OT: Global cooling 34 million years ago

"Blame the sun"? Where else, exactly, other than volcanoes. geothermal heat, and cosmic rays, does ALL of Earth's energy come from?

And if I ever see one of you fanatics even _acknowledge the existence of_ WATER, ... ah, hell, since it's a sure thing, I'll bet $1000.00* that none will.

Thanks, Rich

*(Nigerian Internet Money) ;-)

We're not even done with the LAST one yet! We're simply getting closer to an end in the current lull. >:->

Cheers! Rich

I wonder why all warmingists seem to be against Nuclear energy - it's got ZERO EMISSIONS! Maybe just the terror of the unknown that all ignorant savages have?

Thanks, Rich

They are not against warming or against nuclear power as such. They are against humanity and any things that aid humanity. They don't want alternative energy sources, they want less energy to be available to mankind. So they try to choke off every possible source. If someone invented a clean, cheap source of, say, fusion energy, they'd be against it.

John

Actually, I'm against it too, at least if it is used in the unlimited quantities that are available to us (about 0.02% of the oceans is a *lot*). That shouldn't matter as much because, if humans are still around, the Earth will be a bit of a boring place to be as compared to, say, the Moon or Mars, but the population and especially energy demand will still be enough to be worried about.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

Actually, I'm against it too, at least if it is used in the unlimited quantities that are available to us (about 0.02% of the oceans is a *lot*). That shouldn't matter as much because, if humans are still around, the Earth will be a bit of a boring place to be as compared to, say, the Moon or Mars, but the population and especially energy demand will still be enough to be worried about.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

Actually, I'm against it too, at least if it is used in the unlimited quantities that are available to us (about 0.02% of the oceans is a *lot*). That shouldn't matter as much because, if humans are still around, the Earth will be a bit of a boring place to be as compared to, say, the Moon or Mars, but the population and especially energy demand will still be enough to be worried about.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

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The IPCC's prediction is of what is likely to happen at the end of this century. It would seem that thirty years strikes then as a little too short term for comfort.

As we get a better grip of what is going on in the oceans, the consequences of the multi-decadal ocean oscillations may become more predictable.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

See? What I said.

John

Perhaps warmingists know enough physicis to be aware that nuclear fission produces radioactive nuclear waste, which emits alpha, beta and gamma rays. An ignorant savage like Rich may not appreciate that these constitute emissions, but the more sophisticated may understand that nobody has yet worked out an entirely satisfactory way of disposing of this waste in a way that can be guaranteed not to foul the world we leave to our children.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Leftist weenies think it all should come from the federal government or, even better, the UN.

. t

This description may fit a lunatic fringe, but most people who accept the reality of of anthropogenic global warming seem to think that we can use carbon-neutral energy sources to sustain a technologically advanced civilisation that will be no less comfortable for humanity than todays society.

Do you have any evidence to support this implausible claim? My own feeling is that ITER now being built at Cadarache in France, is going to be the last of the proof-of-principle prototypes

and that once it is up and working - in 2018 - it will lead the way to commercially viable fusion power. Of course, the economies of scale will probably have made wind energy competitive with fossil-fueled power generators by then, and solar power won't be far behind, but nuclear fusion will remain attractive as a reliable and controllable power source.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not exactly. Tim Williams is worried by nuclear fusion only to the extent that it could produce thermal pollution. At least in theory, we could build enough nuclear fusion plants to generate enough heat at the earth's surface to produce direct global warming. It would take some 0.5x10^^15 watts to match what we are now contributing by adding greenhouse gases. At the moment we seem to use about 1.5x10^^13 watts, so we have some way to go.

This is something rather different from your "They are against humanity and any things that aid humanity. They don't want alternative energy sources, they want less energy to be available to mankind " and it is disingenuous of you to claim otherwise.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill, did you take into account the total heat generation and not just the useful electrical power generation? I remember a DOE (US thing) website discussing nuclear power generation in the USA -- it showed some 8.5 quads of total generation yielding some 2.66 quads (they showed the total on the left side and the useful generation on the right, with the rest (as I took it) being waste heat somewhere (in the power plant and elsewhere in the distribution, I suppose.)

That's not 100X, obviously. But if you missed taking that into account and if I didn't badly assume from my reading before, then there may be a not-entirely-insignificant factor of 3 involved, unless improvements in generation and delivery are applied.

Jon

If we cut off all energy to Slowman, how long would it take him to croak? Would the remains (ewwwww ;-) emit CO2?

