Actually, it is more dangerous than any other scram, as it means that you don't have a grid connection to power your cooling pumps. You have to rely on your backup generators. If they fail, you're in serious trouble.

As to the GP, nuclear's biggest problem is a "negative learning curve". We make a generation of nuclear reactors, but over time instead of getting cheaper to make and operate - as in most technologies - it gets more expensive as we discover all sorts of new things wrong and try to patch them. Some can be fixed, some are fundamental design problems. We try to work around this with a new generation of reactors - but that then starts the learning curve over from scratch, and often with an even more complex system.

It's been a real problem.

A transformer blowing up at a plant is actually a pretty big issue. An "off" PWR or BWR still needs power for quite a while for cooling. See Fukushima for the consequences of losing both mains power and backup generators at the same time. Clearly the backup generators worked - yeay! But what if they hadn't?

Indian Point, even in the event of a major accident, is not too much of a health threat to the people of New York City. Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion; you can run away from them, you don't have to sit around on contaminated streets drinking contaminated water. But what you can't do is ignore them. The financial costs if Indian Point underwent a Fukushima-scale disaster and large chunks of NYC had to be evacuated for long periods of time are almost unthinkable. That's the real problem with its positioning.

I'm saying that they have a business model entirely based on the mass breaking of laws.

I think that's why Uber is trying to diversify, and fast. Amazing that so much money was thrown at this company whose business model was, as you put it, "basically illegal".

I'm going to start a netsharing company. We're going to put up wifi routers around town and charge people for net service, but we're not going to pay for the outbound connections. Instead we're going to wardrive around cities and wherever we find an poorly secured wifi network, we'll place a repeater there that routes our outbound net traffic through it. We'll be able to offer offer cheaper net access than everyone else, get a bunch of users, and thus a bunch of revenue, and we'll have a huge margin on our balance sheet. Who wants to toss us a few billion dollars?

Or maybe I should start a construction sharing company. We'll let anyone who wants to be a "builder" sign up and offer construction to anyone who wants the job done. No, they won't be licensed or have any sort of "permits", but that's not our issue, that's theirs. The point is, they'll be able to build things really cheap! And so we'll get a bunch of users, and thus a bunch of revenue, and we'll have a huge margin on our balance sheet. Who wants to toss us a few billion dollars?

Or maybe I should start a medicine sharing company... or a sex-for-money sharing company... or a software-license sharing company... or a gunsharing company... you see, if you add the word "sharing" to it, it's not really illegal!

Huh? Biking is the most energy efficient way to get around (more efficient than walking).

Which is why electric bicycles are a very efficient way to get around. But we're not talking about electric bikes; we're talking about human powered bikes. And unfortunately, the CO2 footprint per unit energy out of growing food, harvesting it, shipping it, cooking it, digesting it, and turning it back to kinetic energy via the muscles, is often ridiculously high compared to far more efficient ways of harvesting chemical energy (such as directly burning it in an ICE or gas turbine)

If a cyclist's energy comes overwhelmingly from efficient, locally grown starchy / fatty plant sources, the efficiency of a bicycle can overwhelm the inefficiency of using food as an energy source, and they can get a better CO2 footprint per kilometer than a Prius. On the other hand, that's not a typical diet. If half their calories are from beef, for example, they might as well be driving alone in an SUV.

One thing to keep in mind is the carbon cycle. Burning gas / oil / coal unlocks carbon that has been locked away for a loooooooooooooooooooong time

Are you under the impression that the CO2 footprints from food production don't?

And note that right now I'm only talking about CO2 footprints. Should we also go into the vast amounts of habitat destruction and water consumption used to produce food? Take a look at a satellite image of how much of our planet we've turned into a food-producing machine, and all of the rivers that no longer reach the ocean, or are so full of fertilizers that they make dead zones. Let's not pretend that the act of voluntarily consuming more calories (aka, exercise) is unrelated.

And exercise is good for you.

Note that my post wasn't about health. :) This is absolutely true, most people would benefit from more exercise, health-wise (although too much is also bad for you). Although cycling does put you at much greater risk of injury than driving.

Also, see this post.

It's perfectly reasonable to look at all aspects - health, injury, CO2, etc. But I find that all too many people are not only willing to ignore the negative effects of cycling or walking as a mode of transportation, but even get shocked and indignant when someone points them out (see the responses to my post for examples, including the speechless "What? No. Seriously." response).

There are good health effects for people who need more exercise. But there also are negative effects (injury, CO2, land and water use, etc), and let's not pretend that they don't exist.

Take your time. It's not a very long post.

They burn more calories (that's where the energy for propulsion comes from). Calories come from food. If meat is part of their diet, then yes, they eat more meat. Which has a huge CO2 footprint associated with it. Vegetables too have often very high CO2 footprints per calorie (because they have so few calories). As does anything shipped in from long distances away.

