But Slashdot is losing traffic for years now. https://www.google.com/trends/?q=slashdot
Google Trends normalizes against the total volume of search traffic; the graph says what *percentage* of searches were made for this word. Almost every topic is 'losing traffic' because people are searching for more things on the web.
Many myths here.
People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels.
http://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels.
http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.
http://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
http://skepticalscience.com/solar-cycles-global-warming.htm
Nuclear is great for keeping my computer running and keeping my house cool. Unfortunately, nuclear does nothing that will get me to work.
What about stuff that runs on electricity: trams, railway, subway, electric cars?
Also, given enough energy, we can make synthetic gasoline.
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/01/nuclear-synfuel-economy.html
How many new nuclear power plants have been licensed and built in the past 20 years?
88 new grid connections in the last 20 years, 73.3 GW total.
It is obvious that this build rate could very easily be at least 10 times higher.
http://pris.iaea.org/Public/WorldStatistics/OperationalByAge.aspx
I think GP's statement about Fukushima was supposed to be ironic: he put "disaster" in quotes.
Isn't this the institute headed by Amory Lovins, a guy whose predictions turned out wrong, wrong and wrong many times, yet still remains a celebrity?
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=676
By the way, he promotes quite a lot of distributed coal burning.
This guy is a climatologist and promoting nuclear power is basically the main thing he does now.
How did this pile of ideologically motivated falsehood after falsehood get modded to +5 Insightful? I will just point out one example of blatant lying:
"even 500,000 years later (25xTau) this waste would still be deadly to all living things"
The rule of thumb is that after 10 half-lives, the radioactive substance decays to nothing. But it doesn't apply to very long lived nuclides, which cease to be harmful much earlier, because their radiation becomes very weak. Spent fuel is less radioactive than the ore it came from after 10 000 years.
Moving away from nuclear power isn't going to hurt them.
The cost after just a few months is already in the billions of euros due to higher power prices and lost taxes from the nuclear power plants, an E.On alone is planning to lay off up to 50 000 people. Not going to hurt them? To me it looks more like the worst possible shot in the foot.
That's the third scam, because it is an outdated model
The absurd "baseload is an obsolete concept" thing again... It does not become true if you say it 1000 times. You will end up either relying on imports or having to massively overbuild at a staggering cost.
For the amount it already invested in renewable energy subsidies, it got back less than 1% of the electricity supply
Correction: solar energy subsidies.
problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium
1. Thorium breeders don't produce plutonium.
2. Plutonium from breeders is not useful for weapons.
3. Plutonium is far less toxic that the anti-nuclear clowns claim.
all serious nations are moving away from nuclear
Way to pull a no true Scotsman. The only nation pulling out is Germany, which is heavily infested with Greenpeace and other similar paranoid fanatics. It's obvious that they will return to coal - even the energy comissioner of the EU said so. US, France, Britain, even Japan is not going to abandon nuclear power.
nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong
Your characterization of accident consequences applies more to hydro power. Fukushima failed to kill anyone. Compare this with 171 000 dead from the Banqiao dam failure.
How many people are dying because of nuclear waste every year? Not even a single one.
I am very disappointed that otherwise rational people like you have given up reason and parrot the doomsaying from the media and anti-nuclear clowns. Even more worrying is the fact that your absurd, fact-free rant was modded up to +5 Insightful. Slashdot is no longer the place I thought it is.
On the other Hand, building 1.6 Mio. wind turbines is the cheapest viable alternative. Germany alone already has about 22.000 of them, and they are profitable.
They are profitable to their operators but not to the society, as they are supported by large subsidies.
Safe nuclear power is not commercially viable. The only reason why it looks cheap is because today's commercial reactors are unsafe by design and the risk costs are carried by the society.
Where is this risk?
How many people died because of accidents at German NPPs? How many people died in Fukushima because of the nuclear accident (as opposed to direct effects of the earthquake and tsunami)? In both cases the answer is zero. Your perception of risk is very far from reality. People in Japan are evacuating to avoid 20 mSv per year of radiation, even though its negative effects are too small to measure below 50 mSv/year, and a dose of 100 mSv corresponds to only 0,5% higher chance of eventually dying from cancer (the normal chance is about 25%). That's how pervasive the anti-nuclear bullshit has become.
With the cheap nuclear reactors that are still being build today we will have a major nuclear disaster every 20-30 years, and the economic damage to the affected country is huge.
The Fukushima design was not built since the 70s. There is a second nuclear plant (Fukushima II) very close, and it did not suffer an accident, because its reactors are newer and the site is laid out differently. The economic damage from the nuclear accident is completely dwarfed by the damage from the tsunami.
in some areas in Bavaria deer still can not be consumed because the meat is too radioactive
Deer meat from Bavaria is not dangerous. This is simply a result of unscientifically low limits on radionuclides in food. The limit is usually computed by requiring that you can't get more than 1 mSv per year even if you ate the most contaminated meat as your only source of food. This level of paranoia cannot be justified in any way, as health effects below 50 mSv are undetectable.
That's only your interpretation. The real reason is stupid overreaction to Fukushima. Otherwise Merkel would not overturn the phaseout decision in the first place.
When someone says "nuclear waste" people stop thinking rationally. Did someone actually die because it was not stored properly? All those claims how dangerous it is sound hollow unless you can point out some actual harm (as in, measurable health consequences, not a small radioactivity release causing stupid people to shit their pants).
So there is no place in Germany were we could safely store nuclear waste at all.
That's some kind of joke. There are plenty of places, but the real problem is that the government is fixated on the "metal can in salt" method, which has been proven inadequate by experience. It is not the only method in existence; for instance, the Swiss method uses metal containers in clay backfill buried in granite rock. The problem is that the extremely high concentration of anti-nuclear clowns in Germany is preventing any change from happening.
any politician will fight tooth and nail against a mine in his district.
That's another example of hysteria.
At the same time Germany tries to increase the amount of renewable energy and is quite successful.
For the amount it already invested in renewable energy subsidies, it got back less than 1% of the electricity supply, while an equivalent amount of money spent on new nuclear reactors could completely decarbonize power generation. How wise.
Care to put some substance to that claim? What are you going to do with nuclear waste? Reprocessing produces more waste than what goes in.
No it doesn't. It separates the waste into fission products which decay to the level of radioactivity of uranium ore after 300 years, plutonium which can be reused as fuel, and uranium which can be re-enriched.
Yes, but they didn't have them. You see, real safety, not mickey-mouse make believe duck-and-cover safety is much too expensive to the folks in the executive class that get to become rich with this type of projects. So they prefer to allow for the occasional meltdown.
This makes completely no sense. It is far more profitable not to allow an accident to happen than to cut corners, because operating a nuclear power plant after its construction cost has been amortized is like printing money.
About 25% of the ocean floor is suitable for sub-seabed disposal. Sites suitable for deep geological disposal are also quite common. I don't think that running out of space for waste storage is going to be a significant problem.
If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton
