I always found the plastic argument in teflon vs cast iron a bit weak. Its health risks are well documented at this point. But the seasoning on a cast iron? That is polymerized fats... One might even go so far as to call it plastic. I am told the seasoning is also a carcinogen and in my experience more likely to be ingested than Teflon from a pan (getting a good seasoning that lasts on a pan can be tough!).
The noise is inherent to our sensor technology... Very sensitive telescopes are cryogenically cooled to reduce the temperature of the focal plane, reducing the noise. As in an above comment, the light from distant objects is more spread out and appears weaker - fewer photos are arriving each second and hitting the focal plane than if the telescope were closer. At a certain point, the signal gets buried in the noise.
I worked on the BICEP Array telescope at the south Pole - the light we are observing is actually extremely low energy and we can't see it unless our detectors are colder than the light source we are looking at (which is about 2.7K). We cool our detectors to 0.3K!
Does the natural cold at the South Pole make it much easier to cool the instruments down that low? I know it's around 200K at its lowest, how does that make it easier and cheaper?
Yes, there are several factors that make that location particularly good, not only temperature. The cold and absence of sunlight for months at a time causes a relative absence of water vapor in the atmosphere during winter, which is extremely important for CMB observations. The high elevation (~10k ft) means there is less atmosphere to look through as well. During summers the sky heats up, contains more water vapor, and reflects so much more light that our telescopes become substantially less effective. Another advantage to the South Pole is the ability to continuously observe the same part of the sky, as the telescope is located on the earths axis there is no rising and setting of sky overhead. There is also a particularly 'dark' patch of sky in the southern hemisphere called the 'southern hole'. This is located up and away from the plane of our galaxy and contains very few objects standing in the 'path' of the CMB which also helps obtain better quality observations of the CMB.
Edit - it is as good as it gets on earth and way cheaper than a satellite! Other benefits are rapid upgrades and repairs with newer technology. A satellite, by the time it is deployed, is already pretty old! But the South Pole still isn't cheap!
Quite the change in distance from the sun. Btw, kinetic energy is proportional to 1/r, and is at a peak at the perihelion. Potential energy is highest at the aphelion.
From some information in the article, it seems possible to me that the mass sacrifice might have been a cruel pacification technique by the conquering Inca? It says the Chimu empire fell around 1475 to the Inca. The rope and textiles were radiocarbon dated to 1400 to 1450 AD.
But in this case the media companies are not the ones publishing the photo, Twitter is. The embedded data was never produced or even passed through their servers. It is loaded directly from Twitter.
So, this is basically a technical argument based on a technical implementation detail.
These mostly are considered irrelevant and frequently fail (see, e.g., napster et al)
It's true, fwiw, the ninth circuit did reject visual incorporation tests in favor of a physical transmission test.
This is, IMHO, silly, and only some courts have chosen to follow it.
It seems like more than an implementation detail to me. If Twitter receives a DMCA notice and deletes the image, it will immediately be deleted from all of the sites embedding it. When the publishing, distribution, and unpublishing are entirely under someone else's control, it's really hard to justify treating a link as infringement.
BTW I know you're talking about the way judges actually tend to interpret these things. I'm talking about the way they would interpret things if they had any sense.
With your ebook example, if the ebook "auto-loaded and displayed that content for the user" then you're describing something completely different from what happens when a site links to a tweet. It's more like if the ebook reader parses "Encyclopedia Britannica volume B, page 38" whenever it appears in any ebook and embeds the contents itself. If Encyclopedia Britannica is violating someone's copyright on that page, it's just crazy to hold the ebook publisher liable.
Perhaps it helps to think about the physical equivalent...
Suppose your neighbor "hosts" some copyrighted material in their yard, either on a projection screen or a large poster.
If you decide your visitors may be interested in said content, and move your van out of the way so that your visitors may observe the content in your neighbor's yard as they walk to your front door, is that infringing?
If you additionally set up a sign pointing at your neighbors yard, causing your visitors to look in that direction, is that infringing?
If you decide to make some money by selling advertising space on a sign you set up on your property, right next to your neighbor's display (which is still on their property), is that infringing?
Note that to a casual observer who doesn't know or care where the property line is, the end result is nearly indistinguishable from what would have resulted if you had set up the projection screen or poster in your own yard. (The only difference is that it's a foot further away and controlled by a different person.)
Anyway, while it certainly seems sleazy to profit from your neighbors illegal display, it seems bizarre to conclude that pointing your visitors at your neighbor's display is the same as displaying it yourself.
"BTW I know you're talking about the way judges actually tend to interpret these things. I'm talking about the way they would interpret things if they had any sense."
Gonna disagree, but if you live in the ninth, that's already how they think :)
(now, FWIW; i'm also differentiating between what i think the law, as written right now, is supposed to mean, and what i think it should be. I think, right now, as written, this should be interpreted as infringement. I think the law should be changed, not twisted/ignored)
The sites aren’t linking to a tweet, they’re embedding them. There’s a difference of intent between a plain old <a> link to a tweet’s URL, and the full set of tags, scripts, and configuration used to embed a tweet inline with your page. It would be unreasonable to hold you accountable for a simple link if I had a browser plugin that automatically converted them into embeds, but if you used the twitter markup such that they would be rendered as embeds on any standards compliant browser that’s a different story.
