Are nuclear power and terrorism incompatible

I'll let François speak for himself

Well, let DeAnander speak for herself, too: is this a lot more information than what she admitted or not? (I don't think they touch on my complaints on secrecy a bit, either.) What really is the comparison you have in mind when you say "not quite closed and secret"? And do you agree with Francois that claims of secrecy are just BS?

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

So, yeah, you need the military to protect your nuclear waste from other militaries, but that's about it. And in that respect protecting nuclear infrastructure is like protecting any other infrastructure.

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

I think I have told you before to get off your high horse, melo. You're pushing it again.

If you're right, you should be able to convince yourself. Then you should be able to convince a friend. Then you should be able to convince an enemy.

Convince me.

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

If an accident is reported the outcry is much more vocal when it's a nuke accident than if it's a burning oil dump.

Therefore profits will be hit, and a plant may be closed down. Therefore - since it's mostly about profit - it's better to minimise the truth than be honest.

I think De's point is that a key difference is that it's impossible for people to assess the risk for themselves, which means that nuke damage assessment relies on expert testimony more than any other industry does.

When something like Bhopal happens it's obvious who has been affected. With coal burning you'll see smog and acid rain. But an equivalent nuke accident will release deadly poisons into the air and no one will notice unless some bothers to tell them.

So it's a combination of the profit motive, legacy links to weapons development, the opaqueness of the process itself and - not least - the solid record of dishonesty that the industry has acquired over the years.

This doesn't mean the industry has to be dishonest. But it's very much harder to cover up a loose turbine blade than a leak of radioactive particles.

the fact that people are not as stupid and gullible as governments and advocates of this grisly technology would like, so the rule of the people, oops, democracy, would not permit it to go forward if they didn't have the best paid liars in the world constantly keeping us in the dark and feeding us horseshit.

would you walk me through why that's so hard to understand?

would you be happy raising your children downwind of a nuke plant?

do you trust nuclear power companies to tell you the truth?

and what are they doing while feeding us lies?

it's a secret!

qed

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

So, the problem is terrorists?

The problem with the nuclear power industry is that it is staffed by a pack of liars.  They lie by omission.  They lie by commission.  They give out little lies that they then cover with other lies that they cover with a big lie that they then, finally, admit were lies.  They have lied in the past.  They have lied in the present.  No doubt they will lie in the future as well.

The nuclear power industry are murders.  They killed tens, if not hundreds, of people in the Four Corners area in the 1940-1950s directly from uranium mining and indirectly from the dust cause by uranium mining.  They have also killed a whistle blower in the US by putting radioactive material under her driver's seat.

The nuclear power industry are incompetents, e.g., they build nuclear power plants meters away from the San Andreas Fault.  And, when this was pointed-out, claimed it was perfectly safe.  (A twofer!)

The technical papers and reports - even the science - behind the nuclear power industry are irrelevant to the this discussion.  Saying some nuclear power plants and some groups of nuclear power plants are run by truth-telling competents  brings us into the Existential which, by definition, precludes Categorical analysis.  So general statements regarding the operation of nuclear power plants has no necessary application, or bearing, on the nuclear power plant down the road.

Speaking of which, the nuclear power plant down the road has 4 reactors.  The advertising prior to construction was that they wanted to build 4 to keep 3 running while doing repairs, and so forth, on 1.  Since the plant came on-line they've kept all 4 running all the time.  

