Yes, the land area numbers are large. But we shouldn't stifle options such as solar because of falsely thinking that it has to be the sole replacement for all electrical production.

Single family homes seem to have enough roof area to power themselves via solar in most latitudes which are not disproportionately cloudy. This is a no-brainer. That leaves industrial use, which will be powered by the remaining mix of production.

The only solution is price--markets, and freedom--if I want to put up solar panels and de-grid, there should be no way for anyone to stop me. Note that I don't claim any "right" to be able to sell surplus power to the grid. That would have to be a negotiated, with access costs implied.

There are ways to enable markets better than what we've tried and proposed. We need "real" rather than totally synthetic, politically fabricated markets. True markets spontaneously emerge where property rights exist.

"Why should nearby property owners get a disproportionate say?"

Obviously, because risk and property damage potential are roughly inversely proportional to radial distance from the nuclear plant.

How about we give them a choice - ..."

In a civil society, there really is no choice about giving property owners a choice. For protecting life, liberty, and property is the only legitimate purpose of governance, no matter how that is implemented. Property owners out to some cutoff radius should be allowed to submit a vote (weighted inversely with radius) to permit or veto the construction of a nuclear plant.

This is the true point of democracy--geographically contiguous groups of property owners should be able to democratically administer the rights to use property in certain ways within their region. Democracy is illegitimate if it is voting on how much to take from a minority group at gunpoint, to give to a majority group, while a criminal gang gets to take a cut off the top. That is the "democracy" we practice now.

Coal plants are actually in a different category. Since they continuously pollute, they should have to pay royalties to the collective owners of the atmosphere. That's basically everyone on the planet, though there is a case to be made that due to circulation patterns, the payment should be weighted according to the statistical distribution of pollutants.

People should be issued a share of the atmosphere at birth. They may be traded freely once one reaches adulthood.

ALL pollutant emitters should have to pay, both individual and large scale. So the power plant will pay, that cost will be included in my bill. It will make the power expensive. Thus, a true market price (with externalities accounted for) will exist. Renewables and nuclear can compete on this basis.

However, the waste disposal for nuclear MUST also be accounted for!

When I buy gas, interestingly, the oil co. should owe no royalties. Since I will be the one doing the burning. So I will pay, reflected in the purchase price. But the royalties will partly get paid back to myself. This is fine. It also results in a true market price for the procurement and effective disposal of the pollutants resulting from burning the fuel. This will make it more expensive. But the royalties are not taxes, so they DON'T go to politicians who will squander them. They will go right back to the consumers.

This is fascinating because, some of the royalty cost cancels itself, but the increase in the effective market price of the fuel remains valid nonetheless! Government can't accomplish this. But they have a place in administering it--only to the extent of formalizing the definition and judicial administration of the property rights.

Excellant! You understand the difference btw. technical vs. political/human challenges, unlike 99% here.

It doesn't matter what can be done technically. The fact is, people will fuck it up. That is why complicated technology is sometimes the very wrong choice, when compared to simple technology. Nuclear is complicated, with potentially huge consequences for error.

I'm not anti-nuclear, but very libertarian/capitalist. I'm convinced that if nuclear's externalities were truly priced in, it would be 10-20x more expensive. Coal would be 4-8x more expensive. And the current crop of solar & wind (even combined with large scale storage), would be no more than 2-3x.

I seriously doubt the LD50 for coke is 80g. I nearly had a heart attack myself once from snorting a bit too much at one time (probably 0.2 to 0.3g), which made me gag and laid out on the floor barely able to breath since my throat was too numb plus my heart was racing. And I wasn't an inexperienced user. That was the 80s, real quality Pablo Escobar stuff. Fortunately, getting addicted to the stuff is highly self limiting. After about a year of escalating use (eventually smoking it) and depressing comedowns, the day arrived after which I never wanted anything to do with it again.

And we're going to remove government indemnification for nuclear power plants too, right? It's simple really--get rid of most of the regulations, in exchange for the requirement that the plants purchase private insurance to a degree acceptable to the nearby PROPERTY OWNERS!

Yeah, it'll be real cheap.

Yeah, it really is simple, huh? Now all you have to do it get humans to do it all correctly.

Certainly then, you can us the market prices to dispose of high level nuclear waste and to purchase insurance sufficient to protect the property owners to the affected radii of the various levels of accidents?

Otherwise, what you are really saying is that it's cheap if the government indemnifies the nuclear power industry and shoves the risk down the throats of property owners, who will never recover their losses if a real accident occurs.

As well as allowing the industry to leave the waste sitting above ground forever, potentially wiping out large swaths of land and/or humanity under various, very plausible scenarios that may occur on timescales that cover millions of years. But of course, you neglect responsibility for those possibilities.

I don't support neglecting the "external" costs of coal power production, either.

Because it's just using a crummy sound card, initially AC coupled, then some hacked DC coupled one.

This would be much more interesting with 20-50x the bandwidth, which a scope like this could deal with easily. That would require a good data acquisition (DAQ) card with high sampling rate D/A converters.

Some low-end analog CRT scopes (like my 20MHz B&K) don't include Z axis inputs. I'm contemplating hacking one on to mine, and also building a generic set of deflection amplifiers to use old electrostatic CRTs for "fun" vector scopes, but with serious video bandwidth of 5-15MHz not the 50-100kHz shit that's typical.

High-res. vector display requires high video bandwidth on all 3 axes, unlike raster which only needs MHz bandwidth for the video, 10s of kHz for horizontal, and 100s of Hz for vertical.

What if you have Tourette's Syndrome and yell "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater?

What if you did that and had Tourette's Syndrome before it was understood to be a neurological disorder?

It's broken in the USA too. Just look at the fact that they told us to eat low fat and high carbs for decades, until we're all obese and dying of diabetes.

So what funding incremental research seems to do, is create a high risk that if initial research results are flawed in subtle ways, the error might compound for a very long time before eventually getting corrected. The probability of this is of course amplified if entrenched interests develop as a consequence of the research, such as when governments give scientific associations (AHA, ADA, etc.) power to write regulations, sit on licensing governing bodies, while holding patents and other means of creating a self-incentive to become corrupt and work to avoid correction of scientific errors.

People are correct when they say that science is self-correcting. However, due to the fact that the practice of science is still done by humans, the amount of time it takes for any particular correction to occur may be unbounded.

Of course, there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with climate change science...

WTF? Do you understand that government means: the absolute monopoly over the use of force? No one can corrupt the government unless the government is willing to be corrupted, in which case it would end up corrupt, corporations or not.

A corrupted government is a consequence of a failed government model.

Corporations that do not exploit a fascist system are just plain stupid. I don't blame them. What are they doing that's any different than individual people do, ie., gain an advantage by trying to get more than they produce, by having the government give them a share of someone else's output?

Let me guess, you're the type that tries to maximize your tax obligations, volunteers all your free time for charitable work, and has started at least one companies that pays the workers 100% of revenue, pays the CEO the same wage as the custodian, makes no profits, and is experiencing steady growth.

Only scoffed?

Yeah, just think of the bonanza of choices of formulation you would be given under socialism!

The free market.

The solution to the problems caused by the controls is always more controls, at least until everything spirals completely out of control.