Embedding, a.k.a. hotlinking, a.k.a. transclusion is just another type of linking. Any of those terms would work just as well in my comment because they all share the property that the content is being published by someone else.
But there isn't much of a difference between hotlinks and anchor links in this discussion anyway, since sites (e.g. Google, Pirate Bay) also face legal liability for simple anchor links to copyrighted works. Just Google "[any popular book] pdf" and read the DMCA blurb at the bottom of the results.
But technically they’re not the same. Like, if you were to describe the DOM nodes generated in response to a hyperlink versus an embed tag, they’d be quite different, right?
Can we start suing Google then for Google cache or the WayBackMachine for the same? They are certainly republishing my pages without permission. That's copyright infringement according to this criteria too. In fact, they host the content on their servers so there isn't even this technicality. What about the snippets Google shows in its search results? What about Slack when it embeds part of my page when someone posts a link?
TheWayBackmachine is operated by a library which gives them special license under copyright law. That said they will not make your page available publicly if you tell them not to.
Google cache is copyright infringement however it may or may not be excusable under fair use depending on the circumstances.
"Can we start suing Google then for Google cache or the WayBackMachine for the same?"
Already happened.
Multiple times.
In fact, the precedent the EFF is talking about was "Perfect 10 v. Google", which was about caching, thumbnails, and framing in google image search.
> So, this is basically a technical argument based on a technical implementation detail. These mostly are considered irrelevant and frequently fail (see, e.g., napster et al)
"Details are irrelevant" is the argument you get from people who don't want to consider the implications of the details.
> I could simply avoid all liability by setting up a server/separate legal entity in a country with no copyright laws, place all images there, and then i've never published anything at all by your argument.
Is this not exactly the sort of thing companies do on a regular basis to avoid, for example, taxes? Or minimum wage laws or a hundred other things like that? If there is a jurisdiction where it's legal then it's legal to do it in that jurisdiction, no?
> Similarly, if i wrote a book, and on page 34 it said "for the text and images on this page, please see Encyclopedia Brittanica volume B, page 38", the law would probably be okay with that. If i had an electronic book that auto-loaded and displayed that content for the user, so the user did not have to do it, they'd probably consider it infringement.
This is where we're getting to the part where the technical details have relevance. A website isn't a device, it's a piece of information which is rendered by a third party device. You are just telling them where they can find the information. But the third party browser on the third party device has the capacity to fetch and display it for the user.
Consider a similar scenario: Devices improve to the point that they can parse the words "for the text and images on this page, please see Encyclopedia Brittanica volume B, page 38" and then automatically fetch and display the images. Has your sentence retroactively become infringing because the user's device has improved?
This sort of thing starts to have real salience when you get into things like content addressable storage, where the hash of the data both identifies it and can be used to locate, obtain and authenticate it.
""Details are irrelevant" is the argument you get from people who don't want to consider the implications of the details."
That's just a silly dig, considering i've spent years of my life and training considering the implications of the details of these very things.
"Is this not exactly the sort of thing companies do on a regular basis to avoid, for example, taxes? Or minimum wage laws or a hundred other things like that? If there is a jurisdiction where it's legal then it's legal to do it in that jurisdiction, no?
This is basically a "laws should all be completely and totally logically consistent and judged by judgement automatons following finite state machines"
As much as the news and reddit may make that out to be what happens, it is not what happens in practice. In fact, in the very thing you are talking about, courts in various countries looked at it said "nope, not okay".
"But this is where we're getting to the part where the technical details have relevance."
IMHO, no, they don't
" A website isn't a device, it's a piece of information which is rendered by a third party device. You are just telling them where they can find the information. But the third party browser on the third party device has the capacity to fetch and display it for the user."
You can play this game all you want, i understand in detail the distinction you are trying to draw and pretty roundly reject it. It's just an attempt to abdicate intent and responsibility. The intent of the person who made the page is for the third party device to do what it did and display it. It did that.
If there was a <murder> tag that instructed devices to murder the person named by the text a loaded from the ref attribute, and i used the tag, you don't get to say "well, it was just a piece of information, interpreted by a third party device".
You intended it to murder someone when it was interpreted, and it did murder someone when it was interpreted.
The same way i wouldn't feel "All i did was give the third party murdering device a link to some instructions, not the instructions themselves" is not the kind of distinction i think makes a lot of sense to try to hang your hat on.
If the EFF/others want the law to be different, i'm actually all for it. I even think what i'm suggesting is a pretty shitty policy for the internet (and i spent years of my life fighting to push us towards a better copyright-free utopia ;P). But it's also what i think it says right now.
". Has your sentence retroactively become infringing because the user's device has improved?"
No, because that wasn't the intent at the time i did it.
> That's just a silly dig, considering i've spent years of my life and training cconsidering the implications of the details of these very things.
The silly dig is the argument that technical details are mostly irrelevant. It's possible for some details to sometimes be irrelevant, but it's hardly a generally applicable rule that gives you any useful information about when they are or aren't.
> This is basically a "laws should all be completely and totally logically consistent and judged by judgement automatons following finite state machines"
How is it that, and why is being logically consistent bad?
> As much as the news and reddit may make that out to be what happens, it is not what happens in practice. In fact, in the very thing you are talking about, courts in various countries looked at it said "nope, not okay".
