garric

It's not just you, though it sounds like his reasoning is based around the ideological context of conflating "democratic choice" with "choice in a market". The role of price is a principal guarantor of democracy, after all. /sardonic

Yep! This is why I said it'd be more relevant for historiographers.

I didn't say the bad things were done on purpose (when is that ever the case?) and didn't mean to ever suggest such a thing. And I understand your suspicions, but I've read more than just The Wealth of Nations by Smith.

The other comments are such a trainwreck of assumptions that it's not worthwhile to respond, so you've got that going for you.

It's fine to read these for the literature and/or a peek into how earlier people saw their world, but beware of ideas whose underpinnings are still touted as fact - such as those from the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith may have been among the intelligentsia of his time, but he made claims far outside of his expertise which have long since been shown to be fantastical imaginings. And if you've ever seen A Christmas Carol, you'll have passing familiarity with the debtor prisons and Irish potato famines justified by classical liberalism (economic theory, not to be confused with the popular modern term) which has today become neoliberalism (which contains justification for neoconservatism, so let's not get partisan about it) since about 1980 with Reagan in the USA, Thatcher in the UK, and Deng in China and isn't any better for reasons I won't currently go in to. (Crosby, Harvey)

For instance, Adam Smith argued that barter was an inefficient way to make transactions because it required a dual coincidence of wants by both parties. Nevermind that communities simply didn't function this way, instead giving what they had now in a system of credit rather than debt. This is one of many examples undermining Smith's ideas, so be careful if you decide to read such books. Unless your degree concerns historiography, your time would be much better spent elsewhere. (Graeber)

Smith is easy to debunk, but ideas contained within many classical novels provide popular justification for cultural imperialism. They're not so easy to address. (Said)

He's not saying that we shouldn't. But the U.S. is overwhelmingly focused on punishment, retribution, and incapacitation rather than rehabilitation. Essentially victim blaming, if you want to look at it like that. Opinion: It's going to take system-wide reform to accomplish anything meaningful.

As I understand it, that's very outdated information. These designs have been passively safe as of twenty years ago when they were pioneered by the integral fast reactor. The plant can lose all power and will not ever melt down; liquid metal reactors just don't work that way.

One of the key advantages that recommends fourth generation nuclear reactor technology is that the design eliminates much of the existing "waste" (it's really just ~$50T worth of unspent fuel we have laying around that could power the entire world for ~1000 years) that's been produced by past and current light water reactors. A better estimate would be in the 200 to 400 year range now. That's right; we're actually capable of getting rid of nuclear waste with nuclear reactors.

Yes that's still a good number of years, but estimates for global deaths per year caused just by particulate pollution from coal power plants range from a conservative 100,000 up to 3,000,000. How many people per year is nuclear currently killing? I was pretty incredulous to find this out, but the answer is zero. And given that they produce negligible CO2 as compared with fossil fuels, they are recommended by the climatologist who is largely responsible for drawing attention to climate change since the 1980s, James Hansen. The conclusion (begins on page 116 of this .rtf file) in his 2009 book is worth reading:

http://ge.tt/5GTotjQ1/v/0

Ironically, traditional environmentalist movements that indiscriminately protested and continue to protest against any nuclear power technologies have effectively greenwashed the "clean coal" (wtf) mantra into existence because fossil fuel plants are the only other alternative for baseload. To me, this seems eerily similar to the protestation of tobacco companies that their products were causing cancer. We're still building coal power plants, but the CO2 sequestration they're currently talking about would require burning ~25% more coal to power the process, making it so uneconomical that it won't ever happen.

And since sodium-cooled fast reactors can also run on decommissioned nuclear weapons, decreasing the risk of nuclear proliferation, we have every reason to be using these technologies for baseload power and zero reasons not to. Given the choice, I'd rather live near a nuclear power plant than any other type. Perhaps I'd finally be able to get an electric car that would then be functionally carbon neutral, though maybe not avoiding the ecological damage externalized in the building such massive batteries. (That's something I still need to look into for myself. Anyone have any academic sources other than the Union of Concerned Scientists/Lobbyists?)

Well, yeah... but the difference between 320kbps and 96kbps is fairly negligible with all of that background noise.

See NASA scientist, "the father of climate change," James Hansen's 2009 book entitled Storms of My Grandchildren. He's highly critical of models, though notes that they may be useful in certain specific scenarios. What he focuses more on is the geological record because models can only be as accurate as the information that goes into them.

I want to keep this brief, but I also want to quickly note that the cap and trade for greenhouse gases is business as usual for energy producers. Don't believe a word of it; the short story is that it worked poorly in preventing acid rain and won't work for combating climate change. We need a fee and dividend system that doesn't come back to us in tax breaks. I should note that Hansen comes across as very credible and apolitical; I don't trust anyone else when it comes to climate science.

His most recent work is available here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/publications.shtml

Unless you give an example that includes your rationale, we're not able to judge one way or the other.