It is suspicious that these reports came out right after climategate. I think people are distrusting more and more as the issues seems to be politicized more and more. Also I think people are not certain man is causing any of this. But either way it people are unsure that even if it is happening it is necessarily bad and may be good. Though the solutions are bad, especially for the poor.
My own opinion is that anything we do to try to prevent it is much worse then what would happen naturally.
And in a funny way at election we voted for ‘change’ (Obama), well here is ‘change’, why are we opposing it.
Forget Three Mile Island. You know what was the worst radiological disaster in American history? The Tennessee coal ash spill last year. Except nobody even noticed the radiation hazard, since the chemical poisoning, smothering of homes, etc. was so much worse. That’s right: The dangers of coal waste are so bad that the worst radiation disaster in our country’s history is only an insignificant fraction of it. No, nuclear energy isn’t perfect, but it’s a Hell of a lot better than what we’re using now.
Well, why settle? If clean, green energy is possible, why not go for it? Certainly, I regard nuke power as a lot less risky than I did forty years ago, trading smallpox for a lingering case of the flu is definitely a trade up, but why stop there?
And if we really hit the jackpot…cheap, clean green energy!..? Its hard to imagine the benefits. “Starve” may be a word that loses all meaning, along with “ignorant”. And speaking as a flag-waving red-blooded American radical, I want America to be the one who brings that gift to the world. Just because.
Because we’d need to hit the jackpot. The technology is not there for economic replacement of the bulk of our power needs to be met by solar/wind/etc. And in any case, you still need a base load of power that isn’t subject to the current environmental conditions, so you need continuous-on power. And we don’t even know even if major advances in solar are made if the materials required to make it will be widespread and cheap - we may find that finding the material to create a gazillion solar panels is impractical.
Meanwhile nuclear power is here, well understood, and construction could start soon. We could practically replace all of the coal generation with no real loss of anything. We would immediately hugely cut CO2 emissions, general pollution (coal plants actually release far more nuclear material than nuke plants to, since there’s some cobalt, uranium, etc. in the coal being burned.), etc.
Why turn down the current near-miracle for the unfounded assumption that some even bigger miracle is around the corner, when the status quo is vastly inferior to either?
Oh right, because nuclear is like… scary… man… like… yeah.
They were scheduled to release the report. It’s been underway for some time. There is no secret cabal that gets together to decide when to release climate change reports so that they achieve maximum gain. The suspicions are only in your mind.
I think your suspicions reveal a deeper truth about how you think science works - in other words, you don’t have a clue.
Sure you can’t work in a bath/haircut joke in there, Beefy? Bob Hope had a zillion of those, real zingers too. I mean, if you need lame sneers to bolster your argument. I don’t, but, hey, freak freely.
Well, you don’t need “lame sneers” to bolster your arguments since your posts are almost 100% lame sneers and 0% argument. (This isn’t quite an insult - I’ve actually enjoyed your posts more since you’ve gone over to 100% snark.)
But I would better be able to characterize people who were opposed to nuclear power if someone could actually make a decent argument. So far I haven’t heard anything outside of “but… Chernobyl!!!” with no understanding of the amazing sequence of events that was required for Chernobyl that only an arrogant megastate with no regard for safety could manage - and even then it was pretty remarkable.
I meant in threads about nuclear power. The opposition side does not have an argument more cogent than “uh… nuclear… bad… like… radiation and stuff” or “chernobyl!”
So when I summarize their arguments with “uh… nuclear power is like… bad… dude” it’s because that’s roughly the highest level of discourse I’ve ever seen from them. I could not accurately represent a quality argument with them if I tried. I simply don’t know what one would be.
for an oil company that is chump change. Its surprising there isn’t emerging energy companies. You would think that somebody would have jumped on that one by know. Are all of us going to wait for mofoing exxon to dictate how we get our energy. If it takes money to get people motivated I’m all for it. Isn’t that what America is all about?
Not even remotely true. First of all, nuclear power in the U.S. was already dead when Chernobyl happened, and it was thriving ten years after Chalk River. It was already dying before the Three Mile Island incident.
Here’s what really happened:
In the late 1960’s, ten years after Chalk River, nuclear production plans in the U.S. were estimated by the AEC to result in about 145 GW of electricity by 1980. Nuclear power was in full swing at this time. But that all changed in the early 1970’s, without any major accidents or incidents happening in between.
