I can’t for the life of me understand is why so many things the government does cost so god damned much. There was a budget item I saw for Alberta transit upgrades that listed 20 thousand dollars (Canadian) for bus shelters. Let me just clarify that this was PER SHELTER. Each one had a cost of 20 grand under contract. You’d think you’d get a pretty amazing shelter for that but no it was just the standard metal benches, metal frame and plastic covering. About as structurally sound as a phone booth. They had lights. Not much more. No heat or anything of course. I could have built the equivalent from the hardware store for a few hundred dollars.
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:26 am
One word: paperwork. By their very nature governments assume that unless you continually verify, they will be cheated. So they require verification and reports for everything. That’s why a hammer costs $700. At $20,000 the Alberta gvmt is away cheap.
Gordon said:
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January 25th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
J Carlton said:
Well, I worked for a long time at a company that installed communications equipment and it was common for the need to arise for some kind of additional tool or item for a job. If a guy on a job had the need for a hammer or some other cheap tool or something, the general rule was not to bother notifying with things that were under about $50. Just go buy them and staple the receipt to the work order with a note like ‘needed hammer to attach conduit. hammer is in tool box. receipt attached. $8.99.” Of course, the workers were not expected to spend out of their own pocket if they didn’t have the money or it was something more expensive, but it was just not worth doing paperwork when someone needed to get a couple of screws and nuts. They’d just pay cash and we’d give them the amount back.
If it were something more than $50 or so, then obviously the company would provide it. If it was a one-shot thing that was needed like if they needed a few extra lengths of pipe or something, then someone would get it from a store and pay with the company account. Normally things like that are just as cheap to buy retail then have them come in from a supplier and it’s faster. If it were more than a single item we’d order it and of course these items are noted and passed onto the client. Sometimes it might be noted on an order as something like “Misc Hardware and fittings: $60″ but the receipts and everything get scanned into the book keeping system in case there were a need for it, which there never has been.
If worst came to worst and we didn’t have an item or and it wasn’t something standard to be ordered from the standard supply catalogs then I could just track it down on the net and if it wasn’t severely expensive it’d be no problem.
You might be surprised to learn that despite this system the company has never suffered any kind of severe problem.
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January 25th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I’m well aware how it works. I worked in a hardware store for ten years off and between contracts. But that is a company, a small company from the sound of it. larger institution seem to require that they assume that nobody can be trusted. Of course the flip side is that they are frequently proved right. If you treat employees like children they will act like children. If you treat them like adults then you get adults. Governments don’t seem to get out of the treating like children mode fro any reason, with terrible consequences.
Gordon said:
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January 26th, 2009 at 1:33 am
It might overstress some points but I don’t see what is wrong with this. Nuclear power is by far the most dangerous and difficult to deal with the enviornmental hazards. The waste is the issue. There’s nothing that can be done with it to make it safe. There’s where the issue ends. The waste is a problem that has no answer. The other thing is that nuclear is practically perfectly made for terrorists and countries that want to do others harm. Nuclear power makes waste that has only one use and that is weapons of mass destruction. No peaceful purpose to that. They say we are running out of oil so replace it with nuclear? Not for me. We replace it with nuclear and that only buys us a few more years until the uranium runs out and we’re left with a lot of waste that will be our terrible legacy for ever.
Nuclear might be our last way to go if we had no other choice but we do. There is a new kind of solar power that is going to be able to provide for all the power we need and they sya it can be cheaper then coal. It does not use panels it uses tall towers and they want to build one to power the whole country of Australia soon. That is the future. Nuclear is the past and it is a past of death we should never have to see again. Ask anyone in Japan about how great it is and we’ll see what they say./
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:35 am
Feng said:
No it is not. The far most dangerous ones are coal, oil and biofuels… and hydropower.
Combustibles kill approximately 2 million people each year. Look up for instance “Asian Brown Cloud”. Coal power kills about 25 people per TWh produced. The US produces 2000 TWh from coal each year. Do the math. These are not “maybe’s” or some probablilistic risks. These are actual deaths happening as we sit here.
Hydropower has killed more than fourty times as many as nuclear power in the 50 years that nuclear power has been in operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties
Compare this to nuclear power, which during 50 years in operation has killed less than 100 people. Now you’re drawing breath to scream “Chernobyl!”, I can hear. But fact is that Chernobyl by 2002 had killed 56 people. 47 from direct trauma or acute radiation poisoning, 9 from cancer. It is projected that the accident will cause about 4000 cases of thyroid cancer… and that’s it.
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
Feng said:
In the word of the eminent Dr Cox: Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…
And here is the proof: http://skb.se/Templates/Standard____16775.aspx
This modest page may not seem like much… but SKB is finished with their 30 year research into final repositories. The KBS-3 method works, proven by research and by nature herself. Sites such as Oklo, Gabon, Africa and Cigar Lake, Canada has proven conclusively that once waste is put into the ground using this method, it is safe for good. In 2009 SKB selects the site for the Swedish deep repository. The authorities are expected to give clearance in 2010… and after that construction begins. The issue is solved.
Of course the greens will deny this vehemently because it blows their credibility out of the water like a depth charge right under their rickety keel. For 30 years they have been saying “Nope, cannot be done”. And here comes the nuclear industry with a scientifically proven solution. Big “oops” on the greens’ part. So there is only one thing to do: denial and hope that noone notices. But it’s too late: we have.
Feng said:
And that again is wrong.
Anyone wanting to make nuclear weapons would be a complete idiot to try to use nuclear waste from a power plant. Fuel cycles from a nuclear plant does not produce good Plutonium-239, which is what you need for a nuclear weapon. Nuclear waste has at least four other isotopes of plutonium, among them Pu-240 which will make a nuclear weapon fizzle. Getting Pu-239 from nuclear power waste requires isotope separation, which is difficult, expensive and requires much hardware.
It is very much simpler to make a purpose-built graphite channel reactor like those at Hanford or Windscale. Any moron with a half-decent engineering team can do it… the knowledge is more than 60 years old. Just look at North Korea, one of the world’s most backwards countries that made a bomb despite being under heavy sanctions and being one of the most backwards “developed” nations on this planet.
Nuclear power has next to nothing to do with nuclear weapons proliferation. No country that ever made a nuclear weapon had civilian nuclear power when they did it.
Feng said:
Not even Hubbard, the man who invented the peak theories, believed in Peak Uranium. Why should you? Uranium exists in billions of tonnes in the Earth’s crust. Closed fuel cycles will keep us with going for thousands of years. Fortunately, we only ned a couple of hundred before fusion power is upon us.
Feng said:
Saying that concentrated solar power is something “new” is about as silly as it gets. If legends are to be believed, this was used thousands of years ago in war. And looking at modern times, PS10 was one of the first major attempts at making a solar plant. Not photovoltiac arrays.
Solar power, whether it’s concentrated solar power or photovoltiacs has the same problem as wind: low power density per unit of area. When looking at the investments you have to make in infrastructure in order to make plants big enough to be worthwhile, when put over the amount of energy you get, solar power has higher environmental impact per kWh produced than does nuclear.
Then of course there is the problem that solar power has horrendously poor reliability and availability. Power is a perishable commodity that must be produced and consumed instantaneously. There is no technology that can store energy to such amounts that we can overcome solar power’s less than 40% availability.
Do the numbers yourself. Solar energy is at best 1 kW per square meter. A nuclear power reactor gives 1 000 MW. When you factor in poor efficiency, poor availability, bad weather, and everything else you must concider, you end up with a solar plant that covers 20-50 square kilometers per reactor you’re trying to replace… and then we are still not done with the problem of availability.
Solar power has its niches… but large scale base load production is not one of them.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:45 am
My bad… I just realised I mixed up PS10 with another much older concentrating solar power. I think that one is in France. I’m on my way to work now so someone please look up the link. Pojint remains: concetrating solar power is not “new” technology.
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January 26th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Michael Karnerfors said:
Well those would be some of the earlier ones of the modern solar revival, but there have been solar thermal power plant concepts almost as far back as the steam engine goes. In the late 1800’s there were some giant mirrors pointed at boilers that showed it could work, at least on a very small scale. After world war I some inventors were convinced it was the next big thing but never managed to show any large scale economy. By the 1950’s they were tinkering with boiling ether or alcohol or storing energy in molten salt or molten lead.
So it’s not new by any stretch of the imagination.
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January 26th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I know what side you are all on and nothing you can say is going to change my mind.
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January 26th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Feng said:
Invariably those that make this type of statement are found not to have a mind at all.
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January 26th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
(Pardon double post, please erase the previous one Steve)
Feng said:
Now that I have one that actually uses this kind of argument, I must ask you: what exactly is it that you think speaks in your favour when you argue that you will ignore science, fact and reason just to stick to an opinion? Refusing to change your mind no matter what anyone says isn’t a flattering argument. On the contrary it speaks of a stubborn refusal to think or reconcider. What makes you think we’ll regard you as anything but fanatic when we hear you say things like what you just did?
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January 28th, 2009 at 2:00 am
As an australian, i’d just like to point out this clip was from a short lived aussie comedy/satire show. I use the term comedy loosely as the show really didn’t last very long. Most aussies thought it was rather un-funny, and just a poor effort in general.
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