If a company moves from the US to China and then doesn't pay US taxes on the operations in China and pay the Chinese workers the US minimum wage, they are breaking the law?
> The intent of the person who made the page is for the third party device to do what it did and display it. It did that.
You keep talking about intent when the problem is the precedent it sets. For example:
> No, because that wasn't the intent at the time i did it.
So what happens when you publish the same sentence with the same intent after it becomes public knowledge that devices can use the information to automatically fetch and display it? Is it no longer possible to perform the same action with the original intent?
If you're just requiring people to reconfigure things to give themselves plausible deniability about their intent then the whole thing is a waste of resources, but if you're going to prohibit people from identifying the information regardless of their intent then why are you making such a big deal about intent to begin with?
Fair use is seen as one of the more difficult laws to define in logical consistent terms, so lets start there. Can we create fair use definition in such way that a mathematical function separate all that should be defined as fair use, and all that should not based on unbiased measurable facts.
Common legal theory says that we can not do that. Fair use is inherently subjective and ruled on a balance of interests between copyright holders and the public good. The public good in turn is also extremely hard to define, and is usually seen as one of those things we know when we see it but can't attribute to logically consistent rules.
So this is a good example of what I'm talking about. You're talking about the difficulty of making a fair use determination, but the question in most of these cases isn't whether a specific action is fair use, it's whether any of the reasonable actions are. And you don't need to make an inherently subjective determination for that because the subjective cases are irrelevant if you can find any solid instance where the outcome isn't ambiguous.
The citation example makes the point pretty well. Suppose you make a citation -- this image is on page 34 of this book, using a standard machine-readable citation format.
There are multiple things the user and the user's browser could do with that information. It can show you links to stores where you can buy a print edition of that book, or it can look up the page in a location index and find electronic sources for the content of that page. Some of those sources and some of the uses of the content are plausibly unambiguous cases of fair use. Some of the sources and uses are plausibly unambiguous cases of piracy. They may even be the same sources but different uses.
If you want to evaluate one of the individual cases then you may have to make a complicated fair use determination, but we're not talking about an individual user, we're talking about the person providing the citation. Whether their intent is facilitating users buying the book, or using it in a clear case of fair use, or using it in a clear case of piracy, their action is the same. The action itself doesn't reveal their intent. You can't make the determination based on that because you don't know it.
The difference between this and the murder example is that the defendant's action isn't the directly prohibited thing. If you intentionally kill someone, that's what murder is. If you hire someone else to do it, you're still clearly intending that outcome.
The analogous thing would be selling weapons. Your obvious intent is to sell a knife, not to have someone murdered. That may secretly be your true motivation, but without any additional evidence of that there is no way to know, and certainly at least some of the people who sell weapons do so without the intent that they be used to commit murder.
It can be impossible to determining intent in some cases but that has not stopped law writers and politicians from defining intent and guilt in the absent.
The pirate bay case was actually a such example. The law that the judges cited in the case was based on the concept that if the majority usage of a tool is illegal then the owner of said tool can be held as an accomplish. The background text of that law was biker bars. The politicians wanted a way to confiscate the buildings, so they created the law. No intent needed of the owner, only establishing that the primary usage of the "tool" illegal and there you go. If you had a gun shop and the primary customers you got was murderers you could in theory be charged with assistance of murder in each case that the police can guess is likely to have happened. The pirate bay case also established that someone can be charged with with assistance even if the "original case" has not been proven.
Not saying any of that is good. The law is ugly, inconsistent and full of subjective aspects.
> The pirate bay case was actually a such example.
The pirate bay isn't in the US.
And in general, the fact that some bad laws exist that violate the general principles the legal system as a whole operates under is no excuse for condoning such laws or not construing them as narrowly as possible to mitigate the damage done to the justice system by naked populism like that.
If there are so many marijuana users that the majority of pipes sold are used for marijuana rather than tobacco, it makes absolutely no sense to punish the people selling pipes rather than either punishing the people actually using marijuana or just legalizing marijuana.
I can't say this is true for all Universities, but accounting for inflation, at the University of Washington the cost to educate one student is the lowest it has ever been. So at least at one school they have been working hard at keeping costs down. Unfortunately, we keep reducing state funding to public schools, and the proportion of that cost born by the student is now much higher. Gone are the days that you could work your way through a state college, and it is not because the schools are price gouging.
That graph is very misleading. I don't have access to the published paper which may be accurate, but the article doesn't mention the reduction in opioid deaths from 2008-2010, which appears to be similar to 2014-2016. Also, the title of the graph states the timeline through 2015, but the x axis suggests there is data up to 2016?
Interestingly, South Carolina produces most of its energy using nuclear already... It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour. Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more. So, it seems it is hard to get support to invest in newer, safer technologies in the industry. I do understand the short term economic incentives. Nuclear is expensive to build. However it is very cheap to operate, and relatively environmentally friendly. It takes long term planning on timescales of many years, and looking at safety data rather than focusing on the disasters on their own. Neither of which humans are any good at.
The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste. The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?
>Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more.
I don't this explanation really holds true. For example, there is a single failure with a hydroelectric dam [1] that has killed more people than have died as a result of all nuclear-power related deaths, and in more spectacular fashion.