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
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       How severe can senility be?  Just check out Slowman.

On the radioactive waste, there are some alternative designs that tend to "burn" more of the available radioactive materials -- fast neutron reactors being one (liquid sodium being used, I think, as the coolant) and, if my vague memory is correct, breeder reactors, too. I have NO detailed knowledge about them, but I have read that they can be designed with very much lower volumes of waste to store. From what I read, fast neutron reactors burn existing long-lived nuclear waste, producing a small volume of waste with half-life of a few decades -- which makes finding very long-term storage far less important. (I've read that thorium can be used to also nearly eliminate the buildup of long-lived nuclear waste.)

To examples to look up on the above are: (1) the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), the concept having been developed at Argonne National Laboratory and built and tested at the Idaho National Laboratory; (2) Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), with early development taking place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Both the IFR and LFTR operate at low pressure and high temperatures. Both probably need a decade of substantial, further engineering from what I've read. But South Korea has a sizeable research program going on in these areas, I think. So maybe it is closer than I imagine.

A serious problem is the carbon dioxide and other atmospheric wastes being produced in China and India, with no real end in sight unless they are offered some viable solution in the short term. That may have to be nuclear, if it is to happen in time.

A general concern I have about proliferating fission power based on uranium is the production of plutonium, which can be more easily separated through chemical means instead of needing thousands of gas centrifuges. I recall reading that 120 tons of 239-Pu are produced each year by existing plants. It takes only a very few kg per bomb. I kind of worry about expanding production. People start looking for things to do with the stuff that is laying about.

Even __natural__ uranium fueled systems, those not using enriched

235-U, make 239-Pu. North Korea's Yongbyon Reactor I is a natural uranium/graphite power reactor that was activated in 1987 and uses a 1950 MAGNOX design (graphite moderator, aluminum-magnesium clad natural uranium fuel, and CO2 gas cooling.) It took a few years to get working, but by 1990 it was operating at somewhere between 20 and 30 MW. But before it got operating like this, I read that they extracted some 14kg of 239-Pu in 1988! Just after a year of fitful operation. Over the next three years reports I read claimed that they had extracted another 27 kg of 239-Pu. And that's just one reactor in North Korea. Their Yongbyon Reactor II is another MAGNOX design and started running at 50 MW in 1992 and is producing some 60 kg of 239-Pu per year.

There are other considerations. Electrical energy is a subset of total energy consumption. In the USA, electrical usage in 2002 was

13.1 quads out of about 98 quads total. Of that, nuclear represented that 2.66 quads figure and hydro power was about 4 quads, memory serving. Converting over to nuclear power as a replacement for coal generation of electricity (most of the remainder) would require some (13.1-2.66-4)/2.66 or almost 2 and a half times more nuclear power plants of size similar to what we have now (around 103 or 104 times 2.4, or roughly 250 more sites added.) If looking to replace a substantial part of the fossil fuels used for other than electrical generation (oil heat, natural gas heat, propane, vehicle fuels, etc.), that multiplier really starts to climb up very fast.

Imagine this scenario of fission power replacement, then, across the world's current mix of uses. Yet, it may be the only way to consider replacement of fossil fuels in the face of a world with increasing populations (exponentially rising) and despite (linear) improvements in efficiency of use.

There are some very serious problems ahead and it's likely that if we don't substantially reduce world requirements, which is unlikely even with strong efforts to improve efficiencies (the low hanging "fruit" has already been picked to improve profits), fission power is probably the only surer answer towards mitigating carbon releases in the nearer term. I'm interested in seeing a realizable fusion reactor, but it is hard to imagine it becoming viable on the grand scales required in short order.

No one solution seems anywhere close to the convenience and prevalence that fossil fuels represent. We've benefitted from near-free energy for a century and more and whole societies have grown up in response. It's going to be hard work controlling the continued temptation that fossil fuel represents while finding alternatives that somehow need to be suddenly snapped into place as replacements for a growing capacity we've developed over a period of more than a century's time. All the while the population grows, pressure on the environment continues, and the desire for refrigeration and computer use expands.

Jon

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Good point. I wasn't interested in doing more than specifying the orders of magnitude involved, and in fact I was surprised that we are liberating as much energy as we do.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wrong. This is an interglacial, not an ice age.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I was surprised, too. It's pretty wasteful and a simple look only at the useful side of the equation understates the truer magnitudes. Isaac Asimov was the first one to bring my attention to this idea of wrestling with the magnitude of energy that humanity is approaching compared with natural sources and effects.

Jon