 

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

"economy of scale" as I think someone (not me) pointed out on an earlier thread, presupposes that transportation -- raw materials in, product (such as electricity) out -- is free, or at least that its cost is irrelevant.  the cost in loss over long transmission lines is irrelevant so long as you have productive capacity in considerable excess of demand;  the cost of mining fuel half a world away, or even half a continent away, and hauling it to the centralised facility (not to mention the cost hauling the toxic waste products away again to a "safe" distance) is irrelevant so long as you have a near-infinite supply of cheap liquid fuel for the hauling.  

in other words, the Economy of Scale notion is a product of cheap energy, and is itself scaled to the cheapness of energy.  if energy and other resources were free/infinite, then we could have one godawful huge power plant on one island someplace that fed the entire planet with electricity galore, and the hell with the losses in 4000 mile transmission lines;  but, as with sci-fi Arthropods of Unusual Size, there are physical factors that limit the practical extent of centralisation.  

when energy becomes expensive, the radius of "economy of scale" shrinks, because long supply lines and long delivery lines get more and more expensive proportional to the amount of energy generated.  if you want to save energy by encouraging less car use and more bike use, then the walmart/costco model of centralising all retail activity for a 400 sq mi region on one megabox store becomes unworkable.  that model is only workable when (a) the energy cost of people driving 100 mi round trip to the centralised store is trivial compared to the cost of goods acquired, (b) the energy cost of hauling slave-labour goods half way around the world to stock the shelves is trivial compared to the sales revenues.  as soon as energy becomes expensive, the "advantages" of concentrating manufacturing in "sacrifice zones" (both human and ecological) thousands of miles away, and the "advantages" of driving tens of miles for "cheap" goods, turn into losing propositions.

the Economy of Scale radius is not an axiom (bigger/more centralised is always better), it's a function of a wildly varying term (energy availability and cost).

as long as energy supplies are finite and have non-zero costs or downsides, there is always a point at which economy of scale founders on energy costs and diminishing returns; this is why we do not have 50 foot cockroaches.

I dunno why various folks keep accusing me of being "pastoral," when I personally tend no herds of ruminants -- and even do a fair amt of research on urban microfarming and the efficiencies of self-powered multifamily buildings...  economy of scale may work very well indeed at the apartment-building or city-block level, or the village level (fairly similar transport radii).  smaller radii could apply just as well to self-organisation and robustness w/in urban areas as outside them, as Jacobs argues so convincingly in DLGAC.

and before we jump to the conclusion that centralisation = hightech medical care = happiness, we might wonder how many of the ills presented to high-tech medical specialists are themselves the physical "externalities" [sic] of industrial toxicity concentrated by centralisation.  the high-tech pharma nexus in the US, f'rexample, is one of the worst criminal polluters;  I am not the only observer to note that it makes a large chunk of cash "curing" the cancers and other syndromes that its effluents are causing.  many people worldwide sicken and die because they live in cities (air pollution mostly, but also slum conditions generally) or because the industrial effluents from the activities which enrich the urban elite contaminate soil and water throughout the hinterlands.  which somewhat vitiates the claim that we are all so awfully lucky to have access to the high-tech medical facilities that "only cities" can provide... I think Cuba's track record on decentralising health care to the neighbourhood and the village level speaks for itself here -- lower tech preventive and basic medicine decentralised and spread more evenly through the population achieves better results wrt most accepted metrics than isolated concentrations of industrialised med tech.

what economy of scale really translates into is a tradeoff between the cost of supply lines and the value of the output, and a tradeoff between more and less democratic institutions (i.e. more or less centralised control).  being as how I am a pessimistic student of human nature and tend to endorse Lord Acton's axiom, I don't think any one person or small team of people should own/hold the Off switch for the daily power needs of millions.  I like short supply lines, especially in troubling and uncertain times.

this does not in any way indicate that I object to extending delivery networks for load balancing, energy sharing, etc., as proposed in the recent "renewables for Euroland" study I cited earlier.  but if those networks fail, they should fail into a few broken local nodes and many functional local nodes, not into one massive failure area.  I wouldn't design a 24x7 computational center to work that way (with all the compute power in one single chassis for a single POF), why would I design a power grid that way?  the Beowulf style cluster of peers, or the VO peer-network data mining/reduction architecture, is a far better mimic of  highly adaptive and stable biotic webs, and hence imho inherently superior design (even aside from considerations of "social capital" and institutional culture).

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...