Regulatory capture is THE problem. Contrary to the parent post's claim, the problem is not with our "economic system". It's that, if you're going to regulate something (particularly something as complex as nuclear energy), then you need experts. And the only place to get those experts is from the industry. Generally, those people are naturally going to look at the industry from a certain perspective, one that views the activity of the industry as important, and its status quo as something other than an historical accident.

Until you can find a way to extract human nature from the regulatory process -- and that's even before we start talking about corruption -- you're not going to get anything better.

So sure, the industry tries to push the boundaries, and we should call them out for that. But while doing so, we must also consider how the regulators -- themselves humans -- might do even worse. That side of the equation is too often overlooked.

This is a very key point.

One of the ways that the Navy's nuclear management agency (NR) has tried to avoid the problem of regulatory capture is that they train their own experts in addition to pulling experienced personnel from the nuclear-powered fleet.

Those who have never been underway but still understand nuclear power and administration are typically thought of as a bunch of pompous no-fun assholes... but that's their job and they do it well. They have little to no ability to be empathic with ship's crew as they've not been underway and dead tired and all that... and so it's that much easier to demand that the right thing is done instead of the easy thing.

It's not enough just to train your own experts though. NR pulls people back from the fleet, as those with operational experience are those who best understand the typical shortcuts that might be employed by the crew, and how to detect that those shortcuts are being practiced.

But you're exactly right, it's impossible to design a safe nuclear power industry without looking at how best to design the regulatory component.

This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?

Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part that would even be humanly possible to rectify?

Because if I owned the plant and I didn't have any regulators to deal with, I would think it in my interest to behave even worse: to lie more, to hide more, to be even less concerned about doing a thorough job of preventing the public's exposure to regulation.

Just so it's not a low-content post, a company can lobby the government to change, weaken or not enforce existing regulations, and often they compound this with bribery of the regulator. Many large companies in the United States go further and lobby to extend or re-word regulations specifically to give themselves a monopoly over the regulated market. All of these actions are forms of regulatory capture.

Other examples of it: the present state of the us patent and copyright system, especially if you include enforceable work-for-hire clauses and the language in various treaties referring to copyrights. Elon Musk's difficulties selling his electric cars online in Texas and other states are due to regulatory capture by car dealerships in that state. In general, most government-backed monopolies or "public-private partnerships" can safely be expected to involve a significant amount of regulatory capture.

Still though you should look it up because both the term and the actual process are really useful at figuring out the hows-and-whys of US government domestic actions.

I would agree that we have a problem with inadequate or corrupt regulators in several industries.

A related phenomenon in foreign affairs circles is called "going native".

If it were unregulated by government, then yes. It's a bit misleading to say there would be absolutely nothing regulating the industry if government wasn't.

Some private body with guys placed directly from the industry? Some public body with guys voted by the people (and then regulated themselves how?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/world/asia/25myth.html?pag...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/06/09/national/myth-of...

I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in that world.

Still, knowing you have to hang yourself if the plant goes critical is pretty good motivation to do things right and not cut corners.

EDIT: well, this is getting misunderstood. My point here is: would you accept a lesser guarantee of safety? If you really believe that nuclear power can be made safe, these hypothetical engineers aren't at risk.

Let's say I took a pledge to kill myself if a meteor ever knocks the flame off the Statue of Liberty. Would any of you worry about me? No?

Maybe we shouldn't build nuke plants at the moment, then.

While ritual suicide might make the victims of an accident feel better, they are ultimately unproductive - there are many classes of disastrous errors that have nothing to do with negligence.

Not to mention also, even in incidents with a preventable cause, it is exceedingly rare for there to be a singular cause. Chernobyl, for example, was the culmination of a vast number of errors and safety lapses. Should the entire plant workforce kill themselves?

Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt. What you're basically suggesting is that, in the case of such a black swan event, we will kill off a large proportion of the only people who can prevent it from happening again.

This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.

The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of any significance would kill themselves. Not only would their knowledge be lost, their fellow nuclear engineers would carve their names on a black stone, bury it in the earth beneath their corrupted stain, and never mention them again. Their families would be rewarded only if they showed honor by staying to fight the nuclear corruption, and dying honorably when the disaster is contained.

This won't work perfectly, but it would let society as a whole live with the contradiction inherent in nuclear power: it sustains us, while running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.

This is also pure thought experiment: what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster? I'm not willing to pay this price, and yet, I'm thoroughly familiar with the mass balance equations governing extractable energy and haven't a clue how to post-carbon without at least some nuclear.

