At 5:43 AM -0700 10/1/98, Jim Choate wrote:
Hi,
In regards the discussion about regulation and industry. I can think of only one industry that was regulated before the very first company opened their doors for business....nuclear power plants.
Personaly, 3 Mile Island in a un-regulated industry scares the hell out of me...and I support nuclear power. Look at the fiasco of Chernobyl in a control market.
I'd like to hear from any free market mavens who might want to use the nuclear industry as an example of how things could be so much better with no regulation regarding construction, operation, or waste disposal.
"Regulation" of the nuclear power industry had the predicted effect of overly conservative designs being standardized. Specifically, the Westinghouse boiling water designs, basically frozen in 1955 and little changed since then. Ordinary evolutionary improvement, plus revolutionary improvement, has not been possible. (Some examples would include inherently fail-safe designs like the Canadian CANDU reactor, and various improvements the French have made in the original Westinghouse design.) Waste disposal is even more of an example of a government-worsened problem. If politicians were not grandstanding about the dangers of nuclear waste and monkeywrenching plans, we'd have waste disposal sites. (For example, there is no plausible evidence that storing waste in caverns in dry desert areas in Nevada, California, New Mexico, etc. is dangerous. And certainly better in all regards than storing waste in drums sitting in places like Hanford, Washington, near the Columbia River. Etc.) Personally, I favor the "Pournelle Solution": acquire a 10-mile by 10-mile region of the Mojave Desert. Not in an "ecologically interesting" area of Death Valley, but just out in the vast scrublands. Erect a double fence around it, and perhaps even a minefield (if one is worried about thefts of nuclear waste). Pile the spent fuel rods, medical gear, gloves, etc. on pallets separated by wide roads from other pallets. This "solves" the waste problem for at least a matter of many decades, by which time various technologies will likely have presented other and better solutions. Cost is low, convenience is high, safety is good, environmental polllution is nil. Finally, the "environmental burden" imposed by a coal-fired power plant is vastly greater than that from a nuclear plant. Do the math on particulates, carbon levels, etc. Many libertarians have proposed better schemes for dealing with such environmental burdens....if fossil fuel-powered plants had to actually pay their share of environmental costs, they'd be even more expensive than nuclear. Face it, nuclear has failed in the U.S. because of yahoos who think their children will be mutated or something along those lines. (I dealt with these yahoos at Intel when my lab was using a lot of radioactive sources.) Cypherpunks is not the place to debate nuclear power, but I had to answer these claims. --Tim May Y2K: A good chance to reformat America's hard drive and empty the trash. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments.