Riedquat

That's been an idea that I'd love to have (whether it's to vote in direct democracy or just the mess we've currently got). However, I can't see any way around the problem of who the question-setter is; it would be utterly corruptable without much effort. Stepping back a couple of posts I also somewhat agree with Marcus Brigstocke's point, but not all that way. No-one, member of the public or MP, can be expected to be fully informed, knowledgeable, and capable of having examined and taken in every detail of every issue. I don't know what the way around that is. I don't like the idea of a small number of people who do grasp everything about an issue being the only ones to decide on it either; even with full understanding there's usually a whole range of possible outcomes, all of which will appeal differently to different people. A small number of knowledgeable people deciding isn't really better than a lot of clueless ones ("we know exactly how this will ruin the country, but it'll make us rich, so let's go for it"). So a sufficient, but not full, level of understanding is required; not having to have read every word of the Lisbon Treaty for example, but having a pretty good idea about its main ins and outs. That's a very grey area, making it even harder.

And if you let all decisions get made by everyone do you think it'll actually be any better? The most obvious one for this place is how many people loved their HPI, and would do anything that would keep that going for a bit longer without ever giving any thought to the long-term consequences. Would we end up with even more immensely frustrating token 'green' policies that make life difficult without even having any evidence that they'll improve what they claim to improve? At least with clueless MPs we've got some figureheads to lay the blame directly on. And give full power to everyone and you'll get the Daily Wail writing policy.

Yes, that's exactly what we're seeing - having to invent more and more what are really non-jobs just to keep everyone occupied because we can't keep up coming up with useful stuff for them to do. Now we're starting to run out of service non-jobs too as we find out that they don't really contribute much useful towards the economy, and we haven't got a better alternative. The whole system is currently driven by production, and starts to fall apart when you automate some production and can't find some new production. Inventing heaps of service non-jobs is analagous to trying to borrow your way out of debt. Rich countries have bigger service industries partially because they've shoved all the useful jobs off to some third world country and haven't thought up anything useful to do instead.

A concept that relies on constant development and change, which is playing it dangerously IMO. Do you want to always rely on someone coming up with something new to replace jobs lost elsewhere? Such development should be a bonus, not a necessity, for a long-term stable society.

I'm feeling the same way, my current account is with Lloyds but this sounds like a good candidate for the final straw, if something less repulsive actually exists.

Fool. It's only possible to save too much if you never spend it. Personally I save so that overall I can spend more on things other than banks. Why don't these morons think of all the interest I would've paid on my car if I'd borrowed to buy it, for example? Instead I can spend that on other stuff (or save to do likewise in the future). More spending in shops, less in banks. To be honest they probably do understand, since it's what lines their pockets, but I can't for the life of me work out why those doing the borrowing can't.

Dropping it down a big hole in the ground is a perfectly decent way of storing it, it just gets shot down politically. And as this thread has discussed pretty exhaustively nothing can ever be guarenteed 100% safe, and in terms of the number of people hurt nuclear power has a better record than just about every other form of power generation, even with Fukushima. Besides, after millions of years it will be harmless. Can't say the same about the much larger quantities of chemical wastes produced by other industries. There's simply no rational basis for singling out nuclear power in this way - your objections should apply to all of them, often with much more force. Sure, in an ideal world we wouldn't need nuclear power, but the anti nuclear people have a very hard time actually showing that it really is not the least bad option. You won't get anywhere trying to simply say "Nuclear is bad" if you can't demonstrate that "Nuclear is worse," and that applies even if you do cut usage because you've still got to generate some.

There's nothing fundamentally different about France - if they can realistically produce far more than 20% nuclear then so can a lot of other countries. And if you're going to cut usage by 20% then it's better to get rid of the more routinely polluting sources first.

Seems rather odd, it's been pretty obvious since fairly early on that that would be the case, and anyway, they were due to be decommisioned fairly soon so even if it had been possible to repair them I seem to remember them saying that they wouldn't.

If you spray something radioactive with water the water doesn't become radioactive itself (much, although stuff in it can a bit which is why distilled water is preferred). So just spraying it onto anything intact and non-soluble should be mostly fine and not produce much in the way of contamination. As far as I can gather the contaminated water appears to be coming from the stuff that was pumped into the reactors, where it's presumably washing out small particles of damaged fuel. I suppose in theory it should be possible to separate them out, although that's probably completely impractical. It'll pool up until everything overflows, then end up in the sea.

They may well have rightly said at the time "Ours cannot go pop in the same way as Chernobyl." It quite possibly is a much better design than Chernobyl. It's just a long way from being a perfect design and has been proved vulnerable to other dangers (including, as it turns out, one that posed zero risk to Chernobyl, a tsunami). As with anything else, simply ignore anyone who claims that something is perfectly safe, because they're talking nonsense. Safe from the same scenario could be a plausible claim. A Chernobyl design might fail every 50 years, a Fukushima one every 100 years, something else every 500 years (plucking numbers out of thin air there, don't read anything in to them). Precisely because we learn the chances of the same thing happening again reduce every time they happen, even if they don't disappear, until it eventually reaches an acceptable level.

Could be; I think one was still working at Fukushima I, which is why 5 and 6 didn't suffer as badly. Although why the backups weren't affected elsewhere weren't effected is worth considering. Could be luck, could be that they were located somewhere more sensible. It's always good to learn from what works as well as what goes wrong. Another interesting thought is: Is automatic shutdown in case of an earthquake a sensible precaution? If they hadn't been shut down could they have carried on generating and therefore keep themselves running safely? That might not be an easy one to answer, because it's possible that earthquake damage is more likely than tsunami damage and we drew the short straw this time.

To be fair Fukushima I is pretty antiquated too. Other nuclear power stations were hit by the tsunami and haven't gone bang; I'd be interested in knowing whether that was due to differences in design or simply from not being hit as badly. Were they just lucky, or could a similar but different disaster have the same effect on them?

Are they any more unnerving than incidents in other industries though? Most of those incidents have been very comparable to any other industrial accident that can have devastating consequences on the individuals concerned, but no wider implication - they really, really need to be put into context and compared to determine whether or nuclear power really is more dangerous and has more serious consequences. You must go further than just reacting to what seems scary. When you look deeper it might turn out to be that bad, it might turn out to be even worse, but at least then you've gone further than simply reacting to your gut feelings on the issue.

I don't think they've been lulled, I think they've simply been incredibly stupid and merely looked at what the current rate was at the time they got their mortgage. Why else would we have had all that nonsense about how low rates made it all so affordable? I've said all along that it makes sense to assume 10% and regard anything under that as a bonus, and that may not be cautious enough (your 12% doesn't sound unreasonable).

There have been a couple of mentions of front gardens but from an attractiveness point of view I don't think more than a small one works that well (and given the same amount of space I'd prefer the house to be forward to give a larger back garden). This might be because often older, more attractive houses often don't have much in the way of front gardens, I've not made up my mind.

Good point.

And they wouldn't do that for even more profit if the land had cost them far less? When old terraces are replaced with rabbit hutch newbuilds do they even manage to get much more density out of them? Terraces have always struck me as using space much more efficiently than most modern rubbish.

How depressing, no change where I am (although the actual numbers show a very small drop).

It depends upon what exactly is going on. There have been reports of some detected on the ground, but how widespread and at what levels remains to be seen. Levels found in the water don't mean that you'll be gettting serious contamination elswhere, if it's from water being washed through the reactor. To contaminate land you need to get it airborne - explosions or fires where there's fuel (which is why the spent fuel pool problems became the most worrying aspect, because fires there would be an easy method of getting lots of long-lived radioactive material spreading everywhere). Clearly some has got out anyway, but there's probably not much correlation between land and water contamination, seeing as they're happening in different ways.

Because aside from the immediate and obvious ones it's hugely subjective (and has to be based on statistical estimates) when it comes to how many people were killed by it.

Any reports about cancer rates are meaningless without noise estimations, at least when dealing with small percentage changes (double the rate would've looked significant regardless), i.e. is 849 more within the usual variability?

It would be interesting to compare the amount of land lost to nuclear (basically Chernobyl, and time will tell what happens with Fukushima) with hydroelectric, although admittedly it's easier to drain a reservoir and use the land again. And whilst I'm no advocate of a slash-and-burn approach it should not be used as an argument for doing nothing; follow that line of reasoning for everything and we simply wouldn't generate any energy at all, because no matter what you do it'll echo down to the future in one form or another. As will cutting back. Remember that future generations benefit as well as suffer - ours builds on the technological developments in the Industrial Revolution, for example, whilst still having to deal with some of the problem legacies of that period. And as time goes by the risks reduce, as we learn from our mistakes and build better facilities. I doubt it's coincidence that the power station with the most problems in Japan is the oldest of the ones to get damaged. It's pretty impossible to get to a state where you can do something safely without doing it dangerously (look at early jet airliners falling out of the sky due to not-understood metal fatigue problems, or early railway engines blowing up fairly regularly, for example). If you take a long enough view nuclear contamination isn't the worst. A (possibly inaccurate, I think from "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett) quote: "Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever."

For criticality the fuel must be organised correctly. In the pools the fuel is deliberately (or should be) placed so that even with the water they are too far apart to start reacting sustainably. It appears that sometimes more fuel is put in the pools and boron is added, which stops (some of) the neutrons. However, the unstable isotopes in the pool still undergo normal radioactive decay, which generates heat, and because there's enough of it in one place cooling is needed (provided by the water, which also provides shielding for anyone near to the pool). More so than the 8 people missing when an irrigation dam burst after the quake? It's all down to what choice you prefer - do you want the issues with other forms of energy, do you want power generation? What are the real risks and benefits? What are the risks of recurrence (some newer designs of nuclear power station were also damaged, without having anywhere near as many problems). Every time things move on the risks of a recurrence decrease, but they don't go away. There's a price to pay no matter what choice you make from energy generation. You need to get past the "Aargh, nuclear disaster!" mindset and evaluate the real damage that has been caused vs. that from other forms of energy generation.

OK, that sounds like sensible data. I've probably been over-reacting a bit against the people who seem to simply jump to that conclusion because there's been an explosion at a nuclear power station. Apologies.