NP RE: Pynchon wrote in his defense...we think they are some kind of friends

[Joseph Tracy]

On Mar 8, 2010, at 9:15 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> on the one hand, the Whole Earth Catalogs were a lot of fun
> and he had to have been some kind of bullgoose hippie at one point
>
> isn't it true that there have to be really massive screwups for a
> nuclear power plant to malfunction -

I don't think this holds up. At Vermont Yankee and many other places  
a lot of the problems are just a function of age. Age and pressure  
can cause serious problems. Also people who call attention to  
problems and malfunctions have often been fired and even sued. When  
profit is on the line, people cheat. Also if they are so safe , why  
are so many leaking?

Chernobyl is also too easily discounted as a product of the corrupt  
Soviet system . In my estimate corruption can happen anywhere and  
certainly happened in Vermont.

This is from wikipedia;  it asks important questions:  "Relating  
specifically to atomic energy, Brand argued for a centralized global  
distributor of nuclear fuel without demonstrating any concern for the  
possibility such an arrangement might become totalitarian. As nuclear  
power is unavailable as a tool to ordinary people but, rather, is  
wielded by a military, corporate, and academic techno-elite, some see  
Brand's recent statements as philosophically incompatible with his  
earlier work."



> not just the kind of stuff you
> might do on a bad day, but stuff like higher-ups deciding to turn
> off safety features compounded with zombie-like braindeadness
> on the part of the operators, bad weather, and zodiacal alignments
> of great malignity and rarity?
>
> on the other hand, there is still no good place to put the waste...
> and suitcase bombs full of that are just the thing for your choice  
> of Al Qaeda
> or false-flag CIA operations to brandish, right?
>
> but what I always wonder, and maybe Monte could set me straight,
> is for the billions and billions of dollars they are sinking into this
> flawed design, couldn't they instead put a big chunk of that into  
> making
> (hot) fusion work?  every few months I read about how somebody
> has done some more in that direction but they never seem to fqn
> GET anywhere, is this the kind of problem a bunch of money could fix?
>
> tritium has a much shorter half-life, no?
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> -- "the problem with the deployment of frictionless surfaces is
> that they're not getting traction."