A cyclist can maintain a low CO2 footprint, but only by eating a diet that has low CO2 emissions per calorie - for example, locally grown grains, potatoes, etc.

Now, an electric bicycle is a different story; they have incredibly low CO2 footprints.

(It's not just a stereotype that athletes eat big meals after a big game or hard workout. They have to to not lose weight to the point that they lose energy and their body starts to eat itself. While a disturbing number of people seem to have this notion that exercise is "free energy", it's simply not the reality. Yes, a person being fit and thin by exercising regularly will have a somewhat lower baseline metabolism. But it's not even close to the number of calories they burn to get there.)

First off, cyclists suffer higher rates of death and injury even in areas where there is no traffic, per kilometer. Secondly, are you planning to take all goods by bicycle? No? Then there will still be vehicles on the roads no matter how aggressive you are at switching people over to bikes. My city, for example, is trying to increase cycling from about 4% of trips to about 20% of trips. That's a 5-fold increase in the number of cyclists but only about a 20% reduction in the number of cars. Aka, you're looking at a massive net increase in serious injuries.

Do you drive your SUV without eating anything?

Are we now pretending that moving by human power comes without an additional caloric cost over resting metabolism? That bicycles work by magic free energy?

Water vapor also has a mean atmospheric residence time of 2 to 20 days. You do something to completely throw water vapor levels off balance, it'll be back to where it was a few weeks later. It can only function as a feedback mechanism; water vapor is limited to fluctuating around a mean. What that mean is depends on the other driving factors in the environment. These are known as forcing. For something to act as forcing, it has to have far longer residence times.

(Note that while on human timescales carbon dioxide is forcing, on geological timescales it's mere feedback. A couple hundred years is nothing compared to, say, Milankovitch cycles)

Explain to me again why the addition of something that is " leading to global warming" and "is also a major source of ocean acidification" is not pollution?

Cobalt is a vital element to the human body, critical to health in the sort of quantities naturally consumed. That doesn't mean that it'd be good for us if someone started dumping huge amounts of cobalt in our water supply.

Concerning such pollutants, we actually don't share the same atmosphere. These sort of pollutants have short atmospheric residence periods, they're mainly problems at or near the point of emission (the particular distance that they pose a problem for depends on the type of pollutant).

It's one of the reasons that even if electric cars didn't cut down in pollution (which studies repeatedly show that they do) and simply moved the same amount of pollution from the streets to the top of power plant smokestacks, they'd still improve public health on average. Any pollutants you do emit, you want them as far as possible away from where most people are (aka, away from areas with lots of traffic, aka, lots of people), and as high up as possible.

And the several percent of non-vegans who travel by bicycle instead of cars are acting all smug thinking they're saving the planet, when their consumption of meat for the calories they burn gives them the per-kilometer carbon footprint of an SUV. Plus an order-of-magnitude higher per-kilometer risk of death or serious injury than a person in a car.

Continuing in the same article: "It is an important greenhouse gas and burning of carbon-based fuels since the industrial revolution has rapidly increased its concentration in the atmosphere, leading to global warming. It is also a major source of ocean acidification since it dissolves in water to form carbonic acid."

A lot was left out of the study. I find their methodology fishy. For example, here's their test area:

Located west of the sampling site is a set of traffic lights, which results in various driving states such as cruising, braking, idling, and acceleration. Stop-and-go traffic dominates during rush hour periods, while free flowing traffic is more typical outside of these hours, especially overnight. Given the downtown location...

Downtown... stop and go for large portions of the day... various driving states... in short, even if two people are driving the exact same car in the exact same condition in the exact same driving style on average, if one at the particular moment of passing the sensor happens to be letting off the gas, while the other just happens to be accelerating when it passes the sensor, the two cars are going to give wildly different pollution readings.

I'll also note that the paper says that it's still in review, aka it hasn't passed peer-review yet.

I'm sure the general premise is right, that small numbers of vehicles cause most pollution. But I think their experimental setup is pretty bad. The stupid thing is they're collecting the data they'd need to control for it - they're taking pictures, which would let them tie vehicle plumes to particular license plate numbers, and then only study vehicles that pass by the sensor a number of times times to that they can get a running average. Another way to control for it would be to have a dozen or so sensors spaced out down the road spaced well apart so that they can average a particular vehicle's emissions on a single drive down the road. But a single sensor, single pass way to rate a vehicle's emissions as good or bad? That's a terrible approach. And they stretch very far on their conclusions based on this approach.

Hahaha... you know, this gives the term "going postal" a new meaning. Imagine a world where an Amazon delivery center worker who can't take it anymore starts duct taping cats into the package slot... turning the drones into flying, clawing machines that chase after their horrified, fleeing targets.

Bonus points if they could get their hands on bobcats, honey badgers, etc.