Soaring, Cryptography, and Nuclear Weapons 303
Martin Hellman sends in a pointer to his essay that uses analogies from cryptography and the sport of soaring in an attempt to draw people in to thinking about the risks of nuclear weapons. Quoting: "... I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home." Hellman is best known as co-inventor (with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, and has worked for over twenty-five years to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He is also a glider pilot with over 2,600 logged hours. Hellman adds, "Readers needing a break can go to some photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains taken from my glider."
Off the cuff statistics make me sick. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah...I would love to see how he produced that "risk analysis" statement. I guess, since nuclear reactors are virtually not dangerous at all with todays technology, it can be said that something that is only a little dangerous (relying on nuclear weapons for security, which has worked for almost 60 years) can be a thousand times as dangerous, because 1000 * 0 = 0.
Re:Public-key crypto (Score:2, Interesting)
or, put more succinctly (Score:2, Interesting)
military responses to economic and ideological problems never works
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's funny, nuclear plants don't even make my list. On my list are things like planes, train stations, embassies and other government buildings, cafes, malls, and busses.
While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Do you recall that TMI happened BEFORE Chernobyl, and sparked a quite thorough redesign of reactors to make them safer, and GenIV reactors, if we ever get around to building them, would be safer yet?
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
First, the stuff is safer than coal - a lot of the pollution from coal actually ends up in the environment. Besides that, I(and many other nuclear proponents) figure we'll be going after that high level waste in less than a hundred years to use it as fuel again. Other options include breeder reactors and reprocessing using modern methods to reduce the amount of waste, and the lifespan of the waste, substantially.
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so? I don't think that is factored into the cost of electricity from a nuclear plant, is it?
How long until the Mercury released by Coal plants exits out of the environment? How long until the CO2 is sequestered again?
And yes - it is factored in. The federal government told the nuclear power plant operators: You WILL pay us $X per megawatt/hour produced. We WILL dispose of the waste. There's lawsuits going on about that one.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Chernobyl was bad design. What makes you think Three Mile wasn't shitty design?
Three mile happened 29 years ago, and would NEVER have happened with todays reactors.
Regarding waste. Should we wait until there is a complete solution to this problem, or bet on it being solved in the semi-near future? I consider the gains worth the "risk" of having to keep the waste locked up worth thousands of coal-plants. Especially since coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
Do we guard the coal ash? Don't our children pay a higher price for the ginormous amounts of coal burnt every single day?
I ain't saying that we should drop wind/solar/thermal/wave/hydro power. But I think nuclear is a pretty good step in a better direction, especially since only hydroelectric power can adjust quickly to grid needs, but hydro isn't available everywhere. (Fortunately, I live in Norway where we have *no* coal plants but plenty of hydro)
Does it really sound that bad, compared to the *existing* alternatives?
/wastes/fuel reserves/s (Score:2, Interesting)
Be suspicious of any chain of reasoning based on taking what Homeland Security et al think as true. These people are fear mongers, and use artificially created fear to control the masses. For some reason their otherwise incoherent policies always seem to align on one point: they increase the profits of big oil.
Oh come on. The hydrogen did ignite [ncwarn.org] and nothing significant happened. The "bubble" was what was left over after all the hydrogen that could have burned already had. The public and the environment suffered no injury, and the whole thing was blown way out of proportion.
It's only a problem because we have been hornswaggled into thinking of it as "waste" instead of thinking of it as "fuel reserves." If you want to suppress any technology try this simple trick:
For example, if you could convince people that they could only use 10% of the gas they put in their cars and had to save the other 90% forever, what would happen to the auto industry?
Incidentally, the whole "longer half-life == more dangerous" talking point is stupid. Saying that something has an enormously long half-life is just another way of saying that it is relatively stable. It's the things with the short half-lives you need to worry about. The tungsten in your lightbulbs, for instance, has a half-life of around 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. Buy the backwards logic of the anti-nuke people, it should be terrifying stuff, much more dangerous than uranium with a half-life of only 100,000 to 1,000,000,000 years, right? -- MarkusQ
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Interesting)
God, tell me about it. After reading a comment on the good old somethingawful forums on the subject I did the math for how much uranium/thorium and other nasties can be found in coal. a few parts per million doesn't sound like much but when you burn billions of tons of coal it adds up FAST.
Powering everything with nuclear and having a chernoble every year would put less radioactive material into the air/water/ground.
I wish someone could get around to actually finishing an IFR so we could just say "burn it for fuel in the ifr" whenever someone spews crap about how there's no way of getting rid of nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. Technical problem, technical solution.
Slightly disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's overstating it a bit. The rational reasons for not reprocessing fuel revolve around the following issues:
1. Transporting used fuel to the reprocessing center and back.
2. Production and separation of enormous quantities of Plutonium, which needs to be carefully guarded due to proliferation and terrorism risks.
3. Some hazards in the reprocessing itself. There have been several serious accidents in reprocessing plants, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorp_nuclear_fuel_reprocessing_plant#2005_leak [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident [wikipedia.org]
(and other incidents)
4. Reprocessing only really starts to make good economic sense if you bring fast breeder reactors online, and those have safety issues of their own.
Something like the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) might substantially reduce these risks, but until an advanced breeder reactor is actually built and operated for a significant period, it's hard to say how safe they really are, and whether they'll make economic sense.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd put the figure at a little more than 100 years, some of the medium level 200-500 year stuff can be nasty if you're exposed for an extended time.
But ya, people are retarded when it comes to radiation. I don't know how often I've heard the phrase "dirty bomb" when someone wants to claim that nuclear power plants would be much use for terrorists even after it's pointed out that you can't just grab a handful of normal nuclear fuel and turn it into an H-bomb in your garden shed.
NEWS FLASH PEOPLE: Any terrorists who want to make a dirty bomb could just raid a food processing plant and steal some of the stuff used for irradiating the food.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Interesting)
And while it is obvious to anyone versed on the subject that a coal plant belches out far more radioactive material than a properly operating coal plant, when a nuclear plant goes south, it can do it in a big way. TMI let some 40,000 curies of radioactive Krypton out. Chernobyl was far worse and directly killed a lot of people, contaminated a huge area of the Ukrane, and spewed contamination across Europe.
I think it's pretty convenient and disingenuous that you and your other proponents of nuclear power continue to blame every accident on "bad designs". Sure they were bad - but people didn't know they were bad until they failed in various ways - some catastrophically.
Meanwhile, we have other reactors, also bad designs, that continue to operate far past their design lifetimes.
Look, I realize that nuclear power is going to have to be used to bridge between our fossil fuel-based society as we move to renewable sources of energy. It's out today that global climate change is way ahead of schedule and much more drastic than was originally projected as some of the various positive reinforcements kick in. Actually, anyone who has been following climate change probably realizes we are way past being able to stop what is now going to happen. That window of being able to do something has closed and there is too much momentum to do a damn thing about it. Which, basically, makes the arguments about nuclear waste fairly moot.
It was also in the news that grain yields are also declining. There goes the food supply and when people can no longer feed themselves, wars break out. Maybe we'll even see runaway nuclear reactions that are actually designed to be runaway reactions.
All of these arguments your kind puts out that minimize the risk of nuclear power and compare apples and oranges while trying to argue how safe it is - I love the comment about grinding up nuclear waste and spreading it around to make it safer.
I think it is you that needs to understand things better.