Who the hell is moding you up as insightful?
The people who can read a text and understand the argument that is presented. It looks like you're not one of them.
Gen 4 reactors will happily run in a way that it effectively reprocesses its own waste. It's also got passive safety and the resulting waste (which at this point really isn't fuel) has a half-life well short of the hundred years.
They are also fictional. We'll be able to judge how well they operate and how they reprocess own waste when we see one operating safely for some time.
No, it is not fuel. Part of it may become fuel if one is allowed to reprocess it. Reprocessing, however, is a very tightly regulated business, and in many places, for example in the US, or in Japan, or in Russia it is not an option, or not a very important option. Do you know why it isn't a wide-spread, happy industry? Yep, because it is expensive as hell, dangerous and dual-use.
Here's a fun experiment to do: stop pretending you carry a cesium source and a Geiger counter, and consider what should be done with the 1000+ tons of highly radioactive mud that is already collected on-site in Fukushima. Right next to the used fuel pool.
Please make it a rational solution that can guarantee no leaks for a few hundred years and doesn't cost a brazillion billion million yen.
Thanks.
One, you have serious reading comprehension issues. OP claims coal produces more nuclear waste than nuclear power.
Two, that SA article has been debunked so many times, it isn't even funny. The 'research' it is based on is from 1977 and it discusses coal plants that aren't built anymore. Here, for your reading pleasure: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
nuclear plants produce less radioactive waste than coal plants
This is so stupid it defies belief. Care to substantiate this claim with numbers and sources thereof?
Even this claim sounds quite far-fetched to me.
What certainly played significant role in bringing down the Republic was the inability of the Romans to adapt their political system, which was quite efficient in running a city-state (or a loose union of several city-states), to govern the huge country their successful military campaigns created. It simply didn't scale well enough.
Another big hurdle, IIRC, was the impossibility of legal reform because the Roman viewed the laws of their forefathers as sacred. The legal mess they got on their hands in the last years of the Republic allowed all kinds of manipulation of the political system -- something which Caesar and his successors used skillfully to gradually take over.
I don't think we have enough facts to ascertain the role of the concrete in this process, though.
Your problem is that you have the basics backwards and you try to solve this by arguing over definitions, and then you devolve in 'open your eyes sheeple' crap. This doesn't make you right, however.
Capitalism, a mode of the economy in which factors of production are privately owned and their output is voluntarily traded, exists all over the world. The 'free market' you're talking about is one idealization of one aspect of this system. Unlike capitalism, it is this 'free market' (the correct term is 'competitive market', where nobody has any power to dictate factor or good prices, or output levels) that does not exist.
Your attempt at analysis is also faulty because you aren't making distinctions between how and why phenomena that have similar effects come about and develop. A market distortion that occurs in a 'free market' under a natural monopoly (and yes, in the absence of government regulation, a natural monopoly is a 'free market', although not a competitive one) is a very different beast from the distortions of an economy that develop under a corrupt government, although they may share some similar effects once in place.
The problem I'm discussing is that a democratic political system operating a capitalist economy tends to reliably get into the state you call 'crony capitalism' over time because of the way the two interact, free market or not. Hence the need for an improvement. Pushing for a 'free market' utopia is about as much a solution to this problem as pushing for a communism of the Marx variety would be.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson