How many of these things can one really be missing and still call themselves a programmer? I'm self taught myself. Pointers? Really? You can learn pointers in about 20 minutes.
It's interesting, but it seems some people need a lot more work when learning pointers than others. I struggled with operator precedence issues when I first encountered pointers, but didn't have a problem with the concept itself. But I know people who never really managed to wrap their minds around it.
We just need to build stronger and safer reactors.
Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought.
I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.
Buy Fukushiman land. Raise your kids there. Feed them local produce. To thy own self be true.
I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)
The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Nobody who points out the relative safety of nuclear power wants us to build more Mark I BWR's. My interest is in Travelling Wave Reactors and Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.
But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.
Seems sort of revisionist to say "of course Mark I BWR's aren't safe". You know what nuclear experts were saying 3 weeks ago? They were talking about all the safety features, and the multiple levels of basically impervious containment, and how radioactive material would never get out into the environment. And here we are with a pretty serious radioactive mess to clean up (and from the looks of it it's probably going to get worse before it gets better)
They were wrong because they didn't take into account the possibility that backup power would be unavailable for so long. The backup generators and their switchgear were sited very poorly--behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.
Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.
The problem is that people also compare this with outdated designs for coal plants.
There are much cleaner modern coal plants with filters.
Still coal is dirty and dangerous.
In the nuclear industry you have new designs. But this does not solve the basic problems:
* mining of Uranium is dirty
* you need to transport dangerous material
* nuclear weapons can be produced
* reprocessing is extremely dirty
* storage is unsolved
* it promotes large corporations with all problems (corruption, ...)
* a society needs to be sufficiently advanced to handle the risk (i.e. better than Japan, the Soviet Union, or the US)
* the capital costs are large, needs to financed by the government
Plus with the new reactors you get interesting new dangers. Ever heard of 'stuxnet'? There are now viruses and attacks against nuclear facilities based on computer viruses.
Look a bit more into the different alternative nuclear designs. We have enough stored 'waste' to use it as fuel for a long time, not requiring much if any mining. Nuclear weapons can not be produced from these reactors. They use the material so storage is not an issue. They can use passive cooling which does not depend on computers that could be infected.
The problem with Chernobyl was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned.
The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned.
Does Mr Brown want to wait another 5 years to use the same excuse for Washington's Columbia Generating Station?
If you're living relatively close to a coal power plant you're already worse off. Statistically, you should be far more afraid of living next to one.
I'm not saying it's something that should be dismissed, but I do think that we just have to take into account that anything that handles humongous amounts of energy in a concentrated space is dangerous, but nuclear energy is less so than most alternatives.
Or an oil refinery, people in the area close to the La Teja oil refinery here in Uruguay have significantly increased cases of mercury poisoning and child underdevelopment.
And here in Uruguay, the current way to supplement the already exhausted hydroelectric power is burning oil - I'm advocating a nuclear power plant to get us out of our current energy crisis (and I would have it in my backyard if needed)
Stating that air travel is safer then cars doesn't mean that I wish myself to be strapped upon an early glider and hurled off a cliff.
The fact that one such glider still exists and is apparently in use has no bearing to the current state of the art of aeroplane design. Similarly that one old, outdated and utterly inferior reactor can fail when provoked says nothing of the current state of the art of reactor design.
CANDU reactors are safe, in fact they have a hard time getting anything to happen on a good day. If something went wrong the worst that would happen is the reactor would stop working.
Stopping reactors is not the problem, those in Fukushima did stop properly as the earthquake struck. The problem is dealing with the decay heat aftewards.
I think that's what's good about CANDU, we were so poor here in Canada it was designed using separate tubes which makes it possible to remove entire fuel bundle tubes without requiring the core to be de-pressurized, it's kind of a modular core from what I've read.
The problem isn't that we don't have designs that can deal with these sorts of problems. The problem is that we don't have the political strength of will to decommission the older, unsafe plants and replace them with newer, safer plants. Similarly we don't have the political strength of will to do what is required to ensure uncompromised safety, ie. moving spent fuel into secured areas away from power plants, breeding fuel to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste created and burning that waste out to make it less radioactive before it ever needs to be stored, etc.
