Evolution

[billvon]

Depends on the nature of the screw-up. An explosion and fire in the intake facilities - the physical location to which hot waste from dozens of reactors all over the continent has been transported in various forms and by various means - might present certain difficulties in the "taking" of the waste. Or even the finding of it.

Well, not sure what would explode. I guess you could accidentally place waste over a pile of discarded explosives or something, but that's unlikely. Going purely by history, molasses accidents have killed far more people in the US than nuclear reactor (or waste handling) accidents.

Which might have an effect on evolutionary processes in the affected regions, reaching for thread significance.

Useless but somewhat related fact - although mutation rates are slightly higher, the Red Forest around Chernobyl is now the healthiest ecosystem in the Ukraine. (Not because of the accident, but because there are now no people there.)

 

[iceaura]

Well, not sure what would explode. I guess you could accidentally place waste over a pile of discarded explosives or something, but that's unlikely.

You cannot imagine how a fire and explosion could possibly happen in a vitrification operation involving large amounts of various and variously reactive stuff? The concept of "gas leak" in a glass melting operation is beyond your ken?

Going purely by history, molasses accidents have killed far more people in the US than nuclear reactor (or waste handling) accidents.

Unlikely (you'd have to accept some pretty dubious official claims about Three Mile Island, various military mishaps, and so forth, at face value) . I'd pick flour milling, as a better example. But an illustration of the point, going on: how many of those molasses accidents were foreseen?

The reliability standards for nuke operations are at the very edge of industrial capability. That's one reason they are so incredibly expensive.

 

[billvon]

You cannot imagine how a fire and explosion could possibly happen in a vitrification operation involving large amounts of various and variously reactive stuff? The concept of "gas leak" in a glass melting operation is beyond your ken

Nope.

Unlikely (you'd have to accept some pretty dubious official claims about Three Mile Island, various military mishaps, and so forth, at face value) . I'd pick flour milling, as a better example. But an illustration of the point, going on: how many of those molasses accidents were foreseen?

Well, there was only the one. But the courts found that it was foreseen by the company; they just didn't bother to (for example) test the tank.

 

[iceaura]

: how many of those molasses accidents were foreseen?
Well, there was only the one

Unlikely. Molasses rendering and processing involves several steps that one would expect to be scenes of occasional accidents - welding the tanks, for example. I would be very surprised if only one scene of fatal accident had ever been recorded in the molasses manufacture and handling industry.

Failure of imagination is turning out to be a major feature in these discussions, and directly relevant to a thread on evolution: it's the basis for the concept of irreducible complexity, for inability to handle the time spans involved in evolutionary change, for most of the ascription of necessity to the existence of a creative mind underlying existing complexity.

 

[billvon]

Failure of imagination is turning out to be a major feature in these discussions, and directly relevant to a thread on evolution: it's the basis for the concept of irreducible complexity, for inability to handle the time spans involved in evolutionary change, for most of the ascription of necessity to the existence of a creative mind underlying existing complexity.

Imagination is great. But it often concocts unrealistic scenarios, with which you can make any form of power perfectly safe or incredibly unsafe. (Imagine the death toll if every homeowner who installed solar fell off his roof onto his driveway!) Thus the importance of having a realistic view of risk.

 

[GeoffP]

Anyway - it does sound like a good idea. Surely being solidified would make handling easier and residual contamination less likely?

 

[billvon]

Anyway - it does sound like a good idea. Surely being solidified would make handling easier and residual contamination less likely?

Definitely. Vitrification/geomelting has been around for around 35 years and is a pretty good way to immobilize nuclear waste. I think that it's largely a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, but it might give some people peace of mind.

 

[GeoffP]

Hm. That's a fair point. I just don't like the whole 'burying it up here' thingy, though I guess nothing much would probably come of it.

 

[iceaura]

Thus the importance of having a realistic view of risk.

A realistic view of risk is exactly what is missing in those who simply assume that what they don't know won't hurt them, what they haven't investigated has been harmless, what they haven't considered or discovered doesn't exist, and so forth.

People who claim that no one was killed by the mishap at Three Mile Island, for example, or that the official Atomic Energy Commission estimate of the death toll from Chernobyl is reality based, or that near misses and unforeseen events that come out OK are evidence of safety and lower risk in nuclear power plants.

