You're in good company.

Swedish ones. What american ones do, or don't on their time I don't know about, and can't answer for. You know that the Swedish green party is actually part of the cabinet? They can't be running around blowing up dams, that'd just hurt them in the polls...

Don't know. Didn't mention the Deepwater horizon "incident".

Nope. You must be thinking about someone else.

Nope. Not when it comes to BP at least. They're still doing OK. Dropped from second to fourth largest oil company in the world, but far from bankrupt. Still showing a healthy profit. And the largest shareholder in BP is, you guessed it, Britain. (It was even majority owned, until Thatcher couldn't leave well enough alone.) So they're a bad example, being government owned. You need to look to private industry to find the real weasels.

You mean like "The United States Oil Pollution Act of 1990 limits BP's liability for non-cleanup costs to $75 million unless gross negligence is proven.". You'd be wrong to assume that the nuclear industry is the only large industry that gets to call the shots.

OK, maybe you misunderstood me. Whether it makes sense or not is not the issue. Whether it is "right" or "wrong" is not the issue either. The issue is that private companies do weasel out of paying, and they do so using wholly legal means. (It's not for nothing that oil tankers are often owned by completely separate entities, that can go bankrupt with no ill effects for the company that's actually making the money off of those oil shipments) Whether you like it or not, that's what's going to happen more often than not, especially when we talk about catastrophic events, such as the Tsunami that hit Japan, killed ~15000 people, destroyed large tracts of land, and yes, flooded a nuclear reactor emergency generator system.

You would need to change a lot of law to make that impossible. And as you can't even make these companies pay their bloody taxes as it is, lots of luck with that.

In Sweden, most of our nuclear reactors are owned by the government (wholly owned corporations), so of course the government is going to pay for the eventual disaster, one way or the other. (And since they're not allowed by law to take out insurance, that would be stupid, it's a completely moot point anyway).

So that the government assumes responsibility for what they're going to end up assuming responsibility for anyway isn't as stupid as it sounds. What is stupid, is that you seem perfectly happy with letting the private owners make off with the proceeds in the meantime. That is something you should start looking into.

"The people that died", you mean the ~ 16000 that died in one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history? Those people? Or the approximately zero people that died as a direct or indirect result of Fukushima?

Or the untold people that lost everything, houses, land, the lot, as a result of said Tsunami, or the much, much smaller number of people who have to move from their houses because of the Fukushima exclusion zone? Those people?

Look, what makes us not take you lot seriously is that you have absolutely no sense of scale. This was a catastrophic disaster that struck Japan. Thousands upon thousands of people died or lost everything. Many of the areas hit won't be rebuilt for generations as the wherewithal, economy etc. isn't there to make that happen. Only the economic loss was staggering. And you go on and on about one tiny corner of that, where no-one died, no-one is probably going to die, and the economic impact is limited, especially compared to the rest of Japan that was devastated.

If you had a sense of scale about these things, you would understand that a nuclear disaster is every bit as "linear" as a large hydro dam failure. We are in no way shape or form at the level of "asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs". Even the worst nuclear accident imaginable (Tjernobyl if you wonder) is a very localised affair (country, maybe continent), that's over in a jiffy, compared to your killer meteorite. (In fact contrary to a large dam failure, nature actually thrives in the nature preserve that is the Tjernobyl exclusion zone.) We couldn't effectively hurt the survival of human kind with nuclear weapons, let alone civilian nuclear energy.

So, we're very much still in the linear part of the spectrum. That you nuclear detractors don't realise this, even getting the idea to comparing a puny nuclear reactor blowing up to a large asteroid, is what makes it impossible to take you seriously.

Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.

So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.

In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.

Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.

Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.

If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance. Especially when there is no data for the insurance industry to go on (as is the case with large scale catastrophes).

So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either. And even if they did, it wouldn't cover the actual cost anyway, you'd just look at years and years of litigation and ass covering, with very little hard cash in the end to show for it. (To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.

If you want to construe that as an argument for making these types of endeavours government owned and operated, go ahead, I think that could be argued.

What are your numbers then? Tjernobyl one reactor, Fukushima one reactor (or are you counting multiples there?), vs 443 power generating ones according to Google, that gives me 0.455% let's say 0.5%.

And that's even assuming that number of failed reactors / total, is even a good metric, something I'm not nearly convince of.

"Citation needed."

Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....

Yepp. It's not for nothing that the first thing a doctor will tell you as the answer to the "What do I do now"-question that inevitably results from a positive test is: "Have more tests".

Initial screening tests are often less accurate, since that inevitably makes them quicker and cheaper. That's why they're called screening tests. The odd positive results is just confirmation that better, slower, more expensive tests should be done.

An interesting twist we have here in Sweden is that for purposes of determining who pays cost, even if you win the case but is awarded less than half of what you originally claimed, you're counted as the loser when it comes to paying cost of litigation.

Keeps down frivolous claims quite nicely. However, I doubt this way of running civil cases would serve well if we didn't also have the system of ombudsmen, i.e. in any case where the little guy would face interests with big pockets (including government) there's an ombudsman to hear you case and litigate on your behalf, providing both the expertise and funds. (They can also fine directly.)

Yeah, I can't remember when I was in an block of flats last that didn't have concrete walls between the flats... Sure, concrete isn't technically "air tight", but its close enough as to make no difference.

And of course there is corruption here as well, but they don't rank us amongst the least corrupt nations of the world, year after year, for nothing. I wouldn't say that its a problem.

As for the climate in Canada, you get so much sun down there on the Mediterranean latitudes that you have no cause for complaints. :-) Canada is what, 49 deg North? That's bloody Paris! :-) Us here on up on the 60th parallel OTOH, we have no such luxury.

Wow! I won't claim to be a ventilation expert, but I did read up on the subject when I designed and put my own mechanical ventilation system into my own house, and here in Sweden at least I have never heard of such a beast. Oh the humanity of breathing other peoples air, even if filtered. :-) Would fly like a brick if someone tried that here. (Granted, being Sweden, indoor climate is important, as the outdoors are somewhat inhospitable for parts of the year.)

Now, I've lived in apartments, and while I've had the usual problems of smelling someone elses smoke from their balcony when I had my windows open, to have to suffer that through a wall would really take the cake. That's definitely not to code here, and heads would roll if it ever happened.

However, as you say, probably not a reliable way of getting high on the cheap. It can't usually be that bad of a problem, surely. ;-)

Perhaps naively, I thought that such systems worked such that people in different units didn't breathe each other's air?

That was what the first post in this thread implied, and that's the only reason I can see that pot smoking would be a problem, i.e. if the pot smokers outlet vent becomes your inlet. Please tell me that's not the standard for ventilation in other parts of the world.