Posts by cnapan

these games stand the test of time!

Sure, when you fire them up in an emulator today, they can seem almost laughably simple, but they did their job of dropping you into an imagined world and taking you on an adventure, and that's no less at the heart of a good game today than it was back then.

I still remember the first time I saw Jetpac on the speccy and thought 'ooh this is almost like a proper arcade game!'

It's nice to think that an entire world can be constructed in the same amount of memory that today would be used to make Commander Shepard say 'We're all done here'.

those unable to use logic fall foul of nuclear hysteria

If you're the sort of person who considers salt to be 'safe' because it is necessary for life, then quite clearly you don't have the reasoning skills to engage usefully with a debate about nuclear safety.

The truth about salt is that is a killer. Not only will you die rather quickly if you have large amounts of it (e.g. drink seawater), but you'll also suffer from all sorts of chronic conditions which shorten life if your diet contains slightly raised levels of the stuff.

Now in the same way, nuclear material can either be harmless or dangerous depending on the type and severity of exposure, and the type of radioactive element involved.

But you're already on record as making the declaration that there is no safe level of radiation - something totally disproven by the evidence - something you are quite clearly unable to deal with.

It is precisely because you are unable to reason that you find yourself making no headway in the debate.

If you want to influence others, I suggest you stop hiding from the facts which disprove your claims, stop making things up, and start asking yourself why you have such an emotional hatred for a form of power generation which kills fewer people each year than any other mainstream source of power generation - all without having to change the chemistry of the atmosphere in a way which most scientists agree will cause mass suffering in a few decades.

It must be very upsetting to you that even the most devastating natural disaster pitched against a collection of 6 nuclear power plants led to the death of... absolutely nobody, even though these plants were built before I was even born. Radiation levels outside the plant areas remain stubbornly low - less than you'd experience in a holiday cottage in Newquay. (Which, I suppose, should be evacuated as it is 'unsafe')

I also find it quite sickening that you downplay the destructive consequences of the tsunami in order to try to clear the decks for your non-existent nuclear armaggedon scenario. Tens of thousands of people were actually killed, injured or made homeless, and countless hectares of land will be out of production for a significant period due to plain old 'safe' salt water.

God's tsunami certainly showed us who's boss!

"Benedict also pointed out that for all Man's resourcefulness, recent natural disasters have highlighted that Man is not all-powerful."

It's hard to know where to start with this...

This God who supposedly exists... why did he just do what a made up being would do when a country's people are threatened by killer waves? (i.e. nothing).

Perhaps he thought that the best way to get people into church and praise him was by killing a few of them off.

Here's my advice to God:

1) If you're going to exist, please start having a measurable effect on reality. It would greatly help those people who currently end up on the losing side of arguments when asked to prove your existence.

2) If you're going to exist, could you *please* sort out all your warring followers? They really can't agree on anything about you. They're all bleating about being your chosen people, and a few of them go around detonating people who don't agree.

Ta lots,

X

Herd of elephants still in the room: ad hominem attackers pay attention!

a) This isn't another Chernobyl (Apostasy!)

b) Even Chernobyl didn't kill very many people. (Blasphemy!)

c) Even in its worst year, Nuclear is significantly less deadly to both workers and the general population than any mainstream fossil fuel. (Satanic Worshipper!)

d) The world's energy requirement is dramatically rising and is set to continue to do so for the next few decades. (But we recycle our carrier bags!)

e) Fossil reserves are becoming ever more costly and dangerous to extract, and extraction is coming at an ever more significant environmental cost (tar shales, deep sea wells, resource wars).

These are the arguments which will drive the politicians of India, China and developed nations to pay lipservice initially to the nuclear hysteria, but then go back to planning large scale rollouts of nuclear power.

It makes sense in the end, no matter how many names you throw around.

In answer to 'hhhrrrrrmmmm'

I'd like to respond to your post:

"I had impression that the register is a source of reasonable factual if not always balanced information"

Fair enough...

"yet t he article and discussion force me to state that the ignorant bunch here is just unbearable."

So rather than respond with reason to what you don't agree with, instead you just shout names. Do you know how unlikely that is to win people round to your view?

"I am still ready to read the posts of ignorants with patience if at least one of the 'hurra nuclear is safe' camp volunteers to clean up the shit in Fukushima."

