Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste
By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power plants produce heaps of radiation
This just happened. Explosion in Lebanon
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
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WaPo normally allows two free page reads a month, or something - or maybe used to. Both WaPo and NYT heavily reduced their open access over the last few years, although I think if you register, even without paying it has a more generous limit for what you can read free.
No, because the idea that newspapers have an editorial stance has been known since the first one was published.
The second issue is that without a democracy, there's a very significantly increased chance the only news a journalist outlet prints is what the government tells it to. Autocratic and authoritarian regimes are not generally famed for permitting media freedom.
It's perfectly reasonable to think the comparison between the waste products is an irrelevant point, but it's not an absurd idea. It's a factual idea, whether it is moot or not.
This was already gone over.Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste
By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power plants produce heaps of radiationwww.scientificamerican.com
I guess I must have already read some articles from them within the last month of time.
Coal is awful. It belts out huge amounts of pollution compared to other fossil fuels because its so carbon-heavy and dirty... but radioactivity is some way down the list of problems. Coal mining is frequently environmentally destructive in the first place, and often very dangerous to miners. After that, there's the CO2, and huge amounts of particulates that aggravate the lungs for people with breathing problems, and general toxicity: nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus oxides, heavy metals, cyanides, etc.
I read with some astonishment this week that the Indian government has just opened up substantial areas of the country - including environmentally senstive, protected areas - to coal mining, even as smog clouds their cities and chokes their people. It's astonishing, because although India still has some short-term commitments to coal power, in the medium-long run it's looking at a reduction, with more reliance on renewables and so on. (It's also unclear whether it really needs the extra capacity its planning to build over the next few years: investors could potentially face a loss.) Indian coal is particularly poor quality - low energy output and high pollution, such that even though India is self-sufficient in coal, it imports a load anyway because so much of its own is too inefficient and dirty to meet its own standards. The rationale of the government was that it could export that coal: except it's hard to see who would buy it given its low quality. It seems to me to be a symbol of how well-placed bungs from a powerful industry can motivate government more than sensible policy.
Similar can be observed in China. It has also recently relaxed several controls over coal power, although China has never really made any commitments to reducing coal power. It is odd, because China is also increasing renewables enthusiastically enough, and much of their existing coal power is running far below capacity and at a financial loss. My reading is that it's some form of convoluted internal politics: local governments seeking economic boosts. China's awash with capital that's easy to get and waste on poorly conceived projects, so local government can grab capital to build a station using locally sourced coal: jobs all round. In the long run and at a national level it's hugely wasteful, but in the short-medium terms adds to the local economic figures and makes the local party faithful look good. Therefore they pressure central government to facilitate coal.
A few other countries in SE Asia favour coal, but elsewhere there's little to no interest, and in the West it is rightfully in heavy decline.
Frankly, you're not paying much attention if you think that's what's in dispute. That's not in dispute, that's fact. What's in dispute are the implications and ramifications of that fact. I'm arguing the presence of a double standard in the handling and regulation of radioactive waste products by industry, Agema and Gethesmani are essentially arguing the ramifications of radioactive waste production by the coal industry aren't great enough to warrant special consideration.
You can bypass it with online tools. I used to use Delimiter, until WashPo degenerated under Bezos' dubious editorial control to no longer even be worth that token effort.
The problem is when news outlets editorialize and call it reporting, or worse, infotainment. The bigger conceptual problem isn't a "democracy" problem, it's a "capitalism" problem. Governments aren't the problem when it comes to censorship and propaganda in the news in the West; corporate ownership and media consolidation are.
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I'm not always that negative about corporate ownership. In practice, media occupy a "niche" in the market and need to service that, so ownership often makes relatively little difference. To move away from that niche would have others fill it. Some owners obviously interfere (or have interference done for them by editors keen to curry favour), mentioning no Rupert Murdochs in particular, more than others. The Daily Mail in the UK may be despicable, but its owner is very hands-off. The Daily Mail does illustrate this idea of niche to some extent. The Daily Mail represents its readers very well: it's awfulness is actually a damning statement about the British lower middle classes more than it is about its staff and ownership. Even niche political positions have representation these days... albeit usually only online.
What I think is more problematic is how media is paid for: tightened belts will decrease quality of reporting, and increasing reliance on advertising increases the influence of advertisers over content. Google, Facebook etc. have been bad for journalism, and greedy little fucks that they are, they're happy to take the money even as it undermines their content creators.
In many cases, the degradation of media comes from the degradation of public interest in and knowledge of matters of import. Fox News is trash, the likes of CNN not a vast improvement... but people want to watch them. Many would rather comfortingly be told what they want to hear than challenged with what's true. What do we do about that?
