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martin
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« Reply #1 on: December 08, 2011, 11:12:00 AM » |
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Well, if Bill Gates is involved it'll probably take forever to get running, will cost a fortune to buy, need expensive updates, and will monotonously produce the "blue screen of death" as it conks out....  |
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Unpaid volunteer administrator and moderator (not employed by Navitron) - Views expressed are my own - curmudgeonly babyboomer! - http://www.farmco.co.uk |
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mpooley
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« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2011, 11:16:19 AM » |
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I get the feeling Martin that even if it was proved to be entirely safe ,ate up all the old nuclear waste and was exceptionally productive you would still never accept it.
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martin
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« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2011, 11:28:49 AM » |
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Rather academic question on the point of "safety" - if that were possible (which I doubt), then I'd certainly consider it as a possibility, but I think that's rather akin to asking for solar panels that produce all day and all year.......... Liquid sodium? - nice stuff - I seem to remember a recent piece on a teacher who dropped a piece on a lab bench, it burned it's way all the way down to the floor below...........
And as I've said before, probably one of the very worst things for mankind would be to find a cheap, safe and inexhaustible form of energy - all that would do is give the "excuse" to use up the last remaining reserves of everything else with continued "5 planet" consumption levels, and continue polluting the bejaysus out of the environment (which could be far worse than what we now face....)
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« Last Edit: December 08, 2011, 11:32:09 AM by martin »
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Unpaid volunteer administrator and moderator (not employed by Navitron) - Views expressed are my own - curmudgeonly babyboomer! - http://www.farmco.co.uk |
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mpooley
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« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2011, 11:35:50 AM » |
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Basically you want us to go back to the middle ages where we all knit our own trousers from wool gathered from the countryside from squirrels.
and sit round eco friendly twig fires in our mud hut chatting about how much CO2 we are saving.
Nearly everything we have in our modern way of life (which you seem to hate) comes from cheap energy and uses Chemicals in manufacturing.
Personally I don't like the idea of my descendants living a life similar to my ancestors.
Because it wasn't very nice!
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biff
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« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2011, 11:43:00 AM » |
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simply put,
we do not want to end up with something like the japanese mess and if they cannot keep the lid on it or improve it then nobody can.
may i also add.that had such a disaster happened anywhere in germany france or england,there would have been no que of vounteers rushing in the door to certain horrible death. there would be riots and revenge.
biff
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spaces
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« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2011, 11:58:09 AM » |
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The 'modern' way of life you describe is rapidly becoming how things used to be. We have had the benefits of 'free' and 'unlimited' energy for the masses for decades with the extraordinary advances and growth which follow. But remember the railway, aircraft and the roller bearing (without which we wouldn't have bicycles, motor bikes or any other efficient motor vehicle) were all invented in the coal age or right at the start of the oil age.
People in the UK and US still live in damp and festering housing, people still die (en masse) of diet-related diseases, etc.
I feel that a long period of relative struggle followed by a plentiful and cheap energy discovery is what has created the advances of the 19th and 20th centuries. Continued unlimited, everlasting energy only comes from our careful and clever use of solar/fluvial power. It is the military use of nuclear which promotes its continuing use - and Germany which, having destroyed Europe 70 years ago, knows better. Similarly Switzerland, the once most-feared army in Europe, is now a neutral country with self-defence its only military purpose.
I wonder how long it will be before most Joe Publics realise the futility of war (and learn to ignore their politicians) - as well as the enormous benefits of peaceful living in a world where we aren't continually polluting the air we breathe and soil we eat from?
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martin
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« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2011, 12:21:16 PM » |
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I don't subscribe to the "stone age" view - we aren't "where we are" just because we polluted the hell out of the planet - the negatives came about because of the way we did things. We can live healthy, productive and happy lives whilst treading more lightly on the planet - if only we could regain the "positives" of stone age life too (an unpolluted environment for a start). If consumption and despoilation of the environment was how we measured "civilisation", blobboid Americans living off junk food, driving Hummers, and using resources like we had 5 planets would be at the very pinnacle...  As I've said innumerable times, I remember an age when virtually noone flew, kids walked or biked to school, hedgerows were denuded of their bounty in autumn, bedrooms were unheated etc etc etc - arguably in many ways, life was genuinely "better", so I really don't swallow the nonsense touted by the pro-nuclear brigade that life is "impossible" without it...... |
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Unpaid volunteer administrator and moderator (not employed by Navitron) - Views expressed are my own - curmudgeonly babyboomer! - http://www.farmco.co.uk |
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artful_bodger
Jr. Member
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Posts: 64
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« Reply #8 on: December 08, 2011, 02:39:03 PM » |
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like or loathe it, nuclear is one solution to keep us going whilst the fossil fuels run down.
Nuff said, otherwise this thread will run forever and look like every other pro/against nuclear debate.
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If a man says something in a forest and a women doesn't hear, is he still wrong?
