climate humor

Electric is great for UPS, many stops on fixed routes. I don't want one: I want to be able to jump in my car and drive to Truckee when I feel like it, without recharging on the way.

Modern cars are very clean, something like 100x better than they used to be. Most diesels are still pretty nasty.

There are some electric airplanes around, like self-lofting gliders, mostly novelty stuff, good for 1/2 hour flights. There's talk of hybrids.

As safe as touted? There's no way of measuring or comparing all the rumor/claim/PR/noise in the world media with safety! Bad claim! No biscuit!

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But the earthquake and tsunami on that occasion were unprecedented in magnitude! Of course, in the absence of observed events of that amplitude, there is resistance to 'considering' (or, should we say 'fantasizing'?).

Opening a door for extra fear, uncertainty, doubt? That's a generic strategy for manipulating people, and not at all limited to nuclear power- you could complete that sentence with references to toe fungus, or crustal subduction, or ants.

Virginia is the site of that study and plant. There WAS a recent earthquake there,magnitude 5.7, and in the last century, how many others? Zero? Proximity to a fault is hard to determine, when the only fault data is from archaeology. As nearly as USGS can tell, there hasn't been a magnitude 6+ earthquake east of the Rockies in recorded history.

Are you on drugs? We're not letting you anywhere near the nuclear discussion, much less the nuclear plants.

Silly boy. The fact that we have not seen an earth quake in the last

So now we know that our plans were not realistic. In the US we are reviewing our earthquake assessments in view of the more recent events and will be good to go for... what, the next 20 years or so until we find yet another way we underestimated the issues and over estimated our ability to design such complex and dangerous systems.

Did you have a point? Actually you are spouting nonsense.

You are a late comer to the conversation. First, I already know about the earthquake. I am right now about 10 miles from earthquake ground zero and three miles from the North Anna reactors. Why do you think I know about all this?

Actually I believe this is not correct. There is a major fault in the general vicinity of St Louis called the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

A number of quakes exceeding 6.0 magnitude have been recorded there. The historical record indicates the area is due for a new quake any time now and it may be as large as the ones in the early 1800s.

If you are quoting USGS in the sense of what they have measured, then you are ignoring a lot of info about very dangerous faults. I think the USGS didn't exist in 1811 when the ground was moving. Fortunately there are no nuclear plants anywhere near the New Madrid seismic zone.

More important is that the magnitude 5.8 quake shook the North Anna power plant with twice the intensity it was designed for. Fortunately even with that level of shaking, there was adequate margin built in so nothing significant happened that we know of. Still, this again illustrates how we fail to anticipate the hazards.

That's why we will always have gasoline.

Where does all the smog come from? On flights to the states, you can see the brown wall starting at the border.

Smog is still a serious problem here in Canada, and we have very strict emissions requirements. I live on the Great Lakes where the air is fresh and clear. Whenever I drive near Toronto, I get so sick as I drive by that I have a hard time completing the trip.

There's plans for a round-the-world flight using solar. Good for a couple of columns in the paper, but of no practical value. O'Hare runs on kerosene, not photons.

I believe the US Military is the world's largest single consumer of fossil fuels. They have run tests on biofuels at a hundred dollars a gallon and found they work fine. But it will be a while before renewables replace conventional oil in a tank.

World shipping runs on oil. Some of the large tankers burn over a hundred tons per day:

So even if thorium molten salt reactors were available tomorrow, they may have little overall impact on CO2 production.

That's absolutely terrible, but Chernobyl wasn't even a design failure; they just ran the thing way outside its design envelope.

The toungue in cheek part of my comment is that we simply burn so much coal that the actual radiation is higher.

Of course. I hate to be that guy, but I bet nobody builds a plant like that again... for one, it's one of those old G.E. designs; for another, I am sure that storm surge models have been redone in spades.

I appreciate the blurb.

So it's really important to make sure it goes well.

So breeder reactors. Security problem? Dead zones - everything that moves within radius X of it dies. Weapons potential? Just don't. It should be abundantly obvious to everyone by now that nuclear weapons are never going to be used.

MAD is ironclad game theory.

So you're trading a few acute disasters in a region for one global, slow-moving (potential) disaster.

It's always important to limit the scope of the problems you're trying to solve.

The Big Ugly Fact is: the carrying capacity of Planet Earth for humans was about 1 billion in 1790.

Now we're up to seven billion. We cannot go back.

So they did the wrong thing anyway. But it's okay because they were a-scared.

You may be right; it may well be that the political climate is such that hu-mans simply can't pull off things like that. I won't live long enough to see the full effects of that play out, but my kids will.

I don't think ti will come down to hunting rats by candlelight, but I'd no longer be surprised. If it does, I'd tell 'em "enjoy it; you earned it."

I don't read it that way.

When you cannot tell the truth, you are ed. It's time to resign. Tell the truth anyway.

Cascaded failure, then.

I will simply say that if we* - collectively - cannot have an adult and reasoned discussion of what to do with large risk items like this, then we pretty much get what we deserve as a species.

As per XKCD: "I'd like to file a bug report...."

But the way they "breed" fuel is by turning U238 into 239Pu and 240Pu.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You aren't listening. Those numbers only consider the very tiny amount of radiation that leaks during *normal* operation. Do you see any indication they counted the radiation from the two disasters? I don't recall what the date of the report was, but I think it was from before Fukushima.

The bottom line is this "fact" isn't true.

Don't assume we haven't built similar problems into our designs. The point is humans aren't infallible. If you'd like to get a subjective idea of the risk-damage product, ask your insurance agent about a policy protecting you from a nuclear accident. They are experts at assessing risk and giving it a monetary value.

Which is clearly not possible. Or we would have avoided two terrible accidents.

Not sure what you are talking about.

