Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

Please see my original post:

They're not going to work as cops ever again.

And they're not going to get hired as security guards in the U.S., either. Would you hire someone that you already knew, 100%, had violated someone's civil liberties so egregiously? Of course not: your shareholders would can you for hiring them. If you hire people you know are a discipline problem, you're just begging for a lawsuit when they fuck up again while working for you.

If you think the people who hire cops don't bother to check with previous employers and do Google searches on new applicants, you need your head examined. These two are done. They're not going to work as cops ever again.

Well, chalk one up for electrics, I guess.

Tesla's working on automated full-service battery swapping stations. And apparently also on charging cords that can plug themselves in:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1...

Robots of that sort already exist, so you can see the sort of thing he's probably referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That's what the Amazon drones are for. The truck just has to cruise through the neighborhood. Meanwhile, small drone aircraft that it carries will work to carry packages out of the truck and to front doors. A human will still be needed for heavy or bulky packages, or for deliveries that have to be brought inside or where there's no convenient place for the drone to land to deposit them, but those packages and destinations can be separated from the others at the local depot, and all put on a smaller number of trucks, therefore needing a smaller number of humans. You won't need a human for every truck if you work out the routes each day based on the nature of the packages you've got and where you're taking them.

LEDs have lifespans of what, 50-100k hours? So maybe a couple decades. And some will significantly outlive their design life, as is always the case with failure curves. The solar cells should be good for decades, until the contacts corrode.

One *could* design devices to last for thousands of years. But that's not usually a design constraint ;)

There's no guarantee that ECCS are independent and can operate in the vent of station blackout. The HPCI used in Fukishima, for example, is a steam turbine-driven pump but not a generator, and it has electrical components that require operation. Which is why it didn't prevent meltdown.

The primary turbines are not designed to operate on the amount of power generated from decay heat alone.

Small upgrades, this already happens.

Large upgrades, by phasing out old units and building new ones. The complex as a whole remains.

Taking down an old unit is BTW a very large task ("decommissioning"), can take decades and comes at extreme expense. Which is part of why plant operators try to keep their old units going as long as possible, even when they've become expensive to operate.

Could you, so that we know where you're coming from, elaborate on where renewables "dont cut it"?

These "some environmental groups" include the governor of New York, who is trying to get the plant permanently shut down.

It's not fringe radicals who think it's a bad idea to have a nuclear plant right next to the largest population center in the United States.

Right, because generators the size needed to operate nuclear power plants are the sort of thing that you just pick up at any corner hardware store and "drive up and plug in"?

here's what one of those generators looks like. A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task. These things take prep work and a lot of labour to acquire, move, install and set up. Weeks to months. That's all assuming that the generator building itself is still usable; a failure in such a large generator, or the sort of external event that can take out such a large generator, is not exactly some sort of low energy event.

Back before Fukushima people like you were all over Slashdot harping about how major nuclear disasters couldn't happen again, that it's only possible with old Soviet designs like Chernobyl that are horribly misused. Quit being so damned short sighted. Unforseen events and cascading failures do happen. You can't just act like "the list of causes of major that have already happened is the entire comprehensive list of what could cause major failures".

If you scram, lose your grid connection and lose your generators, you will likely get a Fukushima-like event. Two of the three happened here. Let's not pretend that the concept of something taking out the generator room, or otherwise preventing its power from working the pumps - generators which are only rarely tested - is such a preposterous concept. And let's not be silly and act like massive pieces of industrial equipment can just be plopped down and hooked up like a little Honda generator.

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!