interesting video, but many of his same examples were in this 2012 NASA video: https://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw

Also, not to detract it's usefulness (and cool factor), but many people seeing this photo think that's how the Earth actually looks at night - it isn't. That composite uses satellite data from Suomi NPP's VIIRS sensor, which can detect much dimmer light than the human eye, and part of the compositing process was to normalize brightness of individual pixels (so dim lights get brighter, and bright lights don't washout adjacent pixels). More details here:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html

Even some cool night-time videos from ISS (example: https://youtu.be/FG0fTKAqZ5g ) are made using still photos with long exposure time (1+ seconds) See FAQ.

This did lead me to a live webcam from ISS that I didn't know existed: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/

If Hinkley Point C is any indication, you're not going to find someone to finance/build a nuclear power plant, not in a capitalist society.

It's a massive upfront investment that private entities are basically allergic to; it cannot be insured due to the massive damage caused if things go south on you, so you need the government to act as a backstop; the price you'd have to charge per MWh is humongous compared to solar/wind, so you need massive subsidies, and that's without the ridiculous amount of rent-seeking corporations insist on nowadays.

That, to me, sounds like private is out. Hinkley Point C is being built by EDF, aka the French state, and EDF is struggling not be dragged into the abys by Areva, after the EPR in Flamanville is nothing short of a financial disaster. And we're not even talking about the troubles they are in for having fudged the specifications on the pressure vessels of more than 20 French power plants. Cost-cutting measures, as always.

So, which capitalist state is going to pick up the tab? Any volunteers? Over here, we cannot even get bridges fixed before they collapse...

And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I would want a profit-oriented enterprise or austerity-supporting government construct something like an NPP these days. Look at the construction sites at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, they are modern towers of Babylon, with subcontractors of subcontractors from 30 different countries working for povery wages. Anyone think either of these, should they ever be finished at all, will come even close to the safety standards layed out in their official plans?

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Indeed, I am all for reactor simplification, the reactor I want to see constructed could theoretically be nearly completely made on a factory line then shipped and installed very simply. The molten salt reactor concept is just a bunch of pipes with a graphite core. Most of the Gen4 reactors have this goal, and while large construction projects do mean jobs, usually good jobs...they are also costs, and if we want China and India to adopt greener power systems, they need to be cheaper than coal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

I am going to sift this after I post, but it is a short look into reactors in general, and why the MSR and other potential Gen4 concepts could eliminate that huge capital and labor cost. And nearly completely eliminate radioactivity problems to the general public.

300 billion is actually not to much money when you get down to it. Each year, the global economy spends up to 10 trillion dollars on dino fuel technology. Considering the reliability of NPPs and the nearly 90% load rate over the course of many years...those costs are really really good! Typically speaking, when you consider the costs of decommissioning, waste transportation, nuclear generally ends up being about on par with coal...mostly because nuclear plants last so darn long, over 60 years for some of our gen2 plants in the US and still going strong! Compare that to the 150 billion or so Germany has spent on solar project to their total ACTUAL output and it is a very telling tail. Even more so when you look at total carbon emissions of Germany compared to France.

Waste is actually what made me anti-nuclear myself. My introduction to caring (negatively) about nuclear was the Fukushima Daiichi incident. But after learning more about that situation, I actually really started to appreciate nuclear more. No one died as a result of FD failure, the containment building stopped most of the most harmful radiation, and the stuff that did get out is the really mild stuff (stuff with the million year half lives). I don't want to downplay this, it is still a very serious industrial mess to clean up, but compared to the 20 thousand people who died in the Tsunami and the tons of fuels, trash and other crap that got souped around in Japan as a result, the old reactor help up respectably, and is a credit to the operators (all of whom are currently alive an well).

I had a common misconception about radioactivity, I thought something with a long half-life was bad because it was going to be radioactive for a long, long time. That is mostly wrong. What that means is it is going to be hardly radioactive for a long time, elements that are short lived are VERY radioactive, but disappear very fast. I don't want to mire you in most of the gritty details, but the fission products reactors produce don't last very long, most only hours, a fewer some decades, and only a few longer than that. Stuff that has billion year a billion year half life...well, you don't really need to worry about it at all, it just isn't that radioactive. Most of the worry is based around "transuranics". That is just fancy speak for "stuff heavier than uranium". This is the stuff like Plutonium and Curium ect. The great thing about modern, Gen4 reactors is they don't really make those things...the thorium reactor I like starts with thorium, which is a long, long way from making anything heavier than uranium (less than 1% theoretically possible). So micrograms per year...not really that much to worry about (there is also no way to really get that to go into the environment because we don't use pressure vessels, but I will leave that to Kirk to explain).