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martin
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« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2011, 03:22:16 PM » |
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"is one solution to keep us going whilst the fossil fuels run down" - wrong! - possibly part of a solution, but is ludicrously expensive, won't be in time to plug the energy gap towards which we are hurtling, and will rob genuine renewables of much-needed funding  |
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GavinA
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« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2011, 03:57:18 PM » |
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may or may not work, may or may not be safe, may or may not have huge long term costs etc etc. the nuclear industry has been making claims like this for it's next generation of stations since the 50's, and they've all proved false so far. I don't see any particular reason to believe this particular claim now, although it seems worthwhile to invest in a pilot plant. Even if a pilot were successful, it'd still be 2030 or beyond before these could be rolled out to any significant extent, so it's not going to be much use in the crucial period between now and then. |
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at home | 80 tubes, 2 tanks direct PV powered SWH + 5 x Yingli 185Wp solar PV panels.
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vstar
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« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2011, 04:50:05 PM » |
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As I've said innumerable times, I remember an age when virtually noone flew, kids walked or biked to school, hedgerows were denuded of their bounty in autumn, bedrooms were unheated etc etc etc - arguably in many ways, life was genuinely "better", so I really don't swallow the nonsense touted by the pro-nuclear brigade that life is "impossible" without it......
Yes, Martin I remember the '70s, my childhood was very much like that... and I wish my childrens childhood could have been like that, BUT we were burning a shed load of coal/gas/oil even then. All of which was pumping out tonnes of pollution (as well as radiation*), the trouble isn't how much energy we're using, the real problem is that there are too many of us using energy now, the UK population has risen from 55 to 65 million, but the world population has gone from 3.5 billion to 7 billion... That's the real problem... There's a very informative video on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY it's in 8 parts of 8-9 mins each, stick with it... That's the real problem, whichever way you look at it, we need SERIOUS population control... before we run out food and water never mind power for a cuppa... V. *Yes, uranium in coal, which is burnt and pumped into the atmosphere emits far more radiation than any nuclear power station... |
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Solal
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« Reply #12 on: December 08, 2011, 05:31:06 PM » |
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The world population in 1920 was around 2 billion. Now India and China alone are well above that. Scary isn't it? We've been living the good life for years though. Fewer than 30 percent of India's 950 million people have bathrooms in their homes or easy access to public toilets. The rest routinely relieve themselves in the open -- along roadsides, on farmland or in municipal parks.How many of you had toilets in your homes as kids? It was the back of the ditch for us as kids or in with the cows in the byre and hope you didn't get kicked.  We were lucky though, no snakes in Ireland to jump up and bite you. Big problem in India. I was at a barbeque in the summer and one guy went inside to use the toilet and another guy remarked " Long ago people ate inside the home and shat outside, now they eat outside and shat inside".  |
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« Last Edit: December 08, 2011, 05:51:20 PM by Solal »
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wookey
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« Reply #13 on: December 08, 2011, 06:11:18 PM » |
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Interesting. I've read a lot of stuff suggesting that LFTR is a very interesting technology that would clearly merit a pilot plant, and I understand the first of those is likely to be built in China soonish (not clear if it's actually funded and going ahead yet). I haven't come across the Travelling Wave design, but I guess it's good enough to interest people with serious money to spend. Like Gavin, I wait to be convinced, but if only because these designs run on existing nuclear waste, they are very intersting. If you can solve the waste problem and make energy doing so (existing reactors only get about 1% of the energy out before declaring the fuel 'used up') that has to be a good thing.
The new designs also helpfully separate the power-generation and bomb-making aspects which also has to be a good thing. That's true of LFTR - not read up on TW yet to see if it is the same.
Intellectual Ventures, mind you, are scumbags, at least in the area of software, who game the patent system in order to make money for doing nothing. They sit around brainstorming up ideas, then write them down and patent them, so that when someone else thinks them up and makes something with them, IV can screw them over. That's not nice, but sadly is legal, and even encouraged in the US.
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Wookey
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rt29781
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« Reply #14 on: December 08, 2011, 06:16:56 PM » |
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Basically you want us to go back to the middle ages where we all knit our own trousers from wool gathered from the countryside from squirrels.
and sit round eco friendly twig fires in our mud hut chatting about how much CO2 we are saving.
Nearly everything we have in our modern way of life (which you seem to hate) comes from cheap energy and uses Chemicals in manufacturing.
Personally I don't like the idea of my descendants living a life similar to my ancestors.
Because it wasn't very nice!
Why do we need to go back to the middle ages as regards living conditions. We have the technology to reduce our carbon usage and we have massive unemployment. Fixing this just needs us to print some money (just like we did to rescue the banks) and get on with building smart grids, solar farms, wind farms, hydrogen production units and methane conversion units etc. If we put the same effort into that as we did into winning the second world war we would be out of danger quickly. Judging by the weather today in Scotland it seems nature is going to remind us regularly why we need to get on and reduce carbon pollution |
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