Alexaxas's reply history at Help.com

Well, it’s the paragraphs after the one line you quote that were interesting:

“In other words, the difference is only about what they say and not about what they do. I challenge proclaimed agnostics to describe how their life is different from those who say there’s no god, or the even more common “areligious” who simply say they have no religion…. Agnostics imagine that atheists say they are “certain” and thus are fools, but the truth is just about every atheist I have ever seen would say that, should God appear before them, miracles a-blazing, they would of course respond to evidence and change their minds. They just don’t think it’s likely enough to make it worth worrying about. It may be that agnostics do indeed worry about this more than atheists do, which in a way is a difference of behaviour, but a minor one. Atheists by and large admit, in the extreme, that the agnostic is technically right that we can’t know for certain, and agnostics, in spite of the claim of uncertainty, live their lives exactly as atheists do, presuming there is no god. Agnostics think the concept of “doubt of certainty” is important. Atheists acknowledge and even agree with it, but find it unproductive…. Agnostics that I’ve met don’t tend to pray “just in case” following Pascal’s Wager.”

I’m not trying to ‘change’ you or anyone else; not any more than simple conversation changes anyone, at least.

Yes, actually I’m always taken aback by how amazingly diverse the ecosystem is on the old Chernobyl site. Sure makes it seem like the rest of the planet is a lot hardier than we are.

Just ask him out. The worst that can happen is that you’re both hit and killed by a bus before he can answer. After you accept that, everything is cake.

All *our* computers.

Stupid fingers.

‘Need’ meaning ‘can not possibly do without’. Unless you’re willing to regress to horse-drawn iron plows or you’re up to killing off 3 billion people or so.

The alternatives to nuclear (discounting fossil fuels of course) are at least 50 years away from being able to make up the gap, particularly if we actually convince people to switch to hydrogen or electric cars, and not without their own substantial environmental and aesthetic impacts.

As for your “very very very huge” consequences, you’ve been watching too many movies. Next you’re going to tell me we need to destroy all out computers because they’re going to take over the world, eventually.

[quote Florie]The whole thing is, WHY TAKE A CHANCE that there will be an accident that will cause mutations and death for centuries to come? There are other ways, many other ways.[/quote]

Because we need energy. We need an awful lot of it and we need it last Thursday.

Neo-luddism aside, I can’t understand why you guys believe that such a small risk should outweigh such enormous potential for benefit.

Odd semi-coincidence, someone on my WASTE hub just linked this to me:

http://ideas.4brad.com/what-differenc…

Any thoughts Xeno?

Ah, but what is it when you accept something as though it were fact because the evidence strongly supports it, even though there’s no proof?

If you only accept something as fact if it has absolute proof, you’ve gone well past skepticism and into a branch of epistemology I whose name I forget at the moment.

For certain values of ‘very safe’ and ‘prohibitively expensive’.

Suffice to say that driving a car, drinking alcohol, and swimming recreationally are all unnecessarily risks with higher mortality rates.

Its past two am on this cost, my typing is slipping badly and I don’t get enough sleep as it is, I’ll look back tomorrow.

Using the lowest figure must also assume no progress in design or control.

And and becquerel is 1 decay per second. Tts a derived SI unit.

1 Ci is equivalent to 3.7*10^10 Bq (I had to look that one up, I admit.)

I hope you can understand why I’m skeptical of an interview as a primary source.

And using the International Nuclear Event Scale, only level 7 incidents are classed as ‘major’, making Chernobyl the only example. That gives a empirically derived rate much lower than yours.

And really, no one uses curies anymore. Becquerels man, becquerels.

The people who buy Dells are the same people who think that the little button on the front of their pc opens the ‘cup holder’.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe your story either.

Well, since there have been maybe 3 ‘major’ accidents in the last 50 years, I’m not sure that its accurate. If you discount Soviet reactors, the track record for nuclear power is substantially better.

Anyway, I stand by my position that your attitude is unnecessarily alarmist.

Because, of course, Dell has such amazing and useful software… somewhere.

Hey, could you source your original claim of 1 major accident in 10,000 reactor years? I can’t seem to find it and I’m curious regarding the definition of ‘major accident’, among other things.