Naggsty Butler

We've tried talking to you about waste storage plenty of times but you always seem to plug your ears and yell "10,000 years! 10,000 years!" over and over again as if that means anything. You refuse to educate yourself on what radiation is or what it takes to store radioactive waste. We've talked about dumping it into the ocean. There is a lot of uproar about Japan dumping its radioactive waste from Fukushima in the ocean, but nobody seems to understand what it actually means. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-really-ok-if-japan-dumps-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-the-ocean/amp/ You mentioned Nevada being opposed to Yucca Mountain. And yet nobody seems to have a good reason as to why it is not a good option. But pretty much all the evidence out there shows that it is as good of an option that there could be. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w1/docs/YuccaMountainEPWReport.pdf To give some perspective, you would receive a higher dose just from cosmic radiation by living in Colorado for a year than you would by living next to Yucca Mountain for a year. I received a higher dose of radiation on my flight to Boston a few weeks ago than I received since the beginning of the year working in a nuclear plant everyday. Just because there is long lasting radiation doesn't mean it is dangerous. It is like wanting to ban candles because they utilize a flame and fire kills people. We have solutions available to handle the radioactive waste but people like you stop any progress from happening because you insist on maintaining your ignorance.

I was in 11th grade, just walking into my first class of the day. This random girl asked me if I recognized her, and I, not fully taking in her face, mistook her for some other girl from class. Turned out she was my best friend from like first grade and had moved away for 10 years. I was so excited once I realized who she was. We tried to catch up as we walked into class, I thought it was weird that the teacher had the news on the TV. It wasn't until the second plane hit soon after that I realized what was going on. Any excitement I felt about reconnecting with my friend was gone. I stared at the TV, trying to understand what was happening. When the news about the Pentagon came in, I said out loud "This is war." I was in total shock. We got sent home after that and I sat on the couch watching TV with my older brother for the rest of the day. Everything changed after that. We watched the news a lot more often at school. I remember sitting in my biology class watching as we used MOABs to cause "Shock and Awe." Life after 9/11 was all about our boys getting revenge. I don't remember what it was like to not be thinking about catching Bin Laden. I joined the Air Force in 2010 while I was in school, and everything was about the War on Terror. After I got out, I have worked in the defense industry, first for a private contractor and now as a government employee with the Navy. Our mentality as a military is so heavily influenced by what happened on 9/11. And I don't think that will change any time soon.

So many wasted opportunities this game.

I thought both Shawshank Redemption and Misery were fantastic adaptations.

My issue with the Trump saying "Why do we want all these people from shit hole countries coming here?" is not about him calling those countries "shit hole(s)". Those countries are exactly that. I would never want to live there. What I have a problem with is that the statement implies that anyone from those countries are also "shit." My ancestors were from what plenty of people 150 years ago would have called "shit hole countries." That doesn't mean the people from there are shit. People come to America BECAUSE it isn't a shit hole country. They come because it gives them the opportunity to make their lives and their children's lives better. So I do take issue with Trump's statement because he implied that those people aren't worth having in this country. That is racist. Calling those countries or Baltimore or Delaware or Pocatello shit holes is not racist. Calling the people from there shit is. Except Pocatello. Those people suck.

Having been a Mormon missionary, these kinds of experiences were always the funniest and the ones we would talk about for years after. I knocked on a door once and the guy opened the door Kramer style wearing nothing but a leopard print speedo. I don't think he expected Mormon missionaries when he opened the door, he seemed pretty confused.

Rach 2, suckers The second movement is amazing.

All I know is that if you start being able to climb on walls and sense danger before it happens, you're supposed to fight crime or something like that.

Isn't it weird how turning 30 does that to you? I was studying for a test today and listened to Tom Petty, the Castlevania 2 soundtrack, and the original Blade Runner soundtrack. I have no idea what the childrens listen to now a days other than that air horn thing.

When I say we were too early for nuclear, what I mean is we didn't spend enough time trying to overcome the technological challenges before implementing it on a large, commercial scale. We should have spent more time on research and development and do a gradual roll out. It's like if we were to try and send a group of people to Alpha Centauri right now and put them in cryo sleep for 40,000 years when we could just wait until the technology develops to the point where it is practical to send them in a matter of years. In the mean time, they could focus on small scale things like getting people to other planets in our own solar system. Just look at this picture from the control room in the Three Mile Island plant- They had a million different gages for all the different parameters they were trying to monitor, and when the accident happened, it happened so fast that the operator didn't even notice something was wrong until it was too late to stop it. Their event recorder computer spent hours printing off all of the information, so they didn't have any idea of what happened until long after. On today's plants, all of those parameters can be monitored from one or two screens. The computer handles all of the protective actions, and even if there is something wrong, the computer can put the plant in a passive state so that the operator can talk about what to do, go get a coffee, go home and sleep for a night, and then come back and resolve the issue. We are much better equipped today to deal with the risks of nuclear power than we ever were when those plants were designed. Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, are very interesting. They have been working on them for a while, and are currently building one in Idaho that will provide power for northern Utah and Idaho. They aren't necessarily one specific design, there are many out there. The Navy only uses Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs), which aren't the best or smallest but they know how to use them and they use them well. I think the SMRs supposed to be even smaller than what they use in the Navy, which is great because they will be cheaper and easier to build. I am excited to see how they progress.

No question, nuclear is inherently dangerous and more risky than any other power source. But we have learned a lot about risk management since the early days of shimming out control rods by hand. We are aware of how dangerous this power is, and we treat it very carefully. The designs you see now are designed with safety measures that make it impossible for something like Chernobyl over ever happening. The problem I have with nuclear today is our reliance on old, overly complex tech that depends on a lower margin of safety than what we can do with today's tech. I think we need to retire most of the older plants and replace them with newer, safer one where we don't have to worry about another Three Mile Island or Fukushima. We dove into Nuclear before we were ready, and we paid the consequences for it. Nuclear is something that requires a technology level closer to what we have today than in the 50s and 60s when all of the current plants were designed. But I think the benefits of nuclear outweigh the risks.

For any one who is interested, here is a very informative and interesting explanation on the Fukushima Disaster. We use this video in our training at the Navy Shipyard.