But you already have read them, because you are commenting on their 'ignorance'. Now you're telling us that you won't read them until someone decides to 'clean up the Shit in Fukushima'. Do you know how unlikely that is to win people round to your view?

(Oh, and if you want to see the 'shit' that needs clearing up, fire up Google Earth and see for yourself the towns and villages washed away. There's plenty of shit to clear up alright.)

"I donot even care what you are going to do but show us how safe that really is by own example. Let us judge on results."

But people *have* travelled from Europe to help 'clean up the shit' (both at Fukushima and elsewhere). Yet you're *still* claiming it isn't safe.

"OTOH no not really the nonsense about 15 (or less) dead children in Chernobyl did it for me.

By by register."

Gosh well goodbye to you too. I guess that'll give you more time to concentrate on your IT job, which, judging by your reasoning abilities is possibly not going as well as it might...

Google Earth: Take a trip over the disaster zone

See for yourself what is causing the suffering in Japan:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fukushima&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=2gJ&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&prmd=ivnsum&biw=1600&bih=1116&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

This is the location of the fukushima nuclear plant.

Now take a trip north up the coast towards Sendai Airport. What can you see?

That's right:

-Countless towns and villages simply washed away or seriously damaged. Massive damage to industrial sites in many places.

-Large expanses of farmland despoiled by seawater and the materials - some of it undoubtedly toxic - from the destroyed infrastructure.

The region around Fukushima is already devastated. Tens of thousands of people are already dead. Hundreds of thousands of people already have their lives wrecked, and will be suffering for a long time to come.

It seems a common theme on here by those who are unable to meet reason to say "why don't you go and live there?"

A quick trip there courtesy of google earth demonstrates why it is a bad idea right now. The place is utterly shattered.

I certainly wouldn't be afraid of the radiation there, but I would be afraid of picking up a nasty sewage-borne infection or having to deal with the stench of rotting bodies which are sitll being extracted from the mud and debris for literally miles on end.

So, no. I'm not going there. Not because of trivial increases in my exposure to background radiation, but because it happens to be the site of one of the most deadly natural disasters in living memory.

I think the problem has been dramatically overplayed not underplayed

"There is no denying that Japan and other nuclear-industry folks have been steadily downplaying the severity of the problem"

1) The exclusion zone has caused people to be moved out of their houses without there being any significant risk.

2) The 'safe' levels are pitched far lower than radiation levels which most of us are quite happy to yield to when it comes from a B&B in Devon, a trip to New York or a nice banana, the consequence being that when something is described as 'thousands of times above the limit', it elicits concern and panic which have their own consequences

3) Even when the authorities have communicated that an earlier concern has eased, such reports generally don't make it to the headlines - this isn't their fault of course, but the overall effect is that we don't hear a balanced view of what the people at the scene are reporting.

The reasons for this are clear:

1) The media know they can cause shock and fear with nuclear stories. Mushroom clouds, endless nuclear winter and double headed mutants are, for many, what nuclear equates to, and that's that.

2) Those who are too ignorant to furnish themselves with the facts about nuclear then go on a religious mission to convert the planet to forms of energy which are proven to kill large numbers of people on a continual basis, or alternatives which either kill vast numbers of people when they go wrong (e.g. dams) or are hopeless at providing modern nations with the power they need when they need it.

Armageddon has been cancelled... till next time

We know this because all the signs are in place:

"If it saves a single child" argument: Check

"Talk about nuclear waste rather than Japan": Check

"Talk about nuclear bombs to dig up some deaths via nuclear": Check

Ad-hominem arguments grow to 50% of all anti-nuclear posts: Check

In fact, it's business as usual again in that debate between reason and hysteria when it comes to nuclear.

Who would have believed that just a few days ago the world was falling into a 'bottomless pit'.

Who will be suprised when, the next time nuclear accidents fail to live up to the hysteria, the same people ignore the facts and repeat their cry of "RUN TO THE HILLS!"

is it because if you say it enough times, it may come true?

"...does not detract from the fact [sic] that the whole area around the plant is despoiled for generations."

This isn't true now. Is it just ignorance, or have you just got something against the Japanese and wish them particular ill-will?

Thanks Andydaws, highlander et al

Thanks for patiently bashing the moles as they pop up.

