Printable Safety Certificates: Fill & Download for Free

I’m sure many respondents said what I’m going to say, but this is my answer, so I’m giving it.I would like to see the following:Overhaul NICS to allow for full public access. Create a web portal where you can input a name and SSN and NICS spits out a YES or NO decision with a printable certificate and reference number. The portal also works the other direction: input the certificate reference number and it displays who the background check was performed against and the valid dates of the certificate (6 months is probably an appropriate timeframe).Along with this overhaul, expand NICS to allow for people suspected of terrorism to be flagged when a FFL does the check. Not summarily denied, but flagged. If a gun store did the check, the purchase would be delayed (not denied outright) and the government would be alerted that a terror suspect attempted to buy a gun. The government would have the opportunity to bring a case against that person. If they chose not to, the system would still default to approve after five business days. We still strongly favor retention of individual rights, and we want to ensure that the government cannot enact a de facto gun ban simply by failing to approve delayed purchases, so we will never change the background check to default deny. Dylan Roof’s case was a mistake on behalf of the government; we do not punish the citizens when the government screws up.By the way, the NICS overhaul and the increased investigation requirement by FBI and BATFE into these suspected terrorists all require lots of dollars. I know how to get the government more dollars, but that’s an answer to a different question.Once the NICS overhaul is complete, require that ALL transfers of firearms, through any form (sale, gift, etc) have a certificate and reference number to show that the background check was completed. Gifting a firearm requires a simple form (no bigger than a half sheet of paper) be filled out and included with the gift and the certificate. The new owner and the previous owner must retain those forms for a minimum of 10 years. Electronic retention is acceptable. For purchases, you can now expedite the process and pre-approve yourself and bring your certificate in to a gun store to show that you are valid. The gun store would check your certificate number to ensure validity and then sell you your gun.The increased funding for BATFE should cover investigations of less-than-honorable FFL gun dealers. If we give them the manpower, we must also come down on them and make sure they are revoking licenses when dealers fail to do background checks. With the new system in place, there should be no reason that a dealer fails to do a check. FFLs should know that if BATFE discovers a sale where there was no check done, they lose their license, period.Require states to issue concealed carry licenses to citizens (i.e. “shall issue” laws). Require states to follow a model similar to driver’s licenses: a nominal fee (which should no longer include investigative fees, meaning the government will have to pay for investigations), a written and a practical test. Full reciprocity between all states. Police can require identification when a gun is being carried.Get rid of free-fire…er…gun-free zones. If you are licensed, you can carry your gun anywhere, except for certain government buildings (courthouses, etc).Increase penalties for carrying without a license. Harshly increase penalties for crimes committed with a gun. Do not allow charges of crimes committed with a gun to be plea-bargained away, and I’m also leaning towards mandatory minimum sentences for crimes committed with a gun. Yes, this will increase the load on the courts, but criminals will know that if they are caught committing a crime with a gun, they are going to jail, period.Legalize marijuana, and de-criminalize most other drug use charges. Retain penalties for dealing and transporting illegal drugs. Divert some of the funding for the “war on drugs” to mandatory treatment and increased psychological testing and treatment. Reducing drug prosecution should reduce crime, reducing the need to use a gun in the first place.

So far, I’ve taught two semesters of Home Economics, followed by a year off, then two more semesters of Home Ec.Currently I’m co-teaching a “Practical Art” class this semester, and I’m scheduled to teach a “Practical, Christ-Honoring Church Music for Beginners” class next semester. I’m also the costuming teacher for our drama class this year, leading a team of 7–12 graders.I substitute teach for a handful of older grades, and occasionally guest teach for a variety of grade levels.Every class has been amazing!It has been my privilege to discuss grocery budgets with 10–12th graders - teach basic hospitality and manners to 4th graders - and share what a day in the life of a music teacher and newlywed mother is like (something the 9–12th grade girls found interesting) as part of a college + career class.I’m enjoying the practical art class this year. My co-teacher is amazing, and with Pinterest at our fingertips we are having a blast! Things like wreath-making, creating printables/wall art, upcycling and spray painting, re-upholstering… it’s awesome and our crowd of students seems to enjoy it!But my heart is with the Home Ec rotation. Getting our hands into slippery raw chicken and reducing it to a neat set of perfectly-roasted sections - exploring the old fashioned art of preserving seasonal produce - tackling piecrust and bread - making careful master lists for grocery shopping - creating a rotating yearly plan for housecleaning - whipping up fudge and gravy and chocolate cream pie - oh, the classes were amazing and the fun superb!It helps that the girls I teach are sweet, teachable, and energetic!For two years, we’ve had the privilege of taking a bunch of fire extinguishers with expired certification out into a field, pulling the pin, and firing away. Experiencing the “kick” of a giant extinguisher, or how to aim a tiny one, was a great hands-on addition to our safety class!Teaching is truly a privilege, and I’m thankful to be afforded the opportunity!So… if every other Friday I miss a lot of comments or don’t write much… I’m probably in a crowd of 7–12 grade girls, laughing a lot and learning things to further honor and glorify our Savior!