The first nail in the coffin of American nuclear power came in 1971, when the AEC reversed rules to allow the National Resources Defense Council to sue to stop construction of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant on environmental grounds. This set precedent which kicked off similar lawsuits around the country.
When Jimmy Carter was elected, he dealt several blows to the nuclear industry - first, new rules were drafted to make nuclear power plants much harder to build and much more expensive. The he signed an executive order forbidding reprocessing of spent fuel, which created the nuclear waste problem the U.S. has today. Jimmy Carter was all about conservation and cutting back on energy, and nuclear power was not acceptable to him even if he paid lip service to it. He was a fan of renewables like solar power (he even had solar collectors installed at the White House), and nuclear power was not where he wanted the country to go.
Nuclear power in the U.S. was given the coup de grace by Three Mile Island. When Three Mile Island had its accident, the environmental movement went bananas. It was greatly over-hyped, with all kinds of claims of destruction and radiation poisoning that never actually happened. Hollywood made “The China Syndrome” that year, while was pretty much a scary fable for anti-nuclear people. Within a few months, 65,000 anti-nuclear demonstrators marched on Washington, and set the tone for the generally anti-nuclear regulatory environment that ensued.
As a result of these regulations and lawsuits, a nuclear reactor in the U.S. was forecast to take 12 to 14 years for construction. Identical plants made by the same companies in other countries took 4-5 years. This was also the era of high interest rates, and nuclear power plants are capital-intensive, so the combination increased the cost of nuclear power plant construction by a factor of ten. The result was the death of the nuclear industry in the United States.
We are not all to blame for that. Myself and a lot of people I know were trying to explain the real facts to people, and to put the extent of the radiation leak in perspective. No one was killed, no one got serious radiation exposure. But it was like pissing in the wind. Within a couple of years of Three Mile Island, the ‘conventional wisdom’ was that it was a horrific accident, three-eyed fish would be swimming the rivers, people would be dropping dead from cancer in the next few years, and only by the grace of God did it not turn into an epic disaster killing tens of thousands of people.
Nuclear power never recovered from that in the U.S. Anti-nuke forces started teaming up with opportunistic lawyers, and every nuclear plant under construction was inundated with lawsuits and stop-work orders. The economics of nuclear power turned sour because of the new regulations and legal challenges, with tied up billions of dollars in capital for years or decades. And this was at a time when the cost of capital was extremely high. The risk of starting construction and having billions tied up for years became too high, and the nuclear industry stalled out.
That’s what happened. It was not ‘everyone’s fault’. It was a bunch of anti-nuclear activists, their lawyers, and a willing, scientifically ignorant media that shut it all down.
Later on, in the 1990’s, people started recognizing that nuclear power wasn’t the evil bogeyman it was presented as, but by that the price of oil collapsed, and the demand for new nuclear power completely dried up.
In the meantime, throughout all this France went merrily along building more nuclear plants, as did many countries. France now gets over 70% of its electricity from nuclear. THEY don’t have to worry about global warming treaties shutting their economy down. America does.
Wow, science works on a schedule, your right, I thought things were revealed as they are discovered, I had no idea it was manipulated to such an extent :rolleyes:
What is the scheduled date of the discovery of cold fusion?
I’m always amused by this news because the (generic) day before it is always “our models are sooooo good, you must trust us” and then the next day “our models did not see this coming, you must trust us”.
I put in in the “X causes cancer” category.
Like the same day Arctic go to its minimum, Antarctic ice gets a maximum, but only the first one is news.
I’m referring to The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. that was released Nov 24 in advance of the United Nations-led climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Reports like this don’t just get published willy-nilly.
However you don’t get it, you will never get it, you are actively opposed to getting it, and you revel in not getting it.
Proud, belligerent willful ignorance is very hard to fight. I’m not going to try.
Thanks for not addressing my points at all.
I didn’t say a thing about variations, of course there are, you gotta be dumb not to know it.
It is the guys who make the models who wasn us to act on them. Then, they say the models are nor reliable and still want us to act on them, that’s what “beyond expectations” mean.
Which sources, which I didn’t name, are deceptive.
Do you deny my Arctic/Antarctic ice* statement?
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