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(Warning - long) Winsor recently refloated the always popular nuclear-is-expensive-because-of-those-goddamn-hippies argument. Since he's not reading my posts any more, and since that's not relevant to the woke-bashing that's going on in that thread, I thought I'd break it out into a separate thread. First off, of course there is an element of cost associated with protests. When people don't like nuclear power (or aviation, or skydiving, or drag queens, or whatever) they protest, and those protests invariably make it more difficult/expensive to do whatever those people wanted to do initially - through demanding more regulation, or lobbying to deny permits, or promoting the bad over the good. In the case of nuclear power, however, that has very little to do with the rising costs. As a pilot and a skydiver, one thing I learned early on is that most aviation regulations were written in blood. The FAR that requires pilots to check the weather before they take off if they are flying to a different airport? That's not there because "bushy tailed Liberal Arts types in Boston/Cambridge" hated airplanes and wanted to screw up aviation. They are there because of the deaths of pilots who were surprised by weather after they took off. There are similar reasons for many of the regulations involved with nuclear power. The limits for worker exposure? That's not there because scaredycat liberals want to shut down nuclear power. That's because early on several people were injured and killed by radiation from poorly designed experiments and reactors. The Demon Core, for example, killed two people working with it. At that point, the risks of gamma radiation were known, but no one had been exposed to a fatal dose of neutron radiation before - something you can only get from a nuclear chain reaction, or via a very complex sort of particle accelerator. After those two deaths, more work was done on neutron radiation risks, and new limits were put in place. More regulations! Side note here - the reason most nuclear reactors are possible at all is due to a quirk of physics called "neutron cross section." It's basically the probability of a neutron hitting the nucleus of a fissile atom. Einstein's work made it clear that the slower the neutron, the more likely it was to hit that nucleus. This is important because "prompt criticality" - the sort of chain reaction we all learned about in school, and how nuclear bombs detonate - is VERY hard to regulate, since the reaction waxes and wanes over the course of hundreds of microseconds, too fast for humans to reliably control (as the physicists working with the Demon Core learned to their dismay.) However, it is possible to design nuclear reactors that cannot go prompt-critical, and can only reach criticality with delayed, or thermal, neutrons. These are neutrons that pass through a moderator (like water) and are slowed, as well as neutrons that are natually emitted from fission, just more slowly. This allows design of reactors with power time constants of seconds or tens of seconds, which makes regulation via control rods possible. Even better, if they lose their moderator (i.e. they lose coolant) the reaction slows automatically. In fact, if the reactor even just gets too hot and boils the water, the voids in the water moderator automatically reduce power generation (i.e. it has a "negative void coefficient.") This gave early reactor designers perhaps a bit too much confidence in the inherent safety of nuclear power. As people started working on reactors for power in peacetime, we saw some of those irrational emotion driven types Winsor was referring to in his post - but initally they were on the side of nuclear power. Nuclear power was so safe, easy and efficient, according to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, that "it is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." He saw so much of the promise of nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) and so little of the drawbacks that the future looked rosy indeed. Turns out, though, nuclear power is hard to do well. For example, if there is a LOCA (loss of coolant accident) in water-moderated reactor, the chain reaction does indeed stop. But the fuel is now full of short lived isotopes due to the neutron bombardment during operation, and those isotopes also decay and release neutrons. Not enough to sustain a chain reaction, but enough to cause additional fission and a LOT of heat. So although the reactor has technically shut down, it will still happily melt into a puddle of spent nuclear fuel, nuclear waste, moderator and steel. And it's hard to keep a reactor full of that stuff safe. And reactor designers started discovering this almost immediately. In most parts of the world, those designers have been very lucky that their mishaps have, for the most part, not