But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in the surrounding waters. But on a global scale, it's just not that big.

what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster?

Wrong question; the answer to it ask you ask it is that we already have a culture of safety at least that serious, with regard to nuclear power, because we treat nuclear power far more strictly than we treat other sources of power (like coal) that pose greater overall risk to humans. If we're going to effectively ban nuclear reactors because we're worried about radiation, we should also ban coal because we're worried about deaths from mining. And we should ban oil because of the risk of something like the Deepwater Horizon spill.

There isn't a simple solution to any of this; but a good start would be to be open and realistic about all the risks of all power sources.

Oh, I should have added: this claim isn't really true either. The WHO estimates that a million people die each year due to air pollution from coal plants. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the annual average deaths related to nuclear energy.

The difference is, there isn't a worldwide push to ban coal because of this; instead, there's a push to scrub the plant emissions to remove the pollution. So again, nuclear is treated much more strictly than other power sources, relative to its actual risk.

I don't believe so. Toxicity and Emissions of a coal-fire power plant does severely affect those in the neighborhood. Studies show that radiation dose is comparable. As and Se are found to have higher concentrations in soil samples.

http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/3/169

So killing or having adverse health effects on far more people is OK, as long as the effects are diffuse? I'm not following the logic here. The number of people affected by Fukushima, even on the worst-case estimates, is less than the number of people affected in a year by the various aspects of coal plants that posters here have mentioned.

And I'm saying that this local perspective (which I understand might not be yours, you might just be trying to articulate the perspective of the NIMBY folks) is flawed, because it doesn't treat equal impacts on self-interest equally. It protests against nuclear plants, while not protesting at all against coal plants that have a greater impact on the same person's self-interest, simply because the impact of the coal plant is "diffuse": it pollutes their lungs over time, all the time, instead of bringing some probability of being in a Fukushima zone, but the total impact on expected years of life (or expected quality of life) for that person is still greater for the coal plant.

I understand that this perspective is common, but that doesn't make it right.

Furthermore, the risks of emphysema and cancer due to coal pollution are underrated. Coal causes much more deaths among people who don't live in coal plants than we like to pretend. (Conversely, nuclear is safer on the balance.)

No, it doesn't. It's a difference between risks taken willingly by the people who benefit from the outcome, and risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit. And it's obvious that it was meant that way. Don't be deliberately obtuse.

Huh? People do have a choice to move if they don't want to live near a power plant. And the plant is making the electricity they use, so they do benefit from it.

(That said, plenty of nuclear plants have been killed because the people who would have lived near the plant protested.)

No, the poorer you are the less attractive choices you have. But you still have the ability to weigh your choices and pick the one that poses you the least risk, all things considered.

The largest part of that mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. Coal power has contaminated the entire planet to the point where any food from the ocean has to be limited for vulnerable people.

There is no way you can possibly say that coal doesn't impose risks on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit.

Coal is far more dangerous than nuclear by nearly every measure. The only reason it's more generally accepted is because that danger is spread out over a much wider area. Global coal power is analogous to a constant, ongoing Chernobyl, except instead of covering a small chunk of Europe, the same effects are diluted over the entire planet.

We all pay a measurable and fairly significant price for coal power generation in terms of shortened lives and increased chances of various disease. Nuclear power has not contaminated the planet to even remotely the same degree.

I personally think nuclear power can be made relatively safe, and that fears about accidents are exaggerated. I welcome disagreement there, but it's not possible to make a charitable comparison with coal in any way. The disparity in opinions and dangers between nuclear and coal is very real.

The problem is that you have no idea how Process Safety works, or even what it is, judging by your posts. As the parent to this post explained, these major hazard events are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means that they can never be completely eliminated, only guarded against and reduced to the point that the benefit is understood to outweigh the risk. There will always be risk.

You suggest that the engineers responsible for designing the plant should commit suicide if this once in a million year event takes place. What about the businessmen who accepted the risk? Or the government who stipulated what the tolerable risk was? Or the people who moved nearby, aware of the risk? Or the workers on the plant who, knowing what the correct maintenance procedures were to keep the plant safely operational, ignored them because it was 'too hard'? What if the root cause was a vector of risk which was poorly understood by everyone at the time? Or the engineering specification was correct, but the materials vendor skimped on QA? Or were lied to by one of their plants? Or a subcontractor of the plant? Etc etc etc.

