Re: power shortages

It would probably be a wise choice.

if there were real money to be made, somebody would have got in early.

It happens, but it isn't usual.

Until there's a product to sell, the market doesn't have anything to buy.

John Larkin is a gullible sucker for propaganda spread by very rich Americans.

The book is written by the same authors who wrote "Merchants of Doubt". Business likes to have a monopoly on investing in new and profitable ideas. People who are investing primarily to make their voters happier can cut the profit margins of people who are investing purely to make money.

But nobody has found a good long term solution for storing nuclear waste for the 100,000 odd years it takes before it stops being dangerous

Non-existent greenie saboteurs. We've had nuclear reactors since the late 1940's but no greenie has ever sabotaged one, or shown any desire to do so.

We've had 70 years to solve that particular problem, and nobody has yet come up with a solution that they can sell to the public. The technical problems may not be insoluble, but solutions that have been found so far don't seem to be socially acceptable.

And why should they be? Nuclear power isn't cheaper that renewable power.

Nuclear waste is a lot more radioactive than bananas and potatoes. If you've got radon in your cellar, you should put a fan to move it out.

Smoking causes about 160,000 lung cancer deaths a year in the US. but radon cause about 21,000 - it's worth worrying about.

Wind turbines and solar cells are a lot less dangerous.

America tried prohibition of ethanol in the great experiment. It didn't work, any more than the war on drugs has. Taxing tobacco heavily has set up a lively trade in smuggling the stuff, but the tax rate can be adjusted to make smuggling less profitable, so it doesn't kill all that many extra people.

The Dutch are pretty technically literate. Roof-top solar is pretty popular there, and Dutch have been into windmills for a very long time - there were plenty of wind turbines around when I lived there.

They'd know that they could get cheaper electricity in smaller chunks.

It's hard to get all that far from the ocean anywhere in the Netherlands. Putting pipes through the dikes to circulate cooling sea water wouldn't be difficult, and the return flow would probably be circulated through industrial scale green-houses to exploit the low level heat.

No it isn't. The general public has no idea of the real level of danger. They're just afraid of the unknown. The real problem is information and education. That, and the various groups of scare- mongers that prey on the ignorant masses.

Natural radiation is everywhere. We all get ballpark 10uSv a day, no matter what. Except in a few cases, the contribution of the global nuclear industry to that is *very* small. Some medical procedures can subject you to several *years* worth of extra dose in an instant, yet hardly anybody seems to worry about that.

Having spent my career at a physics research lab, I myself was classed as a 'nuclear worker', regularly working in radioactive areas and with activated materials. Even so, the average additional dose I got was still much less than 1% of the natural dose.

Jeroen Belleman

Until they realise that the emergency services have lost all their communicaitons too, so there is no one who can receive your message.

But there are a lot of mutations in the surviving wildlife.

It doesn't. Breaks in the DNA do get glommed back together again, but there's mo guarantee that the right broken bits get tied back together

Mainly because we are properly careful. Coal mining got started long before people were all that careful about avoiding accidents, and while we've got better, lots of dangerous habits have persisted.

Over up to about 100,000 years.

They got blasted by an air-burst. Lots of radiation from bomb blast, but the fission products got widely spread by the blast.

Drop a nuclear weapon on a nuclear reactor and you could make a country the size of Belgium or the Netherlands uninhabitable for generations.