I am a computational biophysicist at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. Over the past few months, I have heard (or missed!) seminars about:the protein coat of ebolavirusthe orientation of photodye molecules in inkjet-printable flexible solar cellsdiffusion of ionic liquids in in-situ crosslinked polymer networks for supercapacitorsreaction pathways for carbon-nanotube-terminating mislinksionic energy storage in graphdiyne weavestransition metal dichalcogenides for next generation transistorspolymerized drug nanosachets for intraocular treatment of retinal degenerationAlzheimer-relevant interactions between amyloidogenic peptides and natural antipathogenic short peptidesblack phosphorus nanoclusters for efficient catalysis of vital “green chemistry” reactionsAll of these talks had ideas in common with each other.None of these talks had ideas in common with nuclear power science.And that’s something nobody really talks about, or even knows how to put into words and numbers.First, let me affirm that there are in fact some terrible arguments against nuclear power:”Nuclear power plants are unsafe””Nuclear fuel is unsafe””Nuclear waste is unsafe”These are all terrible arguments with little basis in reality. But ponder: is this really why we have so little nuclear power? After all, cashed-up big business and the ivory towers of academia have usually succeeded at convincing people that weird, unfamiliar things are safe — rightly or wrongly. The societal mainstream has at various points been quickly convinced that vaccines, contrails, soy products, pesticides, antibiotic-laden and chlorine-washed chicken, and even cigarettes are perfectly fine for you. I mean, right now there’s a mass movement to legalise marijuana!Against all that, it’s far more likely that “nuclear power is unsafe” is a result of its low market share, rather than a cause. And to back this up, in America, favorability of nuclear power is generally high and jumps among those who already live near to a nuclear power plant[1][1][1][1] :Even in more recent polling which has shown a bigger partisan split[2][2][2][2] , fully two in five Democrats support nuclear power (compared to two-thirds of Republicans). As such, I find it difficult to believe that widespread public disapproval or a hostile political environment are responsible for nuclear power’s low market share — which are just the kinds of things that a concerted pro-nuclear campaign could fix, as environmentalists keep being told to do.From a physicist’s point of view the more difficult problem is that nuclear physics is just a very different sort of physics. As background, this is a typical topical breakdown of the knowledge a second-year undergraduate physicist will have:classical mechanicsthermodynamics, fluids and gasescircuit physics and electromagnetismquantum mechanicswaves and opticsYou can get easily from any of these topics, or combinations of them, into renewable energy science. A solar PV panel is just a semiconductor junction with a weird taste for photons. Supercapacitors need just electrochemistry and surface science, but they might also solve the electricity storage problem. Wind and wave turbines are basically propellers shacked up to dynamos. And if you put this stuff in a car you get an electric vehicle!But to get from here to nuclear physics, you have to add on some very tricky science. To model neutron absorption, you have to learn a lot about nuclear physics and quantum chromodynamics and the strong and weak force and all that. To model structural strength under constant high irradiation, you need to do very serious multiscale modeling where a neutron absorption event over nanoseconds might develop into a tiny crack over years. And to fulfil basic safety requirements you have to learn nuclear biology, where you take all that and work out how it applies to the human body. This is difficult. It’s certainly beyond my pay grade. There’s a reason “nuclear physicist” is still one of the go-to stereotypes for smart person. But what this means is that the R&D pipeline into nuclear power engineering research is really, really restricted, in a way that simply isn’t true for solar PV or storage or wind or wave.So, maybe nuclear power isn’t financially feasible simply because nuclear power engineers are really, really rare and expensive. I don’t know how to quantify that. I do know that in my home country, Malaysia, a manpower review was recently concluded[3][3][3][3] stating that you need five years’ lead training time to fill even common needs at a nuclear power plant (such as nuclear fuel management, radiological engineering, outage management, and QA).This has the major knock-on effect of hindering developing-world adoption. The technical know-how to install, say, solar PV onto the grid is far, far less than adding Your First Nuclear Power Plant. Should developing nations encourage substantial numbers of academically gifted young people to be nuclear engineers? If yes, that raises serious allocation questions (since they also need doctors and lawyers and engineers and all other kinds of professionals). But if no, then their NPPs are going to be run exclusively with foreign-trained (if not foreign-born) engineers, which is not just prohibitively expensive, but politically