I think it has something to do with the expense and scale of nuclear power, but also something to do with nuclear energy being a thing far outside the natural experience of most people. Nuclear power is also connected to nuclear weapons, which, understandably, has a strong negative connotation to most people.
Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.
All that, and Chernobyl. I was a kid when it happened, but it affected most of Europe, (the radiation ended up going all the way to Sweden and Italy). It is hard to measure the cancer rates due to it, but the numbers are significant.
" (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time."
Nuclear power failure has the power to create a wasteland of its surrounding for millennia, that's why nobody wants them on their backyard.
Where are you sourcing these numbers from? The WHO says "up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl".
I also have a new quote for nuclear talks:
> Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as “the largest public health problem created by the accident” and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information.
You mention Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in human history, today, 30 years later, Chernobyl sits at the heart of a wildlife haven. What is more alive and supports more species, Chernobyl or Manhattan?
"According to the World Health Organization in 2011, urban outdoor air pollution, from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass is estimated to cause 1.3 million deaths worldwide per year and indoor air pollution from biomass and fossil fuel burning is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths.[14] In 2013 a team of researchers estimated the number of premature deaths caused by particulate matter in outdoor air pollution as 2.1 million, occurring annually"
No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is the reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
Natural gas will be cheaper than renewables + utility scale battery storage for only so long; as soon as natural gas spot market prices spike, renewables and storage are deployed, creating a downward price spiral, which natural gas generators can only defend against for so long.
Natural gas might be as bad in terms of climate change as burning coal due to losses of methane during production/transporting, so it would be great to eliminate its use. Unfortunately we are far, far away from having grid storage that could accommodate only having renewables. Grid storage has been worked on for generations and even so, right now, the U.S. has about 24.6GW of grid storage, 95% of which is pumped storage hydro. That is a very tiny fraction of what would be needed.
Has there been consensus on whether renewables can power our society and industry on their own? Or for that matter generate more power than we currently need to drive further progress?
For a while the amount of energy is certainly a question. If it takes 100 gigawatts to produce a solar panel, but that panel only returns 75 gigawatts over its usable lifespan (including maintenance), then that's not a good look.
Even if solar generated 1.25 watts per watt to contruct/transport/install/maintain, it still isn't enough.
Now if solar is at the point where it was generate 5 watts per 1 watt, we're in business.
Come on, knock out being disingenuous. Science experiment territory? California and Germany have so much solar generation, they're having to take active measures to deal with the supply. And solar PV manufacturing capacity is only growing each year.
That article shows a graph indicating that Gas is taking over for the lack of coal plants, and wind/solar are plateaued.
People want a high return on their energy investment to power modern society.
I'm sure solar will get better, and I encourage the fledgling consumer market and small-scale deployments to improve the tech, but it's not ready today, and the longer idealists keep peddling the idea that it IS ready, the longer we accelerate global warming.
> Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.
Persuasion is a science that has been perfected by religions/cults, magicians, marketers and sales people. Scientists, mathematicians, economists, and policy makes don't wield that weapon very well.
You can spit accurate + well researched stats that argue your case until you are blue in the face, but not everyone listens to polite, well researched Oxford-style debates. You are competing with entrenched interests like oil and gas lobbies, doubt purveyers who have purchased professors with grants, the wild imaginations of Hollywood, and the association of "nuclear" in the minds of people who lived through the Cold War.
Well, that hydroelectric dam was built in part as a flood control measure, and effectively ended up being rebuilt a few years later to put a stop to the repeated flooding that occurred without it. It simply wasn't the same kind of tradeoff.
Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built. That is why nuclear plants in Illinois and New York have been bailed out recently and why utilities in other starts are looking for similar bailouts. These utilities could not profitably operate existing nuclear plants in the current market. I totally agree that nuclear power has a much better safety record than most would believe and that nuclear power is a great low carbon electricity source, but it is not a cheap power source. Maybe modular reactors can compete sometime in the future, but we really have no idea until some are built and operated.
> Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built
I would argue that the innovations in rival energy sources have made it comparatively expensive, but the cost was largely established when the plant was built (likely in the 1960s - 1970s). In other words, it was cheap, but the fact that nuclear requires such a massive outlay to build the facility means that nuclear is a very long term financial gamble and assumes that a variety of other energy sources don't fundamentally change their cost curve (like oil and natural gas did in recent decades).
It's only "cheap" as long as you can outsource the long-term costs, like for waste storage or in the case of a disaster.
As is, these plants are barely profitable, imagine they'd be forced to set funds aside for clean-up operations in case something goes really wrong, talking about real funds here that would make an actual difference and not some token amount. They don't do that because they know it would totally ruin their bottom line but by any metric they should be doing exactly that because it would be their mess that needs to be cleaned up when something goes wrong.
These costs are very real and in the case of catastrophic failure can be so high that even major economies are struggling to pay them (like Japan has been).
And it's not like we have any good ways to hold anybody responsible when something actually goes wrong.
The responsible company can just declare bankruptcy and have somebody else deal with the costs and long-term ramifications of the clean-up efforts aka the tax payer.
Most of nuclear waste should not called that. The more radioactive something is the more energy production capability it still has. Only a lunatic puts that stuff in caskets and digs caves for storage, and doesn't reap that. If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.
