"honestly green technologies"

I foresee howls of dismay of people realizing that they cannot actually live with pre-industrial levels of energy input.

Kinda like anti-vaxers when they get smallpox.

toward a Chernobyl-class cock-up

Rather begging the question aren't we?

Try living next to a "good engineering nuclear plant" and then [kills your children]

Try to be living next to a "good engineering scrap metal smelter" and then let dust dioxin all over your bio salads.

Hear, Hear!

I would say that calculating anything-related risks exceeds human capabilities.

At some point in time, you gotta say "go for it or stay on this spot forever". Then things will turn out well or pear-shaped [the black swan comes along] depending on what reality decides and the only thing you can hope for is to have invested enough time and money into contingency planning and fallback plans given the inevitable economic scarcity that reality saddles you with.

All this "risk calculation" mainly serves to butter the bread of plane-hopping consultants.

I also don't know about the speedy repair and rebuilding of other energy-furnishing tools in the present situation.

Striking while the iron is hot

They have a very strong green lobby and "concerned citizens" that want to get out of nuclear energy [and import electricity from abroad I imagine].

Probably driving home after protests in electric cars.

Inspecteur Clouseau, Monsieur!

Indeed.

This "affaire" is clear as mud!

"Seeing as how the Bank of Japan injected $85.5 billion into their economy yesterday"

Yeah well, this is just paper money, not real savings being liberated.

In a sense, a tsunami of nicely printed paper. Once the new "riches" have sloshed through the economy you are still at the same point than you were at the beginning.

Is see where you are coming from...

But where the hell is the "poor taste"?

I don't see an "international panic" either except among talking heads.

On the other hand...

He takes the risk of being proven wrong about it all.

Doommongers and fearleaders on the 24h TV circuit will get their 15 minutes of fame and can never be proven wrong because it's either "I told you so" or "This time we have been extraordinarily lucky".

Be ok with nuclear....

...you MUST be a right-wing thinktanker.

Oh my

The first to mention "nanothermite" will get 10 rad.

You seem to be on the ground.

How is the weather over there?

LOL wut?

It's "Consumer Electronics" now? How about industry? The one that's not "financial", ya know?

You point about inept governance is well taken though.

I remember walking through a presumably slighty radioactive rain, too and hearing mainly French Rubesoothspeak on TV in the days after, but that's "governance" and professional politicking as usual.

"Look at what this TEENAGER did" in the dailymail

Yes, and we would all be driving zero-point energy cars if Big Oil hadn't offed the inventors back when they were writing their patents in their parent's basement.

I also believed these things back when I was about 10.

Terminator icon, because it will be knocking at your door.

Consider....

This _is_ Japan. If you are looking for a country outside of the unlamented Soviet Union where "losing face" has to be avoided at all costs [though for different sociological reasons], this must be it.

Quite so.

Those RBMKs were also hard to stop. Apparently they behaved like car that first accelerates a good bit when you push the brake pedal.

There is somewhat more here as we have 25th anniversary of the RBMK prang next month:

http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/2/19.full -- When safe enough is not good enough: Organizing safety at Chernobyl

In particular check:

http://accidont.ru/ENG/rodes.html -- Special features of reactor RBMK

Yeah...

Anyone remember that time when manual workers threw buckets of water and uranium sludge into a container during cleanup? No-one grasped what would happen eventually until the blue flash came. Five people died IIRC.

"withstand mag 9+ earthquakes"

If the lifetime of the reactor is planned to be 50y, that will not be needed.

Earthquake energy gone now, we hope.

What?

It doesn't say "zor". Now that I have rendered attentive to that fact by good persians, the formerly chaotic pieces of broken glass indeed say "ZiON".

Morpheus' team hacking the matrix again, trying to irritate the machines?

Simple...

It's the water reacting with metal under high temperature.

Same problem with Three Miles Island, where everyone was fearing that the "Hydrogen Bubble" might lift the top off the structure.

DEAL WITH IT!

We are dependent on energy? Say it ain't so.

Well, up until the point where we can simulate all those billions of brains on buried quantum computing mainframes that manage to run on the small heat differential between the upper crust and the mantle, energy demand will only go up!

As for not giving "governments wide-ranging scope", Big Energy is the _least_ of your problems.

Cue Greenpeace howls and anger!

"There are still farms in Britain affected by the consequences of Chernobyl".

...because "disposing of" is equivalent to blowing the whole graphite/uranium core of an RBMK through the nonexistent containment roof.

In the mind of some.

Btw, wikipedia is now "current events":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[The last I heard of Japan maintenance skills in nuclear reactor management was that they were crap except when it's about covering the ass. That doesn't bode well.]

Fire icon because Fire.

"Financials" suck, but....

...a "hedge" fund, as the name implies, is about "hedging", i.e. offsetting risks in share pricing or other instruments. They are not into "breaking up companies" [that's what companies doing Leveraged Buyouts do, a weird practice that became possible once Government thought it might be a good idea to flood the economy with easy credit] or dictating strategic decisions. Or at least they should not.

Needs more jigawatts!

I was hoping someone had finally managed to prove the existence of axions and at the same time put it to good engineering use [which would be - pass light through magnetic field on side A, some photons turn into axions, pass through wall, where another magnetic field turns some back into photons for detection]. That would have been something, even at 330 bps.

Still pretty good though.

The gripping hand of it is ...

they should actually have opted for a simple, cost effective and useful o/s.

Yup...

As the saying went "Shake hands with Microsoft, better check that your arm is still attached."

1 billion USD over 5 years may not even be that much. In 5 years, the whole US monetary base might just be worth a cheeseburger with freedom fries on the side.

That's ok

Finally a good use of all that Panzer Kit we bought for the War on Terror.

Lolwut?

Spare us the defenseless widow with children spiel!

How are Red Hat Sharp Practices [tm] going to impede your income?

Maybe you are confused about what a RHCE is all about. It means you can handle a Red Hat System. It doesn't mean you can do all the support that comes with a Red Hat license yourself. If in doubt, ask for Red Hat support, which is presumably being paid for by your customer.

Ta!

We now know who "the enemy" is.

"The military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents a form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting, and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behavior."

- BuSab Manual, Chapter Five: "The Warlord Syndrome"

By you know whom

"In the late afternoon of September 1, 1870, King William I, surrounded by a pompous staff of princes and generals, was looking down from a hill south of the Meuse at the battle in progress, when an officer brought the news that the capitula­tion of Napoleon III and his whole army was imminent. Then Moltke turned to Count Falkenberg, who like himself was a mem­ber of the Parliament of Northern Germany, and remarked: "Well, dear colleague, what happened today settles our military problem for a long time." And Bismarck shook hands with the highest of the German princes, the heir to the throne of Württemberg, and said: "This day safeguards and strengthens the German princes and the principles of conservatism."[i]In the hour of overwhelming victory these were the first reactions of Prussia's two foremost states­men. They triumphed because they had defeated liberalism. They did not care a whit for the catchwords of the official propaganda: conquest of the hereditary foe, safeguarding the nation's frontiers, historical mission of the house of Hohenzollern and of Prussia, unification of Germany, Germany foremost in the world. The princes had overthrown their own people; this alone seemed im­portant to them."