what do you think we should think? check the first post in the thread, by .. you.

Please read the posts,
i.e. #14. " technically I'm in favour of nuclear "

 

...solar is the safest...

Yup. Too bad the sun shines only a few hours a day and only part of the year. And when it does, the intensity is strongly dependent on latitude. And weather. And dust and dirt. Good thing we've got lots of illegal immigrants who can keep them clean (work Americans won't do).

Oh, and it requires lots and lots of wide open spaces that otherwise could support wildlife. Or be used grow food that people could eat. Or on which cattle could graze. I like filet mignon. I also like bacon. But I digress.

But we can build batteries! Lots and lots of them. Poor kids in Africa can dig 'em up for us. Their short lives weren't worth all that much anyway. Let's put them to use. Of course, those kids won't be working for us, they'll work for the Chinese. The Chinese love their workers (they are a workers' paradise, donchya know), and will treat them right. We'll buy those batteries from China, and the solar cells, too.

The Chinese military needs the money.

And then we can bury those batteries. Megatons worth. Underneath our cities close to where the stored power will be used.

Of course, we'll need flood prevention. Don't want those batteries getting wet...the resulting conflagration could be biblical. But this'll never happen! We'll just install backup generators to run the pumps. Just in case. Underground. With the batteries.

Damn. So many ways to be doomed. Please send the asteroid.

 

Please read the posts,
i.e. #14. " technically I'm in favour of nuclear "

Technically, I'm in favour of cannibalism, once we sort out the eating human flesh problem.

 

Technically, I'm in favour of cannibalism, once we sort out the eating human flesh problem.

Not a problem, things worked out for the survivors. Then there was that plane crash I forget where. Your starving you can get use to flesh eating.

Solar panels are just wonderful assuming you have constant bright sunny days. Here in NE Ohio winters do not offer much daylight and all winter people are eating prescription vitamin D. Progressive Insurance built a large solar array about 10 miles from me on I-271. This was several years ago. After a short period the panels are falling over and winters they are snow and ice covered. Progressive got a pile of money from the government (Obama Administration) and we also have Lincoln Electric who opted to a giant wind turbine, a real giant 2.0 Mega Watt. Came in from Germany. This is a brief overview of the Lincoln Electric monster. Lincoln Electric was right behind our facility so every day we watched it grow piece by Pirce. The 2.5 Mega watt tower only meets 10% of Lincoln Electrics needs. This was a 10 Million dollar cost. It was in no way great but the US government gave them 25% More of a novelty.

Here is the classic. The Cleveland Great Lakes science center placed one out there. Just a small learning tool. Ran for a year and seized up. The last 5 years it just sits there broken, waiting on parts. So here in Ohio...

The majority of electricity in Ohio comes from:

• Coal. Coal is a type of fossil fuel that generates almost 70 percent of the electricity used in the state of Ohio. Burning coal generates heat, which is applied to water to form steam, which is then used to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
• Natural Gas. Natural gas is another type of fossil fuel, responsible for a little over 15 percent of Ohio’s electricity. Natural gas is burned for steam generation like coal or to produce a combustion gas that spins a turbine.
• Other Sources. The remaining 15 percent of electricity is divided among several sources, including petroleum, nuclear energy, hydropower, wind turbines, solar power, geothermal energy, and biomass energy. As renewable sources of energy become more cost efficient, more electric utility suppliers will likely increase the percentage of electricity they draw from those sources.

Yet they keep making legislation promising by 2030 everything will be renewable. Good luck as this is what happens when clueless politicians with no engineers plan large scale power sources. I don't see much changing Under Obama Administration all in all over 750 million tax dollars were poured into Solyndra and we saw hoe that worked out.

Ron

 

I'm in favor of Moon Energy. We need to harness those 8' tides...

 

I'm in favor of Moon Energy. We need to harness those 8' tides...

I'm with you, at the count of 3 everyone drop their drawers.

 

Technically, I'm in favour of cannibalism, once we sort out the eating human flesh problem.

Yuk

 

Interesting how, what starts as a serious discussion, degenerates into the gross.

 

Interesting how, what starts as a serious discussion, degenerates into the gross.

It stopped being a serious discussion about nuclear power long before his prognostications of technical objections. I've heard the same, frankly IMO, dishonest oppositions to nuclear power for decades. The time is now to get off the fossil fuel nightmare train to catastrophic global warming. If that requires living with the danger of nuclear fission energy, it's well worth the risk.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/30/1119904819/nuclear-power-environmentalists-california-germany-japan
Why even environmentalists are supporting nuclear power today

It seemed quixotic, even hopeless, in 2016, when Shellenberger along with the pioneering climate scientist James Hansen and Stewart Brand, founder of the crunchy Whole Earth Catalog, began advocating to save Diablo Canyon.

"We were basically excluded from polite conversation for even talking about keeping the plant open," recalled Shellenberger. Promoting nuclear as an important tool in fighting climate change would get him dismissed by fellow environmentalists as a conspiracy theorist or, falsely, as a corporate shill, he added.

 

Maybe the way to overcome a few of the hurdles to building a new nuke would be to call it something else. I'm thinking a nuclear-powered carbon sequestration machine would be harder to argue against. Do you want to lower CO2 in the atmosphere or not?! Of course our machine might make a little extra power for the grid.