No argument here about any of that, but I attribute lack of regulation and genuine competition vis-a-vis consolidation as the root causes of the issue. Ten years ago when I wrote and defended my article about Citizens United, one of the things that came up in my defense was freedom of the press to report on political controversies and the impact a post-CU jurisprudential landscape would have on it. The gist of the commentary being, how big of a gap in campaign regulation did CU really leave, and whether or not news outlets will exploit it to electioneer openly and call it news.
If I remember right, I presented seven criteria I felt would need to be met to guarantee quality of media representation in political controversies and elections, while still meeting strict scrutiny muster.
1-2. Amend Titles II-IV of the Telecoms Act to prohibit media consolidation and vertical integration in content production, publication, and distribution. The 1948 Paramount Pictures case already provides legal precedent for this, and frankly, the current state of media in the US already runs afoul of it. So, break up big media and prevent telecoms from investing in and owning media outlets (like for instance AT&T's ownership of CNN).
3-5. Restore the Fairness Doctrine and expand it to include criteria for what can be called "news", and mandatory disclaimers of ownership and separation between editorial and reporting content. In other words, legally require Fox News to change its name, and require, for instance, Tucker Carlson's show to run disclaimers it's an editorial and commentary show, not news. And, prohibit "news" programming from editorializing during its run time.
6. Mandate news outlets to create and publish media literacy material, in accordance with standards set by the FCC, for public access, and direct audiences to it on a regular basis. Create a public media literacy database and educational rubric, consisting of it, for use by schools and universities.
7. Reinvest in public access and public broadcasting. Mandate PBS be carried on all basic cable and live television streaming services.
My brain must have glazed over in the post war. So, the article which directly contradicts your sentence was wrong then?
Nah, he'd just like it to be. He never actually responded to that article when I posted it first.
As a matter of fact, he posted another article later. Pointing out all the parts of it that he didn't read was fun.
Agema's first forray into this discussion was in direct response to this article, Ewok.
He ain't you. Further, he never responded to my critique of his critique (other than the one asking if this was a personal thing (I'm still not convinced it isn't); among the critiques of his critiques that I didn't list is that I found his counter-argument fairly unconvincing). Further further, you've never made a direct response to the article. And I don't think you made one when I responded to the article you posted, which this post you quoted linked to.
Lot of not responding, here. Frankly, I don't really care for Eacaraxe's back of the napkin calculations, my forays into data science have shown to me that such things very, very, very rarely make an argument that stands up to an actual scientific investigation. It's also created two pages of what I consider the worst sins of this forum: bickering inanely over side points as if it means anything for a crazy amount of time, with neither side willing to give an inch.
But the overall point, that we have the designs for safe nuclear reactors, and how to reduce the waste from them to a very small amount, and how we have the procedures and material developed to safely dispose of them? All that? Not really been acknowledged by the "other side", here, just some guff about "now, nobody's actually said anything anti-nuclear here" (baloney) and "well, we can just use renewables instead and that has 0 radioactive waste" and like, okay, yes, so does brushing my teeth, it doesn't address whether we have a more advanced technological understanding for a feasible large-scale energy shift between nuclear and renewables (given the current state of designs for both, I gotta hand it to nuclear), and it doesn't address whether there is an "unfair" public perception of nuclear in comparison to modern nuclear designs (after this thread, I'm again gonna hand it in favor of nuclear, i.e. yes there is an unfair perception).
You, and here I do mean the personal you, Specter, can keep up a fear of bureaucracy as an excuse to not get invested into public projects. "What if the government ruins this like it ruins everything and kaboom?!" I think it's been shown in this thread that 3 Mile Island was not any Chernobyl. It also has led to a lot of safety regulation. And if we don't elect a man who wants to actively keep dismantling the EPA and diverting DoE money to oil and gas, we'll actually be able to keep up on those in any new construction. Bad bureaucracies do not make good bureaucracies nonexistent - many of the greatest leaders of history were such because of their ability to build an effective administration and have it run without their micromanaging every decision for their kingdom/nation. Further, our current nuclear energy infrastructure is woefully out of date, either new modern ones need to be built to replace them, or alternatives will. If that doesn't happen, that's the real risk of kaboom. And when we're talking about a long term replacement, that we need to start implementing now cuz any implementation will take years, what's more ready in terms of design for the project, nuclear or renewables? I honestly don't have all the faith in renewables. They help, but they're very much a developing technology still. It would have been wonderful if they'd been better funded and tested by now, but they haven't, and it's time to drop the big investments. In my book, nuclear at its current state of technology is the better investment against the hypothetical development of renewables, at this time.
You know, I was curious how this thread got offtrack to a discussion of the feasibility of nuclear power, and on looking back, turns out it was you trying to use a 3rd world not even functional government to say that 1st world developed nations couldn't handle nuclear. Ah well.