The entire field of nuclear power risk estimation is dominated by the logic that launched the Challenger, and the reasoning that sited Fukushima - that is not realistic risk estimation. It's wishful thinking.

 

[billvon]

People who claim that no one was killed by the mishap at Three Mile Island, for example

No one was killed at the mishap at Three Mile Island.

. . .that near misses and unforeseen events that come out OK are evidence of safety and lower risk in nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants are not safe. They are merely safer than other forms of power, based on the injury and mortality data associated with those forms of power. A realistic approach to risk assessment judges risks based on actual data rather than imagined scenarios.

 

[Billy T]

... There are going to be - in the dreams of the nuke proponents - four or five hundred reactors generating this waste in the US alone. They are not all going to be near the ocean, they are going to have on site temporary waste storage of their own, and so the first observation is that this does not solve the TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima/ problem. It does not solve the misdirected into dirty bomb problem. It does not solve the transport accident problem (how many of these glassification plants are we planning to build?) ...

As small glassification plant is not costly, or "rocket science" as was done in the middle age all over the world. I would suggest there be one in each electric power company's service area (a monopoly typically serving several states, say five on average), so perhaps 10 glassification centers total for the US's contingent 48 states. As a quick guess, I bet the cost of 10 glassification centers would be tiny fraction of just the excavation etc. cost of Yucca Mt and have much shorter total transport from the current "swimming pool" water storage to these centers than the plan to send all radio active waste to the one Yucca Mountain locations, and even that would have been safe:

The nuclear waste was planned to be shipped to the site by rail and/or truck in robust containers known as spent nuclear fuel shipping casks, approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. While the routes in Nevada would have been public, in the other states the planned routes, dates and times of transport would have been secret for security reasons.
U.S. has safely conducted more than 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel without any harmful release of radioactive material. This safety record is comparable to the worldwide experience where more than 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel have been transported since 1970 – an amount approximately equal to the total amount of spent nuclear fuel that would have been shipped to Yucca Mountain.

In many (more than half, I think,) of the cases the power company has only one nuclear plant location, with typically more than one reactor there. This is because of the NIMBY problem - much easier to add reactor 4 to the site where, 1, 2, & 3 already are than get different site approved for it. In these more than half of the cases, the average fuel rod transport distance from swimming pool to glassification facility could be less than football field is long. Thus the 40+ year risk record of zero release in transport of spent fuel would be reduced at least to: 0 /1000 = 0 or zero out to three more decimal places as the total transport distance would be reduced by about a factor of 1000 compared to sending it all to Yucca Mt.

After a decade in swimming pool storage the fuel rods are not very radioactive - sleeping next to one for 8 hours gives less radiation than a single CT whole body scan, I have read. The swimming pool is to passively keep them cool, not radiation shielding.

I don't know if the "crash proof" steel casks the fuel rods are placed in for road or rain transport (all the way cross country to Yucca Mt. under that plan) need any water cooling spray or not. No crash proof cask would be require if spent fuel was only being moved with in the power plant's secure area to a nearby glassification facility, which as I said in post 191, was far less complex than a automatic glass bottle continuous flow facility by huge factor as it could be a "batch process" making perhaps a dozen disks each day from only one spent fuel rod per day.

I don't think one should just cut the end off a fuel rod and shake out the spent fuel onto to a small pool of molten glass, mix and pour it into the (dozen ?) disk molds as most of the valuable U235 is still "unburnt." France, and some other countries have been reprocessing their spent fuel rods for some decades with not one accident. US could and should do this too. Certainly there is no possibility of any accident as you describe processing one fuel rod at a time, say one per week /reactor.

Can you give any even remotely plausible way that one would need "to evacuate everyone for five miles around." Remember we are speaking of one rod's radioactivity converted into about a dozen disk per day and you are dealing with very weak rate of radiation coming from it (compared to a CT scan). I suggested an Aegis ship on each side of the special ship transporting a few thousand of the disks to the 8 mile deep ocean subduction zone just North of Puerto Rico to prevent some drug lord etc. hijacking it. He could do some damages, like you suggest with a few hundred disks, loaded on a plane and then dropped out over Miami as "radioactive mess" bombs.