It might be a challenge to get enough cash flow out of sequestering carbon, but again, aren't those people serious enough to put their money where there mouths are?

 

Interesting how, what starts as a serious discussion, degenerates into the gross.

Entropy in a thread, regardless of the topic or forum it resides, always increases with the thread's length.

 

The time is now to get off the fossil fuel nightmare train to catastrophic global warming.

I'm not even with you on this -- I simply don't believe it (I am quite knowledgeable about IR absorption and emission especially with regard to CO2). I also know the models they've used to predict climate have been abysmal in predicting the future (a requirement of the scientific method to support a hypothesis). I think climate cooling/climate heating/climate change/climate weirding/climate whatever is just another method/form of political control.

The graph I posted at the start is somewhat misleading. It looks like fossil fuels are literally killing people, and we would be better off without them.

This is simply false. The easy cheap energy provided by fossil fuels supports the lives of over 6 billion people. Most of those would be dead in a few weeks if we shut down the oil industry today.

Further, if we completely transition to another "carbon free" energy source -- solor, wind, nuclear, geo, hydro, etc. -- the economies-of-scale of processing petroleum disintegrate. All the things produced from petroleum suddenly become prohibitively expensive. This pretty much includes everything we used today that makes our lives better than brutish and short.

Additionally, China is LOLing over our willingness to impoverish ourselves with renewables -- purchased from them -- while they continue to commission dozens of new coal fired power plants each year. There is nothing we can do to avoid that "tipping point" (if such a thing actually exists) because they are the reason for an increase in overall carbon use -- not us -- and they are not willing to destroy their economy as we are. Period.

Finally, I've now multiple threads mentioning all the ways to be doomed. Inventing doomsday scenarios is a hobby for many -- especially for those with a desire to control the behavior and activities of others. Crossing "global whatever" off the list will not satiate them. They'll just invent a new way to be doomed.

 

Its interesting,
the question was on line of whe we thoguth nuclear power wpuld be safe
I was expecting ,
a) it is now
or
b) around X years ( in the future)
or
c) never

but there seem to be a fair few extremist who just want to "talk" and not answer the question
ah well,
its a pity that we can't even ask a simple question here.

 

Its interesting,
the question was on line of whe we thoguth nuclear power wpuld be safe
I was expecting ,
a) it is now
or
b) around X years ( in the future)
or
c) never

but there seem to be a fair few extremist who just want to "talk" and not answer the question
ah well,
its a pity that we can't even ask a simple question here.

You're not listening then because your question has been answered multiple times, that's the pity. Most of us have said Nuclear Power is Safe Today. There is a nuance to those answers IMO you don't care to see. The fact it's not perfectly safe with room for improvement like cars should not be a deterrence to using the technology today to save us from fossil fueled driven climate change potentially much worse for the world population than nuclear accidents.

 

I'm not even with you on this -- I simply don't believe it (I am quite knowledgeable about IR absorption and emission especially with regard to CO2). I also know the models they've used to predict climate have been abysmal in predicting the future (a requirement of the scientific method to support a hypothesis). I think climate cooling/climate heating/climate change/climate weirding/climate whatever is just another method/form of political control.

Sorry buddy but I believe in objective reality like the oil companies do IRT climate change from burning fossil fuels, not conspiracy theories.
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming

Four others joined Dunlop at the podium that day, one of whom had made the journey from California – and Hungary before that. The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. [....] But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?

Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.


How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:

At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.


But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.

Teller was nobody's fool.

 

You're not listening then because your question has been answered multiple times, that's the pity. Most of us have said Nuclear Power is Safe Today. There is a nuance to those answers IMO you don't care to see. The fact it's not perfectly safe with room for improvement like cars should not be a deterrence to using the technology today to save us from fossil fueled driven climate change potentially much worse for the world population than nuclear accidents.

I was assuming there was not one answer,
but I could be wrong, are you saying there is one answer ?
I am look to pool open ideas from people,
see what people in different cultures and backgrounds think
all answers are as valid as another.

 

I was assuming there was not one answer,
but I could be wrong, are you saying there is one answer ?
I am look to pool open ideas from people,
see what people in different cultures and backgrounds think
all answers are as valid as another.

What does that mean?
Is it like asking is the spaceflight 'safe'?

IMO you're not looking for a reasonably informed answer, you're looking for bias confirmation.

 

Teller was nobody's fool.

...energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels.

Proven wrong.

It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York

Wrong. According to NASA:

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet, causing climate change. Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years.

I live on the freakin' beach, dammit, and have for the last 50 years. Sea level has not changed one bit. You can't gaslight me on this.

But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.

And there is a possibility that they won't!

Teller was wrong about lots. I see no reason to ignore the conclusions of my own mind in favor of his.

 

And besides! -- all we are doing is impoverishing the West and enriching the East for no reduction in atmospheric CO2.

 

Proven wrong.



Wrong. According to NASA:



I live on the freakin' beach, dammit, and have for the last 50 years. Sea level has not changed one bit. You can't gaslight me on this.



And there is a possibility that they won't!

Teller was wrong about lots. I see no reason to ignore the conclusions of my own mind in favor of his.

I'm not trying to change your mind but thank goodness climate science listened to people like Teller and convinced others in charge to start reducing emission decades ago from, burn baby burn, so we don't have the extremes of climate change today predicted earlier.