implausible (to build a major component of baseline power supply exclusively on foreign talent).The other major concern with nuclear power is that it requires substantial upfront capital investment. As such, it is extraordinarily sensitive to regulatory risk.If you buy a lot of solar panels, and something weird happens to your financing, you’ve still got a lot of solar panels. If you buy a nuclear power plant, on the other hand, and something weird happens to your financing, you may end up with three-quarters of a nuclear power plant (and sixteen very expensive, surprisingly useless nuclear engineers, and a stock of nuclear fuel you’ve got to do something with, at which point you get a mysterious call from a stranger with a Middle Eastern accent …), which is worth almost less than nothing.So you will notice that the nuclear-friendly Union of Concerned Scientists, when it says America needs more nuclear energy[4][4][4][4], doesn’t just call on America to “build more nuclear power plants”. What, by government fiat? The feds outright declare that We Will Build Nuclear Reactors, decide unilaterally where they will be and how hot they will run, pay for them (and their engineers!) by taxpayer money, and own them in perpetuity? I believe you call that socialism!No, in order to induce the energy market to make serious long-term investments in nuclear, there has to be clear legislative intent and regulatory consensus with decadal stability. Needless to say that’s not very optimistic for either the United States or developing countries. And you’ll notice that the UCS in supporting nuclear energy says (with emphases in original):We need carbon pricing. A robust, economy-wide cap or price on carbon emissions would help provide a level playing field for all low-carbon technologies.We need a low-carbon electricity standard. A well-designed LCES could prevent the early closure of nuclear power plants while supporting the growth of other low carbon technologies.Financial support for nuclear plants should be conditioned on consumer protection, safety requirements, and investments in renewables and energy efficiency.Policymakers considering temporary financial support to avoid the early closure of nuclear plants should couple that support with strong clean energy policies, efforts to limit rate increases to consumers, and rigorous safety, security, and performance requirements.See that? A price on carbon, and (via LCES) a cap on fossil fuels. They’re the only conditions under which the energy market can remain free and still get past the R&D bottleneck to substantially boost nuclear power. Right now, solar PV and wind power are taking off precisely because the market is bullish on their other advantages (decentralisation, low ongoing operating costs, low professional entry barriers), and not purely on decarbonisation benefits. The best way to get the markets laser-focused on nuclear’s obvious decarbonisation potential is to price carbon.But that’s not what the critics want. I don’t know what they want, frankly. I’ve seen dozens of times now people saying “But nuclear!” and I’ve not seen even one of them say how. By brute government fiat? By regulatory declaration? By carbon taxing? By re-educating power moguls? I’m tired of seeing people complain that environmentalists are leftist ideologues because they “won’t embrace nuclear”, when every plan conceivable for boosting nuclear would bitch-slap the free market and be condemned by those same complainers as more leftist ideologuing.Unclutch those pearls or leave the conversation to the grown-ups.Postscript:Many comments have made two arguments:Public opinion makes regulators issue stricter regulations.Stricter regulations make nuclear reactors more expensive.These are reasonable assumptions to make, but analyzing more data makes it clear that these can’t be the primary reasons for the high cost of nuclear power.Here is a dataset showing the construction costs per kilowatt of nuclear power stations around the world[5][5][5][5] .You can see that, in the USA, construction prices skyrocketed after Three Mile Island. You can also see that those prices were significantly less in other countries. “Aha!” you say, “that’s proof right there that regulatory burdens make nuclear power uneconomical!”And yet, the experience of modern Asian nations suggest that a different kind of fundamental floor exists. You can see that in the last 20 years, nuclear construction costs in Japan, India, and South Korea have hovered above $1.5/watt ($1,500/kW). These are three different nations with varying nuclear attitudes, regulatory regime strength, and labor costs, and yet none of them have significantly cracked that barrier, even when the nuclear cost curve in South Korea looks much more like an economy-of-scale graph:Meanwhile, the competition hasn’t been sitting still[6][6][6][6] :One commenter asked (quite rightly) why we built lots of nuclear power in the 20th century, but not today. This is why: when nuclear power cost around US$2–6/watt to construct, and solar PV cost around US$5–8/watt to buy, it obviously makes economic sense to build nuclear power. (It is no coincidence that all this happened around the Cold War, when nuclear science was an active and important field of military research, while semiconductor