What you propose, even as a thought experiment, is futile. Because even if you could reduce the risk to only systematic errors made in engineering design, if there was a perceived need or benefit to design the plant, you could always find a group of engineers desperate enough, naive enough, or vain enough to take on the risk. And therefore society as a whole would not be safer.

As it happens there's a large body of engineering knowledge which goes into making dangerous plants 'safe enough' to outweigh the risks to their workers, owners, and society at large. It's not foolproof, but arguably it does a good job of allowing societies to benefit from the dangerous processes we seem so desperate to use. And don't kid yourself - just because these massive events incur a media feeding frenzy, doesn't mean smaller hazardous occurrences don't affect the lives of thousands of people every year. Should we kill everyone who could in some way be held accountable for another's death or injury?

In short, don't let fear guide you into silly knee-jerk reactions. There are massive problems inherent with dangerous processes, and most of them relate to the very human failures of laziness and greed. We're working to improve the situation constantly, but it's a long road and a constant battle.

I'm not advocating ritual suicide, but I think it's worth noting that in the case of Fukushima, there is an easily identifiable single root cause to all the current problems: the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. If they had been on higher ground, none of this would have happened; there would have been a continuous supply of cooling water to the reactor cores and things would have shut down normally. The process that led to that siting of the backup generators should be fairly easily traceable, as compared to the design process for the entire reactor complex.

Sure, but who's responsible for that? I don't mean to say that there must be many technical causes of incidents, but rather that it is almost impossible to find a situation where there is a singular human cause.

The multitude of engineers that saw the plans before they went final? The managers who pushed for the generators to be placed there in the first place? The contractors who built it knowing full well that the design was garbage? How high up does it go, and how many degrees removed from the situation do we require before you're absolved of guilt?

We could do something silly to consolidate the guilt, like, "the last person to stamp the designs gets the blame", but that seems like it would encourage a culture of hot-potatoing instead, especially if the stakes are your own life ;)

To put a more extreme example of it: a bus driver falls asleep at the wheel, jumps a curb, and kills a person. Do we punish the driver for his negligence, or his shift supervisor for threatening him into taking an extra-long shift, or someone even further up who knowingly encouraged a culture of overwork?

But if you can focus in on a single technical decision that had such a large impact, you can at least focus attention on how that particular technical decision got made. Yes, many humans will have been involved even in that single technical decision; but it's still a lot more manageable to look into how it got made than to look at how the entire plant got designed.

We could do something silly to consolidate the guilt

I'm not talking about guilt; I said I wasn't advocating ritual suicide. I'm talking about how to prevent it from happening again. To do that, you need to be able to focus on something that can actually be changed. Take your bus driver example:

Do we punish the driver for his negligence, or his shift supervisor for threatening him into taking an extra-long shift, or someone even further up who knowingly encouraged a culture of overwork?

Depends on the facts. Was the driver negligent? Could he have reasonably predicted that he would fall asleep at the wheel? How could he have acted on such a prediction?

Did the supervisor actually threaten him into taking an extra-long shift? If so, how did he get away with it? Aren't there rules about preventing driver fatigue? (Certainly commercial airline crews have strict rules about how long they can fly before they have to rest.) If not, why not?

Is there a systemic culture of overwork, encouraged from higher up? Do bus drivers in this company routinely drive longer hours than the industry average? Than the average in other similar occupations?

The point is that if you can focus in on specific causal chains, you can direct efforts at changing them. In the case of Fukushima, if you can focus in on how the technical decision to site the backup generators that way got made, you can direct efforts at improving that process. Did the engineers just not realize that siting the backup generators that way was a bad idea? Was the question never even asked? Or did the engineers realize it, but management overruled them? Or did the original design have them sited differently, but time pressure during construction persuaded someone (not the engineers or managers who did the original design) to change the location in order to meet some deadline?

All this, btw, reinforces your point that ritual suicide doesn't help anything.

Such things sometimes can't be predicted. If you fall asleep because of exhaustion, you don't necessarily see it coming (it happened to me several years back, one minute I was fine and the next I blacked out). You cannot criminally persecute a person for falling asleep. Only if he did something against the law, like also being under the influence of alcohol.

> Did the supervisor actually threaten him into taking an extra-long shift?

You know very well that supervisors rarely have to threaten their subordinates in low-end jobs. I have a personal acquaintance who's a truck driver. And he was explaining to me how when the new management came in, they first did some lay-offs based on silly reasons and after that nobody dared arguing.

Also do some reading on Japanese culture. Subordinates rarely question their bosses (or change jobs for that matter). It happens in many cultures. If you're from the US, then what's natural to you may not apply in other countries or cultures.

