Posts by camnai

If he's right, at worst we waste--or more accurately, redistribute--a little bit of money. If he's wrong, a lot of people are fucked. What's good risk management on this one?

You mean that echo chamber of scientists who know what they're talking about? Or the ones that are fossil-fuel funded? We stand to lose much less if 98% of the scientist are wrong than we do if they're right. It's called 'risk management'.

And the people who employ sweatshop labour in Bangladesh are doing it in the interests of the wearers of shirts.

Had there been a Technical Workers Union, this would never have happened, and most of you would be making a lot more money. But I guess unions are old-fashioned and stultifying. Oh, and you have to pay dues, too.

Leaving aside what sounds like denier bias in the Mori questions cited here, we seem to have a lot of non-scientists assuming that scientists don't know what they're talking about. That is similar to an analogue-retentive like me proclaiming that, because I often don't understand what the tekkies on here are talking about, that the tekkies themselves don't understand it. My experience in talking to my tekkie acquaintances about things like how to operate my cell phone suggests that in fact they do know what they're talking about. Climate change is happening, and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the smoking gun, and that the basic principles of risk management need to be applied. It will cost a lot of money to mitigate, and it will cost even more the longer we put it off. I would be much happier if it weren't happening, but wishing won't make it so. Nor will surveys of people who don't know what they're talking about.

I'm an Arts graduate of many years ago who has to concentrate very hard to understand anything even mildly technical, and who continues to have great respect for the amount of work my Engineering friends had to do to memorize all those formulae and figure out all those right answers, a problem we did not face because in our fields there are no formulas, and there is no right answer. Our retort to 'fuzzy studies' was 'trained seals', but it takes a bright seal to do complicated tricks. What we had to do was to be cogent and original over 25 pages on something like 'Animal Imagery and the Supernatural in MacBeth', from which experience we would, it was hoped, learn to be comfortable with and communicate in complex real-world ideas. That is something that is hard to quantify, which is why technicians and libertarians don't like it.

Watermarks/records

'Tsunamis of the scale that arrived last March would not be a problem because “... there were no watermarks or records of one.”

Actually, there were written records and sedimentary evidence from the Jogan Sanriku earthquake of 869. The original General Electric design for the reactors put the emergency cooling equipment in the basement, and TEPCO elected, apparently over the objections of some of its engineers, to follow that design. I don't know about the cancer risk, as that will take decades to reveal itself, but surely there's grounds for charges of criminal negligence here.

Rip-offs

Sorry, but when you download copyrighted content for free, you're stealing it, and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the people who have other reasons to want to limit the freedom of the internet. And 'everyone does it' is not an excuse.

There is a lot of hyperventilating about Fukushima, which is probably not a bad thing because it will have its place in the balance of common sense which will, probably later rather than sooner, be restored. In the interests of creative muddification, though, workers at a chip plant in eastern Canada or upstate New York will be exposed to twice the background radiation that prevails in Tokyo because they will be so much closer than Tokyo workers to that good, firm bedrock.

Share price

When Stringer took over, Sony shares were worth about $40; now they're $17. I wonder how much the shareholders have had to pay him in bonuses to keep him in the job.

George I

George H. W. Bush may have been an 'elite carrier pilot', but as far as I've ever heard his combat experience was limited to being shot down while out joy-riding with an old family friend. He only became a war hero when he inveigled Michael Dukakis into calling him one after Bush had insinuated Dukakis wasn't a patriot because he'd never been in the military. This was just after the Willie Horton ad.

Good.

Good on them. Wind power is not going to fill much of our needs anytime soon, but we need to be working on making it more efficient. The real costs of oil and gas (the war in Iraq? The maintenance of navies to police sea lanes?), nuclear power (the economic loss from the perception that produce from Fukushima Prefecture might be dangerous, even if it turns out that danger is exaggerated), and even hydro does not show in calculations of their real cost.

Set out all the costs

Too many posts to read, so I might be covering old ground...Mr Page's analysis of wind-power costs seems valid as far as it goes, and the problems with alternative power sources on cloudy days when there's no wind between tides are obvious. However, wind power here is being tasked with all its costs, while those of nuclear, thermal, and even hydro power are not. Not Tokyo Electric Power nor the Japanese government nor GE/Hitachi will ever pay anywhere near the financial loss and massive dislocation being suffered by the people of Fukushima, and they will certainly never pay for the extra time I've had to spend in a largely unsuccessful attempt to find my brand of cigarettes, whose packaging plant is in that area and hence not functioning right now. They will not pay for the Fukushima residents who for the rest of their lives will wonder if any minor ailment is the first symptom of (slightly more than background-level) radiation-induced cancer. None of these costs will be factored into the price of nuclear power. The companies--all too big to fail--will pay what they manage to convince people they can afford, and the citizens will bear the rest, which will not be considered part of the cost of nuclear power.

Similarly, motorists do not pay at the pump or in road taxes for the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the security measures in airports and elsewhere made necessary by western interventions in the Middle East to secure oil supply. Oil as an energy source is not tasked with the costs of air-pollution or plastics-caused health problems--nor for the research into exactly what these problems are and how they can be countered.

Hydro maybe isn't as bad, but people moved out of the way of a power dam, or people at risk because they live below a power dam, or people downstream who don't get as much water any more, are never fully recompensed for any of this.

I am not suggesting that we should abandon these conventional sources of energy. We need them. But any discussion of the relative cost of different sources should also take into account the free ride these very efficient conventional sources currently enjoy.