... And that brings us to those costs. There are parties that benefit from causing the costs to ramp up. So they have tried to find out ways to do exactly that, and prevent the good cost reducing innovations from reaching even testing so they could be mass adopted some day.
It is widely known that we have knowledge of vastly safer reactor types, but we haven't been able to even get permits for full scale test runs. We know that there are several things about the fuel cycle we could improve, but we have to stove the best stuff away. We could actually go and fix some of the old installations, and their design features, but we are not allowed to do that either. Probably we could drop the price of nuclear power to a fraction (say, 1/10th?), but it is not politically correct to talk about that publicly. And so on, and so on.
> If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.
And here we go, the fabled magical Thorium reactors.
There are many reasons why we don't do this, one of them are engineering constraints because molten salt is very corrosive as such maintaining a reactor like that is a real pita.
You should also be aware that, contrary to popular belief, even Thorium reactors can be used to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, it's not impossible to weaponize U-233, after all this process was used to produce the fuel for Operation Teapot in 1955.
And lastly: The only reason why thorium reactors have such a great "safety track record" is that we barely build any of them, our sample size is way too small to make any useful statements about this.
We have roughly 435 commercial nuclear plants in operation, with another 63 being built [0]. There have been around 20 major nuclear accidents over the years [1]. In contrast to that, there are only around 15 Thorium reactors [2], imho that's not a big enough sample size to make any statements about the actual failure rates, especially when you consider that none of these 15 reactors are run on a commercial basis.
For all purpose and effect, Thorium reactors are just an attempt to "rebrand nuclear" to get rid of the horrible nuclear track record and public reputation. Even if we'd go full Thorium we'd still need some reactors to cycle uranium for the Thorium reactors to actually work. In that regard, it's not really a solution but just another excuse for keeping the problem going.
Actually no, he's not talking about Thorium reactors, he's talking about Breeder Reactors I believe, which will allow the fuel to be recycled over and over until it's virtually exhausted of all it's radioactivity.
I think that's what he is talking about. I studied this 30 years ago in primary school, so I might be off, but that's what I remember.
It's actually quite cool what other reactors are capable of and the amount of fuel we waste with existing commercialized types of which were designed to produce weapons grade plutonium as a by product, so efficiency wasn't valued over the byproduct of plutonium.
I don't know the situations in Illinois or New York, but the fuel costs are obviously very low for nuclear power. PG&E says in regards to the Diablo Canyon power plant:
>...At 2.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, DCPP’s average
production costs are lower than all other forms of electricity, but are higher than the national average of 2.19 cents per kilowatt-hour for nuclear power
France gets a majority of their power through nuclear power and has lower rates for electricity than its neighbors:
>...France enjoys one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe; at 14.72 euro cents per kWh, the average cost of electricity in France is 26.5% cheaper than the EU average (20.02 euro cents per kWh).
I would apply some scepticism of some of those numbers until the plant gets seriously into the end-of-lifecycle decommissioning. Particularly when one looks at how the San Onofre cleanup cost is being estimated and who is paying. (4.4B.. which doesn't seem like it was set aside from the rates being paid during the lifetime of the plant...)
> Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong.
Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's literally out of our control.
I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson.
When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn. There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it.
Then a few weeks later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going".
As it were the Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing suicide.
It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was deadly.
That won't fly today.
While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!
This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that happened that people could only watch:
* Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse
* Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River
* But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either.
* Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly
* Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls.
I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).
In all of your examples, a few hours or days later people could wander right into "ground zero" and begin cleaning/re-building or whatever.
No so with nuclear. The impact is so much more serious when radiation comes into play.
> Valdez
Actually thousands of people were mobilized to contain the spill then clean up afterwards. It would have been a much better outcome if they didn't try to hide/downplay it for the first couple of days.
Yes, and radiation can be serious. But nature knows how to deal with high levels of radiation (see Chernobyl's flourishing ecosystem) after a period of time, same with any other disaster. You as a human could go into some moderately radioactive areas since the civilian limits are set so extremely low below the non-stochastic effects, and maybe not have much more of an elevated cancer risk than if you went to the hospital and got an MRI or PET scan (which is unregulated in terms of legal dosage limits).
Just because radiation causes different constraints on cleanup than oil on a large ocean or arsenic in the water table or issues in a space rocket means it is morally worse? That's the part I fail to understand, so long as the engineering continues to behave ethically behind all the systems in their design and construction and retrofit.
Adding to this - there seems to be a lack of observable damage from nuclear accidents apart from self-imposed evacuations.
Literally no-one died at Fukushima. It is the only energy disaster I know of where no-one ended up dead.
This is strong circumstantial evidence that we are being too safe, because we implicitly accept a few deaths when things go wrong in, eg, coal (pollution & extraction deaths), solar ( mainly in installations not in operating), hydro (big-time risks).
Going from 1 death to 0 deaths on this scale is a huge marginal cost. It almost certainly outweights the benefits.
EDIT: We haven't had a solar disaster yet, but coal & hydro disasters happen and can be very bad indeed.
I agree. Anywhere there's a dam, people will drown in it. In fact, if it's close enough to a town and people like to drink then we'll see many more deaths in the winter since it looks like you an skate on it---but can't.