 

[garbonzo]

This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

Of course it can. You merely lack the understanding of how that could happen.

You keep claiming it, and yet you cannot provide a single instance of how that could be accomplished that did not already happen, and did not falsify it.

(now, think of this line as a post-break, everything past this line is another post)
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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

biologists demonstrated that it was composed of several quite reducible units, all of which had evolved for other functions. Let me know if you would like more details.

I would.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

In every case, an example of a reducible design was found. Again let me know if you would like more details.

I would.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

biologists discovered that 1) you really didn't need all the proteins that creationists claimed you needed and 2) those proteins also served a function as digestive enzymes, thus giving a basis for their evolutionary development.

As I said in my first replies, those are just so stories unsubstantiated by evidence. Just because someone tells you that something could, possibly, maybe, we have no evidence against it, have happened a certain way, doesn't mean it did.

And by studying it, I don't mean reading TalkOrigins and memorizing talking points.

Let me put it to you bluntly.

You say that 'blood cloth' do not need all of the proteins that are used for it. What are the function of those unnecessary proteins, how does blood cloth works when those proteins are missing, what covers for their functions on their absence?

You said that proteins are also used for the digestive system, but the text is ambiguous. Do you mean to talk about the necessary or the non-necessary ones? What is the evidence that, despite their presence on present day's digestive system, they were also present on ancient life form's digestive system? What is the evidence that they were re-used? Do we have examples of life forms that possessed them in both digestive and cloth system? What's the evolutionary path, showing the progression from a digestive protein to a blood cloth one?


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

Ah, the bait-and-switch. You claimed that there was no "backing evidence that creatures simply evolved into hermaphrodites first, and then split the sexes away later." In fact creatures that "evolved into hermaphrodites" and then "split away the sexes" not only existed, but do exist today.

So we learned a new word and are eager to use it. Does not mean what you think it means, though. However, since you raised a strawman, I will have to, again, point out the dialog to you.

Me: Counter-evidence from sexual reproduction. Explained away by claiming without backing evidence that creatures simply evolved into hermaphrodites first, and then split the sexes away later.

You: Except there is evidence - organisms that still reproduce both ways.

Me: The fact that hermaphrodites exist is evidence that they exist, not that our ancestors were hermaphrodites. There is no evidence of the latter.

You: I'm not interested in word games.

So, let me get this straight. I asked for evidence that the organisms that reproduce sexually were once asexual and then hermaphrodites before becoming sexual. Your 'evidence' was 'there are hermaphrodites today'. That's it? That's your damning evidence? Stones exist, therefore all species were stones one day?


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

They meet the definition of macro-evolution; they represent new species that no longer share a gene pool.

Again, what's the threshold? And also, define species.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

You've essentially admitted defeat at that point.

The desperation of the evolutionists. You can't reply so you will just link to talkorigins and declare victory.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

it begs the question

This does not mean what you think it means. Although evolutionists do tend to beg the question a lot.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

which is it you believe, then? That species are fixed? Or that species are not fixed, but that a creator is behind change or design, or designy change? You've alluded to both: and of those two, the notion that species are really fixed is shocking.

Really? When did I allude to anything? Are you sure we are following the same discussion?


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

I have listed several examples of where mutations accumulated until a new species - perfectly viable - has appeared.

Again, define species. Then demonstrate that those are new species by your own definition.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

The fact that there was grass only for 41 individuals* trapped on a rocky off-shore island after the ice of the last ice age melted and made it a tiny (football field size and mostly bare rocks) island no longer connected to the mainland (and most of each new generation starving, but those with slight advantage, like being the runt of the litter and needing less food, or having eyes more forward looking** etc.) is why an entirely new species, the preã, could evolve in less than 10,000 years.

Ok, prove. You have to keep in mind that I don't fall for the fairy tales of the evolutionists. Every time you decide to make your point with a fairy tale, I will ask you to prove it. A hint; 'the preã exists' is not evidence.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

No need for an eye on each of the two sides of the head, like their ancestors had, to better notice a predator's approach as there were none on the island. But good depth perception, with large overlap of the two eyes' field of vision, was a big help and strongly selected for. Which is why preã eyes are close together on the front of their face.