I'm not saying that blame cannot be assigned (it can clearly be, especially in the case of broken engineering designs), but seeing people here suggesting "ritual suicide"? OMG.

But why would you even take that risk? Not to mention that tsunamis can easily reach 100 feet in wave height; I'm not sure you could build a seawall that could keep one out.

Besides, it was pretty clear to me reading the sequence of events at Fukushima that there was entirely too little thought given to backup decoupling - there was too much of a zipper effect of one failure leading to another.

I'm not a lay person on this - I worked for 3 years on airliner designs, and much of that is finding ways to deal with failure cases. The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers.

Yes, that would work, as long as you also protected the switchgear and the power cabling leading to the pumps that serve the reactor.

The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers.

I think the nuke industry in general does pay attention to these things; I was actually somewhat surprised to find that the designers of Fukushima had missed such an obvious failure mode.

1. hydrogen being vented into an enclosed area

2. no backup method for determining coolant levels

3. backup generators were not protected

4. no backup method for adding coolant (I would have had a gravity fed backup system)

5. critical systems were located too close to the reactor - I would have moved them further away so they could be repaired without the workers being irradiated

None of these are expensive to do.

3. Backup generators were located in different areas. The only mistake is that they were ALL at ground level. That's unfortunate that they were all wiped out at the same time but one of the largest Tsunami ever, some stuff that almost never happens. They'll learn from that.

> None of these are expensive to do.

Yeah, when you are building the plant, it's not expensive to do. When you have to modify an existing design, it's way more expensive and you'll have to make a good case for why you need it.

The key idea is nobody has managed to design parts that won't fail. But they have figured out how to design highly reliable systems out of parts that fail.

Current designs use lots of redundant safety systems. New designs depend more on simple physics...eg., fuel that expands enough when it heats to damp down the reaction, or large quantities of coolant with very high thermal capacity and conductivity. At Argonne's IFR project, they shut down coolant circulation and electric power, and the reactor quietly shut down with no damage.

The ultimate solution is probably the molten salt reactor. With liquid fuel you continually remove fission products, and with most of those gone you don't have decay heat issues anymore.

What I would like to see is mandatory escrow of a large percentage of profits from highly-profitable, possibly-disaster-prone industries. If you go disaster-free for 20 years you get your escrowed money with interest. If not, you lose (an appropriate amount of) it.

Simply having it around as a cultural trope ain't gonna do it. I'm talking about a voluntary pledge that assumes the force of law.

Turn it around: if an engineer thinks he can build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, why shouldn't he pledge his life? Similarly, if an engineer thinks she can't build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, that there is a significant risk she'll have to kill herself and leave her children motherless, would she agree to build it?

Regardless, reading up on the Code of Hammurabi is interesting :)

Fact is, seppuku is a part of relatively recent Japanese culture whereas it's not a part of European culture. In Europe suicide has been socially unacceptable since the fall of the Roman Empire.

So in a sense, this idea (while not nearly as extreme as yours) actually exists today. Architects and Engineers regularly take risks when they attempt to create something new. When it doesn't work, they are usually held accountable:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/06/mit_sue...

2) nuclear is so expensive to clean up that they run for decades after the initial design, presumably many of the initial designers are dead, and every incremental change should involve a suicide pact?

Remuneration for such an undertaking would have to go up by a large multiple to make such work attractive.

This is the point. The cost of operating the plant would have to take into account what are currently deemed externalities. If that turned out to make the plant too expensive to run, that's the market.

2. What do you consider "perfect"? A lot of things aren't engineered to be perfect, because that's expensive. Instead, a lot of questions -- like with sea walls -- resolve around things like "ten year storms", "hundred year winds", "thousand year earthquakes". It's very possible that the flaw in this design was considered, but it was concluded that it would take a once-every-thousand-years disaster to breach the sea wall and cause a problem. Everyone involved may have agreed that a 1% chance of failure of the lifetime of the plant was acceptable.

Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. At some point, risks are declared "small enough" and everyone agrees to move forward. In this case, a regulatory agency in Japan -- representing the interests of the government and people -- could very easily have signed off on the risk posed by the positioning of the generators.

And more importantly, just because a small risk ends up being realized doesn't mean we were wrong to take it in the first place. Negligence can cause accidents, and negligence can exacerbate accidents, but also sometimes shit happens. Wasting time, money, and people trying to shrink a one-in-a-million risk just because it happened once is stupid, and we do it all the time.