science was still in its infancy.)But today, when nuclear power still costs around US$1.5/watt to construct while you can buy solar PV for 30 cents per watt, nuclear power is a terrible proposition in economic terms. Furthermore, since so much of the cost of nuclear (and solar PV) is front-loaded into initial construction and certification, it makes lots of sense to keep old reactors running, but also to not build new reactors. Meanwhile, larger-scale concentrated solar power (CSP) installations are already hitting lower per-kWh operating costs than nuclear, with installation costs of US$3.3–5.5/watt[7][7][7][7] : this is already competitive with pre-Fukushima Japanese nuclear installation costs, and the cost curve is decreasing with no sign of a slowdown.Meanwhile, over 20 years of French development, nuclear reactors actually got more expensive per kW in investment costs[8][8][8][8] :which is frankly bizarre from a technological economics point of view.Finally, there is some evidence that the regulatory cost does in fact bear returns — that is, more expensive reactors which meet more stringent rules really do work better, and this is not just public fear-mongering. A report from France[9][9][9][9] looked at quantifying the factors influencing nuclear reactor cost. Two of the indicators they examined were international standards for Unplanned Capacity Loss Factor (UCL), which is the percentage of energy the plant could not supply due to mishaps, and the Unplanned Automatic Scram (US7), which tracks the number of automatic shutdowns per year (7,000 hours) of operation.The median values were UCL = 7% and US7 = 0.7 — that is, at least 50% of plants lost only 7% of power output to mishaps and only had about one automatic shutdown per 17 months. But the worst values were UCL = 12% and US7 = 1.4 — that is, the worst plants lost 5% more power and had automatic shutdowns twice as often! When the study’s authors regressed construction costs against these indicators, they were the most significant correlates (lowest p-values) with cost:So there is some evidence that more costly reactors really do perform better — they lose less energy to mishaps and shut down less often. The regulatory burdens and cost increase aren’t just malingering by misinformed citizens.(Post-postscript: As a responsible scientist, in relation to links 5, 7 and 8, I would never advocate using some kind of illegal service, such as Sci-Hub, to download paywalled scientific papers for free. You didn’t hear about the illegal service for downloading scientific papers for free, Sci-Hub, from me. I am shocked, shocked to find that illegal free downloading of scientific papers from Sci-Hub is going on in here!)Footnotes[1] Public opinion on nuclear energy: what influences it - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[1] Public opinion on nuclear energy: what influences it - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[1] Public opinion on nuclear energy: what influences it - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[1] Public opinion on nuclear energy: what influences it - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[2] 40 Years After Three Mile Island, Americans Split on Nuclear Power[2] 40 Years After Three Mile Island, Americans Split on Nuclear Power[2] 40 Years After Three Mile Island, Americans Split on Nuclear Power[2] 40 Years After Three Mile Island, Americans Split on Nuclear Power[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4972901[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4972901[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4972901[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4972901[4] The Nuclear Power Dilemma (2018)[4] The Nuclear Power Dilemma (2018)[4] The Nuclear Power Dilemma (2018)[4] The Nuclear Power Dilemma (2018)[5] Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors[5] Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors[5] Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors[5] Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors[6] File:Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977.svg - Wikipedia[6] File:Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977.svg - Wikipedia[6] File:Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977.svg - Wikipedia[6] File:Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977.svg - Wikipedia[7] Concentrating solar power for less than USD 0.07 per kWh: finally the breakthrough?[7] Concentrating solar power for less than USD 0.07 per kWh: finally the breakthrough?[7] Concentrating solar power for less than USD 0.07 per kWh: finally the breakthrough?[7] Concentrating solar power for less than USD 0.07 per kWh: finally the breakthrough?[8] The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing[8] The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing[8] The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing[8] The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing[9] https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00780566/document[9] https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00780566/document[9] https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00780566/document[9] https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00780566/document