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This nuclear-powered wine sounds delicious.

Mikey wrote:Yeah, but it's not Beaujolais unless its from Beaujolais.

Don't worry, TLH. The wine will still be made - it'll just be made by a nationalized company, after Germany buys it out for three times the actual value and then overpays into a worker's trust.

Well thank God for that!I'm a bit of a pussy when it comes to red wine and the very light bodied nature of Beaujolais is about all I can take these days. As long as you don't try and palm me off with German wine either. The only thing that stuff is fit for is cleaning the drains!

Can I have a bottle of this as well?:

Some German wines are decent, as long as you use them right. As a light-bodied replacement for a sack or port, some liebfraumilchs work well.

I personally like the idea of nuclear, as long as for fuck sake you manage it right

In fact, most of the "mismanagement" one reads of is hyperbolic or exaggerated for the sake of a news story.

Yup, nuclear power is incredibly safe. Even that pile of shit design they had at Chernobyl had to have all the safety systems shut off before it could explode like it did.

Hell, didn't even Chernobyl only go up because the guys running it started deliberately screwing around with the reactor and the control rods?

Mikey wrote:In fact, most of the "mismanagement" one reads of is hyperbolic or exaggerated for the sake of a news story.

Very true. You see, it sells. People are automaticaly terrified of anything even remotely nuclear. So if you have some guy standing on a corner yelling "Extra, extra! Nuclear power plant operator spills coffee!" then you'll have a stampede of people rushing to see just how serious the coffee spilling incident was, how many innocent children were irradiated by the incident, whether the station will be shut down due to that incident and how they can spin the accident to further their anti-nuclear campaign.

Honestly, even if the incident in question is of damn all significance, or even of something going wrong and the safety systems working properly and containing it then you still have people shrieking that the end is nigh. Bloody morons.

Yes. Chernobyl is something that happened because its operators forced it to. The RBMK-1000 is a bad design. Western reactor designs have a tendency to shut down when they get ramped down to low power levels. They can't sustain a reaction. Well the RBMK-1000 is the opposite. When you drop the power down low the reaction will ramp up, suddenly surging the power output. Well the technicians and engineers at the plant wanted to do a low power test, to see how low they could run the reactor and maintain control. Of course the people who designed it aren't total idiots. They know how the thing behaves so they designed the safety systems to force the plant to shut down at low levels lest they get an out of control reaction. In order to do the low power test they had to disable the automatic safety systems. They did the test and OOOPS! The reactor got out of hand. The reaction started to take off like a rocket and with the safeties disabled the techs and engineers weren't able to manually shut it down quick enough. Moments later, BOOM. It was a bad design, bad operating practice, with insufficient training.

I wonder if those same people realize that every second they are being bombarded by photonic radiation.

I'm actually a 20-minute drive (in traffic) from a nuclear plant, and as such have been to various meetings, conferences, etc. about the safety measures, inspection reports, NRC visits, etc.; and everything I've seen makes me perfectly happy to live near one.

which means one of two things:
1. Nuclear Power is actually pretty safe and the people in charge actually have a clue.

2. The spokesmen are so good at what they do, they were even able to persuade Mikey.

Since I haven't heard Mikey boasting about a lifetime supply of free beer and strippers, I'm going to have to assume the first one is true.

Nuclear power in incredibly safe, and the people who run the plants have a vested interest in keeping it that way. If something does go wrong they'll be the first to die, horribly.

lol, very true.

Lt. Staplic wrote:Since I haven't heard Mikey boasting about a lifetime supply of free beer and strippers, I'm going to have to assume the first one is true.

Yeah, once my wife found out about a lifetime supply of booze and strippers, she would make things very dangerous fro the supplier.

Mikey wrote:

Lt. Staplic wrote:Since I haven't heard Mikey boasting about a lifetime supply of free beer and strippers, I'm going to have to assume the first one is true.

Yeah, once my wife found out about a lifetime supply of booze and strippers, she would make things very dangerous fro the supplier.