Third, an obligatory "do you even know how bad coal is?" A hundred thousand miners in the US died mining coal in the last century. 6000 died in China in 2004. "Oh no," you say, "nuclear is extra bad because it poisons places for hundreds or thousands of years!" Underground coal fires: a seam of coal exposed through mining can catch fire and burn underground forever. We have no way to put them out. The most famous of these is in Pennsylvania, where a town had to be abandoned because the coal mine underneath it was burning and releasing noxious gasses up to the surface, along with the occasional flaming sinkhole. The fire is expected to keep burning for hundreds of years. There are dozens or hundreds of fires like in the US, and dozens or hundreds more in China.

I wouldn't want to go swimming in that water released from Fukushima, and by all accounts radiation poisoning is a terrible way to day. But so is being crushed to death in a mine collapse, or slowly starving to death underground in the dark, or dying of the various cancers and ailments related to the carcinogens coal plants routinely belch out. Everything we do has risks, from driving to taking a shower to building power plants.

You are presenting a false dichotomy: the choice is not between a world with nuclear disasters and a world with no disasters. It is a choice between nuclear disasters and non-nuclear disasters. We should seek to minimize the chance of nuclear disasters, yes, but we shouldn't treat them as "special" just because they're "scary". We should weigh the risk of a nuclear plant against the risk of non-nuclear plants, fairly, and make the decision that saves the most lives.

It was not as you describe; the original design was absolutely not correct. The original design was additionally so difficult to implement in reality that one of the manufacturers of the structural parts proposed a design change - one that made the flaws of the original twice as bad - that architects approved without any actual review.

I've been there several times, since it's a popular spot for conferences - looking up at the doors to nowhere in the lobby atrium is haunting.

I'm probably willing to let my claim stand without anecdote (deviations from design occur outside the engineer's control), but honestly it's the weaker point, so let it drop. The more important one is that engineers design within a set of constraints, and if these parameters are exceeded, it is not the fault of the engineer.

This is the problem. The solution proposed is that they have a bit more skin in the game.

The roof of my house has a certain maximum load it is designed to carry. This load is mostly based on expected snowfall. Conceivably, in a year with exceptional snow fall the maximum load could be exceeded and the roof could collapse, killing my family and myself. However, I -- both through my representative government which makes the rules on minimum maximums and also through my decision to live in such a home -- have decided the risk is acceptable.

If the architect has not misrepresented the maximum load of my roof, why should he be held responsible if it collapses in unexpectedly extreme weather and kills me? If he should not be punished, why is nuclear special?

Example: Technician with respirator samples gas levels in giant "empty" natural gas tank, gives OK to welder and steps out of the tank. Welder grabs technician by the arm, escorts him back into the tank and invites him to hang out for a few minutes while he fires up his torch. Technician waves his probe around a few extra times, double checks the display, and crosses his fingers.

I'm sure there's plenty of this sort of thing going on in industry today. Still, probably better not to formalize it.

In the various projects I've worked on, I've seen that happen first hand. What works better for the quality of the product is to have a collaborative, open process about finding bugs, fixing them, and rewarding people for having a quality result.

So what if it's not your fault? I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea, but it might increase safety just a little. A tiny probability that a lot of people won't die is a net benefit.

And if an incident did happen, a few extra innocent people dying is barely anything to worry about. Especially if it helps at preventing it from happening at all.

I don't think it will ever happen, but I think it's a good idea.

My observation is that the biggest obstacle to things going into desired direction of aligned incentives is hierarchical management system. You can't expect workers (engineers in nuclear example) to take all responsibility or even feel responsibility when they rarely have a say in budgeting, safety policy or overall strategy of corporation they work for. If the system was more democratic so to speak then I can see it happening but currently most endeavors are interested in "minimal pay, no say" policy when it comes to hiring.

Did you ever work on a project where you said to your boss, "We need to do X or this won't work," and your boss said, "X is too [expensive | time consuming | difficult], we won't do that."

Or a project where your boss hired a bunch of incompetents at the last minute because the project was running late, and the new hires made endless mistakes that you then had to fix?

Do you want to seppuku because your nuclear plant blew up because your boss was an idiot and wouldn't listen to the engineers?

And don't suggest that the engineers become whistleblowers. We all know how that turns out.

What about getting that level of commitment from the owners? And if that's not practical, why not remove the profit incentive?

Maybe activities with as massive negative externalities as running nuclear plants should be run as non-profit organizations. Possibly as research institutions, with a strong anchoring in the surrounding local community.