Okay, so now the mic has been well and truly dropped, can we return to discussing the situation in Lebanon? The last reports I read indicated most of the current government - allegedly corrupt bastards to a man - have resigned. Presumably to escape being strung up in the streets.
Ewok. You are not an idiot. Stop acting like one. Agema and Geth have given you the science of this, I'm going to give some common sense.
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/8f/65/8f65b096-7f6b-4ed0-9e58-a7abe529dea5/1024px-child_coal_miners_1908.jpg)
How long have we been mining coal Ewok? Have you read about what kind of horrible life it was to be a coal miner? Wake up, go to the mine, spend 10 hours or more down there, with about 2 hours for traveling from the entrance to the destination. Men, covered in dirt and coal dust, many of whom didn't even get to bath after returning home and would eat their bread with hands covered in the stuff. Wives and children of the miners checking the dirt piles for coal that was missed so they could heat their homes. The men had stunted growth from malnutrition and hobbled backs from walking around down in the mines. The advancement of machines even made things worse for them because the drills would work so fast that they had less time to secure new tunnels with support so more cave in happened. A man could subject to a cave in, get dug out up to his shoulders, then get buried by another collapse before he could be saved, only to be dug out again, and then another collapse fall and do him in. This is all not even getting into all the lung problems this job did to them.
Know what these people didn't die of after working day in and day out in coal mines, covered in coal, eating coal, and breathing coal? Radiation poisoning. Spent nuclear fuel can produce about 20,000 rems a meter away and all it takes is a dose of 350 rems to kill you from radiation poisoning. Coal doesn't do that. Coal is shit. But this is NOT one of the ways it is shit.
And it wasn't me that decided to have an argument about this, my point of bringing it up was the incompetence of governments, a relevant topic with this given what we all saw in those videos. What is this section most dedicated to if not the incompetence of our governments and how slow they act? Everyone here loves talking about how Trump fucked up the response to covid in various ways, and you don't feel trepidation about that same government being in charge of nuclear facilities? It was not me that derailed this thread, it was Escaraxe that, out of nowhere and for no reason, brought coal into the discussion. The differences between coal and nuclear was not being debated until Escaraxe brought it up, it was nowhere in sight, for discussion until he brought it up, don't pin this derailment on me just because I refuse to say that 2+2=5 for Big Brother over there.
There! I'm done with this thread. Good night!
From what I've read, Lebanon's political representation is along group identity lines. There's 18 religious/ethnic groups that all want a piece of the pie, which means that they want to hedge their bets. Also doesn't help that the regional powers back said groups (e.g. Hezbollah backs the Druze). I'll post a link below that explains it better.
Protesters may never be able to oust the shadowy oligarchs who really run Lebanon
As the financial crisis destroyed livelihoods and people became increasingly desperate, it was clear to observers that most Lebanese wanted change. In the wake of the Beirut explosion, questions remain over how to bring it about, writes Eric Tlozek.
www.abc.net.au
And of course, ever present in the background would be Covid-19....
The whole elected government resigned right so who is actually leading the response to protests right now anyway? Just the cops?
I'd assume, since most of the violence (so far) has been in Beirut it will be its regional governor/mayor/premier or whatever term they use. Lots and lots of deservedly pissed off people getting their nark on will be handled for what it is: a local problem. So while the federal government is running around burning papers, murdering hookers, flushing its cocaine stash etc so they have a small chance of not being lynched, their locally ranked counterparts get to do all the exciting civil repression and the like.
The civil service, effectively, and local government where relevant. So yes, police chiefs, mayors, etc.
The idea of the bureaucracy is that they keep everything ticking over no matter what happens. You need the guys at the top to change things (law, policy, taxation), but without them the status quo pretty much just rolls on and everyone gets by. Countries can trundle on okay for years that way. They'll need a government again eventually, either when enough small problems eventually mount up or there's a major problem outside the ability of the existing system to cope with.
A Ukrainian friend said that what everyone needs to know about Ukrainian politics is that it's all about oligarchs. We can talk about popular protests all we like, but it's really about oligarchs who make money from the EU against oligarchs who make their money from Russia, and whichever government is in power they're servicing oligarchs first and foremost.From what I've read, Lebanon's political representation is along group identity lines. There's 18 religious/ethnic groups that all want a piece of the pie, which means that they want to hedge their bets. Also doesn't help that the regional powers back said groups (e.g. Hezbollah backs the Druze). I'll post a link below that explains it better.
Protesters may never be able to oust the shadowy oligarchs who really run Lebanon
As the financial crisis destroyed livelihoods and people became increasingly desperate, it was clear to observers that most Lebanese wanted change. In the wake of the Beirut explosion, questions remain over how to bring it about, writes Eric Tlozek.
Although of course that was before the latest incumbent, who stormed out of leftfield. Perhaps he hasn't been captured by oligarchs yet.