Prove. Where are the skeletons of the 'ancient' preãs with eyes that are not close together on the front of their face.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

Note what appears to be depressions (or absence of hair) on each side of the head about where a guinea pig’s eyes would be. (At first glance, you probably thought the eyes were there, but they are close together, where a guinea pig's mouth is on the very tiny face.)

Fairy tales, fairy tales, fairy tales. Not a shred of evidence for the claims. As always, evolutionists are always confusing a good tale with scientific evidence. You can tell tales until the cows go home, I told you already. Prove them. That's the challenge. All you have are fairy tales.


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This a reply whomever typed the following, you know who you are (anyone else is welcome to respond):

their hind legs have evolved to be good for jumping, like a rabbit, and very different from those of the mainland guinea pigs they evolved from in only 8000 years.

Cool, we have a time frame. I love time frames. Let's do some math, shall we? How many mutations it took to evolve those hind legs in those short 8000 years, and is such mutation rate possible?

 

[GeoffP]

Hi garbonzo.

I'm sorry, but I was forced to report your post, above, for violations of SF format. Without speaker and with extremely truncated quotes, it becomes difficult to see where you are taking up the argument, and moreover, what it is you are attempting to argue. This appears to have been done explicitly and deliberately, which raises other issues.

I would like to continue the discussion with you - particularly as you've been a critic of evolutionary theory for ten years, or so you say - but if you're just going to start dismissing statistical evidence for evolution as 'fairy tales' because you don't understand statistics and reduce the sheer enormity of my responses above to, ludicrously, "it begs the question", I feel that there is little worth to attempting to engage you. I have no real conviction that you will attempt to debate honestly or with honour. So - prove to me that you're a honest investigator, instead of dodging and throwing up chaff. All told, it looks rather more like literary combativeness than discussion. Also, make sure to indicate which speaker you're referring to. This is standard SF format.

Thanks.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

No one was killed at the mishap at Three Mile Island.

From the Wikipedia article:

The partial meltdown resulted in the release of unknown amounts of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment. Dire predictions were made by anti-nuclear movement activists; however epidemiological studies analyzing the rate of cancer in and around the area since the accident, determined there was a small statistically non-significant increase in the rate and thus no causal connection linking the accident with these cancers can be made.

 

[garbonzo]

Hi garbonzo.

I'm sorry, but I was forced to report your post, above, for violations of SF format. Without speaker and with extremely truncated quotes, it becomes difficult to see where you are taking up the argument, and moreover, what it is you are attempting to argue. This appears to have been done explicitly and deliberately, which raises other issues.

I would like to continue the discussion with you - particularly as you've been a critic of evolutionary theory for ten years, or so you say - but if you're just going to start dismissing statistical evidence for evolution as 'fairy tales' because you don't understand statistics and reduce the sheer enormity of my responses above to, ludicrously, "it begs the question", I feel that there is little worth to attempting to engage you. I have no real conviction that you will attempt to debate honestly or with honour. So - prove to me that you're a honest investigator, instead of dodging and throwing up chaff. All told, it looks rather more like literary combativeness than discussion. Also, make sure to indicate which speaker you're referring to. This is standard SF format.

Thanks.

You had no problem with replying to all other replies that had no indication of what speaker it is referring to and I can look at your post history and see this was the case until this thread. I've not been addressing the poster for the entirety of this thread and ALL my other threads because it is much easier on me to not do this due to the format of this forum, so you can see that this is how I am and how I always will be, this is was deliberate, but thats how it's always been, it wasn't to deliberately derail the discussion like you seem to be doing with this ridiculous deflection. This is an attempt to deflect the debate away from the scientific grounds of evolution because you cannot debate it, it seems to me and to any outsider. I respected you because you would always reply to the points given and not ad hominem attack or attempt to deflect the conversation away like the other posters on this forum. Are you trying to prove me wrong?

Would you rather me post each quotation and reply as a separate post? I tried to do this with the post-breaks so that it won't spam the forum, but if you'd rather that, I can do that.

The point is, you would have absolutely no problem if I submitted a post like this:

Evidence.

No evidence.