Your idea is the latest in a long list of stupid, short-sighted, and ignorant semi-articulated fears.

So, we shouldnt build driverless cars unless some engineer is ready to kill himself over it? Seriously, stop the drugs.

Our world is not even vaguely ready for any of this.

Same goes for GMO. Its a good but potentially very dangerous technology. We should not simply allow it because a few billion USD in turnover and GDP growth are promised.

The problem is everyone is thinking about the short-term.

The difference between millions starving to death or not is inequality and indifference.

GMO's are mostly used to sell the same food to the same people that always had food and can pay for it, just with better profit margins.

Not to mention patents, locking the seeds etc -- something 100 times worse than software patents.

"We" in this case is the US (perhaps combined with the Ukraine, Australia & a few other large grain providers).

But that means that much of the worlds population has to rely on food supplies grown elsewhere.

Increasing drought resistance in grain crops could allow African countries to feed themselves, which could decrease political tensions over water supplies.

It's not just the industry or governments, it's also the shamelessly, breathlessly partisan pros and antis who seem to dominate the broader debate on nuclear.

> It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the industry are towards minimizing costs / maximizing profits. This is fine for some other industries, but it seems to fail for areas where the impact of mismanagement is much more severe than a bankruptcy.

There are definitely serious incentive problems. However, making everyone a public employee and so notionally an agent of the public interest doesn't necessarily make such problems go away, viz. Chernobyl.

That sounds more like an unfortunate law of nature rather than our "current economic system". Even under communism or in hunter/gatherer groups there is pressure to do more with less; it's just not called "profit".

The important thing to do is avoid hiding long-term large risks with short-term safety. Our modern economic systems actually make that easier; although technology makes the long-term large risks larger.

So far on the nuclear front we've failed that test. Fukushima had its backup generators in the basement -- in a tsunami zone. There is no global nuclear emergency response team. There is no long-term waste solution in many countries including the USA. Managers of plants routinely slack off on safety, reporting, etc.

We are quite simply too irresponsible and immature for such toys... yet. Humanity has a little bit of growing up to do.

I don't think GMOs are an exact comparison, as I think the risk is much smaller there (at least with most GMO technologies). But it's the same class of thing-- a technology that demands maturity and responsibility. I'd extend that to biotech in general.

Nuclear power in its current form presents tremendous, potentially country-altering downside when things (can and will) go wrong.

Is this really the best humanity has got -- the side effect of a decades-old weapons program?

Because the accidents have all been with very old designs. Even at Fukushima, in the face of a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, reactors built in the 80's instead of the 70's got through it all just fine.

Because climate change is turning into such a desperate problem that we can't afford to leave any solutions on the table. And nuclear works quite nicely with solar power...nuclear all the time, solar for extra peak load during the day.

Nuclear is not just the side effect of a weapons program. It's an amazing energy source. With the most advanced reactors, all the energy you need for your entire life can come from a lump of fuel smaller than a golfball.

It's very sad that our first use of this technology was to kill people. Perhaps if we hadn't figured it out in the middle of WWII, things would have been different, and climate change would be a hypothetical instead of an imminent nightmare.

You are asking the question this way hoping someone has a better answer - they don't. Nuclear is our best option for making clean and reliable power that will get us to that next best option. Some of the new designs out there are quite amazing feats of engineering.

You mean, like integrated circuits, GPS, and the Internet?

The thing to do is be open, transparent and honest about risk and rents. But at our core, we're all liars when the stakes get high. The math is also error prone.

Remember the political climate those old GE nuke plants were built under - "too cheap to meter" and run by people like Leslie Groves who had infought enough to be at the top of the heap. there was this strange, willful naievete.

"Making those industries transparent and honest" seems impossible.

If you look around you'll find a lot more examples than these two, and you'll trace the root cause as illegitimate use of government force, i.e. use or threat of violence for what is simply peaceful activity.

If someone threatens you with violence, "for your own good", you tend not to trust. But for some reason, when government does this very same thing, most people still trust it. It's like how children still trust parents even though the parents might restrain or even spank them (and this makes good evolutionary sense), but the difference is that the government is not your parent, it does not actually have a concern for you as an individual, it doesn't love you. It is a collection of strangers with their own agendas.

Somehow, government has figured out how to not only co-opt this evolutionary circuitry that was meant for trusting parents at a time when the child really doesn't know what's good for him, and what's more, extend this infantile frame of mind beyond childhood.

