Geraldine Ferraro has died of complications from multiple myeloma. My thoughts are with her family and loved ones.
Japan is becoming increasingly toxic, with the widespread soil contamination probably their biggest long-term nightmare.
Somehow these two things seem to go together. American Catholics don’t seem to be influenced by papal teachings on social issues and American Jews seem equally disinclined to accept the infallibility of Israel’s actions.
David Gilo, who is the chairman of J Street, said in the hearing [before the Knesset] that the contract that had long existed between Israel and Jews abroad — one of unconditional support — was expiring and a new one was being drafted. He argued that the new contract was good not only for those abroad but for Israel as well, since it would bring into the fold those who would otherwise be alienated. “The new contract cannot be based on unilateral dictation of what is right, who is right and who is wrong,” he said. “Only agreement on common values and a genuine attempt to understand where each party comes from can reinstate an Israeli-American Jewish partnership.”
Andy McCarthy is a complete idiot. But I like that he is honest enough to admit that he opposes the military intervention in Libya, in part, because it gives liberals a compelling argument against gutting our social safety net and other valuable government programs. After all, if we have money to spend on tomahawk missiles then we have money for public broadcasting. Right?
As if the president isn’t busy enough, he’s issued a statement about the Ivory Coast which the White House calls ‘Cote d’Ivoire,’ proving once again that he wants to let the French lead the free world.
It was really hard to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, but I don’t ever see it being reinstated, regardless of how many Republican candidates call for it. I don’t think the amorous mindset argument is going to hold much water with younger Americans.
Syria is a bit of a wildcard in the Middle East these days. They are having their own protests and unrest. I don’t think anyone except Iran and Hezbollah would be unhappy to see the Assad regime replaced. Their southern neighbor Jordan, however…a lot of people would be upset to see King Abdullah toppled.
What’s on your mind this afternoon?
I hope this poor woman lives to see Ghaddafi die.
Chances are good that she will.
The news from Japan is horrible.
Japan is becoming increasingly toxic, with the widespread soil contamination probably their biggest long-term nightmare.
But wait a minute, the nuclear defenders were here the last couple weeks telling us that the media was exaggerating the problem. It was all supposed to be contained. What happened?
Here are a couple of points to remember:
First, we are in uncharted territory with this nuclear disaster. None of us know how bad things will get, and even if we get open and honest reporting we won’t fully know for years. It conceivably might get under control very soon and the damage not much worse that has already happened. But if that does happen it will be by sheer dumb luck, as there certainly is no contingency plan available right now that would contain it — if there were it would have already been tried.
Second, this really does illustrate the problem with one of the key arguments the nuclear defenders raised a week ago on this blog (at the time I was on a business trip and had no time to respond) vis-a-vis cost benefit analysis and disaster preparedness. Cost-Benefit analysis tends to fail when analyzing the potential threat of a highly unlikely yet highly costly event.
A) You don’t have enough data to really quantify the possibility of a highly unlikely event. Is the chance of a 9.0 earthquake happening during the 50 year expected life span 1 in a million? Or one in 10,000? You don’t know, but that knowledge is essential to making a correct calculation.
B) Since you don’t know, and since the people doing the calculation are trying to save costs, they will tend to underestimate the probability of the severe event, distorting the calculation. And no one will have data to prove them wrong, because the data aren’t available.
C) The other error is in making the calculation one plant at a time. Thus it may be that the potential disaster is very unlikely to occur for one plant, but when 100s or 1000s are deployed the likelihood that one of them will experience the disaster during the lifespan will greatly increase to the point where it is likely to occur. As an example of this principle, I once worked for a company where we all knew there was a timing problem with our microcode that could under very rare circumstances cause a data integrity problem, which was very bad since our computers were sold for a premium because they were designed to have perfect data integrity. But we calculated that this would happen less than once every 50 years for a single customer, so it wasn’t worth fixing. Until one customer built a network of 1000s of our systems and they found the problem immediately. I did the calculation for them and realized that the expected frequency of them encountering this extremely rare but very bad error was once every 10 months. Needless to say we rushed a fix for the problem.
So, with nuclear we are dealing with a technology that has the potential, under a worse case scenario, to cause millions of casualties and spread cancer-causing radiation around the globe. Emphasize: that is the absolute worst case, with almost infinitesimal probability given what we know now. However, it has that potential and the types of events that could cause that worst-case disaster are extremely rare events — multiple low-probability events strung together at once. But we really can’t assess the likelihood of those nor have adequate contingency plans due to total lack of an experience with those situations.
That is the issue.
I agree that the risk has to assessed on a national and global level, not simply for each plant. If you have plants at 200 disparate sites that operate for 50 years, that’s 10,000 years of plant operation. I’d expect multiple once-in-a-millenium events like this earthquake and tsunami, in addition to one or two less likely events. The situation is worse because plants don’t ever seem to be retired at the end of their 50-year lifespan.
However, you also have to compare that risk to the risk of producing the same amount of energy in other ways: mining, drilling, fracking, hydro, etc. How many windfarms would it take, and where would they go? Etc. So I’m not sure, even taking the global scale into account, that nuclear loses.
Which is not to say that I like it; I can’t believe we’re not pouring money into research to find alternatives. In the world as we know, however, energy is just super expensive in one way or another.
Another point that hasn’t really been made is that renewables meet a mere fraction of the energy needs that nuclear can meet. Take concentrated solar, for example. This overcomes the problem of lack of sun at night by storing energy in molten salt. Right now, the biggest concentrated solar plant is orders of magnitude smaller than a nuclear plant. To provide the same power output, you would need to scale up hugely.
And then of course, it would also be subject to cost-benefit safety measures, just as nuclear is. If you build concentrated solar on a fault line and then an unprecedented magnitude 9.0 quake occurs, all that molten salt is going to be at risk of spilling on to the landscape.
Local <> national.
Compare:
“Japan is becoming increasingly toxic”
with:
“The U.S. was inundated by Katrina.”
“Africa is experiencing its worst recorded drought.”
“Temperatures fell in France in 2010. What global warming?”
this breaks my heart.
Genuine question: what did Geraldine Ferraro do? I mean other than be the first woman selected for the VP slot in a major party? The fact is at some point some woman somewhere was going to be the first. What else has Ferraro got? Did she get any good legislation passed? Did she run a foundation that did good work? These are not rhetorical questions. Geraldine Ferraro’s heyday was way before my time, and I’m left wondering if she built any kind of genuine legacy or if she is going to be relegated to a footnote in history by dint of being lucky enough for Walter Mondale to pick her name. Please enlighten me.
is this a real question or are you a spammer?
Real question. I fully admit that I’m ignorant and that I may be taking her for granted. But I’m trying to settle in my mind what to think of her legacy. Is being chosen by someone else to run for vice president a real accomplishment? Did she do anything with her repeated runs for office after 1984? Did she accomplish anything as a human rights ambassador to the UN?
And yes, we’re probably all thinking of it: how do we balance what she’s done against the terrible things she said in the 2008 campaign?
I’m young and I want perspective.
I normally try to avoid wiki, but this time it seems to be a pretty decent source for Geraldine Ferraro’s life.
I too replied to your comment but my reply disappeared! – this happens sometime. subject too long? who knows. myster.
shorten the subject line and re-submit your comment.
keep posting…its great..