Because when the original thing didn't work as intended (with which we were pretty sure, otherwise we'd never done it cause of the risks) then the kill switch will work 100% as intended for sure, and also have no unexpected side effects?
Nothing is 100% without risk, but each layer of safeguard reduces it. The standard shouldn't be zero risk, but rather weighing the risk of one (in)action vs another.
To draw an analogy to the obvious vaccine-related situation on everyone's minds, no one who knows what they're talking about would say that mRNA covid vaccines are 100% safe. But they are far, far safer than not having a vaccine, so it makes sense to accept that risk. I'm not saying the same is necessarily true of any given 'contagious' animal vaccine, but it could be.
> I'm not saying the same is necessarily true of any given 'contagious' animal vaccine, but it could be.
That's what I think I wanted to say.. there is a huge difference to anything self-spreading / replicating - be it self-reproducing true AI nano robotors, simple things as self replicating plants (and here we have already a dozen examples of promised containment not working with bad consequences involved - oops) or 'contagious' vaccines.. it needs to be magnitudes safer, not?
So if as an individual there is a minimal risk to my health by taking a mRNA vaccine, I can decide for myself vs the risk of infection or consequences, or also let my doctor decide. It is also easy to run "trials" among the population for studies. But if there is a risk to our complete biosphere, that is just very different for the risk calculation?
And think about the timescales we are talking about here. We might be creating something that evolves and persists for millions of years. We don’t seem anywhere close to the level of knowledge or wisdom needed to safely do anything that has that kind of long term impact.
The article discusses a safeguard that would only allow a set number of replications, so the lifespan of the intervention would be limited. (Assuming it works as expected, of course.)
totaling 8 now .. but in the end will need another one really going down bad to stop all the sudden pro-nuclear movement here in Europe, which I can imagine only must have some astroturfing behind.
But til then, blow more money into insurable and as much green as coal and gas power plants :(
(And that calculations done by real experts didn't even include all the other uneconomic issues from getting that stuff from somewhere til storing the waste - but yeah I know, all these waste will be taken by those new shiny molten reactors that have no problem at all on paper and will eat all the waste - both things just so far from reality in practice, which almost does not exist even).
The common stance and knowledge here at HN about all this is consternating :(
But they do generate (human-)life-threatening nuclear wastes that last 100k years. That dwarfs even the longest human civilization like Egypt[0]. 100k ago, humankind was barely appearing. Plastic in comparison takes around 450 years to be disaggregated through exo-human processes[1].
How to deal properly with these wastes is still a vigorous debate generator[2]. The thing is, with our current theoretical knowledge and practical expertise, we don’t have solutions that scale at the industrial level at which nuclear wastes are produced. Not in a way that we can say "and thus mankind will be completely free of dealing with this issue in the next 100k year".
But what if most accepted those limitations, and while personally a disaster, found it on the other hand right to follow common sense and obey rules applying to everyone for the greater cause of society?
Rules applying to everyone the same is one of the basic foundations of a just society...
> Also expelling a person who has already got in the country physically and attended a courts makes no sense from the epidemiological point of view - he has already brought the virus
No matter what you argue beyond, the epidemiological aspect is now not really the point here anymore. He faked stuff for entry one or the other way (I think it is even more likely he wasn't positive at all, but that the second test was just created so he counts as recovered, which was the requirement to get in if not vaccinated..) - so its good to see consequences on that.
> obey rules applying to everyone for the greater cause of society?
Sounds like communism. No cause can be considered greater than freedom.
> No matter what you argue beyond, the epidemiological aspect is now not really the point here anymore. He faked stuff
He should be investigated for faking then and expelled/imprisoned/fined by a court if evidence proves him guilty.
> second test was just created so he counts as recovered, which was the requirement to get in if not vaccinated
Just test him antibodies/T-cells + PCR and you know if a person used to be sick and recovered. No necessity for speculation here. Presence of immunity (which one only get through overcoming the sickness or a vaccine) is an objective thing. Is it not?
I would also suggest introducing a law sentencing people who falsely claim they are immune or expose others to a risk of being infected any other way to serve a sentence aiding in a hospital taking care of infected people.
> Sounds like communism. No cause can be considered greater than freedom.
Are you a 10 year old American from the Cold War? What you're saying is so comprehensively stupid I'm not entirely certain you're a real human.
No, that's not what communism is. If you want to know what it really is, go read "Das Kapital" and the "Communist Manifesto", you might learn a thing or two.
As for freedom... it's subjective. Absolute freedom is obviously incompatible with living in a society with other humans. And as we've seen time and again, most people value many things over freedom. Just look at Singapore and Rwanda, people there are happy with the prosperity and stability even if they're really not free on a lot of levels.
I see, but it's hard not to see a pandemic as a legitimate emergency and "higher causes"-invoking situation. It's not just a leader inventing a paper foreign subversive enemy out to get us, it's actually a thing which isn't hard to see and comprehend for oneself. I don't think any country's experience under communism is in any way applicable to the current situation.
There can be legitimate higher causes and situations when such are painfully obvious like overcoming pandemics. Nevertheless politicians (let alone masses incompetent in relevant subjects) can never be trusted as actually pursuing such as their primary aim. Appealing to such to justify anything always is a huge red flag (pun intended).
Politicians apparently are driven by the game theory and will do/say anything they believe will help them maximize their own power and safety (elections already mentioned) rather than sustainable wellbeing of the people.
Masses are driven by even more chthonic energies like unconscious xenophobia and value the chance to unite by any attribute to attack anybody they can (especially those enjoying a benefit they don't or trying to achieve a benefit they enjoy) above everything and will use any excuse they are given.
Simply saying politicians have already made a too many of suspiciously inefficient (and logically obviously futile even before proven such) decisions to trust them competent and benevolent and the mob will believe and shout any nonsense you tell them as long as this justifies them carrying torches and pitchforks.
Imagine president Trump, seeing himself loosing the elections and actually facing a real prison sentence risk, would have said nuking China is going to end the pandemics and we need to do so to make the whole world great again. I would bet the number of people supporting him would be way far from zero, all over the world.
Yeahyeah, freedom over all, and everything natural is also good, right ? :D
Please also reflect on the rhetorics you bring up here :D This is black and white painting, there are a lot of levels between..
There's been a bad loss of topsoil in "good" farming areas but I don't think aggressive farming of marginal soil or subsoil in arid areas does much extra damage on top of natural erosion.
Romantic but far off topic from what it is about here?
With that, death becomes indeterministic for everybody, because unless believing that everything is predetermined, if someone will be remembered/thought off again is .. (even with the clacks thing btw).
And then also, what about people living, and noone ever thinking of them, are they dead too? :s
Not understanding what you are both getting at ... the situation has maybe changed now.
But before, here at least, it was repeatedly underestimating the in the aftermath clearly visible exponential growth, exactly as the r factor is calculated? Which scientist/MD doesn't understand there is a saturation, in the extreme even schoolers understand you cannot have more than 100% infected.
Yes, at some point it is becoming logistic, but the previous waves were not about getting anywhere there, but going from 0.1% to 1% or more, and there it was truly exponential growth and overwhelming the health care system, what the start of that logistic curve is about..?!
And that thinking is insane to me, long-term best is to have renewables and not pollute - nuclear is no alternative but just another bad with too many problems, bad economics, and waste produced.
Nuclear is fantastic economics, its just regulated to death. The real effect of suppressing nuclear has been a slower transition to a sustainable carbon economy, and increased power prices limiting innovation and productivity. Solar and wind have benefitted, but its still a minor player, and without a revolutionary new battery tech, and gargantuan infrastructure investment, it simply cant replace a majority of current power production, much less satisfy the massive suppressed demand.
You can tell because for profit(if staterun) companies are building them across the world. France is drawing significant profits from existing nuclear, and constructing new. Nuclear has been ridiculously profitable for most countries which built them, with the sole exception of countries which started building them, then forbid nuclear. Many countries in Asia are building them because its cheaper than coal power. Most countries impose nuclear specific taxes, in addition to long term disposal fees, which exceed the price of production by several times. Sheer state profit. Despite this, the main reason nuclear does not get built in Europe is regulation, the the risk of losing the investment due to changing laws on nuclear. Which has happened several times.
Byproducts, aside from nuclear weapons, which most countries do not have, are a negligible part. Sweden for instance built ample nuclear early, but never built the kind of reactor which is used in nuclear weapon production. Sweden also didnt subsidize it, but rather has been taxing it at an additional 300-500% in addition to long term disposal fees(so little of which actually went to long term disposal they introduced a second free named exactly the same 40 years latter). Despite also discarding the cooling water heat into the ocean completely needlessly, all it took for these plants to be profitable was not forcing them to shut down when public opinion turned. It took a while sure, but plants have been profitable for 30 years now, and could have continued to be so if they hadn't by law been prohibited from upgrading and researching.
Nuclear regulation in most places goes as follows: is nuclear profitable? if yes, increase safety until it stops being so. If technology improves so that the same safety can be achieved using less cost, further improve safety. If this happens while building a new plant, force them to start over. For what that looks like, look to the 3 complete restarts due to previously approved safety measures suddenly being retracted and increased during the construction of the Finnish plant.
Its this idiotic idea that they must guarantee zero percent risk which is the main culprit. Flying kills more people, and more people need power than flight, yet we require far more of nuclear. Many countries built dozens of perfectly safe plants during the 60ties for pennies on the dollar. If we could build those again, you know the ones where less than 0.25% had an serious accident over a 60 year history, and removed the massive taxes, we could have power prices at a fifth of what they are today.
Umm, it's not the safety regulator's task to promise the results will be sufficient if you use a specific methodology: "Scrum methodology is fine, so the resulting software quality will be fine too."
Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale, with multiple copies of the same design. Serial production of nuclear plans in the 70s produced plants at a cost of about 2 billion per GW of capacity. And bear in mind that nuclear's capacity factor is over 90% as compared to 25-35% for wind and solar. And it's not an intermittent power source, eliminating the need for storage.
The reality is that we don't have the capacity to fulfill energy demand without controllable sources. You can't just say, "well it's cloudy and not very windy. Guess plumbing just isn't going to work today because we can't power the pumps." Well, you can but you'll immediately get voted out of office and replaced with someone who will build fossil fuel plants to keep the country alive.
Finland has researched and invested quite a lot in the ability to dispose of the nuclear waste in a way it's safe underground for the next 100 000 years.
The research includes extensive geological surveys and every possible simulation you can run on a cave system.
Beats hands down the option which would be to burn fossil fuels and let the planet enjoy the negative externalities (CO2).
There's a simpler solution for disposing (not storing) final nuclear waste: deep core drilling. You drill a 1m round hole 2km+ deep and dump shit there and fill back up. Unlike caves, natural or otherwise, on a properly selected site there is no possibility of things coming back up in millions of years. It's expensive, but not that expensive compared to the energy hitherto produced by the waste involved and eminently doable as it uses tech from the oil industry.
The main reason we don't do that is that most of the waste can be expected to be further used with future reactors.
Just dig out the numbers and realize this project is as expensive and uneconomic as every other of our +50year history record before..
And as if this was the only problem and it hadn't a lot of huge others, nuclear proponents will use this now as an example how nuclear is the way out of the climate crisis, and how comparing nuclear with renewables is wrong..
No, the best future would be neither fossil nor nuclear.
Density doesn't matter very much outside of niche applications (e.g. submarines). It's not like very running out of space for power production. Cost is essentially the only metric that counts, and current nuclear technology is a bit on the expensive side. Maybe future reactor designs will drastically improve that, but with global warming we don't really have the time to wait for the R&D to be finished.
Now we bring another very specific for that location argument, while the general new consensus for here seems to be that is the ultimate solution to the climate crisis? The rhetoric strawman is also pretty cheap...
I haven't heard any reasonable immediately implementable numbers or solutions from the renewable proponents how affordably store enough energy to heat cold countries during months long winter.
The technologies I like provide solutions to the hard problems.
In Finland, the coldest weather is experienced when, during winter months, there is a persistent anticyclone parked overhead. Those can cover the entirety of the country, and inside them there is negligible wind. For example, on 8th of December it was -20°C, and the average output of wind power (nominal installed capacity ~2800MW) over the day was 330MW. The average output of grid-connected solar was <1MW (It's December in Finland, what did you expect?).
Anticyclones can remain in place overhead for weeks. The value often used to calculate the cost of renewable+storage is 3h. This is a reasonable value for California, where solar production correlates well with use. If you built the grid in Finland based on that, we would just die when it gets cold.
There are no renewables that work well in Finland. Water power is fully built out. Solar only produces power when we don't need it. Wind reliably does not provide power when we need it. Compared to renewable with enough storage, even with all it's overruns, OL3 is remarkably cheap.
But how much of the heating is, or needs to be, electric?
Many current heating fuels are fossil and not great either, but they can be replaced with renewable fuels which solves storage vs renewable-produced electricity.
That does seem to head for electricity based heating. But a web search lead to some (admittedly 6 yrs old) graphs that have electricity being in in 3rd place after fuel based heating solutions by energy use: https://www.stat.fi/til/asen/2014/asen_2014_2015-11-20_tie_0... - and hopefully those new houses are better insulated and use proportionally much less energy than the average housing stock, eg passive houses.
Do you propose to build so many nuclear plants that you can provide peak electricity including heating in cold winter months? Do you have numbers for that? (I imagine that'd be the most expensive solution ever, as nuclear plants are high in capital costs and you're basically proposing to have lots of nuclear plants that only run on very cold winter days.)
I guess what many nuclear proponents seem to forget is that you need flexibility no matter what source of electricity you have - because even if your plant runs 24/7 (which it doesn't), energy needs aren't constant.
Storing heat is not difficult. You just heat up water and put it in an insulated tank. Either steel, or dig a hole in the ground and insulate that, with a floating insulated lid. Once it's big enough, the losses are so low that you can use it for seasonal storage, and with solar to heat it up in the summer, it's cheaper than natgas. At least where I live.
Next year, I think, they're building a storage not far from where I live with 200.000 m³ capacity.
Nobody is using gas to heat anything in Finland. District heating is pretty much all some combination of waste heat from some other industrial process (including electricity production), coal, wood or peat. Some district heating scale heat pump and storage projects are in prototype phase but are meaningless % of actual usage.
For individual house heating it is some combination of pure electric, heat pump, wood and oil.
Gas in general is used very little for electricity here (only ~7% of total energy production) and gas cooking stuff is also relatively rare.