After a week during which we were supposedly to be plunged into nuclear armageddon, it must be very frustrating for those clinging to their religious belief in the evil of nuclear technology to have no actual stories of nuclear deaths to cling to.

This is the most pathetic armageddon I've ever witnessed. The people of Japan are battling with levels of radiation which they'd get from a lovely thatched cottage in Devon or a flight to Disneyland.

Run for the hills!

Yet it isn't really funny. With around 20,000 people confirmed dead so far from mundane things like their homes being washed away by the sea, what is wrong with you people?

Don't you feel just a little ashamed that you hide uncomfortably from the raw facts about mortality and nuclear power, as well as the surprisingly high death toll from more mundane forms of power generation?

When you tiptoe over the facts which jar uncomfortably with your armageddon rhetoric, doesn't it feel a tad... dishonest?

What's the point of clinging to a belief which the facts don't actually support?

If nuclear power is so dangerous, how come so few people die from it, even when the worst that could ever happen does happen?

Northern Europe experienced your armageddon just 20 years ago. As armageddons go, it was pathetic, with the most significant cause of suffering from the incident being the pyschological stress it led to.

Live longer: stop getting so hysterical about nuclear power. It's the only low carbon technology which can power large industrial countries for the forseeable future, and once the hysteria dies down, policy holders will be left looking at it for our energy needs for the next 50 years or more.

Oh look... conflating nuclear with thousands of death *again*!

"10,000+ people dead, destroyed cities, melted nukes, radiation exposure to people, food, water, etc. and this is a minor incident?"

This is precisely what the media has been doing.

You appear to be dumb. Nobody is claiming that the tsunami and earthquake are minor incidents.

They are saying that in the context of these *really* damaging events, the loss of life due to the consequence of these disasters on a nuclear plant is utterly inconsequential and doesn't merit anything other than a footnote at the bottom of the real story.

You really, really want nuclear to be a killer, but it just refuses to be. Hold on to your beliefs anyway: Stop eating bananas, never enter a hospital, don't whatever you do get on a plane, travel to anywhere with stone buildings or live on the surface of the planet in full view of those gamma rays, or even worse still, take a hike up a mountain.

If I lived in the region and had just had my life washed away by a natural disaster, the last thing I'd be wanting is to go hungry because some rabid commentards on the other side of the planet had decided that I wasn't allowed to eat food as it had the same chance of giving me cancer as a banana.

People seem desperate for nuclear to kill: classic belief reinforcement.

Even now, there are some people in this debate who are saying things like:

"don't write off (the possibility of mass death from nuclear) just yet"

...even though the very worst thing that could happen to a nuclear plant did: Chernobyl, and the impact of the incident across the irradiated areas of Europe is unmeasurable, and even though by *design*, these old Japanese plants stubbornly refuse to disgorge their contents despite the devastation across the region.

Then we have the people who are just screaming:

"no no NO! I'm right I'm right I'm right!" (or words to that effect). Not even the slightest attempt to even meet the debate. I doubt very much these people are El Reg readers. Stuff tends either to not work or to never be created in the first place when these people are in charge.

This is just a glimpse of how things were in the pre-enlightenment world, when claims didn't need to be tested against reality, and when the strength of personality was all that was needed for an idea to gain traction.

Fukushima is, for many, a test of belief long born during the recent cold war history and its attendant fear of nuclear annihilation. People stuck with these beliefs are no more likely to yield to reason than a god bother is ever going to be able to square the 'all powerful all loving god' with the evidence (of a totally non-intervening, non existent or rather bastardish being).

Finally, a note to those bickering about whether we should call this accident 'serious'.

Were it the case that these plants all decided to render themselves at 'end of life' while just doing their job normally, it *would* be serious, because it would suggest that it isn't possible to run nuclear reactors reliably, and would push the cost of their electricity beyond economic sense. It wouldn't be serious because the risk they pose to life, because they don't pose any particular risk to life compared to any other mainstream power technology.

Context is everything. How absurd it is to demand of these nuclear plants that they carry on undamaged whilst the rest of the region is rocked by one of the biggest earthquakes in written human history or swept away by a wave which has completely erased entire towns and tens of thousands of people.

In this context, how can one be anything other than amazed that these 40 year old plants stubbornly refused to be a threat to the general public?