You have a strange definition of "local" for Exxon Valdez/Deepwater Horizon. As well as "temporal", too. 20 years later species haven't recovered from the Valdez spill (unless you ask Exxon). Deepwater Horizon was also a very prolonged event, it took "forever" to cap the damn thing. 1 billion+ tons of coal Ash spilled across the USA didn't just disappear over a day either from some small city corner.
The only reason why nuclear sticks so easily is because of the magic word "radiation". It's easier to be scared of it than sit down land learn that it is all a natural physical phenomenon, even if it originated from a man-made isotope. It's difficulty arises from the stochastic (quantum) nature of it's interactions.
Lastly, reactor designs have significantly improved since 50 years ago. New reactor designs I saw coming out of Westinghouse could lose all power and pumps and still use natural convection and reservoirs (elevated pools) within the containment to prevent any sort of critical event leading to meltdown. Imagine if we were stuck with the coal technology of the 70's. I would prefer modernizing the nuclear fleet if possible, which does include decommissioning old reactors, and closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant (some sort of pyroprocessing) unlike UREX.
Look, I'm pro-nuclear but 'if only everyone were as knowledgeable as me' is a losing communications strategy. seriously, why do you expect people to trust the engineering in a nuclear power plant when clever people can't even get the financing to work or the construction ot go smoothly?
My point isn't "be as smart as me" and I do apologise if my tone is coming across that way. My point is "get educated on the issue" which seems reasonable to me (the tone of which I guess can also be misconstrued as negative, but I mean it in a constructive and positive manner).
I know you mean well and I do feel your frustration. But to use a phrase from political scientist Brian Caplan, people are 'rationally irrational' about this (as in public choice theory): it's very hard to really assess the risk factors properly, and given the potential downside risk and the existence of alternatives they decide not to bother.
>closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant
Isn't simply using a non-PUREX reprocessing method sufficient? Realistically, a "nuclear club" nation like the US/France/GB only needs to ensure that the reprocessed fuel contains enough non-Pu239 isotopes that any attempt at a bomb with stolen Pu would necessarily fizzle. The fact that the nation itself could (theoretically) produce Pu239 via the process and cause "proliferation" seems far fetched in the absence of the Cold War level rivalry that was the original proliferation impetus. Warheads are expensive. Nobody who already has a bunch of them already is really interested in making more.
>...I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson.
You missed the important lessons from Fukishima.
A major power plant suffered about the worst possible catastrophe that it could have through a combination of incompetence by the plant and its regulators. For all that, the highest estimates of death due to the evacuation are less than the deaths that come from a day of burning coal (when the coal plants don't have an accident). What about other power sources? Coal/gas/hydro all have much worse records than nuclear:
The lesson I got from Fukushima is that, if we have a reactor, we need to take care of it. I think Fukushima was neglected because people didn't like it. I see this as more of a political issue. The lessons learned summary[0] hints at this.
You can't really say "it's the safest kind of energy of all - except when you don't do the right thing, then it's scary" because the chance that people are going to do the wrong thing has to be an inherent part of any risk analysis.
Nuclear might be safer than coal and oil but coal and oil are established and nuclear is marginal most places. More people might die falling from roofs installing their solar panel than die from nuclear power "done right" but hey, if they'd installed their solar panels right, they too wouldn't have died either.
But finally, renewable allow relatively incremental development - you can gradually add solar panels and wind-generators and see if the investment pans out. Nuclear requires vast gobs of investment and you only learn if it's a good idea, provides good total positive returns, over a long time frame, just as you're expected to store your pollution over a large time frame.
So nuclear's prospects don't look good, don't seem like they should be good, etc.
Has it, though? Keep in mind the difference between "expensive" and "a lot of money". Nuclear costs a ton to build and a ton to decommission, but in between is a very long period of nearly constant very high power production.
New-built nuclear costs around €5.3b (Finland[1] and France[2]) to €9.3b (UK[3]) per installed GW, and France, Germany and UK estimates €300m, €1.4b and €2.7b (respectively) pr GW installed to decommission. That's €6-€13b/GW total + operating costs -- and those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants.
New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW[4] -- and these prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out. Capacity factors are only around 50%, so already there offshore wind is roughly on par with fully loaded nuclear (which has capacity factors of 90+%), and that's without counting decommissioning, extremely high operating expenses and the extra infrastructure and pollution required to deal with the unreliability of wind (typically, gas plants), and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear.
One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun.
Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind; nuclear has to be run at maximum capacity in order to get to those numbers, just as wind's energy has to be used to get to its numbers, and neither of these follows the demand. So both nuclear and wind require other dispatchable resources.
Though it's gas plants at the moment, it seems very likely that battery storage will take over quite soon from gas plants. In many markets, peaker plants are already more expensive than battery storage. As batteries get cheaper, and more technologies (like flow batteries) mature, gas's days are numbered (except perhaps for combined-cycle gas turbines).
I also can't share your optimism about nuclear construction costs going down. The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US. The promise of the AP1000 reactors which were just abandoned in South Carolina was that it was a modular, consistent design, implemented around the world. The cost savings for that have not materialized. Meanwhile, the tech curves for wind, solar, and storage technologies have had more than a decade of proof of declining costs. Even in "modular and reusable" designs, every nuclear plant seems to be a one-off, due to the massive scale.
> One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun.
