Until the Aftermath of This Election I Had Never Realized....

http://sandiegosierraclub.org
They have some good hikes there and it has been a few years but I have been to a few of their monthly public meetings. Yes, most of the people I have meet there and discussed the issue with are very antinuclear. They don't seem to know what base load power is and seem to think everything can be run on solar, wind, and unicorn farts.

Nukes are currently the only non-fossil fuel baseload replacement we have (that isn't geographically limited).

The problem with most renewables is that they aren't constant. You can't build a grid around them. At least now.

In order for them to take over as base load we need to replace our entire grid (smart grid), all our appliances (internet of things) AND have a storage revolution (better/cheaper/bigger batteries).

OR we could build some nukes to handle base load while we figure the rest out.

When were you attending these public meetings? And the issue of nukes came up? What were y'all endorsing/opposing in relation to nukes?

Fuck you. I said as much as I am willing to say on a public website. You asked, I told you. Now go play your game some where else.

OR tell people they'll have to do without that hair-dryer and all those other big-energy-consumers that they "need".
But that will lose you votes. Which is why I'm pessimistic. We'll never pull it off in time because people refuse to recognize the urgency. And they refuse because it ain't convenient to recognize it at this time.

All this falls into Collins' points about (1) the need to meet "needs" and (2) faith in solutions coming tomorrow for our harmful acts today.

And it ALL ignores the Overwhelming Elephant in the Living Room: (geometrically progressing) overpopulation.

I'm kinda fond of central A/C. Yes, I lived in France without it for 4 years. No I don't think I'd do without it (at least not in the south east). I guess I could kill myself.

In my defense I've spent $3,000 on energy efficient windows (installed myself!) and blew in 24 inches of attic insulation in the past 6 months.

I have consistently voting green for half a decade now yet Anc seems to think I have never been to any environmental group meetings or hikes. Hell, I even work in the environmental field not that Anc knows anything about that.

It does get tiring though. Just how I was at the local woman's March last weekend and then you hear some of the people here claiming some how I didn't go. Sure, what ever. Half of you do not know as much as you think about other posters you have never met.

This is yet another example of why nobody gives a fuck what you think.

http://www.newser.com/story/237417/mathematician-wants-to-fight-tsunamis-with-sound-waves.html

Who's going to stop China from industrialing?

How long is it actually dangerous though?

What was wrong with Yucca Mountain?

Answer:

Nothing.

I heard about a process that cooks plutonium back down to uranium so it's still hot, but not as hot, but...it takes power, so...irony.

More than 24,000 years.

You do know that "half life" and "dangerous" are not necessarily the same thing don't you?

You do know that half the plutonium 239 in spent fuel is still lethal, don't you? And that's at 24,000 years.

Lots of things are lethal if you inhale them.

A cup of water for instance.

I hope you never teach science.

Here are the Yucca Mountain standards. 10,000 years, 1,000,000 years. Who cares, we won't be around.

Shortly after the EPA first established these standards in 2001, the nuclear industry, several environmental and public interest groups, and the State of Nevada challenged the standards in court. In July 2004, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found in favor of the Agency on all counts except one: the 10,000 year regulatory time frame. The court ruled that EPA’s 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short.[55][56] The NAS report had recommended standards be set for the time of peak risk, which might approach a period of one million years.[57] By limiting the compliance time to 10,000 years, EPA did not respect a statutory requirement that it develop standards consistent with NAS recommendations.[58]

EPA's rule[edit]
EPA published in the Federal Register a final rule in 2009. The new rule limits radiation doses from Yucca Mountain for up to 1,000,000 years after it closes. Within that regulatory time frame, the EPA has two dose standards that would apply based on the number of years from the time the facility is closed.

For the first 10,000 years, the EPA would retain the 2001 final rule’s dose limit of 15 millirem per year. This is protection at the level of the most stringent radiation regulations in the U.S. today. From 10,000 to one million years, EPA established a dose limit of 100 millirem per year. EPA's rule requires the Department of Energy to show that Yucca Mountain can safely contain wastes, considering the effects of earthquakes, volcanic activity, climate change, and container corrosion, over one million years. The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose through 1,000,000 years.[59]​

I teach science right now.

I weep for your students.

I was complimented on my perfect knowledge of the subject matter by an older woman who was helping with my Advanced Placement Science class

She has taught science for more than 20 years by the way

The quotation marks are a tell.

As with just about anything, the dose makes the poison. Plutonium is dangerously radioactive in relatively small amounts (not polonium dangerous, but not U238 safe), however plutonium is also wickedly toxic in quantities that would only otherwise raise your risk of cancer.

We can't unseen your Praxis exam results, and we all know you scraped through on reading comprehension.

For history, yes, but I doubt you grasp science any better than you do history.

If I remember by AP chemistry class correctly, the half-life is a measure of how long it takes for half of a substance to burn itself out (I forgot what the science term was for that process, seeing as I took this class fifteen years ago) .

So, you've got 24k years for the dose of radiation to become half of what the initial dose was. And then, it's another 24k years for *that* second dose to halve. And so forth.

This is why California's push back against nuclear power plants being built here. One big quake could render massive areas of our coastline an exclusion zone. And traffic is already congested as it is,without rerouting parts of the 5 onto other north/southbound freeways.

The solution is to reprocess spent fuel rods. The spent rods still have over 90% of their useful energy left so recycling is a good idea.

California's a big state. You don't have to build a plant on the San Andreas fault you know.

Is half life and radiation dose directly, linearly connected?

Sir Isaac Newton believed in creationism. All modern science is derived from his beliefs.

No. Dosage gets complicated and distance becomes very important. A half life just means how long for half of the radioactive item to break down. Ad long as you are reprocessing in a closed, or nearly closed, fuel cycle then that doesn't matter. You will still end up with a few actinides which cannot be reprocessed and will need to be despised of but we are talking a tiny amount.

All modern science is derived from his....wut?