resulted in large public health threats or loss of life. The first meltdown occurred at reactor EBR-1 in Idaho in 1955. This was a breeder reactor, so different design and different coolant, but same basic idea. A power excursion caused a partial meltdown, but cooling was restored and the core solidified before anything worse happened. The next occurred at the same facility, but in a different reactor - this time an experimental boiling water reactor. It was designed to not go prompt-critical for all the reasons listed above. However, when a technician removed a single control rod from the reactor, it did indeed go prompt-critical. Fortunately the core disassembled itself before nuclear weapon yields were reached, but the power excursion (20 gigawatts in a reactor designed to handle 3 megawatts) caused an explosion that killed three men in a fairly gruesome fashion. How could this have happened? This reactor was designed to be SAFE! It could not go prompt critical! Turns out two factors allowed this. One, some of the neutron poisons inside the reactor (that reduce reactivity) had corroded and flaked off. Two, it turns out that it takes water some milliseconds to boil, and this event happened in microseconds, so the voids could not form fast enough to shut down the reaction. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. In 1977, the nuclear reactor at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant had its coolant level drop while the reactor was powered down, exposing the fuel elements to air (actually steam.) A hydrogen explosion occurred, which damaged the reactor and seriously injured one worker. How could this have happened? There's no hydrogen in a reactor! Where did it come from? The hot fuel elements, clad in zirconium, reacted with the steam to generate the hydrogen. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. Then Chernobyl happened. Fortunately for us the RBMK reactor is so different from US designs that a similar accident almost certainly can't happen here. But again the accident was due to something that no one had considered - that there is an operating regime for a reactor where poisons build up so quickly that it shuts down the reactor, and when they burn off (as they do eventually) then the reactor can restart so violently that it, again, goes prompt critical. So probably no effect on US reactors; ours can't go prompt critical. Although we initially thought the same thing about the SL-1 reactor in Idaho. Lesson learned. This time, no new regulations for the US. There are about a dozen of these. Three Mile Island, the most visible US incident, was the result of two mechanical failures and three coincident operator errors. And despite all the reassurances from the utility, the incident came very close to a containment breach - most of the core did in fact melt down, and a lot of it ended up on the bottom of the vessel. During the investigation, it was discovered that valves to the emergency feedwater supply were closed and never opened, there was no clear indication on the reactor status panel that the PORV was stuck open, and an operator actually shut off the emergency high pressure injection system. So failures of training, equipment and instrumentation. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. Then outside the US came Fukushima. A textbook case of how to shut down a nuclear reactor in an emergency, and everything looked good. But then a tidal wave damaged - not the reactor, not the control room, but the power lines and the generators that provided cooling water for the reactors when shut down. And THEY melted down. So failure to take into account protection of the entire plant - not just the reactor. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power. These new lessons are why it's so hard to build new nuclear power plants. Recently the first nuclear reactor in decades opened at the Vogtle facility in Georgia. This was a simplified Gen IV design that's referred to as "walk-away safe" - no power needed to cool the reactor after an emergency shutdown. It was so simple that an early ad from GE for the reactor's original design touted "first concrete to fuel load in 36 months." From the beginning of the planning to the first operation took 20 years and came in $20 billion over budget. No protesters, just contractors screwing up, companies folding, and the usual very high level of quality required at a facility designed to safely contain a nuclear chain reaction. I keep hoping that, someday, we will get a Gen IV reactor design (or, heck, even a fusion reactor) that does indeed meet the promise made by Strauss all those years ago. What keeps us from getting there is not those goddamn hippies, and it's not evil liberals in suits toting briefcases. It's the fact that nuclear power is hard to do well, and we as a society have (wisely) demanded that it's done right.