Offshore construction procedures aren't going to improve by a ton. There is half a century of intense offshore experience in the oil sector, and two decades of experience building a lot of off shore wind. Even with that, prices has stabilised at a very high level. Yes, there is low-hanging fruit in the US, that is correct, but the total potential (miles of coast) is very limited.
> Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind
Strictly speaking, yes, but it's non-dispatchable in the opposite direction, if you will. It's much, much more efficient to have nuclear covering the base load in the grid, and then having some gas to deal with peak loads, whereas for wind or solar, you need alternative sources to cover nearly the whole installed capacity (a cold, cloudy day with little wind). But yes, if you were to get to 100% nuclear, you'd need a good (if smaller) storage solution, as with wind and solar.
> The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects
Both Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point C have famously and massively overrun their initial estimates. Optimistic numbers would be those for, say, South Korea or China.
> without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US.
That's going to be true (or solved) for any large, complex project, whether wind, solar or nuclear.
>Even with that, prices has stabilised at a very high level. Yes, there is low-hanging fruit in the US, that is correct, but the total potential (miles of coast) is very limited.
Not quite, offshore wind construction is improving, perhaps because they are focusing on improving that rather than just repurposing oil tech.
> those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants.
Sorry but that's a rather naive expectation. We have plenty of other technologies, which are far more developed than nuclear, and they still end up going over budget quite often.
How long have we been building nuclear reactors? For decades, yet we are nowhere close to "avoid cost overruns", how many decades more of building overpriced and outdated designs do we need to get to that point? And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?
We mostly learn from mistakes, but with nuclear, the mistakes are very pricey, not just in economic terms but especially in environmental terms.
> And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?
Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?
There was a reactor meltdown. Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died. If we held the rest of the energy generation industry to such a standard, we'd be living in caves and banging rocks together for warmth.
> Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?
Because that's where it belongs, just like Kyshtym.
> Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died.
What a convenient claim to make considering the long term effects of the radiation usually show in the form of cancer and a direct correlation can never be made except when doing massive epidemiological studies on the affected populations, which rarely happens.
It's this very same dynamic which allows people to make outrageous claims along the lines of "Nobody died from Chernobyl radiation, it was all just naturally occurring cancer!"
Meanwhile, people in the US are still wondering how and why cancer clusters happen [0].
Look at that map, look the red spots and with a little bit knowledge of the US nuclear industry you will realize what's around that area. What a coincidence? That's what it probably is, just a coincidence because admitting anything else to the public wouldn't really play that well, so coincidence it has to be [1].
Now, I'm no statistician, but to me, it looks like there is... No correlation between the two. Maybe the mundane, unsexy explanation in the article, citing lifestyle choices, smoking, alcoholism, access to healthcare, and poverty as the main factors influencing cancer death.
Cancer valley running through Kentucky has more to do with bourbon, then its non-existent nuclear reactors (It has an enrichment facility in its western part, but that's not where the cancer deaths are).
The new-built nuclear power plants you are mentioning are not finished yet, have huge cost overruns and delays (and that's not finished yet).
The french EPR (Flamanville) for example had many issues (for example, some serious defects on the reactor vessel) and required redesigns while under construction.
Quite frankly having seen it from the inside (I worked on a minor sub-system of this plant a few years ago), I even doubt it will ever deliver a significant amount of electricity to the grid.
Even if construction is completed, it will be quite unique compared to the other EPRs, so I will not be overly confident about learning and be more efficient at constructing those.
The finish EPR (Olkiluoto) played a huge part in the near bankruptcy of Areva (french company providing various elements of the nuclear life cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste "recycling") and lead to its bail-out by EDF (which is mostly state owned, so in the end, the tax payer will pay).
The two Hinkley Points EPRs are a huge gamble, and the decision to go through by EDF (builder and operator of the future plants) on this project lead to much criticism, the EDF workers syndicates are deeply against it and the financial director and a member of the board resigned because of it. Given all the unknowns regarding the EPR, at 20 billion euros, it's a really huge risk taken more for political reasons than economic ones.
Also EDF must face a huge overall of all its nuclear reactors as they are nearly all reaching 40 years old. This "Grand Carénage" will cost ~50 billion euros to gain 10 to 20 years for the 58 existing french reactors.
For the decommissioning part, there are many unknows. The old and small Brennilis plant is being dismantled since 1985 with no definitive solution regarding the handling of the reactor vessel. Also there are tons of criticism regarding the future underground storage facility at Bure.
That the not so bright economic situation of nuclear industry in France (nuclear produces 70% of electricity here).
To finish, I'm personally worried by the implication of nuclear energy. Basically, believing in our capacity to manage highly dangerous wastes for several order of magnitude longer than human civilizations exist (let alone individual states) seems overly confident.
Yes, it has. The UK basically had to agree to pay a substantially above-market price for power for the life of the plant to make it viable: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/23/spending-wat... (and it's not clear that it's viable even then). As I recall, some US states have had to subsidise their existing nuclear power plants just to keep them running thanks to falling electricity generation costs. This is only going to get worse as renewables drive down the cost of electricity further.
