XT, I am well aware that coal is going to be around for awhile. I regret that, because it is such a dirty energy producer that we may not be able to recover from the damage it is causing to the planet.
I also know that alternative energy is not ready now. it may have been if we had financed and stressed it a decade or so ago. But we did not and we are not doing it now.
But nuclear is not the answer. It takes too damn long to get on line. It costs too damn much to build the plants. It is inherently dangerous. It creates a radioactive waste problem that nobody can solve.
We are in limbo with no good way out. We can just hope we survive the damage. But as the ozone numbers clearly demonstrate, we are in trouble.
good fricking grief gonzo.
I think you will have to admit that Gonzo is way smarter than the other two though, right?
And lev apparently thinks that when comparing the dangers of nuclear and coal you need to add in the good that coal’s electricity has done for all time vs nuclear’s smaller amount of good, due to shorter existence and smaller market share.
That’s way stupider than anything Gonzo said. Gonz just believes some dodgy statistics.
How many milion times above the safe level of what are we today?
Calcium 67? Helium 7? Rutherfordium 666? Zinc 41.6?
From the IAEA update web site:
-XT
This report pains me, as I am a big fan of the John Muir trust and a lot of the work they do (funnily enough for a keen hiker who lives in scotland).
However, they are extremely biased against windfarms, and the report is a hatchet job. It’s going to be a lot more interesting when the offshore windfarms get going - as we know a fair bit about building offshore installations, and by fuck our coast line gets enough wind. Anyone who’s ever been on an oil rig during a storm will have no problem believing there’s a lot of power to be tapped there.
But Scotland is a pretty rare case. We’ve got a tiny population, a large amount of coastline, and all of it in the famously windy north sea. There’s also the capacity to use that to pump water into storage reservoirs up hill to help sort the peak power v peak demand problem.
Just in the interest of fairness and all. I’m no more anti-wind than I am anti-nuclear. I think we’re going to need a mix of different techs to meet our upcoming requirements.
In a sense this argument distills down to a comparison of bad numbers. When someone states the radioactive water is 5 million times over safe standards, a reply will be no, its only 3 million times over. As XT showed above, the radiation is escaping into the food supply, both land and sea. When the food supply is poisoned, it is bad and will continue for a long time.
I read yesterday, the big fear at the reactors is more explosions. This mess will continue for a long time.
But I believe radioactive food is a bad thing. Ann Colter thinks it is beneficial. Perhaps we should put small amounts in everybody’s food until it is gone. Problem solved.
Jimmy Carter had solar collectors on the White House roof (removed by the next occupant) and wore a sweater on TV saying we all should conserve energy. How different things might have been if those policies had continued.
Heard on the radio recently that regarding global warming:
Every dollar spent on energy conservation produced 7 times the greenhouse gas reduction than would be produced by that dollar funding nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuel energy.
Which is a lie.
I actually once rented a house in Martinez, California that was built by John Muir for his daughter. Muir also lived in Martinez. I think the rule of thumb in the wind industry is that you can expect about 25% of the nameplate capacity in good areas, so you need to spread out four times the needed capacity across a continent.
And I can certainly see how people might think that wind farms are ugly. I don’t personally agree that they are ugly.
http://ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
The nuclear industry does not care who dies 30 years from now. Nor how many. Nor how much it costs future generations to clean up. Their profits are now. Nor do the imbeciles who post pro nuke.
Seeing nuclear power has been around for over 30 years, please point to the hordes of people who have died because of it. Please compare it to the safety record of other sources of power over the same time period that have equivalent power output.
Pointing out the people who died from radioactive fall out is like trying to show the people who died from radioactive coal ash. You know it must have happened, but nobody can actually prove it.
I know it must have happened? How do I know this? How do you know this? What proof do you have?
You believe it must be so, but that doesn’t make it so.
People arguing against coal claim it kills all these people. Every year. But you can’t point to all the bodies and say, “coal killed them!”
Same for nuclear fall out around the world. Statistics say people must have died from it, but nobody can point to the bodies and say “radiation killed them!”
It’s a problem.
Well, actually not for the people running coal and nuclear power plants. The extreme difficulty in proving causation is a great protection for all kinds of pollutants, not just a leaking reactor or a coal plant.
This argument again?
Nuke has been around for close to 70 years now, and the only thing it’s proven is that it’s expensive and dangerous and always will be expensive and dangerous. How long are you going to keep falling for the exact same scam?
All the renewable technologies have proven what they can do right now and the technologies regularly experience breakthroughs and improvements. They are doing it right now.
The only improvement nuke is capable of is going from 70-year-old technology to “newer” 65-year-old technology. What the hell??
France sells its heavily subsidized “cheap” baseload nuke power to other countries, and then turns around and imports expensive fossil fuel peak load power from other countries, as well as all it’s transportation fuel. They are anything but energy independent and they pollute just as much as any other country, except the CO2 emissions count against the fossil fuel exporting countries, which makes France look good in headlines, but not so good when you actually start reading about it.
France has reprocessing! Ooh! How’s that working out for them? Have they gobbled up and rendered safe all the world’s nuclear fuel? Not a chance. I read they can get 60 times more power from their reprocessed even more highly refined plutonium. That’s nice. You can’t ramp a 1000MW nuke plant up to 60,000MW nuke plant. That’s silly. You’d have to run your 1KMW plant 60 times as long. So, if a nuke plant has a design life of 50 years, now we have to design plants that will run for 3,000 years? Riiight! Or, maybe we’ll build 60 times more plants. Ha, ha! G’luck with that.
Nuke has murdered land. Places where nuke plants are unusable . Chernobyl radiated a huge part of land that will not be usable again.
Nuke has destroyed coastal land in Japan, where land is very precious. They eventually will have a radioactive scar along their coast.
We are creating pockets of useless land all over the world.
It’s funny on a huge scale, that even after exactly what the people against nuclear power said they were worried about has happened, the supporters still think that nuclear power is ‘safe’.
No matter what happens, no matter how many reactors fail, leak, burn or explode, a true nuclear believer will not change their mind. No matter how bad an accident, they actually will still believe.
This is how religions are born.
Oops. Sorry. I should go to the rant room now. Please go back to your calm rational discussion of anything nuclear. (except the crisis in Japan).