I don't want to make it sounds like there isn't any risk or anything, but the risks have been way overplayed by political interests and not technical ones. For instance, many of the exclusions zones for FD were way overblown, they were no more radioactive than my home in the mountains ...but that isn't want you heard in the news.

But I think I will leave it like that. Nuclear has a bunch of mystic joojoo around it. Don't take my work for it, please, give "bill gates nuclear" a google, or other "gen4 reactor" stuff a chance before you completely write off nuclear as a green option for the future. I personally think it will have a big role to play if we want to stem off CO2 production AND bring more people into a western quality of life. Thanks again for the back and forth.

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

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...this is so so wrong on so many levels. Cenk is generally a pretty good guy when it comes to actual issues....this is not one of those times.

One nuclear power plant is propped up so that 2-5 coal power plants dont have to be propped up.
Coal power produces more radioactive waste material than nuclear power plants.
More disease and death has been attributed to coal power plants and coal mining than that of nuclear plants and associated industries.

All this, despite the meltdown scenarios that are well known....nuclear is safer, and in the long term cheaper than coal.

...oh theres also this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CO2%26NPPs.png


Nuclear plants are not evil, picking a few billion dollars a year when the defeceit is OVER 100$TRILLION including liabilities, is a JOKE, and a sick one at that.

Shutting down NPP research funding will potentially kill off the best chance humanity has of overcoming its thirst for energy - thorium salt reactor design / implementation.

Sorry Cenk...you are dead wrong on this one bud.

>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^rottenseed:
So she gets high twice, has 1 good trip and 1 bad trip, and now they're reached an ultimate conclusion. Wow...science sure is easy.

Well i don't understand exactly what's going on with the separate experiments. I assume the cannabinoid is what you typically get from weed, and the pure THC is the extracted drug from the weed without anything else.
.


Maybe you are confused because they tried to dumb down the terminology. They are testing the interaction between two cannabinoids found in Cannabis, THC and cannabidiol. The idea is that new varieties of Cannabis have been selected from higher THC content, and that this throws off the ratio between THC and other canabinoids in the plant. The question is, "does the ratio of THC to other cannabinoids affect the frequency of psychosis in Cannabis users?" They are testing this by giving people either synthetic THC alone, or synthetic THC in conjunction with synthetic cannabidiol.

Their sample size is small, but the results appear to support the prediction that the effects of THC are altered by the presence of an additional cannabinoid that naturally co-occurs in Cannabis.

This appears to be the research they are reporting on:
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v35/n3/full/npp2009184a.html

I don't see why the marijuana users have their hackles up about this. Wouldn't it make sense to push the breeding community to develop strains with smoother, or a wider variety, of highs, rather than constantly pushing for greater potency? Maybe they are already doing this?

Gojira!
>> ^Yogi:

GODZILLA!!!

Follow the radioactive cloud via the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI): link (high load)

Take a look at screencaps made over the last couple of hours, Ibaraki prefecture, south of Fukushima: 1:00, 1:20, 4:30, 4:40, 4:50. The wind turns and Ibaraki prefecture goes from ~40 nGy/h up to 5000 nGy/h -- and that's ~160km from Fukushima I NPP, so it's most likely the cloud passing by.

If you convert it 1:1 into nSv/h just to get a rough picture, it's 5 μSv/h. Average annual dose over here is 2 mSv. That's 400 hours at 5 μSv/h for your annual dose, a little less than 17 days.

Now, it only peaked around 5000 nGy/h and dropped again after the cloud moved on, so it's basically negligable in the short term. But that's 160km from the most likely source of the radiation. Some readings from up close would be interesting. They ought to be considerably higher, don't they?

Unfortunatly, all the entries for Fukushima are marked as "under servey" (sic). Last I heard was about 680 μSv/h recorded at some monitoring posts northwest of the power station: annual dose in three hours, how wonderful for the poor sobs trying to prevent the defecation from hitting the oscillation.

"Containment" is somewhat misleading as the layer most commonly referred to as "containment" in the news is the third layer, which is still standing, supposedly even undamaged. First layer is the zircaloy casing around the pellets, second layer is the pressure vessel, a sturdy pot of steel, and third layer is a massive bubble of reinforced concrete, hermetically sealing the pressure vessels and all the piping inside. What blew away was "only" the surrounding building.

Not that this isn't bad enough already, but if the actual containment aka third layer blows up, then the defecation really hits the oscillation.

Then again, listening to three commentators on the news, you'll get four different opinions. The BBC even showed a schematic containing a core-catcher to illustrate the current events, even though that bloody thing hadn't even been invented when these NPPs were build. Flow of information is a mess.

>> ^NicoleBee:

No way.. No way.

Please, read this before you panic: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-12/japan-nuclear-fallout-how-bad-could-it-get/

Pretty much the same as: http://videosift.com/video/Footage-of-the-explosion-at-Fukushima-I-NPP

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