As I demonstrated in my comment, Hinkley Point C, even with its massive cost overruns (and true, nobody knows if that's the final cost yet, but that's the current figure), is roughly on par with offshore wind in cost per installed GW after accounting for capacity factors. It's just that Hickley Point C will have as much capacity as the entire north sea offshore wind fleet (all countries, not just UK), and so the concentrated single number gets very big. And wind is massively subsidised, too, so the subsidy is not an argument in itself.
Most of your points about off-shore wind aren't quite right..
> These prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out.
This isn't even remotely true... You can measure the number of offshore farms in the dozens, there are something like 1,500 cities with populations of at least 500,000 - and most of these are close enough to the water to make broad use of offshore wind power. For instance, there's 1 operating off-shore farm in the US right now.
> New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW
Like pointed out elsewhere, this is true if you only look at off-shore costs. On shore wind is more like $1,250/KW. Importantly though, it's only true today. We're rapidly increasing the size of turbines and the height of towers. Most of the existing installations used 4/5/6-MW turbines. Vestas has already shipped a 9.5MW turbine. We'll likely see 20MW turbines within 5-7 years.
If you're building a 500MW off-shore farm with 5MW turbines, you'll need 100 foundations, towers, turbines, you'll need 300 blades and maintenance will have to service each one individually. Increasing those to 10MW cuts all of those costs in half (more likely, by 30% or so to account for scale). Doubling the size again has the same magnitude of impact. With 20MW turbines, a 500MW farm would only need 25 turbines and 75 blades.
The other benefit from these much larger turbines is that they'd sit much higher. If you increase the hub height from 100M to 150M or 200M, all of the sudden you're looking at sustained annual average winds approaching 20m/s. The wind shapes shift significantly as you increase altitude as well, so you can go from c=12, k=2 to c=20, k=3.5. This should easily move the capacity factors from ~50% to ~70+%.
> and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear.
Nobody serious expects that wind farms will only last 25 years. They'll last in perpetuity as long as their servicing costs stay below the marginal revenue from production. The initial lifetime expectations of nuclear reactors was 40 years, which has been extended for many plants. The same will happen with wind resources for many of the same reasons (high decommissioning costs, the challenges of siting a new generator, proven financial success at that location, etc.).
95% of that cost is due to compliance requirements. 98% of those compliance requirements are 100% bs. If the same requirements were asked of new coal or gas built it would exceed that of a nuclear plant. The average coal plant emits more radiation in a month than the average nuclear plant during its entire operational lifespan. And billions of tons of CO2 for extra planet-killing power.
b) Yes, Nuclear power is heavily regulated and this affects the cost. But that is the world we live in - and the world we build generating capacity in, so deal with it.
Coal plants would not be cheap to operate either if they had to pay for all the environmental damage they actually cause. Natural gas plants... they seem to be a good compromise for now, but we just cannot depend on fossil fuel to meet the electrical needs of future generations.
It is my sincere hope that we continue having a nuclear power industry to maintain the know-how learned over several generations. This would be useful not just for domestic power generations, but e.g. generating power for space stations, lunar/martian bases etc.
Part of the appeal of nuclear operations for the Navy (aside from the prestige) is the lucrative private sector opportunity. You'll see fewer folks going into that field if those private sector jobs dry up.
Although at the current time, low natural gas prices make natural gas plants very attractive, most nuclear plants are closed because of public outcry. A lot of these plants are nearing 50 years old as well.
Per the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.
You are correct, they are being closed due to financial reasons, not due to public outcry.
However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.
Right now we subsidize two technologies, rather than taxing the externality. It would be far more economically rational to tax carbon emissions, and for coal to also tax the other costs it imposes in non-carbon emissions.
There's currently a legal battle going on to allow nuclear plants to have Zero Emmisions Credits (ZEC) in several states where nuclear plants can no longer compete in the marketplace:
> However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.
They already have the benefit of not having to pay for their long term waste disposal and being bailed out in the event of a critical failure, which is arguably among the biggest long-term costs for nuclear.
Not too long ago German energy companies paid a flat fee of 24 billion Euros to absolve them from any future responsibility to pay for end storage. The US nuclear industry does pay a tax for disposal but that doesn't cover anywhere near the actual costs of storage.
We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.
Isn't that a nice vision of the future? We might manage to get our cheap, clean and renewable energy, but we will still be stuck taking care of very dangerous and expensive waste for thousands of years.
>...We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. To put it into perspective, no one of the general public has ever been hurt by nuclear waste and you definitely can't say that about coal waste.
Changes in technology have made natural gas cheap. But I think that's temporary - twenty years from now we're probably going to regret shuttering our nuclear plants and will be stuck with coal for at least a decade.
> when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction
The reaction can be completely rational. It depends on your estimate of the probability of a nuclear accident worse than Chernobyl. Officially it's around 10^-9 per reactor-year, but it's clearly an underestimate, if only because of the unknown unknowns.
Get a more realistic probability estimate, multiply by cost of all real estate in a large metro area, and you can get a pretty large expected loss.
> How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?
" It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour."
And there goes the misinformation campaign again.
The issues is not 'deaths per kw hour'. The issue is the unpredictable outcome of a single reactor incident.
How many more do we need to endure? How many more areas becoming radiated for generations? How much more radioactive waster water? How many more cancer deaths?
And how much more need tax payers pay for cleanup before we realize: Let's stop using this energy source.
Let's go renewals.
It's the only sane option.