No? We can and will... eventually. There is no choice. Those like Larkin who refuse to consider the simple mathematical facts just help speed us along the road to shortages and a reducing population.

Lol, in fact Larkin is the poster child for the dinosaur contingent of the human race. He refuses to consider any other fuel source for his car because "I want to be able to jump in my car and drive to Truckee when I feel like it". But then he admits to not being good at math. He'd rather just give it a go and see how it runs.

It isn't a fact; it's a bumper sticker. I rather doubt that the net release from Chernobyl and Fukishima put together amounts to much on a global scale.

I don't know what you do all day, but I just spent one basically arguing with people who built something that doesn't work. So don't do that.

Wooden building could be a mass disaster; ask Mrs. O'Leary's cow or 1904 San Francisco.

If we're gonna use some horror movie narrative as the limiting factor for what we can do, we are going to do a lot less stuff than we used to.

We probably have. But we don't know.

I'm aware of that.

Look; actuaries are fine so long as you stay within certain limits. They're not even remotely reliable when you're dealing with the unknown. They know how to tdo Bayesian projections and that's about it.

Insurance is wonderful, but it's no way to run things.

People thought surgery was impossible for centuries. But almost nothing anyone, except perhaps practitioners, does seems to actually help us have a better system of energy. It's just one horror movie after another. Took a tsunami to make all the predictions even come true.

Now, if you are saying "this is beyond human calculation", then I'd agree that that is possible. I don't thgink it's *necessary*. But it might be how it is.

One of the things I do is run deployment risk scenarios. It's embarrassing when you find a problem at that stage, but it's better than going with it.

But please - we don't have Massive Nuclear Power not because it's impossible, but because we don't have any faith in our ability to execute. And that's fine.

AGW, presuming it exists. I will neither confirm nor deny; I only note the various uncertainties.

See, I don't think so. I would not bet that way.

I think - and I mean this with the most possible respect - that you've bought into the Great Apocolyptic Narrative.

I don't blame you - it's an amazing story. But there are two cases:

By the Anthropic Principle, only 2) matters.

I pretty much *have* to enjoy the fact that I exist. I therefore have to extend the same courtesy to everyone else. By induction, I simply cannot embrace some human population crash.

If it happens, then I feel foolish ( assuming I still exist ) but I know which way I bet.

I'm probably right along there with him. When you see all the stuff they thought was gonna save us turn sour, it's hard not to be this way.

That doesn't sound unreasonable.

So?

What's specifically wrong with that? Are you familiar with The Calculation Problem? With how uncertainties multiply?

It's just fascinating, how little you can actually know. So diving in, so long as it does not scare the horses, sounds like a perfectly valid approach.

On Fri, 31 Oct 2014 22:44:25 -0500, Les Cargill Gave us:

Ten of each would be a pittance compared to what was released during the test and build years.

That is one difference between a generation source and a weapon of destruction 'source'.

A few orders of magnitude worth of 'difference'.

Look at the findings at Bikini Atoll for some data as one example.

Ok, when we reach that point we can put it in our homes. But that point is not now as evidenced by two major nuclear disasters.

You ramble greatly and respond to the facts not so much. Nothing is "impossible". But we are currently fooling ourselves into believing that nuclear is an optimal solution to our energy problems when it is far from that.

You digress so far from the topic I have no idea what you are saying. Read the above thread. I mention nuclear waste, you talk about breeder reactors, security, dead zones, weapons... then MAD. Then you move on to AGW. You make no sense.

So you believe the human population of the earth will continue to increase without limit?

No, but I understand the mathematics to population growth and understand that there are limited supplies and resources. What most people fail to understand that although humans have been growing exponentially for most of history (save the occasional plague) we have reached the point where we are literally poisoning our Petri dish no differently than cultures in a lab. Humans have no special ability to overpopulate our support network.

It is not likely to be a major factor in my lifetime, but only because more than half of it is gone. If I were in college now, I believe I would see the apex of man before the end of my natural life.

You seem to misunderstand me.

You seem to think there are great uncertainties about the limits of human population growth. Had it not been for the green revolution we would have seen widespread famine in parts of the world. That has only delayed the problem. It is still there and not so far off. These are not uncertainties. The only thing uncertain is when, not if.

Not recorded, exactly; it was 1811 and 1812, and they are estimated. Still, they WERE apparently above magnitude 6, as you say.

Don't you mean archaeological record? There's not a lot of recorded history for Missouri before 1811.

Greenhouse gas pollution and resultant warming and climate change are a threat to billions of people for centuries to come, and deserve at least some serious reading - I'd recommend the papers online at

I certainly will NOT watch the infomercial. I'd do better research than that if it was a matter of choosing kitchen knives. Do you like your Ginzu knives?

So, you rant against something you haven't seen. Why would the 'Sky Is Falling' side publish a paper that didn't agree 100% with their views?

BTW, I've never seen a Ginzu knife, nor wanted to. I'm happy enough with the 50+ year old plain steel knives that I have.

Dig a little harder. 1811 and 1812 were the big quakes. 6.0 is not a big quake.

Again, you need to dig further.

I watched it and it is not anything anyone should take seriously, virtually no factual information, just hype.

lots

es

Look up and learn about radioactive components of coal combustion. Quite a bit of thoruim and uranium there. Enough to enlighten even you.

?-)

Sorry , history refutes you.

NO. It was a real politick dare that worked out for the US. After all it is not like it would be our (US) first war shot.

Actually, the world has warmed, but not as quickly as it did in the 1990's.

If you look at the longer-term temperature record, you will find that the long term warming trend is complicated by shorter term excursions which more or less tie up with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

It's unlikely to presage a mini ice age. The Sun's output does change, but not all that much, and not enough to explain the current warming, the ice ages or anything big enough to be interesting.