Joe, I found a mask that not only keeps people at a distance, but makes them run in the opposite direction - for your consideration -

Freedom of religion doesn’t mean you don’t have to be aware of people you disagree with. Gays, transgender, intersex, satanists, people who cuss, people who wear long skirts — the constitution says they all get the same rights. So if you don’t want to be aware of feminists, that’s your problem, not mine. If you think homosexuality is wrong, that’s your problem. The fact that it’s called out in the Old Testament of the a Christian Bible is no more relevant to secular law than the fact that the wearing of linen and wool together is called out. The Amish can separate themselves, so can others. You don’t like the real world, don’t make it conform to your beliefs. That’s no more American than requiring women to wear long skirts and head scarves because men might be tempted. It’s up to men to control themselves. It’s also up to religious people to control themselves. They don’t want to be offended by something, stay away Wendy P.

So you want the Constitution "terminated." Sorry, my friend, gonna fight you on that one. You may not give a rat's ass, but some of us are rather fond of it. Heck, my father fought for it; I bet even you know a veteran or two who put their lives on the line for it.

If you dispute the stance of the videos, fine. I am impressed that the data regarding Tavistock were laid out in a rather coherent fashion FWIW, a social liberal/fiscal conservative is viewed by 'progressives' as a right wing reactionary, and someone who is indifferent to race or sex from a employment or political standpoint is similarly excoriated. I call bullshit. In the '70s the bright eyed, bushy tailed Liberal Arts types in Boston/Cambridge were hell bent on stopping nuclear power by shrill demonstrations, breaking through fences, chaining themselves to things and whatnot. When I pointed out that they came across to voters as malevolent morons on screen, and thus largely invalidated what were otherwise legitimate concerns, it seemed to be a novel concept. I had to explain that the plants were built to turn a profit, and that ensuring that nuke plants were a money pit would guarantee that NOBODY would build the next one. Strangely enough, being buried in very expensive paperwork increased the cost of a nuke plant tenfold, and construction of new plants came to a screeching halt. The key to halting nuke plants wasn't people on screen behaving as equally frantic and feeble minded, it was people in three piece suits with briefcases ensuring that it was unprofitable. A real issue with today's 'liberals' is the assumption that there are only two positions on any issue. You are either in favor of bringing murder charges for a miscarriage or are fine with partial birth abortions. To point out that the German approach where it is abortion before 15 weeks gestation IIRC, and falls under another category thereafter, seems to work falls on deaf ears. Living and working with people of all persuasions without making a big deal about it is characterized as intolerant, where failing to celebrate ethnic and sexual diversity is unacceptable. To treat people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin or who they sleep with is met with horror, so Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be seen as spouting right wing ideology. It's hard to take such nonsense seriously, and Poe's law comes into play. The videos are a useful for a reality check. It is fallacious to assume that if one side is wrong the other must be right (hint: in general, the extremes of both sides are equally repellent). You are young, but I can still recall when 'liberal' was generally moderate and did not imply hard core Marxism. Hearing out contrary positions and trying to understand them without actually agreeing with them was the goal. Now it is considered unacceptable to allowing someone from a differing stance to speak. Just because I am willing to hear someone out does not mean I support their position, quite the contrary. When I read the Koran or Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto I did not do so with the intent of adopting the particular ideology, but wanted some enlightenment regarding those who adhered to the principles therein. In each case I was left with the conviction that followers of any of these were pathologically mentally ill.. Getting back to your complaint, videos can be quite useful. If you have a point to make regarding their content, fine, If you are stuck on Argumentum ad Hominem, either Circumstantial or Abusive, your point is moot. BSBD, Winsor

It’d be nice if, instead of posting narrative videos which are worse than PowerPoints in eliminating all disagreeing data, y’all would take the actual information (with a little more detail than “liberal bad, conservative good”) and provide the relevant data. Wendy P.

Trump has stated he will "terminate" the Constitution. LOL

yeah that at least is a good way to explain part of my point... overused and dilutes the atrocities that took place. Trump is still a piece of shit capable of doing many evil things if he is given the opportunity. There is a significant portion of the population that has no problem with a dictatorship, because the country would at least 'look like them and their daily life', and they have delusions about 'some better time' that they have be robbed of, despite the fact that most things are just fine. Hate and fear still drives much of the movement towards authoritarianism. I do not undertsnad the human psyche that allows that to take over ones feelings about any given issue, but it certainly is a thing. You cannot do it if you simply point at any one individual person - you have to identify an entire group of people as your enemy and then everyone within that group becomes the enemy.

Your delusion is understandable given your prediction that EVs would overtake normal vehicles in three or four years (now one or two). Let’s see what is happening in the real world… “Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.”

I just think that it was funny that BillV bragged about improving air quality and referred to other states as “less developed” when California has some of the most polluted air in the country. Anything beyond that is overthinking. Let’s get back on track and discuss how Ford is projected to loose more than five billion dollars in its EV division this year.

From WebMD The ten cities with the worst air pollution in America include: Los Angeles CA #1 Bakersfield CA Visalia CA Fresno CA Sacramento CA San Diego CA San Francisco CA BillV didn’t you mention something about California’s air quality compared to “less developed” states? I’m sure Olof will try to blame Mexico BTW Pennsylvania has a higher population density than California, we get the majority of our electricity from fossil fuels and our air is still cleaner.

“Crapping their pants” is my characterization of their “disgust” and fear of RFK Jr. syphoning off support from Biden, resulting in a Trump victory. If you don’t think the prospect of a second Trump, in the minds of Democrats, rises to the level of pants crapping you are not as bright as I gave you credit.