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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:07PM
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.
Three of the four major candidates for United States president have responded to America's Top 20 Presidential Science, Engineering, Technology, Health and Environmental Questions. The nonprofit advocacy group ScienceDebate.org has posted their responses online. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jill Stein had all responded as of press time, and the group was awaiting responses from Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.
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U.S. Presidential Candidates Answer ScienceDebate 2016 Questions
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:56PM
I guess this problem is just insurmountable. There's nothing that a president could possibly propose to congress to change things. There is nobody on the planet [telegraph.co.uk] that can do this right. No technology [wikipedia.org] available that would be a better design. It doesn't matter who the secretary of energy is. There is no combination of regulation and public investment [scmp.com] that could possibly make it work [fortune.com]. Oh well. We should just give up [wired.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:06PM
Thorium reactors sound great.
But we've got such little practical experience with them that promoting them as any kind of solution to the risks of modern nuke design is not good policy. Explore, experiment, totally. But we are far from them being a viable option.
(Score: 2, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:04PM
I understand that. I guess it's a good thing that China is doing that. Americans have become cowards who jump at their own shadow while China moves the state of the art forward.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:29PM
With all due respect I think it has more to do with the protestors in the USA being seen as a great yellow journalism topic to be encouraged via propaganda then the grandstanding politicians weigh in as if they are smart enough to say anything vs in China they just shoot the protestors.
Naturally in the USA the protestors are a major PR problem, and in China they merely slightly drive ammunition sales.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:03PM
It's actually more that China doesn't give a crap about pollution or consequences for the average citizen, since all projects like this would perforce be NIMBY for the CCP. That is, they are never affected by the consequences of their actions.
BTW the CCP's vision for the future is a horribly outdated caricature of 1930's modernism. As in, discredited in every other industrialized country with the possible exception of Russia.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:26PM
While the US's CEOs' vision for the future is too rarely past the next few quarters, and hardly ever as far as 5 years.
"When will a thorium reactor turn a profit? What's the ROI, and how will it affect the stock? Not interested."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:30PM
thorium reactors can be made into bombs. It is not as safe as you think.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snow on Wednesday September 14 2016, @05:16PM
You know what else can be made into bombs? Bombs.
The USA makes god knows how many of those per year and no one seems to care about that.
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:00PM
Not easily. Liquid fueled thorium reactors have a very tight neutron economy. To make a bomb you'll have to shutdown a reactor, or at least spend many years making one. There are much more practical ways to make a bomb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @07:10PM
So can fertilizer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:47PM
The problem is, everywhere we've looked carefully, whether the nuclear reactors are being run by a government or by a private company, unsafe procedures and shortcuts are taken. The design of the reactors could be improved, but that's not the basic problem The problem is the stuff is long-term dangerous, so it needs to be handled properly, but people aren't designed to properly evaluate long term risks. (They don't even do that well on short term risks, consider the popularity of betting on horse races or slot machines.)
With nuclear reactors, many "short cuts" will be safe 99 times out of 100, but the cost of it being unsafe is such that taking that short cut is an extremely unwise decision. However much of the cost of failure is not borne by those operating the plant, but is instead borne by the populace living around it. Or down stream from it, if it's on a river. So while it's true that even for those operating the plant the short cut is a bad decision, it's doesn't appear nearly as bad to them as it actually is.
If the plants were properly operated, and waste disposed of correctly (i.e. safely), then nuclear plants would be a good idea. As things are, however, it's usually a bad idea. (There are circumstances where they provide advantages that nothing else will match, and in some of those cases even their real costs [including appropriately discounted risks as a part of the costs] don't raise the cost to where they should not be used.)
OTOH, even under current operating conditions nuclear power is probably safer than coal.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday September 15 2016, @12:56AM
Under current operating conditions it's *certainly* safer than coal. It may even be safer than solar:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html [nextbigfuture.com]