All of this recent NSA stuff is just getting toward the final consequences of allowing yourself to adopt such a childish frame of mind. The government has no more right to take a threatening or coercive action against innocent people than any stranger does.

The solution to "regulatory capture" is sometimes less regulation, but at other times transparency and better regulation. This is the real world, and there aren't any silver bullets.

Actually, you're just misinformed, e.g. read this:

http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/priceanders...

This is a 1984 argument from the Cato institute that an act limiting liability to nuclear power facilities should not be renewed.

I think wissler is implying that this shows that the government does "not exert[ing] sufficient regulatory force against bad actors in the nuclear industry"

I think many non-libertarians would agree with that analysis, but would add that the existence of bad regulation does not invalidate the idea that regulation is appropriate.

To be clear: most non-libertarians are less inclined to agree with the idea that this use of government force is illegitimate.

Nuclear power is a special case since it arguably represents a threat, even libertarians would argue that it should be "regulated", in the sense of being required to prove that it's safe. Part of proving safety is by being able to obtain private insurance from a reputable insurer, which is precisely contrary to the non-libertarian solution of just having the government say "just trust us, the nuclear power is fine, and besides, it helps us build nuclear weapons."

I reject the implication that government regulation is an attack of any kind. I do not agree that the fact a government can enforce its power is an attack, nor do I believe it is immoral.

I do not agree that government regulation is immoral.

As a specific example, I believe in the right of government to tax and their ability to enforce that.

I do not agree that private insurance is a solution for things like nuclear power, even in a "perfect world" theoretical sense. A nuclear disaster is a "black swan" event, and many people/companies would be quite happy to ignore the possibility of disaster and take the insurance premiums while things are going well.

If a company can make 50 years of "free" profits from insuring a nuclear plant, and then go bankrupt in the 50th year when they can't pay out the coverage then all that means is that investors have to make sure to safeguard their dividends/profits over the 49 preceding years.

"I reject the implication that government regulation is an attack of any kind."

It critically depends on the meaning of "regulation". If by "regulation" we mean "prove to us that your nuclear power is safe", then as I said, there can be a moral case for that, given the threat of meltdown. But if you mean "don't smoke that plant that's been growing on Earth for millions of years, and we'll send in a SWAT team if you disobey", then that kind of regulation is a crime against humanity.

So, you need to be clear here. Bandying about the term "regulation" is just not good enough.

I'm not ignoring it - I thought you meant that the requirement for private insurance would be a major part of it. I replied how that wouldn't work.

What exactly do you mean by "regulation" beyond the (non-workable) private insurance idea?

To be clear - my idea of regulation in this case is an independent government body with the sole purpose of being responsible for safety oversight. This means approval for blueprints, locations and operational procedures etc, as well as continuous operational monitoring, the ability to shut down the plant and to impose penalties of fines and jail time (subject to oversight of the court system course).

if you mean "don't smoke that plant that's been growing on Earth for millions of years, and we'll send in a SWAT team if you disobey", then that kind of regulation is a crime against humanity.

Yes, I believe that government has a right to make laws regarding the use of drugs. No, I don't think they should send in a SWAT team if someone smokes a joint (And no, that isn't a contradiction as the many places that do have drug laws but don't use SWAT teams to enforce them shows). I do not have strong opinions for or against cannabis prohibition. I don't want to derail this into a drug law discussion though.

This is the critical issue.

By what right? Where does an institution of mere men get the prerogative to interfere with other men deciding to consume certain types/arrangements of matter?

By the right of a society to make rules that govern those within it.

I realize from previous experience that it's likely you think this is an illegitimate right. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this is how societies have functioned throughout human history.

Edit: I believe this is a distraction from the nuclear regulation debate - which I note you have chosen to ignore.

I agree that, yes, there is a fair debate to be had about the legitimacy of laws deciding what someone can do to their own body. However, there is a fair amount of historical evidence that indicates it has been a long accepted right (eg, laws against drunkenness). As I said previously I don't have a strong opinion either way as to if these should apply to private use of cannabis.

But from your answer I can see why you don't want to have this discussion, it's just sheer nonsense. The word "right" doesn't refer to "we've always raped and pillaged after we won a war, so that gives us a right to keep on doing it."

I don't think you are philosophically equipped to use the word "right" here. For you, "right" simply means "might." So you might as well just say, "Yeah? Whaddya goin to do about it?" Don't pretend to be having a discussion about "right".

The word "right" doesn't refer to "we've always raped and pillaged after we won a war, so that gives us a right to keep on doing it."

