Tar_Alcaran

but I am curious why you keep calling that road an “access road”

Probably a bit of a holdover from Dutch civil engineering. We split roads here in three main types: The first type are “Flow roads” (stroomwegen) whose purpose is to have unimpeded traffic flow without obstacles. Think highways without level crossings.

The third type is the “Living street” (erftoegangsweg), which is mostly unmarked and has no signals, the kind of street that’s walkable and bikable, leading to houses and stores and parking areas.

And then there’s the thing in the middle, which is what you put between option 1 and 3, which is the (gebiedsontsluitingsweg), which literally translates to “area unlocking road”, but better translates to accessroad. It has level crossings with traffic lights or roundabouts, and serves to connect different areas like suburbs to town centers.

This road is some kind of deformed hybrid between 2 and 3, intended to connect different areas and moving traffic, but constantly interrupted by crossings and traffic signals. You have to stop two whole lanes of longer-distance traffic, just to get to a parking spot at a single store. As a result, you need a crazy-wide road with multiple turning lanes, just to make room for all the waiting cars. This contraption creates constant interaction between two intirely different types of traffic, and mixes two uses of roads that really don’t combine well. You shouldn’t have to stop multiple lanes of longdistance traffic just because I want to move from the pharmacist to the supermarket.

This one massive slab of asphalt could be a 2-lane area-unlocking-road with seperated exits leading to living streets. It would take far less road surface and massively improve the flow of traffic, because you’re not mixing fast through-traffic with slow destination-traffic.

huh? which part did I make up?

This being a closed-asphalt mix? That’s pretty obvious, since there’s water pooled on top. That the road was poorly designed? It’s a 6 or 7 lane accessroad, by definition that’s poorly designed. That the maintenance is bad? There’s water pooling in dozens of places because either the road sagged from the weight of waiting cars (the lengthwise puddles) or from ripples caused by braking cars (widthwise puddles). Or that the US doesn’t spend money on infrastructure? I guess that’s debatable (6 lane accessroads don’t come cheap after all).

That source has a pretty significant bias itself. It being from 2001 might be a clue as to why: before polymer-modified bitumen, there were many more downsides to using open asphalt mixes on anything but long, straight highways. That’s probably also why it only mentions hot-mix asphalt, which the Netherlands is basically banning next year for environmental reasons in favour of warm-mix. I REALLY hope this isn’t the latest version of this book.

It’s true that high-speed roadways more greatly benefit from open asphalt, but it’s very much not true that open-graded mixtures don’t have benefits at lower speeds. They still reduce road noise by 5-7 db even at 50kph speeds, and of course the benefits of less water on the road is substantial. The downside is that there is more fraying, so using it at traffic lights or roundabouts is not a great idea. Even with modern PMB mixes and SAMI treatmeants that reduce fraying pretty effectively (which didn’t really exist in 2001 when that source was composed), a stone-mastic asphalt is still the go-to for areas with a lot of turning or braking.

But most of all, it’s more expensive to build and to maintain, and since maintenance is already pretty crap in a LOT of places (having 6 or 7 lane accessroads doesn’t help there) using open asphalt is probably a bad idea.

Source: Married a Dutch engineer, worked on a lot of roadbuilding projects myself (admitedly not in the design phase, I do know what gets put where here in the Netherlands).

Also, Americans are too poor/cheap to spend money on proper infrastructure, so they use old closed asphalt and have poorly designed and maintained roads where the water just pools on top when it rains.

An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.

In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.

I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.

I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.

Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml

Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.

And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.

That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.

The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.

Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.

There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.

Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.

Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.

There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.

It’s not renewable, but known reserves will power the world for a century, based solely on current average efficiency and not modern improvements

But Uhm, it’s also true

Why make it hard on yourself when idiots self-select into an easy target audience?

Welcome to the new Industrial Revolution, where one person can do the work of many. Sure, mass produced goodscontent aren’t as good as handmade artisanal products writing, but there’s a huge market for it.

Absolutely. But I learned in 2005, and the electric calculator had replaced the sliderule a couple of decades earlier.

But this is something they were great at, but usually not with the same accuracy. It’s hard to get more than 3 decimal places out of one, and tables are great for that, you can fill whole books with them.

I’ve had an economics teacher in the Netherlands who had interest tables and wanted us to them too. For those before calculators, those are tables that list the years on the left, and the interest on top, and then the multiplier in the table.

So, 10 years at 6.5% = 1.877

This was in 2005i sh.

Quick, but them a pony!

Won’t a fire axe work perfectly well?

I didn’t say they were wrong, just that this would always be the answer

Well, I doubt their official position would have been “we prefer to be unemployed”.