And end the post like that. Then you would respond to it. BUT, all of a sudden you have a problem with it when it is all in one post? This is arbitrary. You know the replies that are to you. You know the words that you typed. If you are confused for whatever reason, then don't respond to that quote, as it probably wasn't you who said it anyway, but don't claim you are confused and can't respond to the whole debate.

 

[garbonzo]

but if you're just going to start dismissing statistical evidence for evolution as 'fairy tales' because you don't understand statistics

What statistics? There was no evidence presented in that post, just a story. Show me the evidence.

 

[GeoffP]

You had no problem with replying to all other replies that had no indication of what speaker it is referring to and I can look at your post history and see this was the case until this thread. I've not been addressing the poster for the entirety of this thread and ALL my other threads because it is much easier on me to not do this due to the format of this forum, so you can see that this is how I am and how I always will be, this is was deliberate, but thats how it's always been, it wasn't to deliberately derail the discussion like you seem to be doing with this ridiculous deflection. This is an attempt to deflect the debate away from the scientific grounds of evolution because you cannot debate it, it seems to me and to any outsider. I respected you because you would always reply to the points given and not ad hominem attack or attempt to deflect the conversation away like the other posters on this forum. Are you trying to prove me wrong?

Would you rather me post each quotation and reply as a separate post? I tried to do this with the post-breaks so that it won't spam the forum, but if you'd rather that, I can do that.

The point is, you would have absolutely no problem if I submitted a post like this:



No evidence.

And end the post like that. Then you would respond to it. BUT, all of a sudden you have a problem with it when it is all in one post? This is arbitrary. You know the replies that are to you. You know the words that you typed. If you are confused for whatever reason, then don't respond to that quote, as it probably wasn't you who said it anyway, but don't claim you are confused and can't respond to the whole debate.

There are a variety of issues here, garbonzo, which I won't treat in whole: firstly, why would I need to respond to the whole debate? Without a proper quote - not four words - from an identified source, it becomes increasingly wasteful to go through the debate to find whatever it is you've cherry-picked out as being relevant to some obscure angle you're trying to leverage. Further, if I see a point therein, without a name or a more full quote, it becomes increasing difficult to backtrack so that I can identify their angle. Frequently, it is not possible to do this with a few selected words or a single phrase. So please don't try to confuse the discussion with this ridiculous tactic; and don't tell me that it's somehow too difficult to do (see below). Have a fair and honest go at the subject. All right? You aver that this is indeed your objective, so let's just make it all clear for everyone.

It is, as I expect you know, possible to use the "quote" function to quote multiple people people when posting. Their name will be displayed at the top of the quoted post. If you're not sure how it works, experiment a bit and figure it out. Unlike a creationist view of the development of life, the results of such experiments are repeatable. Thankyou.

 

[garbonzo]

There are a variety of issues here, garbonzo, which I won't treat in whole: firstly, why would I need to respond to the whole debate? Without a proper quote - not four words - from an identified source, it becomes increasingly wasteful to go through the debate to find whatever it is you've cherry-picked out as being relevant to some obscure angle you're trying to leverage. Further, if I see a point therein, without a name or a more full quote, it becomes increasing difficult to backtrack so that I can identify their angle. Frequently, it is not possible to do this with a few selected words or a single phrase. So please don't try to confuse the discussion with this ridiculous tactic; and don't tell me that it's somehow too difficult to do (see below). Have a fair and honest go at the subject. All right? You aver that this is indeed your objective, so let's just make it all clear for everyone.

It is, as I expect you know, possible to use the "quote" function to quote multiple people people when posting. Their name will be displayed at the top of the quoted post. If you're not sure how it works, experiment a bit and figure it out. Unlike a creationist view of the development of life, the results of such experiments are repeatable. Thankyou.

I didn't know that, thank you for the tip. Can I do it next time?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

The point is, you would have absolutely no problem if I submitted a post like this:

No evidence.

It's not at all difficult to respond exactly that way. What you do is "Reply" to multiple posts in your own post and interleave your responses to each post. I do this routinely and so do many other members. You can even respond to more than one person.

 

[GeoffP]

I didn't know that, thank you for the tip. Can I do it next time?

Sure.