I agree with that 100%. I don't think anything I have said could be taken to mean that I support rape & pillage.

For you, "right" simply means "might."

No it doesn't, and just saying that is what I think doesn't make it so.

I understand the libertarian view: that governmental power is illegitimate because it is derived from force.

I also completely reject that view: I believe that governmental power is derived from a civil society and that power is society's way of imposing an agreed set of behaviour in the face of bad actors. I see nothing immoral or wrong in this - indeed, it is the very principle of democracy.

A couple of additional points:

1) Trying to say I don't want to have this discussion is demonstrably wrong (ie, this reply, and all the other ones). Saying something is sheer nonsense is unhelpful - I'm not clear if you think the discussion is nonsense or if it is merely an expression of frustration?

2) I don't care either way about drugs. Clearly that is something you feel passionate about, but I'm not the person to discuss it with. Sorry.

3) I find it very interesting that you have avoided the problems with your theory about nuclear regulation and insurance. I find that is often the case with libertarians - their ideas sound nice on a surface level but when you dig a little bit there is nothing there. I'm unclear if this is because the ones I discuss it with don't understand their own philosophy, or they are unable to explain it, or because there really is nothing there.

So far you haven't tried to explain it. Unfortunately that leaves me none-the-wiser.

This is incorrect. Certainly some strains of libertarianism wrongly think that, but certainly not all. The word "libertarian" is a very loose idea, not some specific ideology. And besides, you were the one who claimed I was "libertarian", I never made the claim myself. What I'd say is that I'm pro-individual consent. "Classical liberal" is a fine word.

I also completely reject that view: I believe that governmental power is derived from a civil society and that power is society's way of imposing an agreed set of behaviour in the face of bad actors. I see nothing immoral or wrong in this - indeed, it is the very principle of democracy.

The question you're ignoring is: what are the proper limits of government power? You claim I'm ignoring questions, but this is the only question of importance. I only bring up the drugs example to highlight an obvious abuse. Nuclear power is a more complex issue. When you're confused about arithmetic, we don't discuss calculus. Likewise, when you're confused about rights, we don't discuss nuclear power. We stick with simpler issues.

Many early people groups (nomads, pueblos, even manors and unfederated fifedoms), had optimized for small communities. Presumably they were not aware of the efficiency of centralized power, or capable of the centralization we can accomplish today. Some apparently were aware, and chose the benefits of small communities.

I believe we are now at a crossroads. We choose small communities and relinquish the convenience of centralized power, or we submit to the requirements of centralized power (lack of privacy, lack of individuality, etc).

The informed opposition to GMO covers two types of modifications.

#1 Making plants more resistant to herbicides, so that more herbicides can be used.

#2 Giving plants new abilities to create their own insecticides.

Both are terrible ideas. Mostly because they're pumping the biological arms race as well as the side effects.

GMO for increased yield, durability, flavor, whatever are totally okay (depending on ones esthetics). We've been doing that for millennia thru breeding, artificial selection, and hybridization.

The notion that the genes spliced into crops could spark an evolutionary feedback loop that spirals out of control -- the evidence doesn't indicate any great cause for alarm, afaik. And the toxic side effects are unlikely to be of greater concern than from chemicals made in labs. I think the amount of public alarm about GMO is way out of proportion to the actual risk. This technology holds the promise of making agriculture less damaging and more efficient. I think the fixation on this issue is related to traits that make it a good a viral meme, and have nothing to do with rational risk-assessment.

There are sereval of studies that show that those examined can be harmful -- but it's a whole field, one cannot speak for all of them as harmful, can only examine them one by one. The general practice is harmful to me, because profit motives and patents are involved.

I don't think just because they found out how to genetically modify plants that they also can understand the long term effects of their creations (to other plants, insects, animal life, the consumer, etc). Nor do I believe that they have the scientific rigor and patience to study those with the timeframes needed. It's more: "fuck it, let's sell these things".

Plus it's a huge industry, with trillions to be made, that dwarfs smoke -- not many research labs get the funds to examine it critically. It's like pre-eighties, when tons of smoke studies were sponsored by tobacco companies, and found "little or no evidence" of it causing cancer.

They have been markedly less successful at that than other industrial accidents.

edit: Wikipedia suggests a total of about 9250 accidental deaths worldwide over the past 56 years related to nuclear research, power, weapons and therapy, of which some 126 died of radiation while the rest died from explosions and cancer (estimates vary; except for the 9000 deaths attributed to Chernobyl, the numbers likely discount some terminal cancers).